Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 23, 2025)

Shanah tovah!

It is so good to be together as a community; these times when we are all gathered are a dream come true for me. Let’s take a moment to feel the sweetness of it.

OK. I’m going to start with a little survey. Listen carefully. […] Blink once if you feel totally comfortable in High Holiday services and know what’s going on at every single moment. […] Blink twice if you feel like everybody around you just blinked once. […] I’m not 100% sure of the survey results because I was … blinking twice.

This fall season wouldn’t be the same without the High Holidays. The best-known verse from the psalm for the season says:

אַחַת שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת־יי אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ
שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יי כּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי לַחֲזוֹת בְּנֹעַם־יי וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ
One thing I ask of Adonai, this is what I seek: to dwell in the house of God
all the days of my life, to gaze upon God’s beauty, and to visit God’s temple

And indeed as summer turns to fall, an invisible thread starts to tug at our hearts to bring us here, to our human approximation of God’s temple. Yet for all our longing to be here, for all that mysteriously pulls us in, these services can be as alienating as they are uplifting. For folks who are regular synagogue-goers, the services are different enough from the usual Shabbat service to be strange and destabilizing. And for folks whose primary engagement with prayer comes only at this time of year, the services can be long, confusing, and repetitive. If we have memories of childhood High Holiday services, they are definitionally different from this—different tunes, different people, a different rabbi. And if people don’t have those childhood associations—becase they came to this tradition with a partner or through their own journeys in life, or because they are still children—this all can feel very foreign. Objectively: catching up with old friends we haven’t seen all year by reflecting together on the fragility of life and the passage of time, and meditating on the nature of sin and the challenge of forgiveness, is kind of a weird combination.

Yet both culturally and religiously, something calls us back every year. The concept of תשובה—of return or repentance—is woven throughout the season and throughout the liturgy.

The imagery of return is with us in the structure of the shofar service that the students just led with me. Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a 17th-century European sage, noted that there is a pattern of departure and return in the order of the shofar calls: tekiyah, shevarim, t’ruah, and back to tekiyah, like a baseball player taking off from home plate, and then returning to the same place having accomplished something. In Horowitz’s framework, the first tekiyah represents us when we feel whole and sure of ourselves. Shevarim, the slightly elongated broken sound, shows us the cracks just beneath the surface, the places where we are not quite aligned, or have done things we regret. Going deeper still, the t’ruah, those sobbing, shattered calls, show us the parts of us that are truly broken. Horowitz teaches that by coming to terms with the aspects of ourselves represented by the t’ruah call, we can return to the wholeness of tekiyah, stronger for having reckoned with our own brokenness.

Another way we reflect on departure and return at this time of year is through the words, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם—renew our days, like before. It’s a funny phrase. We want something new, but we want it to be similar to the past. Even when we seek new experiences, we crave the security of being able to recognize them like familiar faces and connect them to our experience. The idea that something can be both new and old is central to our holiday cycle, as we shed the old year’s hard words and cruel deeds and, as I spoke about last night, renew our hopes for the coming year.

We come home to ourselves through these rituals and words, and through the very act of entering this space as a community.

And yet for all this spiritual uplift, there are moments for many of us when, for one reason or another, we don’t quite feel like we belong here, don’t quite feel like all this belongs to us.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, a Hasidic rabbi who lived in 18th-century Ukraine, was one of our wisest and most sensitive teachers. He told the following story:

One time, a certain man in a certain city dreamed that in the city of Vienna, under a bridge, there was a treasure. He went there and stood by the bridge and asked around as to how to dig there. A soldier came by and said to him, What are you doing standing here and thinking? And he thought that it would be good to tell the soldier his dream so maybe the other man could help him in exchange for a share of the treasure. So he told him.

The soldier answered saying: Oy, stupid Jew! Why do you pay attention to dreams? Couldn’t I dream a dream that there was a treasure underneath the oven in the house of a certain Jew who lives in your home town? Do you really think I’d travel there for a treasure?

The Jew was taken aback and went home to his house. He dug in the kitchen under the oven, and found the treasure. Afterward, he remarked: I had to travel to Vienna in order to know there was a treasure right near me, in my own house.

My beloved friends, each one of us is on a journey throughout our lifetimes of going away and coming back and going away and coming back, of searching for a treasure somewhere else, and then finding that it was close by the whole time. Finding that treasure isn’t easy, and making sense of it isn’t either. I can imagine the man in our story digging underneath the oven to find the treasure and then needing to figure out how to put his kitchen back together. Teshuvah is not neat and tidy.

My own story is full of those zigzags, from the first time I got sent to the principal’s office in religious school because, having started in 5th grade, I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t understand why I was there. The zigzags continued for decades: from refusing to schedule a Bat Mitzvah and dropping out of religious school, to putting off rabbinical school for some years because I thought it was too late for me to learn and I’d have to be alienated forever.

But the beauty of our tradition of תשובה is that we have a whole entire framework for coming back. There will always be aspects of Jewish tradition that feel uncomfortable—I’ve got a couple myself—but תשובה invites us back and encourages us to find our way. The root letters of the word תשובה—shin vav bet—speak of return, but they are close cousins of another root word, yud shin bet meaning, to stay. Teshuvah is not only an invitation to come back, but to stay, to settle in and explore.

To be Jewish is to wrestle with God, and sometimes with ourselves. It’s there in the word ישראל—God-wrestler. Our tradition expects us: to interpret the text, to ask hard questions, to argue with God. Digging up the kitchen is bound to kick up some dust.

So for folks who are counting the pages till the end of the service, or squirming in your seats, or wondering just who is this God that keeps accounts with such coldness, what I want most to say to you is: you belong here. All this—

the long, confusing services,
the ambiguous teachings,
the endless details and variations,
the arguments and the counter-arguments,
the words with multiple meanings,
the melodies that float around in your head for days and weeks,
the shofar and the honey cake,
the grownups who pat your head and tell you how tall you’ve gotten,
the children who make you think—sometimes too much,
the soft heart and the sharp points,
the community that loves you—

All of it. This is your treasure.

Welcome home. Shanah tovah.

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 22, 2025)

Some years back, I went through a big six-word story phase. For a self-professed haiku enthusiast and general word freak, this was the obvious next step! The six-word story demands that the writer have a clear expressive goal and the courage to trim everything that doesn’t point toward the goal… and then trim some more. Some of my attempts include:

Two sweet boys. One sweet life.

Read books, write words, eat popcorn.

Awkward young nerds can become rabbis.

There’s something about a short story.

But seriously, there is. Sometimes the discipline of having parameters like 5-7-5 for haiku or using only six words to make your point reveals some greater truth. So it is for me with this phrase from our machzor:

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ וְתָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ
An old year with its curses ends; a new year with its blessings begins.
Or to attempt to put it in six words:
Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

There are so many ways in which the year just ending feels accursed. We’re living in a time of mounting dread: here, in Israel, and around the world. Dark forces are gathering, hard realities closing in. From a regime that governs by chaos and intimidation, to an ever-fracturing public discourse in which the toxic fringes drown out reasonable voices, to a widening crisis in Israel, to a disturbing uptick in antisemitic words and deeds, to devastating climate events, to school shootings, to drug overdoses, to political violence… It’s demoralizing even to list all these, much less to live them. Day by day, it seems the world threatens to boil over, with rage, dehumanization, and cruelty.

Amidst all this, something drew each of us here tonight. We come back to our tradition day after day, week after week, year after year. We come into the synagogue looking for connection, for spiritual uplift, for community, for emotional catharsis. Threaded through each of these, and many others I could have named, is hope. Even in a world beset by so many problems, in a time when it’s all too tempting to despair about humanity, we—as a community and as a people—are called to find some semblance of hope.

As we begin this new year, I want us to be able to approach it with hope.

I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture. Hope isn’t some namby-pamby, fake cheer. It’s not the practice of telling ourselves lies, convincing ourselves that everything is going to be perfect in some future time. Rather, to paraphrase Rabbi Shai Held, hope allows us to muster the energy to remind ourselves that we are OK enough for now.

Recently, I came across a passage from the book Hope Amidst Conflict by the political psychologist Oded Leshem of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the excerpt, Leshem writes of disentangling the connection between our desires and our expectations, in a move toward what he calls optimal hope. In extreme conditions, it’s wise to, as he puts it, “decrease our expectations but keep our hopes propelled by our desires.” In other words, optimal hope is balanced between realism and yearning. When we want something but are realistic and clear-eyed about how likely or unlikely it is to come to pass, we approach Leshem’s intricate calculus of desire and expectation. Putting optimal hope into practice would mean, for example, engaging in activism out of conviction and integrity, rather than out of an exaggerated notion of how much influence we have on the wider world. It would mean parenting with deep feeling, but without attachment to the fantasy that our children will turn out to be violin prodigies and math geniuses with the athletic skills of LeBron James and the patience of the Dalai Lama. Even though, theoretically, some of them might.

Despite or perhaps because of the pattern of catastrophe and recovery that permeates Jewish history, our ancient tradition places a huge emphasis on hope. We see it in the way Torah pushes ever forward in the face of daunting obstacles. Take Moses, who suffers grievously throughout his life. He is deprived of the chance to be a child in his own family, and after being reconnected to his people as an adult, loses numerous close relatives, including his nephews, Nadav and Avihu, and his siblings, Aaron and Miriam. And he is ultimately denied the chance to see his life’s work fulfilled by crossing over into the Promised Land. Yet even Moses finishes with hope for his people. As he prepares to send the Israelites ahead without him, he says in Deuteronomy 31:8:

וַיי הוּא הַהֹלֵךְ לְפָנֶיךָ הוּא יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ לֹא יַרְפְּךָ וְלֹא יַעַזְבֶךָּ לֹא תִירָא וְלֹא תֵחָת׃
God will go before you and will be with you.
God will not abandon or forsake you. Do not be afraid, and do not panic.

Even as Moses agonizingly steps back, his thoughts and good wishes are with his people, carrying them forward, without him.

There are hints of hope amidst despair tucked in throughout our sacred texts—in our daily prayers, and in words that get pride of place at this time of year in particular. For example, the final two verses of the psalm for the season, Psalm 27, point tentatively toward hope. Verse 13 reads:

לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַנְתִּי לִרְאוֹת בְּטוּב־יי בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים
If only I could believe in seeing God’s goodness in the land of the living…

The verse trails off as doubt and skepticism loom. Then the next verse, the final one of the psalm, answers:

קַוֵּה אֶל־יי חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יי
Hope toward God! Be strong and courageous of heart,
and hope toward God.

This final couplet finds the Psalmist in a crisis of faith, wondering if he can actually believe the things he’s been saying—and then pulling himself toward hope and wholeness. The doubt peeks through in the phrase קַוֵּה אֶל־יי—hope toward God; it’s not a direct hit, but rather a fumbling in the general vicinity of the Divine. As in Leshem’s concept of optimal hope, the Psalmist acknowledges his desire for closeness with God while admitting that it is not a guarantee. This is optimal hope. Grownup hope.

The Akeidah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, which we’ll read on the second day of Rosh haShanah, offers a stunning hint at hope. In a moment of moral compromise and panic, when it seems even God has turned away, as Abraham is poised with the knife over his son’s neck, there appears, just in the nick of time, a ram in the thicket. The Mishnah teaches that this ram was there all along, since the earliest days of creation. At the moment when it could all go irreparably wrong, Abraham sees the ram, a new possibility, and he narrowly avoids making the mistake of a lifetime. Even when it seems that all is lost, the narrative somehow pulls us back from the brink.

For my part, when the brink feels perilously close, I often look for guidance from the Piasceczner Rebbe, who served as Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. The Piasceczner Rebbe endured unimaginable oppression over an extended period of time, and yet managed to scrape together some crumbs of hope to help his community manage the day-to-day existential threats they faced. He walked the tightrope between desire and expectation, even as the dangers grew more and more acute.

In his Rosh Hashanah sermon from 1940, he included a parable of a man so distraught he burst out in wailing and tears. The man called out so loudly that his father ran to him and tried to comfort him. But because he was so wrapped up in his own anguish, the man couldn’t recognize his father or accept the comfort being offered. Imagine the solace he could have experienced, had he been able to perceive his father reaching out to help. This wouldn’t have reduced the ultimate cause of his distress, but at least he would not have been holding it alone. The Piasceczner’s teaching is profound, for his time and perhaps for our own: as individuals, we have very little power to alter or even mitigate the distressing circumstances swirling around us. But allowing ourselves to accept care—both human and divine—softens the heartbreak that threatens to overwhelm. And coming to the side of those who are suffering gives us a sense of purpose. That the Piasceczner could find inspiration to serve, week after week, in perhaps the most hopeless time our people has known, should itself be a source of hope.

In fact it’s due to an incredible act of hope that we even have his writings. During the Holocaust, in the Warsaw Ghetto, a historian by the name of Emanuel Ringelblum collected the everyday artifacts of Jewish life, in the hopes (that word again!) of preserving what could be preserved. Among the things he collected were the Piasceczner Rebbe’s writings, which were packed up into milk cans and buried underground, to be dug up later, after the war’s end. The miracle is that in a time of unrelenting misery, when the worst of humanity was on gruesome display, there were people—the Piasceczner Rebbe, Ringelblum, and others whose names we will probably never know—who saw that even though so many individuals would not survive; Jewish theology, culture, and thought were worth saving. Could be saved. The unimaginable future would someday come. In the words of the Chinese poet Lin Yutang: Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The Hebrew language invites us to reflect on just how fragile hope can be. The word for hope תקווה also means… cord or thread. Sometimes, hope is as robust as a strong cable, a lifeline; sometimes it’s as thin as a thread we can barely see. But threads can be spun together, becoming strengthened over time. Threads can weave in and out of fabrics to reinforce and beautify them. You tie a knot in a thread and have an anchor for your work. Sometimes a thread is all you need to keep the story going.

A thread, like a six-word story, can hold our place and pull us forward.

Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

Threads of hope bind us together.

Shanah tovah.

Nitzavim for TAA

(Delivered September 20, 2025)

I still remember where I was when I learned. It was a silvery spring day, the first really warm day. Sunshine, buds, short sleeves. My siblings and their spouses and Bill and I went for a nice long walk in the Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of my favorite places on this planet or any other.

I don’t know why, but we decided on a little game of hide-and-seek. I hadn’t played for years. There’s not much opportunity to, as a self-serious music student with ambitions as high as my vocal range. But we were getting pretty silly that day—must have been the spring air—and a game of hide-and-seek seemed like just the thing.

We decided who was “It” and scattered amongst the trees to hide while they counted. I found my spot and settled in. Then came the lesson. Having not played in a long while, and having been a very rule-obedient child, I was shocked and thrilled when I saw one of my brothers-in-law sneak out of his hiding place, run behind the “It” person and switch trees, while I crouched seemingly for an eternity behind one single oak tree.

It had never occurred to me before that minute that I wasn’t glued to my hiding place like a sitting duck. It had never occurred to me that switching hiding places was a strategy. It had never occurred to me that hidden things could change.

The whole episode came to mind this week as I was studying Parshat Nitzavim. As we’ve just heard, the parsha mainly revisits laws and teachings given in the service of the covenant that frames and permeates the book of Deuteronomy. Again, we receive the sharp warnings about what will happen, should we get caught up in idolatry, and again, we receive the gentle promises that returning to the fold is always possible, that if only we restore ourselves and our children to the right path, God will take us back in love.

And in the midst of this push and pull of sin and repentance, comes the mysterious pasuk that finds the hidden and the visible in a subtle dance. Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 28 reads:

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד־עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת
What is hidden is for Adonai our God, and what is revealed is for us and our children eternally,
to do all of this instruction

The commentators make the logical connection that the word נִּסְתָּרֹת—that which is hidden—refers to secret idolatry. The bigger lesson, though, is that there are things that are known only to God.

One of my earliest teachers taught me this—although neither he nor I knew he was my teacher as it happened. In a moment of teenage discombobulation, I went to stay for a few days with our longtime family friends, Jerry and Roberta Goldman, to recover from a broken heart. One afternoon, sitting in the backyard, I poured out my uncertainties and sadness, and Jerry, a rabbi who is as sensitive as he is brilliant, gently said, “Life is like a tapestry we can only see the back of. We see the knots and the clusters of threads tangled together and, sometimes if we’re lucky, the barest hints of what the picture on the other side might be. Only God sees the whole thing, and somehow, from God’s side, it makes sense.”

When it was first offered, Jerry’s lesson was one of hope and perspective, a grownup’s thoughtful advice to an overwrought teenager. Only later have I begun to see it also as a teaching about humility. Each and every one of us, no matter how curious and knowledgeable we might be, is limited in what we can observe. Countless factors contribute to this, from temperament to environment to the thousand quirks of the moment. The plain truth is that we can only ever see a small part of the world around us, and everything we perceive is a product of our experiences, expectations, and biases. It’s easiest and most normal for us to see what we’ve always seen, what we plan to see.

This is all the more so in the current polarized media environment, as we’ve witnessed to a horrifying degree in recent weeks. The shocking murder of Conservative media personality Charlie Kirk is only the latest Rorschach Test that maps political and social orientations onto the very perception of reality. While folks to my left have been excoriating Kirk as one of the most vile people ever to walk the earth, folks to my right have been canonizing him. The government’s policies on immigration, free speech, and gender issues are similarly met with cheering in some quarters and loathing in others. Many believe we are edging toward fascism; many believe we’re finally cleaning things up. Families and communities are navigating real schisms based on the American political scene, based on the situation in Israel and Gaza, based on world views about gender, sexuality, and race, based on beliefs about the rights and freedoms and responsibilities we regard as sacrosanct. The point is that in a feverish environment like the current moment, in which we don’t talk to one another across difference, the things we might be able to agree about remain hidden. And what’s revealed is so skewed as to be cartoonish.

Between the technology that dominates so much of our waking lives, and the algorithm that offers us refills on what we already have decided is truth, and simple social isolation, we, as a society, have lost the thread of what constitutes fact, much less nuance. Each of us comes to conclusions that make sense, based on the information we’ve been fed. But we are not ordering from the full menu, and we are not asking questions of one another across the table.

I often lament how disheartening it is to hear people say they just can’t talk to so-and-so because their politics are not aligned. The less we hear ideas and viewpoints that challenge us, the more convinced we become not only of our rightness but of the essential wrongness of anyone who thinks differently. The middle space where we talk things over and consider multiple angles hollows out, while the habit of dehumanization gets ever more ingrained in us. There’s an arrogance to the whole vicious cycle, a knee-jerk dismissal of anything from the so-called other side. And what I want to say to you is that yes, there may be things about the ideology on the other side that are disagreeable or even hateful, but much of what we’re tagging as hateful is being fed to us in a way designed to make us think that. The same is true for the person you most vividly differ with.

For the most part, the places where we get information are curating content and viewpoints for maximum agitation, at once disparaging those who see things differently and flattering our assumptions. All this is a very effective way of keeping us scrolling so they can generate more ad revenue. Our very humanity is being bought and sold, while our capacity for holding multiple perspectives with curiosity erodes with every conversation we avoid.

But the hidden things, the nuances of who we are, away from political argument, are known to God alone. What’s revealed is very much at the human level, and we simply can’t see the whole thing. Yet that long-ago game of hide-and-seek holds a lesson too. Hidden things can change, and we always have the choice to look harder at what’s revealed and wonder, together and apart, What is it that God sees in all this? What else is it that God sees in all this? And how can I teach my children to return to a stable path, so God can take us back in love?

We can never know the fullness of this world, but we can respect the not knowing, hold our convictions with humility and others’ with curiosity, and, in the words of Leonard Cohen, bless the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.

Shabbat Shalom!

Shoftim for TAA

(Delivered August 30, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Shoftim, closes with a bizarre and confusing passage concerning a ritual that came to be known as עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה—a broken-necked calf. As I mentioned before, this ritual was prescribed in cases in which there was an unsolved murder out in the open (the assumption being that if the murder was in town it was much less likely to be unsolved). In such a situation, elders and judges from the area would painstakingly measure the distance from the corpse to each of the nearby towns. Whichever town was closest would then take on the responsibility of attending to the ritual, in which a young calf that had never been worked would be taken to a flooded ravine that had never been plowed. Once there, the elders would break the calf’s neck and, as they washed their hands in the flowing waters, they would recite the formula:

יָדֵינוּ לֹא שָׁפְכוּ אֶת־הַדָּם הַזֶּה וְעֵינֵינוּ לֹא רָאוּ׃
Our hands did not shed this blood, and our eyes didn’t see.

They would go on to say: Adonai, absolve Your people Israel, whom You redeemed, and do not permit innocent blood among Your people Israel. (Deut. 21:7-8)

To me, this ritual feels barbaric, in the way that it answers senseless violence with more senseless violence, all wrapped up in a veneer of religious practice. My dismay is compounded all the more so when I look at how the Rabbis of the Talmud treat it. Perhaps it’s just the Sages doing what Sages do, but it’s hard to stomach their exacting discussion of various aspects of the case: If the person was decapitated did the head roll away from the body, and if so, is the distance measured from the head or from the body? Supposing the body is still twitching? If the corpse was found hanging from a tree—in other words, not lying in the field as specified in the original verse—does the practice apply? The Talmudic approach to the ritual is grisly but precise, sparing no effort in the pursuit of certainty.

The possibilities are endless…and gruesome. It’s all too easy to imagine the Rabbis investing in the minutiae with cold hearts, having somehow left behind the reality of a person who went missing and was found dead, a person who at one time meant the world to someone.

And yet, our ancestors lived in a time of intense uncertainty. They didn’t have rapid communication systems or forensic investigators, much less DNA testing. When a dead body was discovered, it was cause for even more anxiety. An unwitnessed, unmourned murder represented a threat; a killer was out there. Performing עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה assigns responsibility where none can actually be ascertained, and in doing so protects a semblance of social order. Communal atonement and protection seem possible, even as the killer does remain out there.

All these centuries later, the attempted creation of black and white where only grey exists reads to me like a container for doubt, a strategy for managing the sense of danger and anxiety that bubbles to the surface with an unsolved crime. The era of Rabbinic Judaism was barely more than a century after the destruction of the Second Temple, and it seems to me that the exactitude the Rabbis brought to the matter served a psychological purpose. For a people who had lost everything—twice—the need to manage uncertainty must have been profound. Their precision was the best tool they had for facing the existential dread that accompanied them day by day. I imagine them telling themselves, “If we know what to do, we can hold on.” Ritual filled the void when uncertainty grew unbearable. The Sages of the Talmud reached into every corner where a question might lurk, no matter how revolting or far-fetched.

Yet questions and doubts, innocent blood and senseless violence, and devastating questions of social order are again the topic of the day, and whether or not a killer’s identity is known, the very act of murder remains a mystery in and of itself. This week, a twenty-three-year-old opened fire on Annunciation Catholic school, killing two children as they prayed at Mass, and injuring at least 18 others. This horrific burst of violence—one in a too-long stream of similar events—forces us yet again to confront the darkness that persists in human nature, millennia after the Torah tried to locate an answer where none could exist.

And yet … about some things there is no doubt, no mystery. There is no doubt that we live in a society where weapons of war are available to private consumers; where red flags such as hateful social media posts are ignored or explained away; where cruelty has become part of the currency for much communication, particularly online; and where mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting gets met with hand-wringing and “thoughts and prayers” and an attitude of voluntary inevitability. There is no mystery, other than how and why inertia feeds on itself as more and more innocent people are murdered simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ironically, Parshat Shoftim also contains the famous phrase

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף
Justice, justice shall you pursue

We are tragically far from that ideal; day by day, the pursuit of justice is entangled in the snares of polarization, a warped definition of liberty, a dogged commitment to the wrong rights, and sheer exhaustion on the part of those of us who might make a change. Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, the two children who were murdered this week, are just the most recent casualties of this uniquely American repetition compulsion. While we all go through the well-practiced motions of outrage and defensiveness and red herrings and legislative entropy, more and more will die.

This is not a dvar Torah with an easy answer. As obvious as the circumstances are, there seems to be no solution to this modern-day plague that pokes with too much regularity at the holes in our society. As we agonize and wait and advocate for change, let us learn from our ancestors about managing unbearable confusion and pain. Let us invest in ritual and the divine comfort we heard in today’s haftarah and in the blessing of community. And may we never know such sorrow again.

Re’eh for TAA

Delivered August 23, 2025

Shabbat shalom!

I bet you didn’t know this, but I am a thief. I try not to talk about it too much, it’s a little bit embarrassing, but it’s the truth. Not the kind of thief who sneaks about in the night and breaks into fancy houses. Nor the kind of thief who goes into stores and pockets things off the shelves. Nor the kind of thief who cheats on income taxes or tries to get unearned advantages.

Rather, I have a long criminal record of stealing from God.

Let me explain. From Masechet Brachot 35b:

אָמַר רַבִּי חֲנִינָא בַּר פָּפָּא: כָּל הַנֶּהֱנֶה מִן הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה בְּלֹא בְּרָכָה
כְּאִילּוּ גּוֹזֵל לְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא וּכְנֶסֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל
Rabbi Hanina bar Papa said: Everyone who enjoys something from this world and does not make a blessing, it is as if they have stolen from the Holy Blessed One and from the community of Israel.

Before I began my journey home to Judaism, I stole ruthlessly from God. So many meals unblessed, so many mornings without Birchot haShachar—the everyday blessings—so many rainbows and first bites of summer peach and transitions into starlit evenings unacknowledged and unblessed. So many opportunities for gratitude squandered.

Everyone who enjoys something from this world and does not make a blessing, it is as if they have stolen from the Holy Blessed One and from the community of Israel.

Elsewhere, the Tosefta takes up the topic of this particular kind of theft, citing the first pasuk of Psalm 24. This should be familiar to my Sunday morning people:

לַיי הָאָרֶץ וּמְלוֹאָהּ תֵּבֵל וְיֹשְׁבֵי בָהּ׃
The earth and everything in it belong to God; the world and its inhabitants.

The tradition is reminding us in these passages that whatever we have—no matter how hard we think we may have worked for it—is not ours solely due to our virtue. We benefit, constantly and in myriad ways, from the labor of other people, particularly our ancestors; from the systems and structures that make things work; from sheer dumb luck; and especially from God. In fact, looking at Psalm 24, we might say that all those things—the people, the systems, the luck—are manifestations of God.

By living all those years without blessing—Jewish without Jewish practice—I was in regular violation of this principle, a repeat offender, so to say. According to this standard, I suppose many of us are. It’s all too easy to go about our lives experiencing deep enjoyment, without pausing to bless the ultimate Source of that enjoyment. But our Torah is interested in teaching us perspective—in showing us that what feels like it’s ours isn’t fully ours, isn’t truly ours.

The earth and everything in it belong to God; the world and its inhabitants.

Parshat Re’eh opens with a stark choice. In the first pasuk, which we’ll study in more depth next year, Moses says:

רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה
See! I place before you today: blessing and curse.

Moses goes on to teach that the choice is ours. If we live a life aligned with God’s commandments, blessing will be ours. And, of course, the reverse.

The parsha goes on to review various topics: the laws of kashrut, the practice of shmita (loan forgiveness), the sacrifices, tithing, the manumission of slaves, the three Festival holidays of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. And the biggie: resisting idolatry.

Woven throughout these teachings is the thread of blessing. Over and over in Parshat Re’eh, we encounter some variation of the phrase: יְבָרֶכְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ—Adonai your God will bless you. These words crop up as we’re reflecting about property and prosperity, and the impermanence of both. The teachings dwell at length on how to treat people who have fewer resources than we have: people who are enslaved, impoverished, or indebted.

In context, these reminders of God’s blessing reveal more about the nature of blessing. For example, in the section on tithes, the practice is that the Levites, as well as widows, orphans, and non-citizens are to be welcomed to come and eat their fill

לְמַעַן יְבָרֶכְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־מַעֲשֵׂה יָדְךָ אֲשֶׁר תַּעֲשֶׂה
So that Adonai your God will bless you
in all the works of your hands that you take on

Similarly in the passage about shmita, the Torah teaches that when contemplating offering a loan to a needy person, we shouldn’t hesitate if it’s toward the end of the shmita cycle and the repayment rate will be low. Rather:

נָתוֹן תִּתֵּן לוֹ וְלֹא־יֵרַע לְבָבְךָ בְּתִתְּךָ לוֹ

כִּי בִּגְלַל הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה יְבָרֶכְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־מַעֲשֶׂךָ וּבְכֹל מִשְׁלַח יָדֶךָ
Give enthusiastically with no regrets in your heart for the giving,
For because of this, Adonai your God will bless you in all your works
and in everything you set your hand to

In this week’s Torah study, we paused over the passage about lending to the poor without regard to whether we will recoup that outlay. The text warns not to harden our hearts or close our fists but instead to give readily, to open a hand to all who are in need. Our sages elaborate: Rashi urges us to prioritize the needy over others, and not to agonize over whether or not to give, even multiple times. Just give. Ibn Ezra extends the generosity, not just to material goods but to comforting words. He writes:

לֹא תְאַמֵּץ אֶת־לְבָבְךָ לְדָבֶּר עַל לִבּוֹ דְבָרִים טוֹביִם
Do not harden your heart but speak to their heart in words of kindness

The gentle heart and open hand the parsha teaches about allow us, rather than stealing from God, to imitate God. Perhaps this is why there are so many customs around reciting these words from Psalm 145, better known as Ashrei

פּוֹתֵחַ אֶת־יָדֶךָ וּמַשְׂבִּיעַ לְכָל־חַי רָצוֹן
You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing

The Shulchan Aroch teaches we must have clear focus when saying this pasuk, and if we later realize we weren’t fully concentrating, we should go back and do it again. The importance of open hands—ours or God’s—warrants this special attention. The parsha makes this connection: to be generous is a blessing, which in turn benefits the work of our hands. There is reciprocity in blessing. The hands that open are also ready to receive. By blessing others, we are blessed. And when we receive, it is our obligation to give the blessing right back to God, in the form of acknowledgement, gratitude, and service.

I said before that Parshat Re’eh reviews many topics, including resisting idolatry. I think this is actually related to whether or not we engage in the practice of offering blessings. To offer a blessing of thanks keeps us in relationship with the divine. And the converse is true. When I was living my old life of untethered enjoyment, this was a low-impact form of עבודה זרה, of idolatry. The thread of blessing that weaves its way through our parsha reminds us that there’s another, more wholesome way. In each moment there is something to bless. When we open our hands to catch what comes, we open ourselves to the divine. And when we imagine, experience, and appreciate the openness of God’s hands, there is nothing to do but bless.

Shabbat shalom!

Eikev for TAA

(Delivered August 16, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’d like to start with a quick survey. Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a mistake. Great. I’m not the only one.

Mistakes, as I often tell my children (and myself), are part of life. We all make them, for all kinds of reasons. And if you were to take the third triennial of Parshat Eikev as the entirety of the parsha, you would make the mistake of thinking the covenant with God was much simpler than it actually is. There is a broader context for the question that opens our reading, a whole framework that brings that question to life.

We come into the conversation in the middle, so to speak, as the Torah raises the topic of what God wants from us in order to uphold our end of the covenant. The expectation from God is high: יראת השם—fear or reverence for God—plus loving and serving God and walking the paths of the divine. This is a relational way of thinking about something ephemeral. It’s quite a tall order, and maddeningly hard to measure in terms of success. Relationship-building is full of challenges, even with tangible, proximate humans. How much more difficult, then, to be in this kind of relationship with … an idea, an abstraction which is definitionally out of reach.

The missing context, which complicates the discussion, is that there has been a breach prior to this. Earlier in the parsha, Moses recounts the story of חטא העגל—the sin of the Golden Calf originally told in the Book of Exodus. While Moses is up on Mount Sinai getting the tablets inscribed with God’s teachings, the Israelites have a spectacular meltdown, panicking at the sheer difficulty of their newfound monotheism. They crave something—anything— to give them a sense of divine presence, and so they take all their gold and turn it into a statue of a calf to worship. Moses describes the aftermath of this episode in excruciating detail: God’s furious desire to punish the Israelites, Moses smashing the tablets, and then grinding the idol to dust. This is a terrible rupture, a grievous mistake.

It seems irreparable. Our worst mistakes often do.

I spoke with someone this week who shared their own story of a grievous mistake, something that came about in a time when their mental health was compromised, leaving them susceptible to unwise decisions. As they spoke, I thought: this is so human. This is a person of deep integrity and compassion who had fallen into a situation that caused harm. It could happen with any of us, and perhaps it even has.

To reflect on this person’s story in the same week as I was preparing Parshat Eikev was instructive. Because the Torah teaches us that while our mistakes—even the worst ones—are real, and consequential, they are not unforgivable. Our tradition doesn’t shy away from the harm that human behavior can cause, but neither does it insist that we remain in a state of degradation forever. Even the Israelites’ act of עבודה זרה—idolatry—a sin which is considered in the same category as murder and adultery, does not define the trajectory of our people for all time.

The parsha goes on to describe a second set of tablets, a second chance to engage with our side of the covenant. God allows Moses to come back up to the top of Mount Sinai, offering a fresh start. Moses brings down the new tablets and places them in the Aron, the holiest place in the mishkan, so that the Israelites can keep this holy teaching with them as they go. But the repair doesn’t end with that. The Gemara states, on Menachot 99a:

רַב יוסֵף מְלַמֵד שֶהַלוּחוֹת וְשִבְרֵי לוּחוֹת מוֹנַחִין בַּאַרוֹן
Rav Yosef teaches that the tablets
and the shards of the tablets rest in the Aron.

Rav Yosef’s statement might seem counterintuitive. Surely carrying around our worst mistake can only be discouraging and burdensome. What could possibly be the benefit of having to live with the reminder of ourselves at our lowest and most vulnerable moment?

I think Rav Yosef’s profound teaching is that retaining the vision of the worst thing we’ve ever done, keeping it close by, allows us to see how far we’ve come. Our mistakes are a record of our growth, like the rings of a tree. Erase the memory of all the bumps in the road, and what remains is a falsified, whitewashed history—a curated image that has nothing to do with reality. We are formed by our deeds—even the ones that cause us the most pain to think about. And if our worst errors give us a chance to learn, they are not a waste.

In fact the rabbis posit in a few different places in the literature that perhaps God is, in some way, glad of our mistakes: יישר כח ששתרת—it’s good that you broke them. It isn’t that God relished the sin of the Golden Calf—surely not! But that horrific episode gave the Israelites a sense of what was at stake, and gave them a chance to know God in a different way: as a presence that offered a new beginning. The two sets of tablets together are a symbol for moving past heartbreak and self-recrimination into a stronger commitment to what’s important. Breaking makes room for something new, for something to grow where perhaps stagnation had taken hold.

As we move into the season of the Days of Awe, thoughts of repentance begin to crowd our minds. What are the deeds we feel ashamed of, and how can we move beyond them? As we take on the work of תשובה—of return—we reset our moral compasses to direct us away from all the wrong paths onto which we might have strayed. But as we examine our past failures, let’s carry them lightly alongside us and allow them to teach us—to bear our lapses with grace, to draw courage from the ways we’ve overcome our lesser selves, and to move forward, the stronger for having been broken.

Shabbat shalom!

Vaetchanan for TAA

(Delivered August 9, 2025)

נַחֲמוּ נַחֲמוּ עַמִּי יֹאמַר אֱלֹהֵיכֶם
Take comfort, take comfort, My people, says your God.

Today is Shabbat Nachamu—Shabbat of Comfort—the first Shabbat following Tisha b’Av. After that mournful day has pressed us into the darkest corners of our communal grief, tradition holds that Moshiach—the messiah—is born in the late afternoon of Tisha b’Av. New life amid the wreckage. This powerful metaphor reminds us that darkness doesn’t last forever, that there is always something that comes next. The seeds of consolation are planted in the soil of the worst catastrophes, and watered with our tears. And in this liminal moment, it is our job to sift through the ashes of the ruined city and find reason to go on.

With Shabbat Nachamu, we embark on the seven weeks of consolation that bring us to the new beginning of Rosh Hashanah. The proportion is significant: While there are three haftarot of rebuke preceding Tisha b’Av, there are seven haftarot of consolation afterward. Tradition knows that when we have been to the depths of despair, we need more time than we often allow ourselves, to metabolize it and find our way out of it.

I think the Torah reading is subtly pointing the way. This week’s parsha, Vaetchanan, which always falls on Shabbat Nachamu, is packed to the edges with words and phrases that have found their way into our liturgy. From the Shema, to bits of the Torah service, to Aleinu, not to mention the Haggadah and of course the recapitulation of the Ten Commandments; the parsha overflows with passages that our ancient tradition encourages us to keep close by, practically in our pockets, for the times when we use words to draw near to the divine. This can’t possibly be accidental.

Its opening lines depict Moses’s unanswered plea to enter the Holy Land, alongside the community he has led through forty years of wandering. But despite this heart-wrenching beginning, Parshat Vaetchanan is engaged in the work of rebuilding faith.

Take, for example, possibly the most famous passage in a parsha of famous passages, Dvarim chapter 6 verse 4:

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ יי אֶחָד
Listen, Israel! Adonai is our God; Adonai is one.

The radical theological move away from practical gods—one for every occasion—to the highly impractical, mysterious, unknowable one God is a doorway into faith, albeit sometimes a difficult faith to grasp. Allowing ourselves to imagine that God is well beyond our reach or comprehension demands of us that we believe, not because we can see concrete evidence but because we are swept up in the idea that there is something much bigger than we are, and that’s worth believing in.

Embroidering the concept of faith in the Shema, Rashi interprets יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ יי אֶחָד to be a statement pointing toward the future. He writes:

ה’ שֶׁהוּא אֱלֹהֵינוּ עַתָּה, וְלֹא אֱלֹהֵי הָאֻמּוֹת, הוּא עָתִיד לִהְיוֹת ה’ אֶחָד
Adonai, who is our God now, but not the God of the nations,
will in the future become One God.

Rashi’s proof text is from the prophet Zecharia בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִהְיֶה יי אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד—on that day there will be one God with one name. This is a statement of profound faith not only in God but in the possibility of a peaceful future time, in which all of humanity comes to embrace that God is indivisible.

Elsewhere, Vaetchanan reinforces the message of God’s oneness with one of my favorite psukim in the whole Torah, Dvarim chapter 4, verse 35:

אַתָּה הָרְאֵתָ לָדַעַת כִּי יי הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ׃
You yourself have been made to see, to know that Adonai is God;
there is nothing else but God.

The idea that the oneness of God encompasses everything, that God suffuses every nook and cranny, lifts the burdens of logic and narrative, and suspends us in the holiness of becoming.

And when, in chapter 6, we envision coming into the Promised Land to find houses we did not build, and cisterns we did not dig out, and crops we did not plant—when we are told of the unearned bounty that will be ours—it reads like a fantasy, like the reward at the end of an excruciatingly long and arduous challenge. What lifts it into the realm of faith for me is that we don’t stay in the Disney-fied picture of perfect houses that someone else cleans. Rather, this whole mirage of idealized wealth is a tool to remind us that it’s God Who both brought us out of enslavement and created the compensatory abundance. As it says in one of the brachot that the folks at Backyard Mishnah studied together the other night, בּוֹרֵא נְפָשׁוֹת רַבּוֹת וְחֶסְרוֹנָן—God is the creator of many souls and their needs. In other words, God creates the needs and their fulfillment. The lock and the key, the disease and the cure. אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ. There is nothing but God.

And when, in chapter 4, our parsha recalls the horrific fate of the idolaters at Baal Peor, the text reminds us:

וְאַתֶּם הַדְּבֵקִים בַּיי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם חַיִּים כֻּלְּכֶם הַיּוֹם
But you, who stuck with Adonai your God, are all alive today.

It’s the generational wealth of tradition, not the illusory ease of windfall and unearned luxury, that fills our souls. The words and the concepts and—yes—the faith in the divine: these are our ultimate source of prosperity. What sustained our ancestors in times of confusion and trouble can sustain us too when we feel ourselves near the breaking point.

And lest we think this faith and this holy tradition are not for us, that we have not earned these precious words and ideas or are not worthy of them, Vaetchanan reminds us:

לֹא אֶת־אֲבֹתֵינוּ כָּרַת יי אֶת־הַבְּרִית הַזֹּאת
כִּי אִתָּנוּ אֲנַחְנוּ אֵלֶּה פֹה הַיּוֹם כֻּלָּנוּ חַיִּים
It is not with our ancestors that Adonai our God made this covenant;
Rather it’s with us ourselves, all of us who are alive here today.

It’s our responsibility and our blessing to make the legacy we inherit our own, generation after generation, and then to teach these words to our children, when we lie down and when we arise, so that the ups and the downs of life—joy and disaster alike—are filled with the presence of God. אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ. There is nothing but God.

NOTE: If these words speak to you, please pay us a visit when you’re in Gloucester. www.taagloucester.org

Dvarim for TAA

(Delivered August 2, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’ve often wondered at the old song—an oldie even when I was young—based on chapter 3 of Kohelet. To everything—turn, turn, turn—there is a season—turn, turn, turn. The cognitive dissonance that comes from the pairing of that tune—achingly sweet and lilting—with words from such an existentially bleak source always leaves me puzzled. Similarly, our Jewish calendar has an emotional rhythm to it that can be at odds with our surroundings. In years past, one of my longtime rabbis, Rav Claudia Kreiman, would invariably talk, in the weeks leading up to Tisha b’Av, about how disconcerting it is—in the season of ice cream and going to the beach—to have this holiday of purposeful, concentrated grief, a day on which everything crashes in on us, literally and figuratively.

But that was before.

On Shabbat Chazon, on this last day before Tisha b’Av in the year 5785, even the sunshine and the ice cream carry a feeling of heaviness, like a scene of carefree frolic in a movie, where only the audience knows the lurking danger that’s threatening our happy protagonists.

In this time of political and social turmoil—in the US, in Israel, and around the world—Tisha b’Av comes right on time. Indeed, just as Tisha b’Av commemorates the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem, I have felt too often in these past weeks and months like the structures our society has relied upon for decades are crumbling, while we watch helplessly, shaking our fists at one another and shifting blame.

It is, as several people in our community have remarked to me in this week alone, a hard time to be a human on this planet.

As always, I look to the Torah, not because I expect it to fix everything. We’re grownups here, and we know that fixing is not really on the menu, even from our gorgeous tradition. But in the absence of fixing, Torah still and always offers us something to hold onto, something that can help us turn toward one another and direct our thoughts to what’s eternal.

So Parshat Dvarim, this opening portion of the last book of the Torah, has a subtle theme running through it—maybe more of a thread than a theme—and that’s where I’ve found my anchor this week. Five times in this rather short parsha, the Israelites are told not to be afraid. Each one comes in a different kind of context—either legal or militaristic—and the truth is I don’t necessarily love those contexts.

But when we go looking in the Torah, sometimes we have to allow ourselves to soften the lens through which we look, so that we can actually see more clearly. My mother often says, “You go into marriage with your eyes open, and then you close them a little.” So, ironically, on Shabbat Chazon—the Shabbat of Vision—I’m inviting us to blur our gaze just a little bit, in hopes of grasping something bigger.

With respect to these five reminders not to be fearful, the comfort we might be missing in the verses themselves, rises more to the surface when our Sages come in to interpret. For example, the first half of chapter 1, verse 17 says:

לֹא־תַכִּירוּ פָנִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט כַּקָּטֹן כַּגָּדֹל תִּשְׁמָעוּן
לֹא תָגוּרוּ מִפְּנֵי־אִישׁ כִּי הַמִּשְׁפָּט לֵאלֹהִים הוּא
Don’t differentiate by acquaintance in judgment; rather hear the lowly and the highborn alike.
Have no fear before anyone, for judgment belongs only to God.

The commandment is to be impartial in legal matters, not to favor your friends nor to regard social class as an indication of rightness before the law. Rashi takes this rather legalistic line as a reminder not to be fearful when we speak up in matters of justice. Surely in our world of all too many injustices, Rashi’s read speaks to the courage we all seek, as we navigate our way through the thorny issues facing us and the algorithmic fog that makes the truth an ever-moving target.

The next few reminders not to fear all come under the shadow of impending warfare. Again, not what stirs me personally, although it makes sense for its time and place. In chapter 1 verse 21 it says

רְאֵה נָתַן יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְפָנֶיךָ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ
עֲלֵה רֵשׁ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר יי אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֶיךָ לָךְ אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תֵּחָת׃
See, Adonai your God gives this land before you.
Go up, take it, as Adonai, the God of your ancestors, told you! Do not be afraid and do not be terrified.

And then just a few verses later, in verse 29, Moses reminds the Israelites of his admonition to the scouts as they went to assess the Holy Land, saying:

וָאֹמַר אֲלֵכֶם לֹא־תַעַרְצוּן וְלֹא־תִירְאוּן מֵהֶם׃
And I said to you: do not tremble, and do not fear them.

While the text is clearly about conquering land and peoples, both the Emek Davar and Ibn Ezra jump the tracks into metaphor and make a surprisingly tender link, from fear to brokenheartedness. Ibn Ezra explains the unusual word תַעַרְצוּן to mean שבר הלב בפחד—breaking the heart through fear. By this reading, the message really is: don’t let fear break your heart.

Don’t let fear break your heart.

In these trying days of chaos, uncertainty, war, and all manner of legitimate reasons to be both fearful and brokenhearted, this idea is countercultural, even radical. How can we not be afraid? How can our hearts not be poised at brokenness every moment? Yet the world we live in is surely no more alarming than that of our ancestors. After all, today’s haftarah describes their state of degradation and sin.

כָּל־רֹאשׁ לָחֳלִי וְכָל־לֵבָב דַּוָּי
Every head is sick, every heart is weak.

Sounds familiar. In ancient times, as today, human nature is capable of both righteousness and sin. The heart can be weak or strong, broken or whole. What is it that makes the difference? Our Sages suggest that it’s courage that strengthens our hearts and protects them from breaking. But what is the source of that courage?

The very last line of the parsha, chapter 3 verse 22, reads:

לֹא תִּירָאוּם כִּי יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם הוּא הַנִּלְחָם לָכֶם׃
Don’t be afraid of them, for Adonai your God will fight for you.

Blurring our vision again to allow for an interpretation more metaphorical than militaristic, the idea of God fighting for us lends a sense of possibility to our struggles. It invites us to imagine an unlimited source of strength and purpose, not for the sake of domination but for the sake of something larger and more lasting than our individual worries and woes. About this pasuk, the Emek Davar teaches: in the presence of God, we are unshakeable. If we wish to protect our hearts in this difficult era, the task before us is to locate that divine presence and cling to it. In order not to let fear break our hearts, the practice of faith in the divine can be our anchor.

Blurring our vision to see more clearly, we proclaim ה’ לִי וְלא אִירָא—when God is with me, I have no fear.

Shabbat shalom!

Matot-Masei for TAA

(Delivered July 26, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I almost didn’t write this dvar Torah. All week, I’ve been avoiding the parsha like kryptonite. Truth to tell, I almost didn’t even get past the first aliyah, with its sharp and troubling teaching about the moment we’d been waiting for throughout the entirety of Sefer Bamidbar—The Book of Numbers.

Think of it: we’ve walked the desert for forty years, a trek which we imagined would have been much shorter and simpler. And during those years, the Israelites have faced hardship, sudden loss, rebellion, sneak attacks, and multiple crises of faith. And through it all, we’ve held to the notion that there was a purpose to all that wandering, that at some point, maybe soon, we’d have a place to be at peace.

Yet what feels clear as we come to the end of Sefer Bamidbar is that there is a moral price for that peace, and it may ultimately be too high.

Given my own theological inclinations, it’s hard for me even to recognize God here: a God who commands the Israelites to go up and take the land that was promised

וְהוֹרַשְׁתֶּם אֶת־כָּל־יֹשְׁבֵי הָאָרֶץ מִפְּנֵיכֶם
And dispossess all who are dwelling in the land from before you

Who is this God of dispossession? How can we hold this idea against the Torah’s previous teachings of loving our neighbor, welcoming the stranger, not standing idly by while others bleed?

We are a people that has known dispossession; I suspect nearly everyone in this room has a story. And so, knowing what we know—the wondering if the moment has come, the sudden flights in the middle of the night, the relatives who didn’t get out in time—reading this passage carries a special kind of pain.

Now I know that we have a range of political persuasions in this room, and I truly regard that as a blessing. When it comes to world affairs, I am no strategist, I make no claims, and, in all honesty, my moments of true certainty are few and far between. But as a person of conscience and a spiritual leader, I think part of my job is to be willing to confront the unbearable. Thinking about the language of dispossession in the parsha has kept me on edge all week. Because it’s hard to read this parsha and not think that what was written about in the Torah all those millennia ago is still playing out. Every day brings new waves of revulsion, terror, and grief as we see news of both Israelis and Palestinians suffering loss upon loss. The images of starving children amidst the ruins of Gaza, the settler violence in the West Bank, and the nearly two years of captivity for our hostages as well as the antisemitism that threatens to boil over, all point back to this notion of dispossession and the consequences it carries. The chicken and the egg are fighting it out, to the death. Dispossession begets dispossession begets dispossession, until there’s nothing left.

The Torah perhaps saw this coming. It isn’t just the prediction that, unless the Israelites fully obliterate the idolaters in the land, there will be generational hell to pay. It’s also in the language. The word וְהוֹרַשְׁתֶּם—and you shall dispossess—comes from the root letters ירש (yud-resh-shin) and here’s where it gets complicated: those root letters mean both to dispossess and to inherit. These two opposing meanings are forcing us to consider the two sides of the coin of possession: that for one people to inherit requires for another to be dispossessed.

As I said before, our people is all too well-schooled in dispossession and displacement. My father’s parents made the long journey from Poland to Australia in the 1930s. His grandfather, a Hazzan, stayed behind for the chaggim. But the unbearable truth is that there exists on this planet a people who felt the late 1940s the way my grandparents felt the late 1930s. The circumstances are different, but the sense of dispossession is more similar than some of us would like to imagine.

Believe it or not, I’m not here to argue one side of the conflict over the other. I am a Zionist through and through AND I believe the Palestinians also have a legitimate claim to the land. I deplore October 7 and all the attacks that preceded and followed it AND I cannot stand to see starvation used as a tactic of war. I condemn Hamas and its cynical exploitation of the Palestinian cause without reservation AND I think this war has outlived its own usefulness and is now making Jews everywhere less safe.

Our Haftarah today, one of the three haftarot of rebuke leading up to Tisha b’Av, is a stinging condemnation of an Israelite population that has fallen into sin and idolatry. In chapter 2, verse 13 we read:

כִּי־שְׁתַּיִם רָעוֹת עָשָׂה עַמִּי אֹתִי עָזְבוּ מְקוֹר מַיִם חַיִּים
לַחְצֹב לָהֶם בֹּארוֹת בֹּארֹת נִשְׁבָּרִים אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָכִלוּ הַמָּיִם׃
For my people has committed two wrongs: abandoned the Source of living waters,
and built cisterns that cannot even hold water.

That is to say, not only have the Israelites rejected God, but they’ve doubled down on it, creating social structures that reinforce their original mistake. This is an ancient warning that moral injury can be fatal.

What I want to tell you is subtle and difficult. The haftarah confirms what the linguistics of dispossession and inheritance in the parsha posit. The agonizing contradiction in any conflict is that both sides of the coin exist; everyone’s story is real to them. With respect to the relentless fighting and suffering in Israel, I am beginning to think that the only moral starting point is accepting that Jews exist and are not going anywhere, and Palestinians exist and are not going anywhere. The work before us is to stand the coin on its edge in search of a way forward that reclaims humanity on both sides and starts from there.

Those root letters we discussed before ירש—letters that intertwine around dispossession and inheritance—are also present in perhaps one of the most treasured words in the Hebrew language: יְרוּשָׁלַיִם—Yerushalayim. But notice—the end of the word has the characteristic suffix indicating a pair. (Think יָדָיִם—two hands, or יוֹמָיִם—two days.) Extending the logic of pairs, we can dare to imagine: Not one people but two, not one narrative but two. We can interpret יְרוּשָׁלַיִם as יְרוּשָׁת שָׁלָיִם—the inheritance of two shaloms, of peace and wholeness for both.

כֵּן יְהִי רָצוֹן May this be God’s desire.

Shabbat shalom!

Pinchas for TAA

(Delivered July 19, 2025)

Shabbat shalom! It’s good to be back.

It was wonderful over my two week vacation to visit with my parents and sisters in Michigan and to see my son Akiva in Washington DC, but along the way, I made a discovery about myself. Two weeks is too much time for me to be idle. After about ten days, I started to get itchy to come back to work. I had seen all the movies that interested me. I had read a couple of books. I had schmoozed with the people I miss the most when I’m in Massachusetts. But the slow pace was starting to wear on me, and I began to feel ready for more activity.

And then I came back to our Torah reading: the third triennial of Parshat Pinchas, another one of those repetitive, seemingly boring passages that describes in detail something that is so foreign to our present-day lives as to feel unapproachable. Verse after verse—of bulls and fire and unblemished yearling lambs, of grain offerings of finest wheat and beaten olive oil—can cause the eyes to glaze over in stultifying boredom.

But as you know, I’ve staked my claim on wonder, and so as always, I ask myself, What happens when you slow down over the verses? What is the invitation the Torah is making?

Why are these endless verses of animal sacrifice different from all other endless verses of animal sacrifice?

It turns out they are! The offerings in Pinchas are not behavioral in nature: it’s not talking about offerings for purification, or for well-being, or for remediation of sin. Rather, the offerings in Parshat Pinchas are temporal and calendrical. They are all linked with the passage of time and with marking certain kinds of moments in one way and marking certain other kinds of moments in another way.

Remember back to the first aliyah, where there was the juxtaposition of the Pesach offerings and the תמידין—the everyday offerings. Seeing the sacred and the daily side by side in the Torah is a little jarring, but I think ultimately the consideration of offerings in Parshat Pinchas is inviting us into contemplation of the interplay between the commonplace and the sacred.

This week in the life of our congregation has given us ample practice in noting the contradiction. In this emotionally rich week, we have held two grievous losses and the joy of affirming our embrace of a young child with deep roots in this congregation—all as we navigated the normalcy of sunburns, and fresh greens from the garden, and paying the bills, and making toast for breakfast. The truth is, our lives are a constant swing—sometimes a roller-coaster—between the ordinary and the sublime.

The Torah knows this, too. Bamidbar chapter 28, verse 4—a verse from the second triennial of Parshat Pinchas—reads:

אֶת־הַכֶּבֶשׂ אֶחָד תַּעֲשֶׂה בַבֹּקֶר וְאֵת הַכֶּבֶשׂ הַשֵּׁנִי תַּעֲשֶׂה בֵּין הָעַרְבָּיִם
Take one lamb in the morning for sacrifice,
and take the second lamb in the evening.

If you came to the Shavuot tikkun this year, these words might ring a bell. This seemingly unprepossessing verse comes up in a few places in the Midrashic literature, tucked into a parable that involves three sages discussing the question of what’s the most important verse in the Torah. This is the kind of conversation that smacks of late nights in the dormitory lounge freshman year: nobody really thinks they’re going to answer the question, but it’s sort of delicious to talk about it and reflect together. So these three rabbis, as I picture the Midrash in my imagination—take it on themselves to come up with the one pasuk that encompasses the meaning of the whole Torah. Now you and I know that if such a verse existed, we wouldn’t need the whole Torah! But even so, the story becomes a kind of Rorschach Test, a lens through which to examine our own theological and moral commitments.

Ben Zoma is the first to speak in the Midrash, and he says the most all-encompassing verse is שמע ישראל יי אלהינו יי אחד—Listen, Israel! Adonai is our God, Adonai is singular. Then Ben Nanas—or in some versions Rabbi Akiva—makes the case for ואהבת לרעך כמוך—Love your neighbor as yourself. Finally, our verse about the morning and evening sacrifices comes up as a possibility, raised by Shimon ben Pazi, and an anonymous sage affirms that one—our verse from Pinchas—as the most all-embracing verse in the Torah.

It might seem counterintuitive to imagine that the תמידין—the everyday offerings—would outshine the summative statement of monotheism, what a family friend from childhood, a Reform rabbi, called The Watchword of our Faith. Hard to imagine how a lamb in the morning and a lamb in the evening could possibly be more important than that!

And then, how could the everyday offerings compete against the lofty aspiration and lifelong challenge of teaching ourselves to love our neighbors? Despite, or perhaps because of, its difficulty, this is surely the Torah’s essential message!

And yet the Midrash holds to the daily sacrifices.

So what makes the תמידין more compelling than monotheism; more compelling than a religion of love?

I wouldn’t dare to answer for the sages, but my reading of this Midrash is that monotheism and a love-oriented religious life are the goals, while the emphasis of the daily is the means by which we pursue them. Engagement with the תמידין draws us to the importance of practice; the gorgeous, heartbreaking value of the prosaic. Daily awareness, moment by moment, allows us to approach, however haltingly, the core values our tradition insists on. The path is rocky with both pebbles and boulders, and concentrating on daily appointments to offer something of value to the divine—whether we feel like it or don’t—enables us to take the next step.

The American poet Andrea Gibson, who died this past week, wrote eloquently on this theme, which came into bitter focus during the illness that eventually ended their life at the young age of 49. Gibson wrote:

Wasn’t it death that taught me
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things
can be seen in a single second?

Friends, this is a תמידין approach to life, a spirit that says, even the boring moments are full of meaning and gorgeousness. It’s the practice of attention that makes it so, those daily lambs and repetitive words we are tempted to skim over. It’s the impulse to elevate the turning points, in a world that’s always turning.

Shabbat shalom!