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!

Sh’lach L’cha for TAA

Delivered June 21, 2025

Shabbat shalom.

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash.

I was alone in the house: Bill was at work; Gideon had just left for school. After saying some rather un-rabbinic words, I went looking for the source of the crash. In the entryway of my small house, I found that a light fixture had, for no apparent reason, shattered. There were pieces of glass on the floor, in the soil of the etrog plant, under the radiator. It was a good, solid mess. I was fine, but jangled. Since I was barefoot, I left the mess for after breakfast. Figured it would keep.

Over breakfast, I started to think, what the heck was that? I might not have said heck. But really: what makes something that’s been in place for decades—a thing that nobody has jostled or fiddled with in all that time, a thing that seems safe and secure, just part of the scenery—suddenly shatter?

The sound of that crash lingered in my ears, as I allowed my mind to wander.

I thought of another seemingly normal morning. Peaceniks waking up on kibbutz to the sound of gunfire and shouts. Young people at the Nova Music Festival initially mistaking the booms for the beat of the music they’d come to revel in together. Folks getting ready for Simchat Torah services suddenly running for their lives. People all over Israel jolted out of their morning routines. And even now, nearly two years later, our hostages trapped underground and the Gazans trapped above ground, all finding themselves at the mercy of forces that seem to exist well beyond the capacity for mercy. Sudden crashes are their daily bread as they try to hold on until something better comes.

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash.

I thought of my friends and colleagues in Israel, of my close friend Rabbi Matthew Schultz, whom I graduated with just a couple of weeks ago. Now known as Rav Matti, he started his new job as rabbi of Kehilat Moriah in Haifa, just as the conflict with Iran started to boil over. He led his first Kabbalat Shabbat service for his community on zoom, because it was deemed unsafe to come to the synagogue. He sent me a message just after Shabbat last week: Naomi, it’s terrifying. We’re just holding our breath, not knowing what’s going to happen.

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash.

I thought of the immigrants—sojourners for generations—raising children and worshipping with their neighbors and paying their taxes. People who have been pursuing the proper steps to gain US citizenship. Suddenly arrested, their hands zip-tied together in front of their children, and detained as they make their way out of a naturalization hearing.

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash.

I thought of the brick through the window at the Butcherie, the kosher grocery my friends and I have shopped at for years. The brick—thankfully thrown while the store was empty—said, “Free Palestine” on it. This antisemitic attack is only the latest symptom in a flareup of Jew hatred that’s got our community on edge.

Some years ago, I had an acting teacher who used an unforgettable metaphor to articulate the structural arc of a scene: When you begin the scene, everything is going along normally. The rhythm and relationships—the resting heart rate of the piece—get laid down, like a groove for improvisation. The scene becomes a drama when something happens that changes the contours of the norm that’s just been established. This is what sets the plot in motion, what engages the audience and the actors in a relationship of meaning. My teacher called this moment of spark the proverbial brick through the window.

That’s how our sixth aliyah is reading to me today. In prior aliyot, the scene is set: with commandments for offerings, detailed instruction for the day to day work of the Mishkan and the Priestly functions that drive it. What to do in response to communal and individual mistakes in these rituals. What to do in cases of overreach.

And then comes the story of the man gathering firewood on Shabbat who meets with a horrific communal punishment commanded directly from God. The passage is unsettling at best, and our commentators are at pains to soften its sharp edges. The Bechor Shor points out that while many of the מצוות are applicable only once the Israelites reach the promised land, the laws of Shabbat are universal. Perhaps, therefore, such a punishment was necessary, in order to stress the importance of keeping an exacting Shabbat observance. Rashi’s comment supports this reading, noting that according to scripture, the Israelites’ adherence to Shabbat מצוות was already slipping, as of the second Shabbat. In any case, the parable of the wood-gatherer is the crash, the brick through the window that says God means business.

It may be hard to imagine, particularly in this time of too many bricks through windows, but a crash isn’t uniformly, permanently bad. Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder of Svara, a Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, has a whole Crash Theory. She teaches that what looks like disaster can be a turning point. The classic example she cites is the period after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. This was the worst calamity the Jews had faced to date, and Jewish life might have ended there. Yet some chose to see that catastrophe as an invitation to go back to the tradition, preserve what was most important in it, and adapt it to the new, unwelcome circumstances. Instead of folding, through the creativity and determination of a small cadre of learned scholars, Judaism was saved as the Rabbinic period sprang to life. Rebbe Yochanan ben Zakai got himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin to establish the academy at Yavneh, and the Sages were off and running to shape something new.

Similarly, in today’s Torah reading, after the wood-gatherer meets his awful fate, scripture goes back to basics. Through articulating the teaching of the tzitzit, we return to the מצוות, reorient ourselves to what God demands of us. The Torah provides us with something tangible, fringes on our garments, glinted with bright blue, to draw us like a mantra back to our holy obligations.

There are many ways in which our world today feels like it’s crashing: escalating war in the Middle East, political chaos in the US, a fearsome rise in antisemitism that, between Beverly in January and Brookline this past week, feels dangerously close to home. And all that is on top of our own individual private sorrows: the ailing relative, the mental health struggles, the recent loss. We recommit ourselves to tradition—even when it feels like our Shabbat candles and our Torah learning and our daily prayers for peace have no effect whatsoever. Doing so connects us with one another across time and space, and aligns us with a sense of something larger than ourselves.

When considered in conjunction with the opening of the parsha—the story of the scouts and their crisis of faith—the teaching of the tzitzit reads like the answer to the question that Parshat Sh’lach L’cha poses. What do we do when our confidence is shaken, when the brick through the window destabilizes everything we think we understand about ourselves? Come back. Come home.

Shabbat shalom.

(Behar) Bechukotai for TAA

(Delivered May 24, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. The Torah is right on time. On this singular day—the one and only day before my one and only ordination—our triennial reading concerns itself with the practice of dedication to the Temple. It could hardly be more fitting to talk about consecration and vows and the certainty underneath them.

But by now, you know me well enough to know that I think certainty is, at best, overrated. I like the complication, the nuance, the eternal question, “What else does it mean?” And part of dedicating oneself to leadership lies in being willing to sit with unanswerable questions and painful truths. I will get to both of these in this drasha, which I’d like to dedicate to the memories of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram, the two young people who were murdered in DC this week at an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.

So, as I was studying this week, I happened upon a teaching from Rabbi David Silber, which inspired me to pause over this challenging and ambiguous verse from the final aliyah. Chapter 27, verse 29 reads:

כָּל־חֵרֶם אֲשֶׁר יָחֳרַם מִן־הָאָדָם לֹא יִפָּדֶה מוֹת יוּמָת׃
All who have been proscribed cannot be redeemed;
they must surely die.

Proscribed and redeemed are both rather slippery terms, making the verse a minefield—or maybe a treasure chest—of potential interpretations. Let’s look at the word חֵרֶם—which takes on a variety of meanings throughout Jewish literature and thought, depending on the setting and the interpreter. It can mean dedicated, set aside, utterly destroyed, banned, or proscribed. Also, curiously, it can mean a net, like for fishing.

Rashi reads חֵרֶם in this verse to mean a person who has been sentenced to death: such a person cannot be redeemed through payment. Rather, their fate is already sealed, they must surely die. But, reading metaphorically, I can easily imagine our pasuk—our verse—to say that anything that is dedicated to God can’t be redeemed. Once we’ve chosen to vow something for the greater good, in the service of God, we can’t bargain our way out of it. A commitment is a commitment.

Several centuries before Rashi, in the Rabbinic literature, חֵרֶם refers to the status of having been forced out of the community. The Talmud tells the heartbreaking story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurkanos, who was so convinced of his own rightness and so unwilling to admit when he was outvoted, that he was placed in חֵרֶם and expelled from the Beit Midrash. The intellectual life of his colleagues continued without him, while he languished in isolation and defeat.

His exile was long and painful. Eventually, as Rabbi Eliezer grew weak with illness and his death approached, his former colleagues softened, and they came to pay tribute to this formidable scholar. As Rabbi Eliezer wept for all the teaching he never got to do, the visitors asked him to teach them all he could, in the time that remained. He taught and taught and taught, many fine points of Levitical law, but of course the end always comes. His last words were words of teaching, and just as he died, the חֵרֶם was lifted.

For the Sages of the Rabbinic age, חֵרֶם was a fate worse than death. A person placed in חֵרֶם belonged to a caste of unredeemables, people who are excluded from learning and from social interaction. They become non-persons, stripped of their humanity.

Yet another usage of חֵרֶם is what it means in wartime, in which context it refers to military siege. The Book of Joshua, for example, teaches about the Battle of Jericho as an instance of חֵרֶם. This was an all-out war, which could only end in utter destruction.

Here’s the thing, though. The Ramban on our verse from the parsha points in a very different direction, citing Shmuel Alef, the First Book of Samuel, which tells of a time when Saul had ordered that his soldiers would not eat, in preparation for battle. The troops came upon a honeycomb, and Saul’s son, Jonathan, unaware of the orders, ate some of the honey that had overflowed the comb. While Saul intended to carry out the punishment for breaking the חֵרֶם, by putting his own son to death, the other soldiers spoke up for Jonathan. Saul tempered justice with mercy, and he relented. Ramban cites this as a complication to Rashi’s more straightforward reading of the verse. Reading with deeper nuance, Ramban is pointing out that even חֵרֶם can be reversible. Even the harshest decree can be subdued.

These two contrasting descriptions of the military use of חֵרֶם feel all too relevant to us in the current day. The echoes are too loud to ignore, and I can’t help but think how the war in Gaza—a war I initially supported with a heavy but committed heart—seems to have taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It pains me to say this, but many authorities believe the Israeli government’s blockade of humanitarian assistance appears to be leading to widespread starvation of innocent people in Gaza. It’s important to note that not everybody agrees on this, and the fog of war makes it hard for even the most well-meaning and well-informed people to discern the truth. Even so, I fear the pain of our losses has been so great that it has caused us to embroil ourselves in an unwinnable war. I am no military strategist and speak only from the reflections of my own conscience, but it sometimes feels to me that continuing on the road we are on carries the risk of humanitarian, military, societal, and moral catastrophe.

I want to say this clearly: you can be Zionist (as I am), you can be pro-Israel (as I am), you can reject the rhetoric about Israeli oppression and other mindless generalizations (as I do), and you can still think that starvation as a tactic of war is immoral. The fact that Hamas has been engaging in the same sort of tactics should give us pause. The Torah teaches us to apply our ethics even in wartime.

There are moments—more and more all the time—when I question whether this war is still serving to make Israelis safer, or whether it is moving us toward bringing the hostages home. The level of aggression that made sense in October of 2023 does not, to me, make sense in May of 2025. Just as the Torah eased its stance on חֵרֶם, from the Book of Leviticus to the Book of Samuel, so too, must we at least be prepared, when faced with new information and new circumstances, to question our own certainty.

Indeed, the two young Israeli diplomats who were gunned down in DC just a few days ago, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram, were involved in the work of peace. The event at which the shooting took place was dedicated to cooperative, cross-cultural diplomacy in the service of solving humanitarian crises throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It adds heartbreak to heartbreak that we lost people who had been engaged in this holy work.

Remember that outlying definition of חֵרֶם—the mesh of a net? Sometimes we can’t catch everything; there are always loose threads and ambiguities—things we wish were more neatly tied together. Our task as Jews, as citizens, and as humans is to hold the pieces with open hands, to continually ask ourselves, “What else might it mean?” We live in complex times, and integrity demands this of us. The one thing I’m certain of is that certainty is temporary.

During his period of חֵרֶם, Rabbi Eliezer’s attitude tempered over time. One of the sayings attributed to him in Pirkei Avot, which is inscribed on his memorial stone in Tiverias, is:

יְהִי כְבוֹד חֲבֵרְךָ חָבִיב עָלֶיךָ כְּשֶׁלָּךְ
Let the dignity of your friend be as dear to you as your own.

There is much hard work ahead, and no doubt devastating heartbreaks to come. I pray that we can continue striving to embrace the ethical standards that make us who we are as a people. Torah teaches us that circumstances alter cases, that few things are exactly all one way, and that sometimes the strongest thing to do is to soften a little.

Shabbat shalom! May the memories of Yaron and Sarah be a blessing and an inspiration.

(Acharei Mot) Kedoshim for TAA

(Delivered May 9, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Yesterday I attended my last class of my last semester of rabbinical school. Hold your applause; I still have to write two papers before my course work is complete. But in the past week or so, I feel like I’ve moved into a different time zone: let’s call it the reflection time zone. It’s not quite nostalgia but something nostalgia-adjacent, as I look back on the moments and relationships that have filled my last six years with so much meaning.

My time at Hebrew College has offered lesson after lesson in careful listening and in bridge-building across profound difference. As a pluralistic Jewish institution, the College community is made up of people who are all passionate about Judaism but who express it in many different ways. Under one roof we have Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews. We have farm Jews and poetry Jews and queer theory Jews and anthropology Jews. We have lovers of Israel, we have Israel-skeptics, and we have full-on anti-Zionists.

This diversity has been a strength but it’s not always been easy. After the attacks on October 7, and throughout the war in Gaza, it’s been tense and at times painful to realize the gulf that exists between and among many in my community. Our perspectives about the world are shockingly different! And yet, it’s also been inspiring to be part of a community so fiercely committed to remaining in relationship despite these sharp differences.

People are often incredulous when I mention the coexistence of political disagreements and deep love that characterizes my school community. The responses range from, “How do you manage to learn together when you see the world so differently?” to, “How can you possibly talk to those people?”

This week’s parsha points the way. Parshat Kedoshim, the second half of our double portion this week, contains one of the most famous verses in all of scripture—actually the famous part of the verse is just three words. But these three magic words carry great power: as we discussed in Torah study this morning, many rabbis—both ancient and modern—consider them to be the essential message of the Torah. These three words, from Leviticus 19:18 read:

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

And you shall love your neighbor as yourself

Sounds great, right? More good advice that’s deceptively hard to follow. In fact, the three little words by themselves are not much more than a dorm room platitude. It’s the words surrounding them that give them texture and meaning. The full passage reads:

לֹא־תִשְׂנָא אֶת־אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ
הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶךָ וְלֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא׃
לֹא־תִקֹּם וְלֹא־תִטֹּר אֶת־בְּנֵי עַמֶּךָ וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ אֲנִי יי׃

Do not hate your neighbor in your heart; rather admonish them and do not bear sin on their account. Do not be vengeful or grudging toward your tribe. Love your neighbor as yourself. I am God.

Seen in its full context, this pasuk shows that to love our neighbor involves not just a tender feeling that magically arises. Rather, this holy love is earned, through self-awareness and principled disagreement. We’re taught not to allow hateful feelings to fester in our hearts, but to speak them out loud.

Commentators have a wide range of explanations of what it might mean to bear sin because of our kinsmen. Is the sin we avoid, as Rashi said, not to embarrass the person in public? Is it, as Ibn Ezra said, not to falsely accuse someone, such that you end up being the one who is punished? I rather think—using an admittedly twenty-first century lens—that the sin we bear is in the hate itself. If we are carrying animosity toward another person and keep it inside, it starts to poison our interactions, which in turn can lead to לשון הרע—disparaging speech—and much worse.

The Torah teaches us instead to have the courage to admonish the offending person, which, when we do it effectively and they are able to truly take us in, allows us to move forward in relationship without the cloud of resentment hanging over our heads. It is only then that we can love our neighbor as ourselves. Having the self-respect to speak up when something isn’t right is a prerequisite to the kind of interaction that the Torah is advocating. And part of giving that תוכחה— admonishment or rebuke—is in being able to hear what the other person might need to say. An effective תוכחה conversation is predicated on having the humility to know that you might ALSO have to change.

The great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai wrote:
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

It’s easy to shake our fists at all that we think is wrong in this world. Holding our own certainty with a light grip, though, allows us to see the humanity of others and move toward it like a magnet.

This is what the Torah demands of us, and as the last two words of this passage, אֲנִי יי—I am God—imply, the whole process is a pathway to connection with the divine, a recipe for holiness. The presence of God is the umbrella under which we undertake the mitzvot, and God’s teaching for righteous living is the reason we do.

And this ultimately has been the approach that made the complicated environment at Hebrew College beneficial for all. Through respectful, open-hearted listening, predicated on integrity and trust, we built, each day anew, a community that could not just withstand difference but find holiness in it.

Shabbat shalom!

Acharon shel Pesach for TAA

(Delivered April 19, 2025)

Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach!

Sometimes it seems like Pesach is one big game of “I Spy.” Or for the younger set, “Where’s Waldo?” The opportunity to step off the usual path to notice what’s different is inherent in Pesach—after all, much of what we do at seder is expressly so that children will take note of the strangeness and ask questions. Opening our eyes to our surroundings leads to a deep, rich experience, and allows us to reflect on the familiar with fresh perspective.

Our holiday Torah readings likewise take us out of the flow of time, inviting us to re-examine familiar passages that we’ve already seen in the course of our regular weekly parsha study. Somehow, they seem to catch the light differently in a different season.

For example, the words of שירת הים—the Song of the Sea, which daily daveners say every morning and which we chant here every Shabbat, are at risk of becoming so familiar that we don’t even notice them anymore. Hearing them chanted in the context of the story they come from invites us to consider them anew. And hearing them chanted in the context of that story and in the context of the holiday that celebrates that story adds another layer of richness.

Something that struck me this year is that שיר, the Hebrew root word for song, appears for the first time in the entire Torah at this passage. The creation of the world—and all of the miraculous, beautiful, sorrowful, connective things that follow—go unsung. There is plenty of beautiful text, but it’s only after the Israelites cross the sea that they, and the text, burst into song. Imagine it! The creation of the world merits no song. Noah’s emergence from the Ark merits no song. Avram becoming Avraham, Yitzhak escaping the knife, Yaakov meeting his love, Josef forgiving his brothers. All these are described in gorgeous poetry but the voice never lifts into song.

As Rabbi Lewis taught us a few months ago, the first word of the Torah בראשית can be anagrammed to say שיר תאב, thus reinterpreting the Torah’s first pasuk from the familiar, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,

With an appetite for song, God created the heavens and the earth. If indeed God desired song from the beginning, it’s all the more telling that it isn’t until the moment of crossing the sea that something breaks open and song pours forth.

The sound of liberation is musical.

And yet this glorious riot of song poses a theological and moral question. The basis of the freedom that we sing about so robustly is found a little further back, in Parshat Vaera. In chapter 9 verse 1, God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh:

שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיַעַבְדֻנִי
Let My people go, that they may worship Me

Though we may be tempted to think that the text is saying the Israelites are Moses’s people, the completion of the sentence makes it clear that in fact we are God’s people, and that the gist of the liberation Moses and we seek is not necessarily a life of ease, but rather a life of theological purpose. Thus Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, is the expression of a new kind of relationship with the divine.

Why, then, do we use this new-found gift of song to rejoice at the death of our enemies? Dayeinu that we would have escaped with our lives, but then we go on at length with detailed descriptions of Pharaoh and his men, just recently bereaved of their first born sons, now drowning in the very waters that parted for us. We gloat at the sight of Pharaoh’s highest officers meeting their watery doom. We refer to God as אִישׁ מִלְחָמָה—a warrior. Why does triumph so often curdle into an appetite for vengeance? And why, even as I feel mildly embarrassed at this war cry, do I also feel a kinship with it?

If it’s uncomfortable to witness this in our ancestors, it’s probably because we recognize all too well the human impulse that drives it. I, too, have moments of wishing the worst on people whose actions have caused pain to the Jewish community; I imagine the same is true of everyone in this room. I grew up holding the contradiction that I should try to see the best in everyone… except Hitler. Today, that small carve-out category includes the Hamas leadership as well. There are people—people who are fully devoted to destruction—who seem to be beyond the pale of sympathy; and yet if we delight in the downfall of those who would destroy us, what does that say about us? What does it say about God? Where are the boundaries of צֶלֶם אֶלֹהִים?

Obviously these questions resonate with a lot of what I’ve been feeling lately as I look out from my happy little bubble at the bigger world. As the soul-wracking war in Israel and Gaza grinds on; as summary deportation becomes normalized here at home purportedly in the name of protecting the Jewish community; as antisemitism continues to surge—it’s all too easy to see the work of dehumanization. And it isn’t just “major social issues” where we see it. Even in our everyday lives, it’s the mechanics of dehumanization that make us decide we can no longer talk to, say, a high school friend whose political orientation we disagree with, or a family member whose sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not aligned with our own. These divisions are painful and growing ever wider. And when the Israelites burst into full-throated song to celebrate the deaths of the Egyptians, despite their justifiable rage at their oppressors, there’s more than a whiff of dehumanization in the song.

There is a teaching from the Talmud that speaks to this question. On Brachot 10a, we find Beruria, a great Rabbinic scholar of the first and second centuries, in conversation with her husband, Rabbi Meir. He is troubled by a gang of criminals in their neighborhood and, out of exasperation, prays for their death. Beruria chides him, using an ingenious reading of a verse from Psalm 104, to teach that he should pray not for the death of the sinner, but for the death of the sin. Convinced, Rabbi Meir instead prays on behalf of the hoodlums, and they repent. Beruria’s wisdom in this instance lay in her capacity to separate the action from the person.

Elsewhere in Tractate Brachot, the rabbis discuss the proper time to say the morning Shema. Their purpose is to describe just how much light is needed in order to say it’s light enough to be morning. They offer a few possibilities: when you can see the difference between blue and green; or the difference between sky blue and white; or the difference between a dog and a wolf. Finally they land on a distinction that speaks straight to my soul:

מִשֶּׁיִּרְאֶה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ רָחוֹק אַרְבַּע אַמּוֹת, וְיַכִּירֶנּוּ
When you can see a friend from a short distance away,
and recognize them.

Our capacity and willingness to see one another and recognize one another’s humanity is our best hope for singing a song that seeks only the death of sin, and that ultimately liberates us all.

Pesach for TAA

(Adapted from my Pesach column for the Jewish Journal and delivered on April 12, 2025)

Chag Sameach!

What a time we live in! By some accountings, Nissan is the first month, and so, in a way, we are at the beginning of the year, even as we’re in the middle. Beginning, middle, or end, the moment we find ourselves in feels tender and fraught. Living in a divided community, in a divided country, in a divided world, we can sense all too plainly the cracks in the foundation.

Within the Jewish community as a whole, there are people of strong ethical and moral fiber who disagree passionately on fundamental issues regarding the Jewish future. Heartfelt convictions as to what the Israeli government should and should not do vary widely from person to person. And all across the country, we are seeing ever more political polarization, as we grapple with the profound implications of the new regime and its forceful moves to reshape our democracy and our society. The world, meanwhile, is gripped by multiple wars and conflicts—from Israel to Sudan to Ukraine—and by all manner of natural and human-caused disasters. Jews are scared. LGBTQ+ folks are scared. Immigrants are scared.

The literal sense of Mitzrayim—narrow places—and the metaphorical sense of what it was like to be enslaved in Mitzrayim—oppressive, confining—feel all too real as we pray for the release of our hostages still remaining in Gaza and as we watch with agonizing concern as the global trend toward authoritarian extremism heats up, for Jews and for humanity in general.

The arrival of Pesach seems both implausible and desperately necessary. To contemplate the miracle of redemption in a time of political discord, angst, and rising antisemitism feels chutzpadik at the least, and perhaps even downright absurd. Who can speak of a parting sea when we ourselves are drowning in grief over relentless violence in the Holy Land? Who can sing of freedom when our people—after more than 500 unbearable days—are still in dusty tunnels while their captors gloat? Who can fathom staying up all night to recount miracle upon miracle when we are, individually and collectively, exhausted to the brink of collapse?

And yet when redemption feels decidedly unattainable, that is when we most need to come together and raise our voices, as we remind ourselves and one another that the impossible is actually possible. What better time to remember the signs and wonders with which God signaled that our moment had arrived? What better time to remember the splitting of the sea, an event that set all Israelites on an equal footing, such that, according to Midrash, the lowliest housemaid saw the same glimpses of the divine that Moses himself saw? What better time to remember the way an unassuming, debilitatingly shy person with a too-hot temper grew into the leader who was entrusted with the task of setting God’s people free?

Everything about Pesach is suffused with possibility: that those who have been downtrodden can rise up, that freedom can come, that things can change.

Our Pesach Torah reading describes the moment of change like this:

וּמוֹשַׁב בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר יָשְׁבוּ בְּמִצְרָיִם שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וְאַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שָׁנָה׃
וַיְהִי מִקֵּץ שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וְאַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שָׁנָה וַיְהִי בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה יָצְאוּ כּל־צִבְאוֹת יי מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם׃

“The Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt was 430 years. And at the end of the 430th year, on that very day,
all of God’s multitudes went out from the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 12:40-41)

I was struck anew this year by a phrase בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה (on that very day) that appears not once but twice in the Pesach readings. (It also appears just a few psukim prior to the beginning of our Torah reading, and in the haftarah that we read today.) That cluster of words is so unassuming that we might skip right past it, but like Moses himself, it contains astonishing potential. This is a phrase that shows us that everything has its moment, that there comes a last day for every hardship.

This profound teaching—that something new is ever possible—is a message of hope, from the Author of hope. It reminds us that the future is God’s time. While we can’t know when the sea will split and the suffering will be behind us, we do know that everything has an endpoint.

And while we wait, the seder invites us to remember: We’ve been in tight spots before. In every generation forces have risen against us. We are much stronger than we’re sometimes given credit for. Our commitment to one another strengthens us yet more.

And every year—even as we end the seder with the bread of misery on our lips—we say L’shanah haba’ah bi’Yerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem. May it be so, in a world at peace. Chag sameach!

Vayikra for TAA

(Delivered April 5, 2025)

I don’t mean to alarm you, but I make a lot of mistakes. Most of them, thank God, are small mistakes: a thoughtless comment or a silly oversight, running out of time to call someone who deserves my attention or tripping over the Hebrew in my davening. Some of my mistakes are bigger, though. And I’m sorry to say that some of my mistakes are yet to be made. I may even make one with this dvar Torah. Living up to a standard of perfection is both extremely difficult and impossible. Difficult because of the toll the attempt can take on us, and impossible because, much to the chagrin of perfectionists everywhere, a life without mistakes is an unattainable standard.

Our parsha this week gives us a way to think and talk about the inherent tension between the state of being human and impossible standards.

As you probably remember from previous years, Sefer Vayikra, also known as the Book of Leviticus, mainly focuses on the practice of ritual sacrifice: who should bring sacrificial offerings; how, when, and where the offerings should be made; and the whole taxonomy of what goes into each type of offering and why. The triennial portion of Vayikra that we chanted today deals with mistake-offerings. The parsha details what to do when one unintentionally—or even unknowingly—transgresses the commandments of the Torah.

Given that it is human to make mistakes, the Torah offers us a hierarchy. Ideally, a person who sins בִּשְׁגָגָה—by mistake—would approach the Mishkan to bring the Priest a large animal from the herd, such as a sheep or a goat. But the Torah expansively notes that not everyone can afford to give up an animal from the herd. Even though it’s called sacrifice, scripture understands that not all sacrifices are sustainable. Giving something up should be consequential but not devastating.

Thus, if the person’s means don’t allow for a large animal, they could instead bring two birds. And if even the two birds were beyond their capacity, our tradition offers an alternative to the alternative by allowing them to bring a grain offering. The Torah seems to be going out of its way to acknowledge that our resources for making it right when we have gone astray are not all equal. Some of us, at some times, are able to do everything just so. But the Torah, knowing human nature as it does, allows for this to be one among a range of possible outcomes. There are times when we can do it all and do it well; there are times when we barely tread water.

A similar principle is at play in a Mishnah I encountered this week having to do with Bedikat Chametz, the search for chametz. One traditional practice around Pesach is to search out and burn all remaining traces of chametz on the day before the seder—or two days before if the day before is Shabbat. The evening of the appointed day, we search all around using a candle, or nowadays a flashlight. The following morning we burn all we have gathered and declare that any bits of chametz that we failed to find and burn in the process of Bedikat Chametz become ownerless as the dust of the earth.

Mishnah Pesachim (1:3) says:

רַבִּי יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר
בּוֹדְקִין אוֹר אַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר
וּבְאַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר שַׁחֲרִית
וּבִשְׁעַת הַבִּעוּר

Rabbi Yehudah says: one checks at night on the 14th [of Nisan] and at dawn on the 14th, and at the time of burning. The Mishnah continues: If you don’t search in the evening of the 14th, search in the daytime on the 14th. And if you don’t search on the 14th at all, search during the festival. And if you don’t search during the festival, search after the festival.

Now, on the one hand, the Zohar teaches that anyone who eats chametz during Pesach, it’s as if they worship idols. High stakes indeed! And yet, on the other hand, we have such leniency built into the practice of rooting out chametz that even if we fail to do it for the entirety of the chag, we can still do it afterwards. Even after it becomes irrelevant, we are permitted to try again. Likewise, our tradition offers Pesach Sheni, a second chance to make the Passover sacrifice if one happens to be traveling or ritually impure at the time of the actual chag and therefore unable to make the sacrifice.

And then there’s the familiar Mishnah from Pirkei Avot (2:16), which coincidentally I also studied this week, which says,

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְלַאכָה לִגְמוֹר וְלֹא אָתָה בֵּן חוֹרִין לִיבָּטֵל מִמֻנָה
It is not up to you to complete the work,
but neither are you free to ignore it.

When three different texts you encounter in the same week are all pointing in the same direction, it’s worthwhile to look in that direction to see what they might be pointing at.

The overall message appears to be—not that we shouldn’t always try our best in matters of importance—but that sometimes our best is going to be truly excellent, and sometimes it will barely be passable. Sometimes we’ll be able to give it the full unblemished sheep treatment, and sometimes we’ll simply have to accept—and know that God will accept—a simple grain offering, the finest flour we can find.

In a week in which we seem to find ourselves in the crosshairs of history, this is a worthwhile principle to keep at the forefront of our minds. We are living in a time of multiple unfolding crises: of a volatile political situation at home, ever-increasing antisemitism, a grinding war and widening chaos in Israel, and looming economic troubles. Many of us, across a range of political orientations, are wanting to take action, whether to march in the streets, or call our senators, or sign onto petitions and letters condemning what we see as injustice being perpetrated in our names. Each of us will find ourselves navigating an individual calculus of what feels most urgent, weighed against our own inner resources.

In times of turmoil, it is impossible for any one of us to meet all the needs we perceive. Those who feel called to action will speak out, take a stand, make good trouble. Those who feel reticent or confused will watch and learn, and double down on the individual pursuits that strengthen them. Our TAA community is capacious enough to support all manner of engagement, and to care for one another with kindness and integrity, regardless of how the unfolding muddle strikes us. As our sacred texts teach us, we will bring the offerings that we can manage, and accept that others will bring what they can manage.

In the parsha, the Hebrew word for offering, קָרְבָּן, carries in it the root letters ק ר ב, meaning to come near. The practice of bringing offerings is a way of drawing closer to the divine and to one another. In this time of high anxiety—even many generations after the sacrificial cult ended and the Temple went up in flames—we can focus on the core principles taught in our parsha and in the Rabbinic literature that develops the idea. These principles invite us to locate ourselves along the continuum that stretches between the ambitious unblemished offering from the herd and the humble offering of a simple handful of flour. Accepting the world as it is and working within the parameters of our own gifts, we set our sights on seeking the nearness of God and the nearness of one another.

Shabbat shalom!

Vayakhel for TAA

(Delivered March 21, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

There’s something I used to say to the children when they were growing up, a phrase that came up a lot when we were navigating the typical questions of life with small children: “My brother got more than me,” or “I want another cookie,” or “I was here first.” The thing I said, much more often than not, was, “There’s plenty for everyone if everyone shares.”

I wasn’t sure if it was true, even though I dearly wanted it to be. I said it so often, because I wanted the kids to hold it as a value, even if it wasn’t always real. I wanted for them to believe in the magic of people pulling together with generosity in order to make life better for one another. Not because that’s the way life always is, but because I wanted them to imagine it could be, and point their compass in that direction.

Had I been acquainted with it at the time, our parsha for this week, Vayakhel, might have been the inspiration for that bit of aspirational maternal wisdom / magical thinking. Vayakhel finds the Israelites busily collecting voluntary donations for the building and decoration of the Mishkan—the portable sanctuary that our ancestors created according to divine blueprint and brought with them throughout their travels in the wilderness of Sinai, on the way to the Promised Land. This process of building begins with a wish list and is scaffolded by instructions that reflect wholesomeness and deep purpose.

In Shmot 35:5, we find the words:

קְחוּ מֵאִתְּכֶם תְּרוּמָה ליי כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ יְבִיאֶהָ אֵת תְּרוּמַת יי
זָהָב וָכֶסֶף וּנְחֹשֶׁת
Take from among you offerings for God; all whose heart is willing,
bring these gifts of gold, silver and copper.

Notice the phrase כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ. We have כֹּל—all, with its implications of inclusiveness; נְדִיב denoting nobility and generosity, and לב, the heart. All with generosity of heart. Many of the higher qualities of humanity are packed into this phrase. Rashi notes the implication that the heart is the seat of generosity, thus this whole phrase is heart-centered. Siftei Chachamim extends this reading to comment that it is the heart that inspires. Sforno reads in the phrase כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ a warning that giving must not be compulsory. When what you’re building is something for divine purpose, the manner of giving is relevant, as this famous phrase indicates.

Now if you have been tracking the Torah readings, you know that this holy project of Mishkan-building is not the only collective effort toward making something that’s been in play in this section of the scroll. Last week’s readings from Ki Tissa found the Israelites gathering up their riches to create something together, but the intention and result there were entirely different. In Exodus 32:2, Aaron responds to the Israelites’ desperate demand for a god to worship by saying:

פָּרְקוּ נִזְמֵי הַזָּהָב אֲשֶׁר בְּאָזְנֵי נְשֵׁיכֶם בְּנֵיכֶם וּבְנֹתֵיכֶם וְהָבִיאוּ אֵלָי
Snatch the gold rings from the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.

The word choice here—פָּרְקוּ—meaning to tear away or to break, is starkly different from the heart-oriented language for the Mishkan. There is inherent violence in the creation of עגל הזהב—the Golden Calf. Even the way the gold is collected speaks of tension, if not outright force. Although our sages try to save face for Aaron—saying that he submitted to the Israelites’ wild demands in order to stall for time, hoping that Moses would come back before he was able to actually make the idol—Aaron’s word choice betrays implicit brutality. At some subconscious level, Aaron knows that succumbing to the temptation for idolatry—an imitation of divine connection as opposed to the real thing—can only be unwholesome, to say the least.

The contrasting mode of collection in these two shared building projects teaches us that how we give—how we share—is consequential. Tearing the jewelry off a family member’s ears is a far cry from giving what the heart is inspired to give. The ill-gotten gold of Ki Tissa could only result in discord and degradation. And indeed Rashi suggests that the women didn’t participate voluntarily; their earrings had to be torn from them because they would never have given them of their own will.

By contrast, this week’s parsha opens with Moses gathering כּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל—the whole community of Israelites—to receive instruction for what comes next. With the remnants of the Golden Calf still smoldering, it’s the entire assemblage that comes together, to try to pick up the pieces of their shattered society. And as they begin to heal, they know that only by giving fully, freely, and from the heart can they recover what has been lost and reset their compasses to the basic principle that there’s plenty for everyone if everyone shares. And that in that sharing, there is space for the divine to enter.