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.

Terumah for TAA

(Delivered March 1, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

As I mentioned last night, I am newly the mother of a twenty-one-year old. This milestone has got me reflecting back to those early days, weeks, and months of parenthood: the utter bliss of falling in love with each of my children in his turn, the abject sleeplessness, the chaos of a household with a new person in it. And of course the recordkeeping. Especially with Akiva, our first-born, Bill and I were pretty compulsive about noting: everything he ate, his convoluted sleep patterns, how often he needed a new diaper, not to mention the gifts and cards and the thank-you notes they required of us. And of course, as a first child, Akiva was extremely well-photographed! Everything he did—from eating to laughing to yawning to sleeping—was adorable enough that we thought it needed to be preserved forever… from multiple angles.

I tried to capture everything in the world’s most comprehensive baby book. Every time he sampled a new food. The first time he sat up on his own. His first steps. His first words. His favorite books and songs and funny things he said. Every single moment was precious to us, and we wanted to hold onto it all, even as we were sure we’d remember everything with exquisite precision. Truth was, in our memories, we would constantly be overwriting one cute unforgettable thing with the next one, with the result that the whole thing was fuzzy by lunchtime. The number of details we were suddenly tracking—or attempting to track—was staggering, and all this, while we were exhausted and disoriented to begin with.

You’ve heard me say it before: the Torah is always on time. And so it is this week, as we study Parshat Terumah, one of a fistful of parshiot known for their repetitive, not to say slightly boring, detail. Terumah spells out the what and the how of building the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites will keep with them through their years in the wilderness. This parsha is full of the kinds of details that can cause the reader’s eyes to glaze over, the kinds of details that drove the Hassidic masters to go full mystical metaphor, the kinds of details that can make rabbis and B Mitzvah students alike wish for an easier parsha.

It’s tempting to skip over all this detail—the what and the how—but as people who take Torah seriously, we have to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of all this detail? Why do we need to know what color threads were used for the curtains, and what the planks were made of, and how the hooks were joined to the planks, and so on? What’s the deeper teaching here?

In a way, this building project is the holiest thing the Israelites have done thus far. This is the moment where they move from receiving wisdom to actually doing something. God provides instruction in painstaking detail because nobody has ever done anything like this. God is asking the Israelites to take a leap of faith and imagination, to contribute from their own belongings toward something larger than themselves.

Here, God says. You don’t know what this will be, but I do. You’re going to have to trust Me to show you what’s next.

Receiving the mitzvot and the manna were both mind-alteringly new experiences, but both of those developments were passive. In Terumah we turn the corner from observance to action. Receiving the rules and regulations is one thing, but if we are to build a society of our own, it’s not just about the rules and regs. There is the doing, and Terumah begins to show us how.

It’s not lost on me that this, too, is reminiscent of starting life with a new baby. Before the baby comes, there is anticipation and learning, and maybe in some way you think you have a vague sense of it. But all that learning is theoretical until you’re up all night with this small, needy creature whom you love with more love than you imagined could exist and he won’t stop squalling. These are the moments when we need instruction, and I can imagine that the Israelites would have floundered and failed, had they not had the clarity of divine expectation and instruction, just as Bill and I needed to be able to call our parents and ask, what do we do now?

And part of the value of having all this detail in the parsha today as modern readers is in connecting us to our tradition. This endless detail, boring as it may seem, enables us to remember, at least in imagination, something deeply consequential to our people, something that now feels as remote to us as Mars. It helps us to think what it might have been like to be in the wilderness—in every imaginable way—and not know what to do next, and then to get the instruction—commandment really—that says, get going. The next part is up to you.

I think ultimately the lesson is, if you want a community you have to build it. And indeed, the one pasuk in Terumah that deeply transcends the what and the how comes from the first triennial, chapter 25, verse 8:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם
Let them build Me a holy space, and I will settle among them.

With this pasuk, we learn the why of the Mishkan. We learn that God commands us to give freely of what we have in the service of something mysterious and unrevealed, commands us to assemble specific materials and do all of this detailed work, so that, once completed, this Mishkan—the word Mishkan rooted in the meaning “to settle or to dwell”—will be a space for God to enter. If we want a community—or a family, or a society—we have to be willing to build it ourselves. We have to bring what we have, surrender to the guidance offered to us, and gradually, make it our own. And when it’s our own, it’s much more than just ours, for the divine presence dwells in places we are willing to work on together.

Shabbat shalom!

Terumah for TAA

(Delivered February 28, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

In the rush and swirl of life, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. We get so wrapped up in the details of life—in the worries large and small, in the file folders and sewing kits and gas pumps of our everyday world—that we forget to look up and around and notice the bigger patterns and themes. Of course, Shabbat offers us a chance to reflect more deeply, but even still, we tend to think of each Shabbat as having one parsha, one scriptural statement, to hold our attention. We can too easily forget that the Torah is a continuous scroll, from

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃
At first God created the heavens and the earth

וּלְכֹל הַיָּד הַחֲזָקָה וּלְכֹל הַמּוֹרָא הַגָּדוֹל אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה מֹשֶׁה לְעֵינֵי כּל־יִשְׂרָאֵל׃
And to all the strength of hand and the great teaching
which Moses had displayed to the entire Jewish people

The sweep of it is so much bigger than we can hold at once: from nothingness to this whole world to the ache of bittersweet anticipation underneath that final verse, as one generation fades and the new generation is poised to enter the Promised Land.

I have big sweeps on the brain tonight.

I’m thinking of the long arc of the past few weeks of Torah: from Yitro to Mishpatim to Terumah. When we zoom out, this narrative line articulates the journey of that first seismic encounter with God and the giving over of the ten commandments, followed by the more mundane and detailed laws of Mishpatim. And then, this week in Terumah, we receive the building instructions for the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary that draws the divine presence into the physical world. The progression of these three parshiot is from anticipation—even dread—to planning, and then to setting about doing the work.

Twenty-one years ago tonight, Bill and I were just home from the Cambridge Birth Center with our brand-new first born, our sweet (now-no-longer) little Akiva. So this narrative of anticipatory excitement and mild dread, followed by planning, followed by settling in and making a life, maps powerfully onto my memories tonight.

When we realize a baby is coming, everything begins to change: in our bodies, in our relationships, in our lives. We make room for a new way of being, and little by little we groove into that new rhythm, surrendering to its pleasures and challenges, until the day comes when we can’t remember how it used to be.

Making room for a new way of being is the essence of Parshat Terumah. The parsha is almost entirely made up of highly detailed instructions for building the Mishkan: what color threads and how many poles and what they should be made of and how they should be joined together with golden or copper hooks.

For all its apparently tedious detail, though, which I’ll say more about tomorrow morning, our parsha contains one of my favorite psukim, one I return to often and will probably never not want to write about whenever we study Terumah.

Chapter 25, verse 8 says: וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָש וְשַכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם

The first half of the verse translates pretty easily: and they shall build Me a holy space. The second half is the subject of endless contemplation because of its ambiguity. It reads either and I will dwell within them; or and I will dwell among them.

בְּדִיבּוּר אֶחַד—in a single word—we have the notion that when we create a holy container together, God will be within us individually and also among us as a community. What we build together becomes a home for divinity. I can think of no better, or sweeter, metaphor for what happens when a couple becomes a family, and for the ways in which a community opens up a little more with each new person who arrives. We make the space, and holiness can’t help but enter.

The Mishkan we build in Terumah has enough gravitational pull to provide a ritual anchor for the Israelites, but still it’s flexible enough to move as we grow. Just like the grounding we hope to give our children. Like a parent’s love, the Mishkan is a sanctuary for the journey. We build it together, this beautiful space, and then… the presence of God joins us here, as we go from nothingness to creation to the bittersweet ache of watching the next generation soar.

Shabbat shalom!

Yitro for TAA

(Delivered February 15, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

In the past several months, many people in my world—family members, fellow students, activists I know, and also (a little bit) me—have been dealing with a prolonged sense of overwhelm. We live in a complicated, overstimulating world, moving at a kind of hyper-speed pace. We are overscheduled, under-rested, and subject to constant bombardment in an ever shortening news cycle. Chaos has become the governing esthetic. Information, much of which barely counts as informative, is growing noisier all the time. Over and over, we get simultaneously drawn in deep and sidetracked by the volume—in both senses of the word—of what comes at us. Catastrophes both natural and human-caused are swirling all around us, and technology has made disconnecting from both bad news and our daily obligations harder and harder.

All this played in my mind when I read the parsha this week, especially as I reflected on the Israelites’ response to their momentous first direct encounter with the divine. As Moses works to ready everybody, he assembles the elders of the community and gives them the message that God has instructed him to relay: that God is offering to take on the Israelites as a treasured people, a people that can become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, if only they can fulfill God’s mitzvot.

וַיַּעֲנוּ כל־הָעָם יַחְדָּו וַיֹּאמְרוּ כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּר יי נַעֲשֶׂה
And all the people answered together,
saying, “We will do all that God says.”

The elders’ eager response is telling. When the experience is new and enticing, when there is the prospect of a reward—in the form of becoming God’s special treasure—the Israelites are all in. Full of the ambition and desire to please the Holy One, they answer, as Cassuto puts it:

בְּלֵב אֶחַד וּבְנֶפֶש אַחַת
With one heart and one soul

In this moment, divine favor seems clear and attainable, so the Israelites have an easy time rallying around their task. They readily accept the teachings of the Torah, sight unseen.

Then… things get weird. The moment of God’s revelation turns out to be intense, breathtaking, and, yes, overwhelming. With thunder, lightning, and smoke, the sheer sensations of God’s presence are shattering. Maybe there’s an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, or maybe it just feels that way. Whatever the logical explanation may be, the cumulative effect of all that divinity is sensory overload. As the magnitude of God’s presence comes into focus, the Israelites realize they are going to have to filter their experience. The נַעֲשֶׂה of the previous chapter is transformed, and they say to Moses:

דַּבֵּר־אַתָּה עִמָּנוּ וְנִשְׁמָעָה וְאַל־יְדַבֵּר עִמָּנוּ אֱלֹהִים פֶּן־נָמוּת׃
You speak to us and we’ll do it,
but don’t let God speak to us again, or we will die.

Overpowered by what they encounter at Mount Sinai, the Israelites pump the brakes. They still want to receive the teachings of the Torah, and they are still committed to fulfilling them, but they wisely come to understand it’s going to be much more challenging than they expected, and they’re going to need to funnel the experience so they can take it in.

This change of heart is so very human. Sometimes the prospect of something seems manageable but the reality of it is much harder than we thought it would be.

And if something as amazing as being in the presence of the divine causes us to back away, how much more must we need to back away from, say, a complicated media environment or relentless political incitements. This is, of course, not the same thing, but the model of the Israelites in the Torah can teach us something about ourselves, and about what it is to be human.

In a way, the Israelites’ desire to titrate their encounter with God is a sign of maturity, an admission that we humans can’t do everything all the time. As the Emek Davar puts it, they realize:

לֹא הרְבָּה אֶפְשָר לַהֶם לִהִיוֹת בְּהַכַנָה רָבָה כַּזוֹ
שֶהָיָה בְּשָעָת עַשֶרֶת הַדִּבְּרוֹת
It is not possible for them to be ready in the same way
as they were at the moment of the ten commandments.

All this religious revelation takes a lot out of them, and they come to see that if they are really going to fulfill their commitments they will need to take a more measured pace. It isn’t just fear of the thunder and lightning, as Chizkuni interprets, but rather that the gestalt of God’s presence and the obligations it imposes on the Israelites add a kind of gravity that defies defying.

Likewise, when the demands of life threaten to drown us—whether that’s being a new parent or holding steady in a complicated world—it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves that we don’t have to do everything all the time. We don’t have to have a perfectly clean house, or read every article, or respond to every provocation.

Indeed our Haftarah today offers a holy antidote to the rigidity and overambition of the Israelites’ initial response. In the opening few verses, Isaiah describes the angels in attendance to God. His description is familiar from the kedusha, the prayer of holiness we recite each morning:

וְקָרָא זֶה אֶל־זֶה וְאָמַר
קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ
יי צְבָאוֹת
מְלֹא כל־הָאָרֶץ כְּבוֹדוֹ׃
And they called, one to another saying: Holy, holy, holy
is the God of creation, the whole world is filled with God’s glory.

Whereas the Israelites at first, over-ambitiously muster themselves to speak יַחְדָּו—together as one, the angels call out to one another, and speak in dialogue, which we imitate when we pray it. This back-and-forth gives us a רֶמֶז—a hint—of how we might handle our moments of overload. By being in dialogue, sharing the load; by calling out to one another; and by drawing our attention to the holiness that is with us, to the glory that fills this beautiful world, we can rest in the moment, even as it overwhelms.

Shabbat shalom!