dvar Torah

Vayeshev for TAA

(Delivered December 21, 2024)

There’s a teaching from Pirkei Avot that I return to again and again. In Chapter 2, Mishnah 5, we read:

בְּמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ:

In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be a human

I understand this beautiful teaching to mean that while the opportunity to do the right thing is always there for us, it’s much easier when the circumstances push us in the right direction to begin with, when the wind is at our backs. But in a setting where the impetus is toward cheating or inflicting pain or lying or simply doing nothing, it takes real courage and striving to resist the prevailing winds and walk the path of righteousness. 

In the middle portion of Sefer Breishit—the Book of Genesis—there are two instances where the Torah teaches us about an encounter with an אִישׁ (ish). Both Jacob and Josef have such encounters, and each of them is changed in surprising ways through their respective experiences. 

In last week’s parsha, Vayishlach, Jacob is preparing to be reunited with his estranged brother Esav after many years apart. He sends his family ahead across the river Yabok. Then:

וַיִּוָּתֵר יַעֲקֹב לְבַדּוֹ וַיֵּאָבֵק אִישׁ עִמּוֹ עַד עֲלוֹת הַשָּׁחַר׃

And Jacob remained alone, and he grappled with an אִישׁ until daybreak.

The tradition explores the meaning and nature of this אִישׁ. There are all sorts of possibilities: is it God? An angel? And if it is an angel, what kind of angel? In Breishit Rabbah, the Midrash posits that perhaps the אִישׁ is Esav’s guardian angel. The Bechor Shor, a 12th century French rabbi, suggests:

מלאך היה שהיה רוצה לְהַפִּילוֹ אלא שהק’ עזרו

It was a messenger who wanted to cause his downfall,
but the Holy One helped him

Many think that the אִישׁ represents Jacob’s conscience: as he reflects on the chaos that his youthful deceptions caused, as he wonders and worries about how his brother will receive him, his inner churn is embodied through this mysterious encounter. 

However we might understand the nature of Jacob’s אִישׁ, we do know that this dustup has a strong and lasting effect on him. When the stranger renames him Yisrael it is כִּי־שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁים וַתּוּכָל׃—because he has reckoned with both God and man and held strong. The felt sense of struggling with forces larger than himself, forces he doesn’t fully understand, helps Jacob see himself more clearly. And his new name gives him—and us—a model of relationship with God that admits complexity, ambiguity, and struggle. Becoming God-wrestlers turns out to be central to Jewish identity, and our capacity for considering and reconsidering contributes to our resilience throughout our history. Only God-wrestlers could have endured the millennia of hardship and struggle and still maintained faith in God and a sense of purpose as a religious group, even as fractious as we are. Jacob’s encounter with the אִישׁ and his transformation into Yisrael lay the groundwork for what we would become as a culture. 

On the other hand, the אִישׁ that Josef encounters is of a different sort, indeed their meeting is so short and seemingly mundane that we might overlook it in the sweep of the overall narrative arc. It comes in this week’s parsha, Vayeshev. The Josef cycle opens with a depiction of Josef and his brothers, a relationship full of conflict & rivalry, which, frankly, Josef doesn’t handle well. Meanwhile his father Jacob, widowed of his beloved Rachel and perhaps overwhelmed by the difficulties between and among the brothers, plays favorites and ignores problems. And in this dynamic of Jacob not really fully seeing how his other sons regard Josef, it happens that when the brothers go off without Josef, Jacob sends his beloved favorite child to catch up.

Josef, wandering the fields to try to find his brothers and the flocks of sheep they are allegedly tending, runs into (you guessed it) an אִישׁ.

וַיִּמְצָאֵהוּ אִישׁ וְהִנֵּה תֹעֶה בַּשָּׂדֶה וַיִּשְׁאָלֵהוּ הָאִישׁ לֵאמֹר מַה־תְּבַקֵּשׁ׃

An אִישׁ came upon him wandering in the field, and the אִישׁ asked him,
“What are you looking for?”

It might be tempting to write off Josef’s אִישׁ as a random minor character, a mere plot point for getting Josef physically near enough to his brothers that the conflict can play out through the cruelties they are about to inflict. But I actually think there’s more there. This אִישׁ is a model for the Jewish tradition of chesed, of caring for one another and offering companionship and support when needed. Josef’s אִישׁ has no particular reason to approach and could just as well have passed right by the young man with the colorful cloak wandering aimlessly by. The Torah doesn’t say that Josef was in distress, but something makes the אִישׁ take note of him and offer gentle assistance. And in so doing, the אִישׁ teaches us a mode of offering care and a clarifying question. 

Of course, where would we be without this essentially anonymous figure? His gentle question and then pointing Josef in the right direction opens up the whole grand story—of the brothers faking Josef’s death and selling him off into slavery in Egypt; of Josef leveraging his wit and skill to make something of himself, even as a slave in a foreign land; of the famine that made Josef a hero in the region and eventually brought his brothers back into his orbit in a stunning scene of reconciliation—and eventually, of the rise of a Pharaoh who knew not Josef and the ensuing enslavement and redemption that is at the core of Jewish identity. 

Both Jacob’s אִישׁ and Josef’s are formative, representing the chesed and the gevurah—the kindness and the strength—of Jewish culture. These two mysterious beings teach us about ourselves and our values, even as they resist easy explanation. 

בְּמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ:

Both of these אֲנָשִׁים —these ishes—show us that each and every life, no matter how long or how short, has the potential to be meaningful and to make an impact. Over the course of our unfolding lives, we too can read our small encounters as sources of learning, insight, and meaning. And each one of us can be an אִישׁ in someone else’s narrative; in fact we never know when we will be. Through seeing the importance of everyday moments and everyday people, we become more fully human.

Shabbat shalom!

Vayeshev for TAA

(Delivered on December 20, 2024)

This week’s Torah portion, Vayeshev, kicks off the cycle of stories about Josef. The favored son whose youthful arrogance alienates his brothers. The hapless youth who is so loathed that he gets thrown into a pit by those same brothers, and later sold into slavery in Egypt. The survivor of sexual harassment who is falsely imprisoned. We love our Josef—he’s an endlessly intriguing character—but he has a lot of tsuris.

Yet, as my friend Rav Hazzan Ken Richmond points out, three times in our parsha Josef is described as מצליח—successful. And each of those times, it’s in the context of his being in a situation of peril and compromise, the kind of situation that most of us would not regard as fertile ground for success. The first two times he’s called successful—in chapter 39, verses 2 and 3—Josef has been purchased as a slave by an Egyptian nobleman called Potifar. Yet even in this state of degradation, a human being, bought and sold, the Torah says he is מצליח. 

Because of his unique personal qualities, Josef attains a high position in Potifar’s household. He is put in charge of more and more things, until he is essentially second in command. Still he is a slave and has no actual power, so when Potifar’s wife makes persistent moves on him, he has no recourse. Eventually, having refused her advances once too often, Josef is falsely accused of assaulting her. On the strength of Eshet Potifar’s position of power and her proximity to the Pharaoh, Josef is imprisoned. And there in the prison, he is again called מצליח. 

For the Torah to make a repeated point of describing a person—a person who is first enslaved and then imprisoned—as successful, makes me wonder how the Torah is thinking about success. 

Looking more closely at the verses, though, the connection is clear and surprising—downright radical in our culture that so equates success with wealth and power. Chapter 39 verse 2 reads:

וַיְהִי יי אֶת־יוֹסֵף וַיְהִי אִישׁ מַצְלִיחַ וַיְהִי בְּבֵית אֲדֹנָיו הַמִּצְרִי׃

And God was with Joseph, and he was a successful man, 
and he was in the house of his Egyptian master.

The text does not whitewash his enslaved status as it calls him successful; the tension between his economic reality as a slave and his so-called success is unresolved. Therefore the Torah seems not to care about financial position when it considers the matter of success. Rather, as Rav Hazzan Richmond writes, it’s Josef’s experience of the presence of God that differentiates him and makes him successful. The Italian commentator Yitzhak Abarbanel writes about this verse:

והנה יוסף עִם היותו עבד מושלים 
תמיד היתה יִרְאָת אֶלֹהים לנגד עֵינָיו ובכל מעשיו

For though Josef was enslaved to the ruling class,
the reverence of God was always with him—before his eyes and in his doings

Josef kept his mind on his relationship with God through all the hardships he faced. By Abarbanel’s lights, through his religious faith, Josef’s dignity remained intact even in the most undignified settings. Josef kept his eyes on the horizon, such that his divine companionship lent him the glow of success even through the debasement of slavery and imprisonment. 

If the chill in the air, the early darkness and the full moon didn’t remind us, our calendars would: it’s almost the 25th… of Kislev. In other words, it’s nearly Chanukah. The origin story of Chanukah deals in part with the desecration of the Temple and the Maccabees’ subsequent recovery. It centers around the well-known (if probably untrue) legend of the lamp oil that was only meant to last one night but somehow lasted for eight nights. As the Maccabees regrouped from experiences of antisemitism, violence, and humiliation, their faith inspired them to light the one bit of oil they had in their possession, even though it seemed like it could never suffice to the task of rebuilding. In fact, some say that the miracle was not the eight nights, but the courage to kindle the light that first night. Similarly to Josef, the Maccabees located their sense of confidence in something other than the promise of material wealth and comfort. To me, the miracle is that what they had, turned out to be enough. Their success was in their belief in the presence of God to carry them through. 

As the dark days of winter approach, we prepare to fill our homes with light, festivity, and especially, with beloved family and friends. Our tradition invites us into the practice of פרסומי ניסא—of publicizing the miracle, through placing our chanukiyot where others can see them. By adorning our windows and doorways with light—a little more each night—we remind our neighbors—and ourselves—that what truly fills us is not material plenty but the success that Josef models, the contentment of divine accompaniment. 

Shabbat shalom!

Vayetze for TAA

(Delivered on December 7, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

Settle in, I’m going to tell you the story of the Jewish people. The Jewish people has a tragic history, following a familiar and terrible pattern. For as long as anyone can remember, the pattern has consisted of the Jews settling in a place, making it home, and then… something snaps. It starts with a vicious rumor or an unsettling event that can’t be explained. The malice swirls into a storm of hate, the Jews are blamed, and violence erupts. Innocent people are driven out or brutalized or even slaughtered. Those who can escape in time run for their lives. Eventually equilibrium returns, at least for a while, and we settle in again somewhere else. The destruction of the Temple. The Inquisition. Kishinev. The Holocaust. October Seventh. The story of the Jewish people is mournful in the extreme, a tale of unending woe.

Or is it?

Settle in, I’m going to tell you the story of the Jewish people. The Jewish people is known for its resilience, its cleverness, its adaptability. No matter what challenges crop up, the Jews find a way to move forward, innovating when disaster strikes and caring for one another in times of hardship. When the Temples were destroyed and the Jews exiled to Babylonia, they established an institute at Yavneh in order to preserve what remained of their tradition. In their project of preservation, the rabbis of that time period developed a new way to think about the teachings of the Torah, and a new way to engage in study. They developed spiritual practices that could be performed in the absence of the original Temples. The underpinnings of these practices became the prayer service we do here each week. In times of relative calm, Jewish people have become prominent writers, doctors, Supreme Court Justices, artists, and inventors. The polio vaccine and the Theory of Relativity and West Side Story all came from brilliant Jewish minds. The story of the Jewish people is exhilarating, a tale of progress and triumph.

Jews are a hapless people, lurching from disaster to disaster. Jews are a glorious people, contributing to world history and culture.

In the words of the brilliant educator Zohar Raviv: The Jews are an ever-dying people, and the Jews are an ever-living people.

Obviously both of these narratives are true. 

Opposites can be true, more often than we’d like to acknowledge.

Indeed, toward the end of Parshat Vayetze, Yaakov and Lavan have a knock-down, drag-out fight, laying into each other about all the wrongs, real and perceived, that each has done to the other, twenty years worth of resentments and demands. Also toward the end of Parshat Vayetze, Yaakov and Lavan make a covenant with each other, an agreement to let each other be. Together they gather stones and construct a monument delineating the boundary between them. Lavan calls the monument Yegar-Sahaduta; Yaakov calls it Gal Ed. The two names mean the same thing: mound of witness. It’s the same pile of rocks but each man sees it differently, according to his own perception and experience.

Yegar-Sahaduta. Gal Ed. Mound of witness. In this place where Yaakov and Lavan have it all out and then determine not to fight anymore, this jumble of stones takes on the role of witness, these inanimate objects somehow seeing that both the quarrel and the covenant are true, that the Aramaic name and the Hebrew name say the same thing.

This week my teacher Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld reminded me of the phrase geologic time. For while we are busy with our human lives, thinking in days or weeks, or occasionally decades, the earth is forming and reforming on a much grander scale. Rocks are changing all the time, but they do so at a pace slow enough to be imperceptible to humans. Geologic time reminds us that we are part of a much larger narrative, one that plays out over generations or even millennia. The things we perceive as outcomes are no more than an eye-blink in geologic time. 

The story goes on. Yaakov and Lavan part. Lavan says an affectionate goodbye to his daughters and his many grandchildren and heads home, while Yaakov goes on his path. As it turns out, the rocks are not the only witnesses, for as Yaakov sets out he encounters מַלְאֲכֵי אֱלֹהִים—messengers of God. Yaakov sees the angels and remarks, מַחֲנֵה אֱלֹהִים זֶה—this is God’s camp. In this place where two people manage to embrace the multiple narratives of their relationship, gather stones to mark their differences, and then move on, the presence of God can be felt.

And Yaakov names the place Machanayim—two camps, the duality enshrined in the place, where—over the course of geologic time—these two antagonists will not matter one bit as individuals. Only their two stories and the stones will remain.

Chayei Sarah for TAA

(Delivered November 23, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

What I’m about to say this week might be troubling or uncomfortable for some of you to hear. Some of you may even be offended, for the same reasons or maybe for opposite ones. I’m going to have to let that be, in the hopes that something in it may also inspire you. As always, I’m happy to talk and, more importantly, to listen. But we’ll get to that.

As you know, there is an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on Monday afternoon at the Episcopal Church just down the street from us. I’m looking forward to sharing this experience with my new colleagues, with our fellow citizens of Cape Ann, and, of course, with you. But getting to this point has not been simple. The planning process has been filled with misunderstanding, awkwardness, and some well-intentioned cultural appropriation. Knowing that it’s worked out well, I want to share a bit about how it unfolded and what it’s taught me. 

Believe it or not, this will tie back to the parsha. 

When I first saw the service plan for the interfaith event, my heart sank: the primary musical expression was hymns; some of the names for God were atypical in Jewish parlance; there was an offertory planned, complete with collection plates! And the only explicitly Jewish thing was something that’s so out of place for this season and setting as to be absurd. My well-intentioned colleagues, knowing that we Jews don’t believe in Jesus as a divine figure, had studiously avoided any reference to him. But still, the absence of Jesus did not make it authentically interfaith. In that first iteration, this was clearly a Christian service at which I was to be a welcome guest. 

I knew I couldn’t participate in something like that, but also—once I cooled down—I knew that if I just walked away and didn’t speak up, not only would I be the one who was unable to do interfaith work, but I would be giving up on the chance to help our treasured Jewish values and culture be more known. So with my heart in my throat, I wrote a message to articulate all the ways in which the service as it was then configured missed the mark as an authentically interfaith endeavor. And, not wanting to just point out the problems, I offered some suggestions for how to bring it more into alignment with our shared intention.

Thankfully, my colleagues were more than receptive, and eager to learn why elements of the service—things that are totally normal to them because of the world we live in—were actually just not quite right. They took my feedback without defensiveness, and what we’ve gone on to create feels like a truly interfaith effort. And in the meanwhile, these folks who couldn’t have known any better about what they were doing wrong, now know a little bit more and will surely do better next time.

That feeling of misalignment, of being a minority in a majority culture is something that we as Jews experience all the time. Although we are blessed to live in less difficult times than many of our ancestors did, there are still occasions, such as my experience with the interfaith clergy, when the dominance of the dominant culture is so strong that it begins to seem more like wallpaper. We don’t even notice it. All the more so, the folks who hung the wallpaper in the first place really don’t notice it.

This feeling of being slightly out of step with our surroundings, the sense of being here but not here, is part of the Jewish soul. I think it has always been with us in one way or another. We see it in the opening of our parsha, Chayei Sarah. Avraham, who has made his way to Eretz Cana’an—the land of Canaan—in fulfillment of the divine message he heard years ago, pauses from mourning his wife Sarah. Then, he sets about finding a place to bury her. Seeing as he has no ancestors and no land holding of his own in that region, he has to seek assistance from the Hittites, the very people God has told him to supplant. He begins:

גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב אָנֹכִי עִמָּכֶם
I am a stranger dwelling among you

Ger: stranger, toshav: dweller, these two words pulling in opposite directions. Even the calligraphy in the scroll shows it, connecting the two words with a makef, a slight horizontal line that visually counteracts their inherent tension. There’s a whole world in that makef, a sense of the paradox that so many of us live inside. 

From the stories I’ve heard, both past and present, the experience of being Jewish on the North Shore, of being Jewish in Gloucester, has a lot of resonance with that makef. In decades past, there was a thriving Jewish merchant presence in downtown Gloucester and, at the same time, the beach clubs didn’t allow Jews on the premises. Ger v’toshav. Here and not here.

Perhaps that tension is still present today, as evidenced by my experience with the Thanksgiving service, and as evidenced by the strong feelings that are surfacing with respect to the Gloucester City Council’s back-and-forthing about whether and how to both acknowledge the realities of antisemitism and be even-handed in the matter of rejecting all forms of bigotry and hatred. Both of these are important values that deserve to be uplifted. Antisemitic attacks and rhetoric have increased at alarming rates in the past year. This needs our attention and advocacy. But surely that does not negate the necessity to vigorously reject other forms of bigotry and hatred like Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. While local City Council votes don’t appear to have a great deal of influence on the course of history, the manner in which this debate plays out will tell us a lot about the community we share, both within these walls and outside them. 

This is a matter about which there can be a wide range of reasonable, ethical, well-considered, and deeply-felt responses. If there were one obvious response, we would all agree on it, because we are all good and moral people. The fact that there is disagreement indicates that it’s complex and doesn’t lend itself to slogans or sound bites or oversimplification. What this moment demands of us is not to silo ourselves with our own ideas but rather to listen for what we might be missing. Our tradition makes a spiritual practice of considering multiple viewpoints, as even a cursory glance at a page of Talmud will demonstrate. Our core theological teaching begins with the word שמע—listen! Our way of being in community asks us to remain in conversation, even when what we hear challenges our own assumptions and preferences. 

Going back to the matter of ger v’toshav: the 12th century French commentator, the Bechor Shor, reads our pasuk along with the one after it, in which the Hittites answer Avraham saying, oh no, you are no stranger but a prince of God among us. The Bechor Shor fills in the space between psukim, making this lovely connection. He writes: 

גר שבאתי מארץ אחרת ותושב שדעתי להתיישב עמכם 
והם השיבו אין אתה גר בעינינו רק נשיא אלקים 
Stranger: for I came from a different land. Resident: because I intend to settle here with you. And they answered him: you are not a stranger in our eyes, but rather a prince of God.

Avraham, the stranger who dwells among, the figure known for his own sense of hospitality and capacity to connect, had become known in the eyes of the Hittites and, for the Bechor Shor at least, this made all the difference. I imagine them listening well enough to get beyond the trap of thinking he is completely different and therefore unreachable—and also to get beyond the trap of thinking he’s just a slightly different version of themselves. 

By working through those misconceptions, they are able to see his humanity, and thereby to soften the strangeness with which they’d regarded him prior. They come to see the צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—the divine image—within him. He becomes, in their eyes, a prince of God.

As we face the gathering darkness, may we meet it with the courage to allow ourselves to be known by those whose intentions are wholesome, and may we listen carefully to the voices around us that challenge us, locating the divine every place it can be found. As we read in Avot chapter 2, mishnah 5:

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Shabbat shalom!

Lech L’cha for TAA

(Delivered November 9, 2024)

For most of human history, the size of the known world was small. People were rooted in place, often for generations, unless a violent rupture upset the established order. We were thickly woven together, for better and worse. Many generations lived under one roof or close by; we knew our neighbors well; we lived lives of interdependence. Communication was in-person and travel was primarily by foot, with an animal and maybe a cart. As such, we might have known what was happening in our own village or the next one over, but that was it—that was as big as the “big picture” got. In contrast to the way many of us live our lives today—taking vacations that bring us all around the globe, spending half the year in one state and half in another, or even schlepping back and forth from Gloucester to Newton on a weekly basis—for most of human history, our existence was mainly about staying put.

So in Parshat Lech Lecha, when God says to Avram—he was still Avram then—

לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ

Go—go!—from your land, the your birthplace, from your ancestral home,
to the land that I will show to you

this is truly momentous. What God is asking of Avram is to have the courage to leave everything that makes sense, everything that is familiar, because some unknown destiny awaits. To pick up and go, not because something is chasing you, but because something is calling you. This is the experience our Torah invites us to reflect on. Unlike Adam and Chava leaving the Garden of Eden, Avram is not going into exile. And unlike the Israelites leaving Egypt in Sefer Shmot—the Book of Exodus—he is not leaving because conditions have become intolerable. Rather, he is subject to what the biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg calls a divine imperative. God says it’s time to go, so he goes. 

And as I said last night, God sweetens this instruction with the promise of blessing: that God will make Avram’s descendants into a great nation, that God will bless Avram and magnify his name, and that Avram himself will become a blessing. This reassurance of blessing jolts Avram, his wife Sarai, and their nephew Lot, and they set out. The journey will take them places they were expecting to go, but also to places they weren’t expecting. When famine strikes in Eretz Canaan—the Land of Canaan—Avram gathers himself again and takes his family down to Egypt for the sake of survival. Over the course of many decades Avram amasses wealth and position, so when he and his ever-growing entourage return again to Canaan, he and Lot find that they have become too wealthy to share the land together. They agree to split up and as they contemplate who should stay where, who should take which parcel of land, the forward motion that has characterized the parsha gets a revealing sliver of an interruption.

In chapter 13 verse 10, Lot looks around the land and, seeing how well-watered and fertile it is, compares it to two things: Gan Adonai and Eretz Mitzraim—God’s Garden, and the Land of Egypt. With this comparison, the text pumps the brakes on all this relentless movement. With this comparison, our Torah acknowledges that with every step forward there is an equal and opposite impulse within us to look back. At moments of change, we paraphrase the divine messenger that speaks to Hagar in the portion we heard chanted today:

אֵי־מִזֶּה בָאת וְאָנָה תֵלֵכִי

Where are you coming from? Where are you going?

At moments of change, something primal inside us says, why can’t things be the same as before? We long to go back to a simpler time, and we idealize even the places we needed to leave. 

At moments of change especially, the words we chant every time we place the Torah scrolls back in the aron ring in our hearts, maybe even make our voices falter:

חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם

Renew our days, like before

When the inexorable unfolding of time and history catches us in its grip, we imagine that there was a time when the path was different. We imagine perhaps that the past held us more tenderly than it did. But it was a hunger for life that made Eve test the fruit, which ultimately led to banishment. And it was conflict in Egypt that led to Avram continuing on his journey, doubling back to a land that ultimately held his fate as religious innovator, the father of three traditions. 

This week, this historic week, the inexorable unfolding of time and history has us sharp in its grip. Political division; another antisemitic attack, this time in Amsterdam; a government shakeup in Israel—all these events and more conspire to tell us, there is change and journey ahead, and it’s going to be harder than we thought. Our unity will be tested in ways that we can’t imagine. Yet in the words of the great Leonard Cohen, whose yahrzeit was this week:

The birds, they sang at the break of day, Start again, I heard them say. 
Don’t dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be.

We cannot recapture what is gone; all that is granted us is to move forward. Like Avram our ancestor, we can lean on the divine presence for strength. Like him, we can think critically about the dominant culture that surrounds us and speak up for what feels most true. The blessings that were offered to Avram—perhaps they weren’t promises after all, but consequences. There’s faith and courage in Avram’s story, and that’s where the blessings come from. Those blessings still speak to us today.

וְאֶעֶשְׂךָ לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל

And I will make you a great nation 

וַאֲבָרֶכְךָ

And I will bless you 

וַאֲגַדְּלָה שְׁמֶךָ

And I will magnify your name. 

וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה

And you shall be a blessing.

And you shall be a blessing.

And you shall be a blessing.

Shabbat shalom.

Lech L’cha for TAA

(Delivered November 8, 2024)

As you might have heard, we recently had an election, the culmination of a campaign season that felt to many of us monumentally consequential, to the point of dread. Never before in my lifetime has the American populace felt so at odds, so willing to turn away from each other, so poised to dismiss the humanity of fully half the citizenry. It’s easy to feel that, although a winner has been declared; at some level, America—or at least the idea of America—has already lost.

The campaign was long, unimaginably long, as we waited and wondered and worried. No doubt there will be more waiting and wondering and worrying; there always is. Yet a tradition that has endured and thrived for millennia has something to teach about taking the long view, especially when the short view looks bleak to half the nation.

Each morning, as I get to the late innings of the weekday Amidah, this phrase often catches in my throat:

כִּי לִישׁוּעָתְךָ קִוִּינוּ כָּל הַיּוֹם

All day long we hope for Your deliverance

We have grown accustomed to waiting, it seems.

We cannot know how a new Trump presidency will play out—whether the predictions of chaos and fascism will turn out to be accurate or hyperbolic, but we can derive strength from the manner of waiting. Our parsha this week opens, famously:

וַיֹּאמֶר יי אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ 

אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ׃

And God said to Avram: Go—go!—from your land, from your birthplace, from your ancestral home, to the land which I will show you.

And then comes a shower of blessing: 

I will bless you
You shall be a blessing
I will bless those who bless you
All the families of the earth will be blessed through you.

God urges Avram to move forward into an unknown future. And then, the promise of blessing. Now, as the nation prepares to deal with the election results, we have no choice but to go into an unknown future. May there be blessing upon blessing upon blessing to follow, and may we find a way, each and every family, to be blessed through one another.

Breishit for TAA

(Delivered October 26, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

When my Akiva was first born, I fell immediately and irreversibly head over heels in love. Also, I was newly a mother and it’s fair to say I struggled with every single part of that new role. He was not a big fan of sleeping at night and the sweet personality that we now know and love was… slow to develop. Meanwhile, I was exhausted, and hopped up on postpartum hormones, with the result that, as happy as I was, I could lose my temper at the drop of a hat, and I cried with alarming frequency. As a free-range adult, pre-children, I was used to being awesome, and in this new phase of my life, I felt anything but. At some point, a very wise friend said to me: The first baby is the hardest baby, the first night is the hardest night, the first month is the hardest month… and so on. New things—even new things we look forward to and embrace, even new things that make us starry-eyed with hope and optimism and soul-melting love—are hard. Newness is hard. Beginnings are hard.

And so this week, as we find ourselves back at the beginning of the Torah, with the delightfully unresolved ending still churning in our minds, we’re forced to contemplate the nature of beginnings. Our Torah opens, famously, 

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

At the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

About which Rashi said:

 אֵין הַמִּקְרָא הַזֶּה אוֹמֵר אֶלָּא דָּרְשֵׁנִי

This verse practically screams, explore me!

I’m paraphrasing Rashi, but only slightly. This mysterious beginning to our most sacred text sets the table for the millennia of questions and answers, and more questions that opened up. 

The text continues:

וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם
וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃

And the earth was tohu vavohu—emptiness and chaos—
with darkness on the face of the deep;
and the spirit of God hovered on the face of the water.

which sparks all kinds of questions: What was this tohu vavohu really? What about the deep, and the water? What was before the beginning?

The rabbis of the midrash practically have a party with these questions. In Breishit Rabbah chapter 1 midrash 9, a non-Jewish philosopher challenges Rabban Gamliel, baiting him with the question—and again I paraphrase: Well, your God is a great artisan but the materials were already there. The second verse talks about tohu and vohu and darkness and spirit and water… What’s the big deal? Anyone can make a world with enough emptiness, darkness, enough depth and spirit. Just add water! Oh wait, that was there too. 

Rabban Gamliel goes on to prove through scripture that God created all those other things too, that God’s labor was unbounded by time because even the things that were described in pasuk 2 were created by God, as evidenced by other verses from all over the Tanach. 

Still intrigued by the mystery of the beginning, the rabbis keep exploring. In the very next midrash in Breishit Rabbah, they spin out different answers to the question, לָמָּה נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם בְּבת—why does the world begin with bet, in other words, with the second letter of the alef bet and not the first? A beginning that starts somewhere other than the beginning is bound to draw raised eyebrows.

The rabbis begin to answer: Rabbi Yonah, in the name of Rabbi Levi, cites the shape of the bet. The way that it blocks from view anything that might have come before it and forces us to look only forward. In this way, it reminds us to perceive the works of creation and attend to the future. The world was created with sharp-edged bet, closed on all sides but one. The tangible, remember-able world is our concern, what came before is above our pay grade. We are not permitted even to peek behind the bet. Bet is the boundary, the backstop that keeps us from asking too many questions. It’s the lock on Pandora’s Box.  

Davar acher—another take. An unnamed commentator in the same midrash says the world was created with bet to show an orientation toward bracha, toward blessing. If it had been created with alef, it would instead be oriented toward arirah, toward curses.  

For the rabbis of the midrash, whose communal memory held the destruction of the first and second temples, this approach is striking. Their determination not to look behind the bet, and their dogged commitment to seeking out blessing, have much to teach us. As we find ourselves in a world with its own measure of tohu and vohu, we can look to these ancient figures who, when facing tragedy, oppression, and destabilization, found a way not only to go on, but even to innovate. When their sense of security crumbled, they picked up the pieces, preserving and transforming our tradition. Our ancestors’ resilience can inspire our own.

So we’re back at the beginning again—a new Torah cycle for a new year, and in so many ways the world we’re in echoes the watery mess, the chaos and catastrophe of the first few psukim of the first parsha. Elsewhere, the midrashic literature suggests that God has tried making worlds before and then destroyed them: scraps on the cosmic cutting-room floor. Yet, something—something!—makes God say, I’ll try again. I can do something with this. Maybe a little light will help.

And it was so.

Sukkot for TAA

(Delivered October 17, 2024)

Four days later, we choose exile. 

I wrote those words twelve years ago, as I tried to map the arc of the fall chaggim in relationship to the narrative arc of Jewish history. On Rosh Hashanah the world is created, and our story begins. On Yom Kippur we fall spectacularly from grace as if from Gan Eden itself. We reckon with our human frailties and weaknesses, with the ways we will never quite be good enough. And we find ourselves, four days later, fully invested in the impermanence of life. 

The book of Kohelet accompanies us through these seven days of embracing the elements. Where Yom Kippur liturgy reminded us that human life is brief, vanishing like a curl of smoke when the wind blows hard enough; by the time we get to Sukkot, we say, OK let the wind blow. We’ll build some walls, the best we can, we’ll invite friends and strangers into our flimsy shelters. We’ll eat and we’ll drink and we’ll sing, we’ll peek at the full moon between the branches. 

That curl of smoke from Unetaneh Tokef? By the time Sukkot rolls around, we’ve almost made peace with it. 

הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃

Total vanity, Kohelet says. Total vanity. Everything is vanity.

This year feels vainer than most, this year it feels at times as if a whole world is vanishing with that curl of smoke. Will we ever recover a sense of safety and wholeness? Or will the simmering rage and violence boil over yet again?

הַכֹּל הָבֶל

It’s all temporary, and will vanish like a fever dream. 

Meanwhile, here we are.

Sukkot tells us that the meanwhile is the point. Zman simchateinu—the time of our joy. We are commanded to rejoice for seven days before God. Today we are here together. We won’t wait until life is perfect and calm and orderly again before we rejoice. Today is the day. As we sang in Hallel: 

זֶה־הַיּוֹם עָשָׂה יי נָגִילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָה בוֹ

This is the day God has made: let’s rejoice and be glad in it.

This day today. This is the one we have. As long as we have voices to sing with, minds to think with. As long as we have each other, we will find the joy lurking in the marrow of the hardest moments. 

Elsewhere, Kohelet teaches, famously, that there is a time for everything: a time for birth, a time for death, a time for planting, a time for uprooting. A time for killing and a time for healing. A philosopher-king in a melancholy mood, Kohelet says: whatever you see or think or feel right now, wait. It will change. It always does. Investing yourself in keeping everything the same is a fools’ strategy.

In the words of the great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai: 

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

I often say—and I’ve probably said it more often this year than in every prior year combined—that our joy is our secret weapon. As Jews, we live in a state of paradox. It’s not for nothing that some of our happiest songs are in minor keys. Our story is one of constant persecution, anxiety, and isolation. Also our story is one of incredible growth and triumph, punctuated by occasional catastrophe. Both of these are true. Life has never been unambiguously easy for us, and when the short view looks terrible, we look toward the long view. Every time we say the Amidah, we are locating ourselves in a line that goes all the way back to Abraham. If the God of Abraham came through for him, we may yet find our way through the current catastrophe.

On Sukkot, we grab hold of what remains and say, yes it’s awful, but let’s go outside and feel the sharp wind on our faces. We’re alive and that is all there is right now.

Yom Kippur Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 12, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

In one of my previous incarnations, I worked as a singer and actor, and as such, I became deeply devoted to the TV show, “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” On the show, host James Lipton would interview high-profile actors about their approach to the craft, citing examples from their work and talking about how they built this or that character. The conversations were individual to whichever actor was in the hot seat, but each episode ended the same way, with Lipton giving his guest a questionnaire consisting of, I don’t know, seven or eight questions—what sound or noise do you love? What is your favorite word? Your least favorite word? And so on. Lipton’s final question was the most intriguing: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Admittedly, the Christian image of the pearly gates might not resonate. But even if we don’t relate to the mental picture, we can surely relate to the question: If we had a chance to meet God panim el panim—face to face—what might we wish for God to say to us? What would we like to learn is God’s essence, God’s true nature, God’s message for us?

In my days of watching Inside the Actor’s Studio religiously, I was not in the habit of thinking about God, much less imagining a personal meeting. But also, in those days, my sense of God’s nature was fairly one-dimensional, a very conventional one in our culture: I pictured an old white guy with a long beard and billowy robes, either sitting on a throne or floating around on a cloud. This image in my head was informed by children’s books and the occasional New Yorker cartoon, and had so little to do with my actual experience as to be laughable. Although I was an adult by then, my idea of God hadn’t really changed since I was about six. 

Over the ensuing decade or so, I guess I got a system upgrade when it comes to how I think about God. And so, with more trepidation than you might think, I’d like to use this time to talk about God. I figure since I’ve already talked about Israel and Gaza, I might as well take a real risk. But all kidding aside, if your rabbi doesn’t take God seriously, who will? 

The image called up by James Lipton’s “pearly gates” question is in tension with today’s Torah and Haftarah readings, and with the depth and breadth of the universe of Jewish thought. So let’s look at the readings first. 

This morning, in Parashat Acharei Mot, we meet a rather forbidding God, a God who, after the sudden and unexplained deaths of Nadav and Avihu, seems to return to business as usual, giving instruction about the proper way to approach the Beit haMikdash (the ancient Temple). This leads into a fairly detailed imagining of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, encountering God—not in the heavens, but rather in the earthly realm, in the innermost chamber of the Beit haMikdash, the Holy of Holies. In this moment of solitude and heightened occasion, with the weight of the community and its sins on his back, the Kohen Gadol will have a fleeting encounter with the presence of God. And because he will be entirely alone—he being the only human with this security clearance—we are left on the outside to wonder what it might be like. This exclusivity is in sharp contrast to the Haftarah, in which we read: 

דְּרָכָיו רָאִיתִי וְאֶרְפָּאֵהוּ וְאַנְחֵהוּ וַאֲשַׁלֵּם נִחֻמִים לוֹ וְלַאֲבֵלָיו׃

בּוֹרֵא נִיב שְׂפָתָיִם שָׁלוֹם  שָׁלוֹם לָרָחוֹק וְלַקָּרוֹב אָמַר יי וּרְפָאתִיו׃

I have seen their ways, and will heal them: I will guide them, 

and comfort the mourners among them. 

Create consoling words, bring peace, peace to far and near,
and heal them, says Adonai.

The Haftarah’s God is a God who sees human imperfection with compassion. In contrast to the Torah reading, we find here a God who is present with the people, a God who heals and consoles, a God who makes a particular point of offering peace and consolation to those who need it. Rashi doubles down on this more accessible God, saying that the “near and far” refers to those who are accustomed to the ways of Torah and to those who are either new to it or have fallen away and returned. Importantly, by Rashi’s estimation, שְׁנֵיהֶם שָוִין—the far and the near are equal. 

The mincha Torah reading this afternoon will add another layer to consider, with instructions for holiness punctuated by the repeating refrain of אֲנִי יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם—I am Adonai, your God. Be holy, because I am holy, and here’s how. The mincha Torah reading lays out standards for behavior that, if followed, allow for us to become more like God. By honoring parents, rejecting idolatry, cherishing the dignity of the economically needy, treating all with integrity, including speaking up rather than letting resentments fester, we are emulating God. The face of God that emerges from this description is one of high ethical and moral standards. 

Our final scriptural reading of the day, the Haftarah for mincha, is the Book of Jonah. There we find a God who performs an improbable rescue, redeeming Jonah from the belly of a huge fish. Of course, Jonah is in there in the first place because he runs away from God’s instruction to serve as a prophet, so God decides to teach him a lesson. The teaching doesn’t stop there. When, later, Jonah is angry with God for accepting the teshuvah of the citizens of Nineveh and therefore not destroying them, God gives Jonah a profound teaching in empathy. So now to the images of God as stern rule-giver, or as comforter of mourners, or as moral exemplar, we add the idea of God as teacher.

Expanding our vision beyond today’s readings to the biblical corpus as a whole, we discover seemingly endless dimensions of—and metaphors for—the nature of God. In Psalm 146 God is One who

עֹשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט  לָעֲשׁוּקִים נֹתֵן לֶחֶם לָרְעֵבִים [יי] מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים

יי] פֹּקֵחַ עִוְרִים [יי] זֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים [יי] אֹהֵב צַדִּיקִים]

Brings justice to the oppressed, gives bread to the hungry,
frees the captive, restores sight to the blind,
lifts those who are stooped over,
and loves the righteous.

Then again, God is also creator of the natural world, as we’ll read in the opening chapters of Breishit in a couple of weeks. Many of us, unlike the Kohen Gadol, find God’s abiding presence in the woods, by the ocean, or surrounded by living beings.

God as bringer of justice, feeder of the hungry, healer of life’s wounds, author of creation… These hopeful images work well when things are going well. But I have to admit they are a tough sell in this moment of deepening crisis in the Jewish world. When Israel is under attack from multiple fronts, when many both in Israel and the diaspora worry that the current leadership has lost its moral footing, when antisemitic rhetoric becomes less and less unacceptable, when the world feels perilous for us, the notion of God coming to the rescue can be eclipsed by the sense of הֶסְתֶר פָּנִים—that God’s face is hidden. A concept rooted in a verse from Parshat Vayelech, הֶסְתֶר פָּנִים has become a way to talk about those historical periods when God seemed absent from the scene, a way of addressing the question of how God could allow great tragedy or unbearable pain in a world which is supposedly suffused with God’s glory.

This past Monday was the secular anniversary of the barbaric October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. Seeing photos of the destruction, hearing survivor stories, remembering the hostages who were killed and those who may yet be alive but are surely suffering, it’s all too easy to wonder, where is God in all this? Where do we turn when catastrophe is suddenly plausible?

For this, we need to resort to the long view, the eternal nature of God that we encounter in daily prayer when we say:

אַתָּה הוּא עַד שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם 

אַתָּה הוּא מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא הָעוֹלָם 

אַתָּה הוּא בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה 

וְאַתָּה הוּא לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

It was You before the world was created
It is You who created the world
It is You in this world
And it will be You in the world to come

Let me repeat that in all its gorgeousness: 

It was You before the world was created
It is You who created the world
It is You in this world
And it will be You in the world to come

This beautiful verse locates the unity of God, and God’s enduring nature, in the ever unfolding universe, in the passage of time. As we learned from the Sfat Emet last night, the unity of God encompasses that which appears good and that which is not yet assimilated into goodness. Even the ashes of the burnt offering—an image that may make us shudder a bit—might unlock something good in the future. The world and its goodness are ever unfolding.

This is not an easy metaphor to get close to; we may long for a less abstract sense of God, for a God who is right here by our side. And the idea that horrific tragedy might someday give rise to something better runs the risk of sounding like justification. I know I’m treading dangerously close to “everything happens for a reason” territory, and I want to be clear that’s not what I mean. But things are happening all the time, and the happening itself is an aspect of God, and what it will come to mean is often still being revealed and created.

To have a non-corporeal, singular, unfolding God means that sometimes God seems hidden or distant. Think about a folded piece of paper. As it unfolds, different shapes manifest themselves. Edges and planes move away as a natural part of that process; geometry demands it. That moving away can really sting. But inevitably things change and change again. Time does its magic. The unfolding continues.

And as this beautiful, terrible, mysterious world unfolds, we can find our connection to the divine in so many ways: in nature, in the riches of our tradition, and in one another. To paraphrase the Sefer Hasidim, a 19th-century halachic work by Yehuda HeHasid: “Two people carrying a load would not be able to carry it as well separately, as together. Two people raising their voices are more apt to be heard than if they cry separately.” If each and every one of us is created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—in the image of God—then every encounter with another person has the potential for holiness, for the experience of God’s presence. Singing together, praying together, laughing, crying, talking about things that matter, or simply being together in companionable silence can all draw us closer to the divine, and draw the divine closer to us. I think of the last words of Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh of Liska, as reported by his grandson Rabbi Zev Wolf. As he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by several generations of his beloved family, Tzvi Hirsh, the Lisker Rebbe, said: “My children, if you cling to God, it will be good for you.” My dear community, may it be good for you, and may you find the face of God that can hold you close and that you can hold close in these trying times. 

G’mar tov and shanah tovah!

Kol Nidrei Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 11, 2024)

Shabbat shalom & Shanah Tovah!

A saying in the recovery community that has jumped the tracks to mainstream usage holds that doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is the definition of insanity. Turns out it’s also an uncomfortably accurate description of how we humans sometimes approach the process of teshuvah. Maybe it’s different for you, but every year around this time, I settle in and focus on what went wrong in the past year and what I hope to improve in myself. I talk to the people in my life that I think I may have hurt and ask to make peace. I resolve to be more patient, more thoughtful, more generous. I plan all the ways I’m going to contribute to my communities: the meals I’ll deliver, the people I’ll call, the donations to worthy causes I will make. I imagine myself a year from now, glowing with the shine of authentic virtue. And then, even so, somehow my humanity gets the better of me every single year. 

I first started to realize this while doing a family Tashlich several years ago, when Akiva and Gideon were little. Bill and I scouted out a place in Newton near a body of water, packed some snacks, got everyone dressed and into the car, and headed over. After a short walk, we found ourselves in a clearing in the woods and talked earnestly about what we wanted to throw away from the past year and what we wanted to do better. What struck me—with both hope and rue—was how much our comments resembled those of years past. The things we wanted less of in the new year—arguing, thoughtlessness, impatience, meanness—were exactly the things we had wanted less of in the year just ended. Did we really do such a bad job of it the last time (and the time before and the time before the time before) that we’d have to work on the same things yet again this year? It’s discouraging to name the same errors year after year, to set the same intentions as the year before and know that we’re likely to be setting (or re-setting) them—same time, next year.

But our wise liturgy already knows this about us. Kol Nidrei is literally a legal formula that admits to failure before we’ve even started. It says, essentially, we have the noblest of ambitions and incredibly good intentions. But we don’t really have such high hopes that we’ll fulfill them. In fact, our expectations are so muted that we’re saying out loud—three times—that we are going to do our best but we already know we’re going to miss. 

Because missing is what humans do. 

In tomorrow morning’s Torah reading, we’ll hear about the origins of Yom Kippur: the High Priest’s ritual for taking on and discharging the whole community’s errors. We’ll hear about his sacrificing animals, about his sending off a goat invested with all the sins of the Israelite people, about his entering the Holy of Holies to encounter God and make atonement on behalf of his community. And the final move we’ll hear about is the commandment to do it again every year, for all time. From the beginning, teshuvah was destined to bear repeating. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If you’re feeling cynical, you might start to think: Teshuvah doesn’t work! So why do we do it?!

After the realization I just mentioned, I wondered the same thing. A lot. What is the point of all this self-reflection, all this redirection, all this apologizing? Where’s the payoff if I still have to do it next year, sometimes with the same people, and about the same issues? 

Little by little, I’m coming to see that when it comes to teshuvah, process and results are both important—and in fact, process has its own unique value. It’s the process of heshbon ha-nefesh, literally the accounting of our souls, that helps us improve. That is to say, while the things we resolve to do differently may or may not come to fruition exactly as we imagine them, the process of soul-searching wears away at our inner defenses in a way that helps us grow. Widening our perspective to truly understand how something we have said or done was harmful helps us grow. Finding the humility to offer a sincere apology helps us grow. Like so much in our tradition, it’s not about instant results but rather about the long game. Even though we may never fully overcome our worst instincts, even though we won’t completely stop making mistakes, this process of working towards teshuvah offers the possibility that in the future we can, at least, make different or softer mistakes, and perhaps move sooner and more devotedly toward making amends when we do.

Despite our best and most earnest wishes, and our most focused efforts at teshuvah, the existence and structure of Yom Kippur remind us that it’s part of being human to need regular reminders and scaffolding for the process of resetting our moral compasses. Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, located teshuvah at the core of creation: just as the purpose of creation is its ongoing striving to return to the perfection of Gan Eden, so too the human work of teshuvah is seen as an ongoing, ever spiraling endeavor. It is, like each of us, always in the process of becoming. 

Or perhaps even in the process of being. I sometimes liken the inner work of Yom Kippur to that moment in meditation when you realize your mind has gone away, and you simply bring it back. That moment of homecoming doesn’t mean you’ve “achieved” meditation and can wash your hands of it. And the moments of monkey-mind don’t mean you stink at meditation and shouldn’t even bother. Rather that moment of return means simply, for that moment, you’ve come home to yourself. You’ve exercised the muscle of return. And every time you exercise that muscle, it… gets a little more exercise. 

In his teaching about Parshat Tzav, the late nineteenth century Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet, spins out a beautiful metaphor for the ashes that remain after the completion of the korban olah—the burnt offering. In the Sfat Emet’s rendering, the final mitzvah of that offering is תְּרומָת הַדֶשֶן—elevating the ashes. Rather than being a mere cleanup operation, removing the residue of the ashes becomes a way of lifting up to God even the parts of ourselves that we might imagine have no value: the hard edges, the self-involvement, the dark thoughts. But in the Sfat Emet’s words:

הֲרֵי הַכֹּל בִּכְלָל בְּרִיאַת השי”ת

See, all of this is included in the creation of the Holy Blessed One

Every aspect of us, like every aspect of the world, is part of the work of creation, and as such has intrinsic value. Even those things that appear to be, in my teacher Nehemia Polen’s phrase, unassimilable into goodness, are part of the divine labor and have the potential for transformation and renewal. The dark sides of human nature—those things we wrestle with each year as we do teshuvah—are also reflections of God, waiting to be uplifted and made whole. This is the work of teshuvah, and it is more urgent than ever. The ashes of our lives, this is what we confront every year at this time. Lifting up the parts of ourselves that we wish were different and the actions we’ve taken—that we wish we hadn’t—is a way of acknowledging our humanity, God’s divinity, and the holy power of trying again. 

So while I wish I could promise you that I will always be nice to my spouse and patient with my children and attentive to my parents, while I wish I could tell you that I will give tzedakah as often as the thought arises in my mind and tend to the planet as much as it deserves, past years and my own humanity suggest that I will try and fail and try again. We can’t erase our past mistakes and walk away as if they never happened, and we can’t look at our future mistakes with a casual “oops, oh well” and move on. Instead we keep the mistakes for learning, like the Israelites kept the broken tablets in the Ark along with the new ones. Both the shards and the unbroken tablets remind us what we’re capable of—the countless and even terrible mistakes we will continue to make, and the repair for which we will continue to reach. Over the course of this challenging day of reflection, self-denial, and soul-searching—let’s come back to ourselves. And let’s support each other, as we attend to the ways that our ever-broken lives are dreaming of wholeness and holiness.

Gmar tov and shanah tovah!