Vayelech for TAA

(Delivered September 27, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

In these weeks of intense preparation leading to and through the High Holidays, I frequently find myself riding on a roller coaster of overconfidence and anxiety. On the one hand, I say to myself, “Self, you’ve never missed a deadline, you’re not going to miss one now.” And then on the other hand, I say to myself, “This is really a lot of writing. What if I run out of ideas?”

Amidst this recurring loop, one phrase that’s been turning in my mind is a saying that was made famous in a 1995 movie about the American space program. The movie was called Apollo 13, and it chronicled a flight to the moon that almost went terribly wrong. In the film, the three astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission encounter technical problems that make it unclear whether they will be able to return to earth safely. After a feature film’s worth of tension, argumentation, suspense, and good old American ingenuity; the astronauts and their ground control crew miraculously overcome what could’ve been disastrous, and bring the rocket and its crew safely home. The movie had a tagline that became a catch phrase which entered the cultural lexicon: failure is not an option. When I’m reminding myself that I’ve never missed a deadline, the phrase, “Failure is not an option,” seems basically plausible.

But this week’s Torah portion teaches something quite different. Indeed, as we make our way through Deuteronomy chapter 31, which constitutes the entirety of Parshat Vayelech, we get the undeniable, unbearable impression that failure is inevitable—that failure is not optional. Indeed it’s God who says so. In preparing Moses for his looming death, God does not offer comfort, but rather says:

‏הִנְּךָ שֹׁכֵב עִם־אֲבֹתֶיךָ וְקָם הָעָם הַזֶּה וְזָנָה אַחֲרֵי אֱלֹהֵי נֵכַר־הָאָרֶץ
אֲשֶׁר הוּא בָא־שָׁמָּה בְּקִרְבּוֹ וַעֲזָבַנִי וְהֵפֵר אֶת־בְּרִיתִי אֲשֶׁר כָּרַתִּי אִתּוֹ
Look, you are going to die soon, and afterward this people will go astray with the alien gods in their midst, in the land they are about to enter.
They will forsake Me and break the covenant I made with them.

Such a vote of confidence!

Despite—or perhaps because of—the 40+ years of wandering, of rupture and repair, of relationship-building, God has grown quite pragmatic about the Israelites’ flaws. God seems convinced, and not without reason, that as soon as the Israelites are granted the land flowing with milk and honey, a land that they have been longing after for all this time, they will shortly find a way to mess it up.

When Moses retells this part of the narrative towards the end of the parsha, he essentially says the same thing. Verse 27 reads:

כִּי אָנֹכִי יָדַעְתִּי אֶת־מֶרְיְךָ וְאֶת־עָרְפְּךָ הַקָּשֶׁה
הֵן בְּעוֹדֶנִּי חַי עִמָּכֶם הַיּוֹם מַמְרִים הֱיִתֶם עִם־יי וְאַף כִּי־אַחֲרֵי מוֹתִי
I know all too well your rebelliousness and your stubbornness
while I’m still alive and with you! You rebel against God now!
How much worse will it be after my death!

In a classic expression of irony, God and Moses know what we also know but the Israelites don’t: that humans are fallible, that we constantly make mistakes, that failure is indeed inevitable.

The beauty of Torah, and of Judaism as a whole, is that it doesn’t leave us in this place of degradation. The Torah knows, as we do, that being human will always involve moral and behavioral crises, that we will always be tempted to turn away from what’s eternal, and follow after trivial, ephemeral matters. We are made in the image of God, but we are not God. Our human makeup is ultimately weak in some truly fundamental ways. They say you can’t fight Mother Nature. Perhaps, you also can’t fight human nature.

Even so, the Torah gives us tools to try. For managing the inescapable lapses that we are bound to have, the parsha offers two notable and seemingly contradictory strategies.

The first of these is courage. No less than three times in this short portion, courage is called for. In verse six Moses tells the Israelites חִזְקוּ וְאִמְצוּ—be strong and courageous. In the following verse, he says the same to Joshua, his successor, חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ. Finally, in verse 23, God also tells Joshua חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ. Ibn Ezra suggests that the Israelites can be courageous because they know that God accompanies them in battle, that this is earned courage, a faith rooted in experience.

Likewise, off the battlefield, knowing that we have overcome past challenges can strengthen us for future ones. If we find ourselves, as the parsha predicts, falling into patterns of focusing on the wrong things, we can derive courage from the knowledge that we have surmounted similar transgressions and made our way forward. In this season when we bring our attention to the work of teshuvah, of repentance or return, this is useful to remember. Failure, while not optional, does not have to be irrevocable.

The parsha’s other strategy for confronting failure takes an entirely different approach, a softer approach. God, knowing that the Israelites will succumb to their humanity in one way or another, offers a decidedly human way of coping: poetry and song. In anticipation of the times when the people will stray and God will turn away, God instructs Moses to redirect and re-inspire them through הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת—this poem or this song.

This phrase should ring a bell, since it’s also in the daily prayers, in a different context. When we reenact standing at the shore of the Sea, reliving a moment of crisis and recovery; the words of Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, accompany us and steady us. They remind us we have faced the impossible before.

I think it’s actually kind of magical and forward-thinking that the Torah offers creative expression as an antidote to moral failure. Thousands of years ago, our tradition already knew that sometimes when we make consequential mistakes, it’s a sign of a soul out of balance. Easing into timeless words of beauty and meaning can show us not only where to go next, but why. It can remind us that the teachings that guide us are already בְּפִנוּ—in our mouths.

In this season of teshuvah, as we grapple with our own failures, may we hold to the creativity and poetry of our ancient texts, and may they give us strength and courage to move forward and bring ourselves safely home.

Shabbat shalom & gmar chatimah tovah!

Nitzavim for TAA

(Delivered September 20, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom!

Shoftim for TAA

(Delivered August 30, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ironically, Parshat Shoftim also contains the famous phrase

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף
Justice, justice shall you pursue

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

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

Eikev for TAA

(Delivered August 16, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

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

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

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

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

It seems irreparable. Our worst mistakes often do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom!

Vaetchanan for TAA

(Delivered August 9, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dvarim for TAA

(Delivered August 2, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

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

But that was before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t let fear break your heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Nitzavim-Vayelech for Temple Ahavat Achim

(Delivered September 28, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

It’s possible you might have noticed this already, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I like to look good, not in the sense of physical beauty but rather in the sense of seeming to know what I’m doing. I don’t have an easy time letting people see my flaws. Not to say I’m a control freak, but maybe I am just a bissl. There is, in fact, a member of this community, a fellow perfectionist, (you know who you are) who has been giving me a hard time, encouraging me to write a mediocre dvar Torah, just to get the congregation used to the occasional dog. Well, my friend. This is your moment!

It wasn’t entirely clear to me that I’d even write a dvar Torah this week. With Rosh Hashanah breathing down our necks and several deaths in the community, plus two presentations to make at rabbinical school, I thought, Nah. Let someone else do it. Although a volunteer darshan didn’t miraculously appear, I figured, as my sweet, 91-year-old dad often says, God will provide. I wasn’t quite sure what that would look like—God providing—but guess what. Dad was right!

This week’s Torah verses seem tailor designed for perfectionist control freaks like me. So many passages spoke directly to my heart as I was learning the portion this week, all the more so as responsibilities kept piling up and it became clear that I was going to fall over if I didn’t ask for and accept help.

Look, for example, at chapter 29 verse 28, which says, in part,

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ

Hidden matters are for Adonai our God,
but revealed matters are for us, and for our children.

Rashi points out this verse is referring to sins, those that are known in public and those that are only known to the sinner. Yet in these words, in the realm of metaphor, we perfectionists can find a sense of relief, as we imagine the hidden things that only God knows: our struggles and our good intentions, our ambitions and our utterly unrealistic standards. Perhaps, knowing that God can see the best in us can help us both to allow our own imperfections to be revealed, and to be at peace with being known and seen in all our messiness and humanity. Not to mention: to allow for our children to see us that way too.

And yet when all is said and done, and our faults land us in moral dilemmas, with our virtues scattered to the winds. Then we do the work of repair, and return to God בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשֶׁךָ—with commitment of heart and soul—and God meets us halfway. At such time, chapter 30 verse three, says:

וְשָׁב יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶת־שְׁבוּתְךָ וְרִחֲמֶךָ
וְשָׁב וְקִבֶּצְךָ מִכׇּל־הָעַמִּים אֲשֶׁר הֱפִיצְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ שָׁמָּה

And Adonai your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love;
and will return your estranged from all the peoples amongst whom God scattered them.

The notion that God could and would gather us back in love, even when we have lost our own center, gives us a sense of hope and possibility when we need it the most.

Likewise, the repetition of the covenant that opens Parshat Nitzavim offers deep relief for those of us with too-high standards. When Moses says,

וְלֹא אִתְּכֶם לְבַדְּכֶם אָנֹכִי כֹּרֵת אֶת־הַבְּרִית הַזֹּאת וְאֶת־הָאָלָה הַזֹּאת׃

כִּי אֶת־אֲשֶׁר יֶשְׁנוֹ פֹּה עִמָּנוּ עֹמֵד הַיּוֹם לִפְנֵי יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ
וְאֵת אֲשֶׁר אֵינֶנּוּ פֹּה עִמָּנוּ הַיּוֹם׃

Not only with you do I make this covenant and this oath, but with those who are here with us today before Adonai our God
and those who are not here with us today.

This covenant between God and the Israelites applies to all of us: whether we are doing everything perfectly or barely holding on, whether we write brilliant divrei Torah or just dig out a few gems worth sharing. In this season of teshuvah as we gather up our errors and missteps, it’s worth remembering the God who takes us back in love, the God who counts us even when we cannot count ourselves.

At the end of Vayelech, God demands that Moses write a poem that will somehow magically keep the Israelites in line after Moses is gone and Joshua has taken over leadership. (Talk about unrealistic standards!) My friend, Rabbi Joey Glick offers a radical reading of this passage. The last section of the parsha repeats the phrase הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת—this song—almost as if the phrase is itself a melody that keeps coming back. Citing the Ibn Ezra comment that picks up on a grammatical quirk, Joey writes, in part: Ibn Ezra deduces from this plural that the task is not given to Moses alone but rather, in the words of the commentator, to anyone—מבין לכתוב—who understands how to write. As Moses penned and then sang out the empty words “this song,” he might have been calling out … not only to the Israelites in the desert with him, but up through the generations to us today. He might have been inviting all of us to write a song, for Moshe, for God, and for our own hearts, that could provide love and strength to all.

In short, in Joey’s interpretation, Moses writes what he can and then steps aside. He asks for and accepts help, much as I have had to do this week. Thankfully, members of this wonderful community have shown their care for me: with hugs, practical suggestions—like don’t forget to eat, words of support, and offers to host me for meals. What I’m saying is, our Torah teaches us, and we teach one another, to take care of each other, and this lightens our burdens, always.

In thinking about perfectionism, I started to muse that back in Breishit, when God created the world, it doesn’t say, “God saw that it was perfect.” Rather, God said וְהִנֵּה־טוֹב מְאֹד—look, this is very good.

I have always loved the passage in our parsha today that says לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא—the Torah is not too abstruse or mysterious that it resides only in heaven or across a mighty sea. Rather it is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart. Ultimately, Torah is in our best thoughts and our kindest actions. It’s in the ways in which we support one another in good times and in hard times, the ways in which we allow for one anothers’ imperfections to be incidental, normal, and even… טוֹב מְאֹד

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Ki Tetzei for Temple Ahavat Achim

(delivered September 14, 2024)

You’ve probably noticed that my sense of time is not my greatest asset. I sometimes forget to eat lunch, I daven on the slowish side and don’t really like to skip things, and I am occasionally late for appointments, despite my best efforts. We have this whole joke about Jewish Time, but I actually think there’s something to it. Jewish tradition doesn’t tell time by the clock—or doesn’t ONLY tell time by the clock. We tell time through what tunes we sing, so that weekday services sound different from Shabbat services, which in turn sound different from Festival services. We tell time by looking at the sky to see how much of the moon is visible. We tell time through what, how, and when we eat—or don’t. And we tell time through the words we say.

One obvious example is the siddur and the weekly Torah reading. Just as we don’t say Kabbalat Shabbat on Tuesday; it would feel weird to read, say, Parashat Breishit at Pesach or Parashat Ki Tavo in January. But in addition to the regular texts for regular, non-holiday time, we fold other texts into the mix for different seasons.

For instance: As you probably noticed, we said Psalm 27 this morning as part of Psukei de Zimrah, the opening section of the service. Psalm 27 is associated with the Season of Teshuvah—return—and so it’s traditional in many Jewish spaces to read it every day from Rosh Hodesh Elul through Simchat Torah.

The overlap of different readings at various times, like different-sized orbits that occasionally synch up, can open up new layers of meaning and raise ideas that take us deep into life’s most essential questions. When this happens, the Torah seems ancient and vast, and simultaneously near enough to put in our pockets.

It happened to me this week, as a verse from Psalm 27 and a verse from our weekly portion, Ki Tetzei, started a conversation with each other.

In Psalm 27, verse 10 we read:

כִּי־אָבִי וְאִמִּי עֲזָבוּנִי וַיי יַאַסְפֵנִי׃

Though my father and my mother abandon me, Adonai will gather me in.

And in Dvarim, chapter 24, verse 16 we read:

לֹא־יוּמְתוּ אָבוֹת עַל־בָּנִים וּבָנִים לֹא־יוּמְתוּ עַל־אָבוֹת אִישׁ בְּחֶטְאוֹ יוּמָתוּ׃

Parents shall not be put to death on account of their children,
nor shall children be put to death on account of their parents:
each shall be put to death only for their own crime.

These two different—and, honestly, fairly bleak—visions of parents and children got me thinking about the ways we are responsible for one another across generations.

Sometimes the answer is easy. When my children were too little to have the capacity to make good decisions—of course I was responsible for them. I tried to teach them as we went, but when it came to things that could be consequential, I knew it was my job to make the right decision because they weren’t yet ready to do so.

There’s a tradition for a parent to say at their child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah:

בָּרוּךְ שֶׁפְּטָרַנִי מֵעָנְשׁוֹ שֶל זֶה

Blessed are you for relieving me of this child’s punishment.

In other words, now that my child has attained the age of mitzvot, it’s no longer my role to discipline them. Presumably by taking on the mitzvot, this brand new Jewish adult is capable of disciplining themselves.

This tracks, then, with the verse from our parashah: once a person reaches halachic maturity, they are accountable for their own crimes. No problem. But given what we know about brain science, it’s probably a rare teenager who actually has this capacity. And sadly, current-day news reports bear this out, as some details of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia begin to emerge. Much of the story is unknown, and may remain so, outside the people who were directly involved. But we do know that authorities decided the shooter’s father was responsible enough for the murders—of two students and two teachers—to be charged with the crime alongside his son. Looking at the photos from the courtroom is heartbreaking. Politics aside, the shooter looks tiny, dwarfed by the judge’s bench and the adult-sized institutional furniture. No doubt he has done something with adult consequences and will have to face up to that, but, in some essential ways, he is a child. And in some essential ways, his parents bear some responsibility. The pasuk from our parashah that says each person is the sole owner of their own crimes is applicable here but incomplete.

By keeping unsecured guns in the home, by buying the boy a gun as a present and not requiring it to be stored appropriately as a condition of ownership, the parents’ behavior falls under a different category in Jewish thought: לִפְנֵי עִוֵּר לֹא תִתֵּן מִכְשֹׁל—do not place a stumbling block before the blind. A teenager who has been struggling socially and who is already known to police as having talked about school shootings on social media simply should not have unlimited access to firearms. This is a person who needed supervision and didn’t get it. This is a person who needed guidance and didn’t get it. This is a person who, quite possibly, needed mental health care and didn’t get it. Through the lens of Psalm 27, his father and his mother abandoned him, and tragically he snapped before God could gather him in.

We often read about the limits of God’s compassion: in the י״ג מידות—the Thirteen Attributes of God—we have an image of God as compassionate and full of grace, endlessly patient and kind. Yet if we read those words in their original context in chapter 34 of Shmot—the Book of Exodus—it goes on to say that God extends the iniquity of parents onto the third and fourth generations.

So while ultimately we may all be responsible only for ourselves, our lives are lived entangled with others, always. If we are unlucky, this can result in multi-generational threads of inherited trauma and chaos. And if we are lucky, this can result in happy, healthy lives with wholesome family relationships. Witnessing the suffering that can explode in those unlucky families makes me ever more appreciative of my own luck, and ever more committed to a universalized theory of responsibility, a concept that comes up in Jewish texts, from halacha to Hasidut:

כָּל יִשְרָאֵל עָרֵבִים זֶה בַּזֶה

All of Israel is responsible, one for another.

We are each other’s guarantors, in ease and hardship, until such time as God gathers us in.

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Re’eh for Temple Ahavat Achim

(delivered August 31, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! It’s so good to be back.

While I was away I went to visit my parents in Michigan for a few days. Because I took a very early flight, I didn’t ask anyone to pick me up at the airport, figuring it would be easier to take a cab or an Uber. After getting off the plane and collecting my stuff, I made my way to ground transportation, to the rideshare waiting area. I opened the app and requested an Uber and waited semi-patiently for my driver to pull up.

The next part of the story doesn’t look good on me, but I think it’s important to talk about. My randomly assigned driver had a clearly Arabic-sounding name, and as I waited for his arrival, I formed all kinds of stereotypes in my mind about what the ride would be like. I imagined he would be brusque. I imagined he would give me a hard time about being Jewish. I imagined he would drive recklessly. Standing there on the sidewalk I started to consider, maybe I should cancel this Uber and try my luck again. Maybe I should call my sister to pick me up.

Maybe I should take off my kippah.

But inertia—or maybe stubbornness—won out, and I did none of those things. In any event, the driver was not like I imagined. He was polite, friendly, and an excellent driver. (Better than me, frankly.) He greeted me warmly, put my bag in the trunk and we settled in for the ride, with the car radio playing the equivalent of elevator music. At first we didn’t converse at all, but eventually, right toward the end of the ride, as we were stopped at a traffic light, he turned to me and apologized. Ma’am, I am sorry. I didn’t ask what kind of music you like. What do you like to listen to?

Still living inside my black-and-white world of stereotypes, I stumbled. Well, I listen to a lot of classical music. (Barely true.) And, I’m studying to become a rabbi, so I listen to a lot of Jewish music.

A peaceful smile came over his face. He said quietly: I love the Jewish people. I am Iranian and we love the Jewish people.

Now I’ve been paying attention to the news and something about this statement felt impossible to me. There was a pause. Then he murmured, The Iranian government and the Iranian people are two different things. Everyday Iranians can remember what it was like before the Revolution, and we have deep respect and love for the Jewish people.

In the remaining few minutes of the ride, he opened up about the struggles his family had experienced due to the extremist takeover, and the ways in which that persecution and the need to flee had awakened his sympathy and empathy for the Jewish story. And I sat there in the backseat thinking, how silly I was for thinking that I knew anything about this person, just based on his name and my assumptions about his national origin. And how much I might have missed, how much I did miss, for having this foolish reaction.

I bring it up today because we are learning Parashat Re’eh this week, and there’s a passage in Re’eh that has been troubling me all week. In describing the importance of not falling into idolatry after conquering the land and dispossessing all the peoples currently there, Moses warns:

הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ פֶּן־תִּנָּקֵשׁ אַחֲרֵיהֶם
Be careful that you not be ensnared after them.

He goes on: watch out not to fall into their ways. For their rituals are anathema to God, everything they do is hateful in God’s eyes.

They even sacrifice their children.

Historical evidence suggests that this may be a true statement, but I want to invite you into the realm of metaphor to consider the relevance of these psukim in our modern world. This statement

כִּי גַם אֶת־בְּנֵיהֶם וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵיהֶם יִשְׂרְפוּ בָאֵשׁ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶם
For they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire

sounds like something you might hear blaring on a particularly partisan news network, or whispered conspiratorially amongst People With Strong Opinions. To be honest, it’s a more extreme version of what you might have heard if you had been listening to my thoughts as I awaited my Uber driver. The toxic combination of a difficult and polarized political climate, social isolation and technology dependence, overheated media coverage, and our own unfortunate impulse to fear the unknown adds up to an ever increasing diet of dehumanization. And this practice of dehumanization has brought us to a place, as a society, where we can all too easily imagine the most scurrilous things about other people.

Of course, it didn’t start with us. Rashi, our great Torah commentator from the 11th century, interpreted that phrase from verse 31

כִּי גַם אֶת־בְּנֵיהֶם וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵיהֶם יִשְׂרְפוּ בָאֵשׁ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶם

by focusing in on the word גַם (also). In Rashi’s reading, the גַם means not only did they burn their children in fire but ALSO their parents, an idea for which Rashi cites a still-older precedent, from the Rabbinic period.

אָמַר רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא אֲנִי רָאִיתִי גוֹי שֶׁכְּפָתוֹ לְאָבִיו לִפְנֵי כַלְבּוֹ וַאֲכָלוֹ
Rabbi Akiva said, I saw a non-Israelite who bound his father in the presence of his dog,
which devoured him.

And Isaac Samuel Reggio, the nineteenth century Italian scholar tightens the screws on the dehumanization by saying of this foreign practice of child sacrifice

וְהוּא נֶגֶד טֶבַע הָרַחֲמִים הַנְּטוּעָה בְּכָל אָדָם
This is against the merciful nature implanted in every human

Obviously if an entire people—conveniently the Israelites’ enemies—lacks even the natural mercy implanted in every human, they must themselves not be fully human.

But here’s what I want to say to you. Dehumanization has two victims: the one whose very being is belittled by being considered as less than human, and the one who does the belittling. When we permit ourselves to believe the worst about others, because of their identity rather than because of their actions, we end up diminishing our own humanity, too. We deny ourselves the dignity of having empathy and mercy for all of God’s creations. When we begin to see all Democrats, or all Republicans, or all Palestinians, or all Israelis, or all [fill-in-the-blank] as a caricature of evil, not because of anything they’ve done but because they seem to fit into a category, we give up some of our own humanity in dehumanizing them.

It is, of course, part of the mechanics of dehumanization that the cycle continues, and that it’s always the most vulnerable who suffer in the most grievous ways: the poor, the historically marginalized, children. In this way, the notion that there could be people who sacrifice their children turns out to be self-fulfilling. For speaking and thinking and hearing such things drives us humans to imagine that we are separate from those people, that we could never be like that. And from that vantage, we teach our children the same hateful values that we decry. Another generation is sacrificed at the altar of degradation and objectification.

In the here and now, there are large forces of dehumanization in play, and I don’t pretend that one well-intentioned dvar Torah will change that. What can any one of us do as individuals against the swirling currents of hatred and extremism? The task is more than we can imagine, yet the consequences of doing nothing are more than we can bear.

Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum of Kehillat Tzion in Jerusalem has said that people—and American Jews in particular—need to let go of the habit of trying to fix everything. The problems of the world started long before all of us and will continue long into the future. Our role is simply to make a little more peace and good will where we can: as my Uber driver did last week, in his sweet unguardedness and willingness to stay in the conversation. Clearly, painfully, we cannot fix everything. For now, not breaking it any further will have to be good enough.

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Dvarim for Temple Ahavat Achim

(Delivered August 10, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

My mother often says, If three people tell you you’re drunk, you better go lie down. Now I’m not much for drinking alcohol, but I take her point. If you keep getting the same message from a variety of sources, there’s probably something to it. Sometimes we need to get clobbered over the head with it, but I guess Mom’s point is it’s better if we don’t.

This week, we study Dvarim, the first parsha in the Book of Deuteronomy. As I said before, there is basically no new narrative material in this fifth of the Five Books of Moses. At this point, Moshe Rabeinu is in the mode of life review: going back over the story, sifting and filtering and trying to make sense of it all. And so are we.

And indeed Parshat Dvarim has a couple of themes that keep re-sounding, frequently enough that I want us to take a close look at them and take in their message. Although these repeating themes mostly don’t come in the part of the scroll that we chant this year, they spoke to me deeply as I studied this week. Over and over, this summative parsha—the beginning of this summative book—is whispering, or maybe even shouting, Keep going! Don’t be afraid!

Keep going! Don’t be afraid!

So let’s look into it. Twice in the parsha we are told רַב־לָכֶם, enough. רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּֽה in chapter 1, verse 6 and רַב־לָכֶם סֹב אֶת־הָהָר הַזֶּה פְּנוּ לָכֶם צָפֹֽנָה in chapter 2, verse 3. Rav lachem: it’s a lot, it’s enough, it’s maybe even too much. You’ve stayed too long by this mountain. You’ve circled too long around this mountain. You’ve been here quite long enough—or perhaps too long—pick yourselves up and turn toward the north. The divine voice is speaking through Moses saying, Nu? It’s time for something different. This is a relatable stance: we stay in one place too long and it starts to feel like the world is moving away from us. And then we realize there’s more life out there and we want it.

But it’s not always easy to break out of the perseveration of staying settled where we are, not so simple to move onto the next thing, even when we know that’s what’s called for.

That’s where the Don’t be afraid part of this repeated message comes in.

In chapter 1, verse 17, as Moses is reiterating the principles to keep in mind when judging legal cases, he says:

לֹא־תַכִּירוּ פָנִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט כַּקָּטֹן כַּגָּדֹל תִּשְׁמָעוּן

לֹא תָגוּרוּ מִפְּנֵי־אִישׁ כִּי הַמִּשְׁפָּט לֵאלֹהִים הוּא

Do not differentiate individuals in judgment, hear the humble as you hear the great
Do not be afraid before any person, for judgment belongs to God alone

Chizkuni elaborates: don’t be afraid that the person you rule against will hate you, because it’s ultimately divine judgment that matters. The human judge is merely a representative, called upon to do God’s will.

The next instance of Don’t be afraid! comes just a few verses later, in chapter 1, verse 21, which reads:

רְאֵה נָתַן יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְפָנֶיךָ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ

עֲלֵה רֵשׁ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר יי אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֶיךָ לָךְ אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תֵּחָת׃

See, Adonai your God has given you the land before you,
Go up! Inherit it, as Adonai, God of your ancestors, said to you!
Do not fear and do not be dismayed.

The second part of the phrase אַל־תֵּחָת, is an unusual word choice, the root letters for תֵּחָת appear only twice in the Torah itself, though it does come up about 50 more times in the other parts of the Tanakh. It can mean dismayed or even shattered, and the 19th century Russian rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known familiarly as the Netziv, explains that it specifically means שלא תהיו נִשְבָּרִים בַּלֵב—that they not become broken-hearted. The Netziv connects it to a pasuk from Jeremiah, which also deals with hesitation before conflict: אַל־תֵּחַת מִפְּנֵיהֶם פֶּן־אֲחִתְּךָ לִפְנֵיהֶם—do not break down before them, lest I break you down before them. In Jeremiah, God is, I think, pointing to a familiar human habit, that of allowing fear of the unknown to make us think we can’t do something—essentially, volunteering for failure rather than taking the risk of trying. In its own way, though, even Jeremiah’s tough love speaks of faith, challenging the Israelites—that is to say, us—to hold our courage in our hands, to overcome our own self-destructive impulses and choose instead to be unafraid.

Our final example comes toward the end of chapter one, when Moses, in recounting the incident with the scouts, recalls encouraging the Israelites by saying:

לֹא־תַעַרְצוּן וְלֹא־תִירְאוּן מֵהֶם

Do not tremble, and do not fear them.

Yet again, the message is Don’t be afraid, and both Ibn Ezra and the Netziv again associate this trembling and fear with broken-heartedness. There is something about experiencing fear that breaks us, that deflates our self-respect and sense of our own value. By facing and overcoming our fears, we become whole. Our hearts heal.

Of course, it’s easy to say don’t be afraid, but much harder to actually do it. It is a human thing to panic in the face of new or unpleasant or challenging experiences. So when, in this third instance, Moses tells the Israelites not to be afraid, he then follows it with one of the most gorgeous images in the Torah: After urging the Israelites to be courageous, Moses reassures them that God will fight for them, just as they have already seen in the land of Egypt, and that God will carry them through the wilderness as a father carries his son.

And this really is the point, the message that the parsha clobbers us over the head with, much like the three people telling you you’re drunk: that the antidote to fear is not braggadocio, it’s not posturing, it’s certainly not pretending to more bravery than we possess. Rather the antidote to fear is courage, and courage comes from faith, from the sense of God’s presence. These texts in Dvarim are locating courage in the practice of the nearness of God. It’s interesting to me that one of the synonyms for courage listed on thesaurus.com is… spirit. There is some essential overlap between being with the divine and being able to be truly fearless.

And in a time when there is ample reason to fear—when our beloved Holy Land, the land the Israelites have been wandering toward these past four books of the Torah and which they are poised to enter imminently—is in the present day under constant threat and coping with massive undigested trauma, there is still this. With all that we face that is uncertain, we know that we have endured harsh trials before and gone on to recover. What keeps us going is this faith, this feeling that somehow our people will prevail, and with God’s help, move from strength to strength. As the words of the last stanza of Adon Olam teach us, each and every Shabbat: יי לִי וְלא אִירָא. When God is with me, I have no fear.

Shabbat shalom!