Ki Tavo for TAA

(Delivered August 29, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

Sometimes I feel like Sefer Dvarim—the book of Deuteronomy—has a split personality. On the one hand, it never tires of teaching, sometimes in a pretty threatening tone, about all the obligations that fall to us as soon as we enter the Promised Land, and about all the suffering we’ll experience if we don’t fulfill those obligations. On the other hand, the word שִׂמְחָה (joy) shows up a good deal more than you might anticipate in a book that is so focused on duty.

To our 21st-century eyes and ears, so inclined to think of joy as being synonymous with lazing around in the golden sunshine on the beach with a good book and a fruity drink, Dvarim’s definition of שִׂמְחָה seems incongruous and hard to fathom.

Ten times the root letters שׂמח—sin, mem chet—show up in Dvarim, typically exhorting us to rejoice before God with our families and our entire households as we bring our offerings to the Temple or as we contemplate fulfilling the mitzvot which God has commanded us. In this valence of rejoicing, it’s not worldly pleasure or self-satisfaction that is at the center, but service and community. Leaving our individual desires aside and doing for others. Doing for God.

Our Torah is teaching us a lesson that is downright counter-cultural for the current moment. Over the course of several parshiot, the lesson has been hammered over and over again: that what we have doesn’t belong to us but rather to God, and that the pathway to שִׂמְחָה passes through sacrifice. To that end, there is no such thing as the self-made person. Torah teaches repeatedly in Dvarim that when you come into the land, when your cherished hopes are finally realized, when the 40 years of wandering, and the 400-year history of enslavement that preceded it are finally redeemed, the obligation is to give. And not just to give dutifully or grudgingly, but with שִׂמְחָה.

It’s a lesson for us all.

Way back in Vaetchanan, Moses predicts that when the Israelites come into the land, there will be houses we didn’t build and vineyards we didn’t plant, and then Moses warns about the danger of forgetting about God when things are going well. In Eikev, there’s a similar warning that as we begin to prosper, we should not imagine ourselves to deserve full credit. Nobody is anybody without God’s help, and the Torah is at pains to teach this emphatically.

This week’s reading, Ki Tavo, opens with the tradition of Bikkurim (first fruits), in which once we come into the land, we are called to bring the first of the crops—before we even eat of them—as an offering to God. And when we do, we say, in so many words, My ancestors suffered and struggled, and I am now here in this extraordinary land. I am here because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, and because of what God has given me. Now it is my turn to give, בְּשִׂמְחָה—with joy.

This week, we lost a true exemplar of joyful giving. When country music icon Dolly Parton died this past Tuesday, dayeinu, the loss would have been significant enough on the strength of her voluminous music catalogue covering the full range of human experience. But in the days following her death, we have come to know not just the entertainer but the person who knew in her bones how to give back with joy.

Dolly Parton grew up impoverished financially but filthy rich with talent. Professional success brought wealth, and with wealth came not self-aggrandizement or ostentatious luxury but rather extraordinary generosity. When she arrived at her promised land of the Grand Ole Opry, she proceeded to redeem those years of struggle and sacrifice by joyfully supporting others in need.

She supported the education of people who couldn’t afford college; she supported fellow Tennesseans who lost their homes and their property to wildfire in 2016; she supported scientists in developing the technology that made the Covid vaccines effective; and she founded the Imagination Library in memory of her father, who himself had never learned to read. The Imagination Library sent free books to children. Anybody who registered would receive a book in the mail every month, courtesy of Dolly Parton.

In 2005, this last initiative caught the attention of philanthropist Harold Grinspoon, who, inspired by Parton’s idea, founded the PJ Library Foundation, which sends Jewish children’s books every month to households with Jewish children under age five. Again, all a person has to do is register.

It might be tempting to look at all the good she has done and make an idol of Dolly Parton. I understand the temptation, but our parsha teaches us about that, too. Chapter 27, verse 2 contains this puzzling instruction:

וְהָיָה בַּיּוֹם אֲשֶׁר תַּעַבְרוּ אֶת־הַיַּרְדֵּן אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־ה’ אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ
וַהֲקֵמֹתָ לְךָ אֲבָנִים גְּדֹלוֹת וְשַׂדְתָּ אֹתָם בַּשִּׂיד׃
And on the day when you cross the Jordan to the land which Adonai your God gives you,
you shall put up great stones and cover them with whitewash.

The careful reader might bump on this teaching: elsewhere we were told explicitly not to set up monuments, for fear they could become idols. The question came up in this weeks’ Torah Study, and Doug Parsons illuminated the contradiction by likening the stones to people. It’s one thing to set them up to admire them, to take inspiration from them or see them as role models. But when that admiration crosses over to imagining them to be godlike, this is where it becomes problematic. Before idols we become passive and powerless.

If we allow ourselves to worship at the altar of Dolly Parton or any other admirable person, we abdicate the responsibility that should rightly remain ours. To put it simply, one person’s work and deep commitment to joyful service should inspire us to do the same. But if we allow ourselves to rest on mere talk about how great someone was, letting the responsibility remain with them, we miss the mark and fall into idolatry.

Regardless of our means, we all have the capacity to give what we can of our time or money, or both, in order to fulfill the vision that Parshat Ki Tavo and Deuteronomy as a whole lay out for us: to remember our past with humility, to credit the role of forces well beyond our control, and to share what we have, בְּשִׂמְחָה!

Shabbat shalom!

Re’eh for TAA

(Delivered August 8, 2026)

Shabbat shalom

You know me. You know me so well that—especially if we’ve learned Torah together—you know that I often say [say it with me] the Torah is always right on time. And I usually do feel that way, but this week has been different.

This week, I wondered a lot about that ‘always’. Is it really always right on time? What about those readings that are impossible to relate to? What about the blood and guts of Leviticus, the cringiness of Abraham’s “sister act” or Lot’s terrible abuses in Sdom? What about the Golden Calf?

Now, Parshat Re’eh is not so extreme, but still… I felt out of sync with it all week. Its timing was not matching with my own.

What I’ve had trouble getting friendly with in Re’eh is why the teaching is so rigid. Why, when it’s offering us wisdom about divine connection, does it couch it in so many rules and regs?

We have to meet at a particular place that God has chosen; the offerings are specified in nitpicky detail; the way the meat is prepared must be exactly just so.

If the aim is to elevate the everyday and make it holy, why is it so painstakingly prescribed? Why is it difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill the specifications? We tell ourselves that God wants us closer, so why the endless exactitude?

We know from living life that having a command of details can be essential in certain pursuits: architecture, baking, learning a language, filing your taxes.

But connecting with the divine? Shouldn’t that be a place of freedom, of expansiveness, of authentic and individual expression?

Re’eh is a Torah portion that makes its case through opposites—look at the topic sentence:

רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה
See, today I set before you blessing and curse

This is a world view that thrives on binaries, that divides everything into two sharp categories, blessing and curse.

What, then, can we make of the implication that fulfilling God‘s specifications for holiness is so very exacting? The terrifying subtext is that anything that doesn’t meet these relentless standards is a curse, not a blessing. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and neither could the demands.

For example: After mentioning the idolatry that the text insists we must destroy every trace of, the Torah goes on to present its opposite, directing the Israelites:

אֶל־הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר־יִבְחַר ה’ אֱלֹהֵיכֶם
Toward the place which Adonai your God will choose

This is what I mean by rigidity! Rather than discovering for ourselves where we feel the divine presence, God insists on dictating it. This is the אל קנא side of God—the jealous—dare I say controlling?—God.

On the other hand, perhaps by linking our sense of the divine to a clear understanding of what’s expected of us, the Torah lets us off the hook in a way. It relieves us of the anxiety and responsibility of searching for meaning and rather gives us a way to focus our longings. For a nation that is just beginning to feel its own feet underneath it, maybe this is not so terrible. A sense of fulfillment is generated through trying to satisfy God’s expectations. After all, if any place could be a holy place—if offerings could be made without taking the effort to go where God shows—the sense of reverence for the newly established religious practices might get watered down. I’m reminded of the line from the movie The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.”

The Torah is careful to differentiate between functional and holy. The animals that we slaughter and eat as part of ritual are categorically different from those we slaughter and eat for the sake of our bodily needs.

The passage goes on with more requirements, this time describing who is part of the Temple rite::

אַתֶּם וּבְנֵיכֶם וּבְנֹתֵיכֶם וְעַבְדֵיכֶם וְאַמְהֹתֵיכֶם
וְהַלֵּוִי אֲשֶׁר בְּשַׁעֲרֵיכֶם כִּי אֵין לוֹ חֵלֶק וְנַחֲלָה אִתְּכֶם
You, your sons and your daughters,
your male slaves and your female slaves,
and the Levite within your gates,
who has no inheritance or share of his own.

The Torah stipulates that the holy offerings be shared with children, with slaves, with the Levites. The lesson, of course, is that holiness is more fully achieved when we are able to keep in mind the powerless, the isolated, and the economically limited.

It’s true that we’re allowed to slaughter an animal and eat its meat when we’re hungry. But the text is showing us that it’s different when we do so in a holy place, in the company of others, mindful of those in our midst who may need an invitation in order to participate. We read last week that a person cannot live by bread alone. Our Torah is inviting us to remember that when we gather as one, caring for the people who care for us, mindful of our spiritual purpose, something else becomes possible.

And what is that something else? Let’s look again to chapter 12.

וַאֲכַלְתֶּם־שָׁם לִפְנֵי ה’ אֱלֹהֵיכֶם וּשְׂמַחְתֶּם בְּכֹל מִשְׁלַח יֶדְכֶם
אַתֶּם וּבָתֵּיכֶם אֲשֶׁר בֵּרַכְךָ ה’ אֱלֹהֶיךָ
And you shall eat there before Adonai your God—
and you shall rejoice in all the works of your hands.
You and your households, whom Adonai your God has blessed.

In other words, when God’s conditions are met, we rejoice and are blessed. At first I thought the rejoicing was yet another requirement. Not only is God telling us exactly where to worship and forcing the issue of who’s included, but also our emotional tone is subject to divine dictates.

Turning the lens, I came to see that the rejoicing is a natural consequence. Not a demand but an invitation. Gathering with others with a spiritual purpose in mind, sharing food together, and including those who might not otherwise be able to participate is a source of joy and of holiness. When we’re looking for a way to infuse meaning in acts that would otherwise be utilitarian, the method is religious ritual, and the medium is community. We are told to go to the particular place, to include everyone in the household, everyone in the community, in order to experience שמחה together.

When God sets before us the two extremes בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה—blessing and curse, the choice seems stark, almost obvious. But the ensuing text unpacks the subtlety and the ways in which the choice is up to us. When we choose one another, and when we choose the mitzvot, we can’t help but choose ברכה.

Shabbat shalom!

Vaetchanan for TAA

(Delivered July 25, 2026)

A dear friend of mine is sitting shiva for his mother this week. Although we have plans to visit in person for Shacharit tomorrow morning, I didn’t want to take the chance that we might oversleep or have car troubles or whatnot. So I attended the zoom shiva yesterday. It was there that I heard my friend use a phrase I’ve been mulling over ever since. He talked about how part of the process of shiva is discerning his mother‘s forever story. After all, now that she’s gone, there are no new memories to make, no new conversations to have together. The file is closed. Her forever story takes shape as memories and moments get sculpted into the architecture of a life.

Part of the poignancy of forever stories is that in some sense, they’re not really forever. Any story is just a snapshot. Just as becoming parents helps us to recast our own parents in a different light; memories and impressions of the past will change as we do. And of course, we almost always have some kind of unfinished business. The file never really closes. Even when someone dies after having lived a long and fruitful life, even when we’ve had the opportunity to say goodbye and thank you, and I’m sorry, and I love you, the mystery of death—its very power—is that it always leaves us with question marks and words unsaid. Likewise, with other moments of transition, moments with significantly less finality, there is still and always the sense of things left undone.

Life’s rhythm comes in stops and starts and ellipses. Even forever stories shift as the light changes, as we grow and change and reconsider.

Our Torah teaches this, with the narrative of Moses’s life as Exhibit A. Throughout Sefer Dvarim—the Book of Deuteronomy—Moses is wrapped up in the drama of an aspect of his life that remains tantalizingly unfinished. In various ways over the course of the book, this theme recurs like a spiral as Moses works it out. And if we are sensitive readers, we can learn from his process.

This week’s reading, Parshat Vaetchanan, begins with a heartrending scene, as Moses pleads with God for the chance to bring his life‘s work all the way to fruition.

וָאֶתְחַנַּן אֶל־ה’ בָּעֵת הַהִוא
And I implored God at that time

Interestingly, the opening word וָאֶתְחַנַּן takes the root letters for grace חנן (chet nun nun) and puts them in a relatively unusual conjugation for this root: the hitpael. (The Hebrew word for praying לְהִתְפַּלֵל also takes this form.) There isn’t a precise translation that makes sense in English for the hitpael with these two examples. But it can’t be an accident that they take the same form, a form which in more easily translatable cases, indicates the reflexive, or something one does to or for oneself—like, I told myself.

I think, for Moses, there is a sense that he feels his very self depends on God’s answer.

He continues

אַתָּה הַחִלּוֹתָ לְהַרְאוֹת אֶת־עַבְדְּךָ אֶת־גָּדְלְךָ
You have just begun to show your servant your greatness…

In other words, You started this thing with me, God. Why does it have to end? This is agonizingly human! We so often say Dayeinu but we don’t always mean it. It’s awfully hard to feel like what we have is enough.

Moses so dearly wants to see the end that sometimes I think he forgets the beginning or begins to devalue it. If someone had said to him, look at where you’ve come from! I think it would be hard for him to hear. But truly, let’s look at where he came from:

Here is Moses: who dodged genocide as a baby and was rescued for greatness; who grew up in privilege; who was given an extravagant second chance after he made a youthful mistake; who overcame his own perceived limitations to seize an opportunity to do something of enormous consequence; and who became the leader of a people and a revered figure we still talk, think, study, and sing about today.

And yet, this isn’t enough for him. There is a reason our tefillah calls for us to say שַׂבְּעֵֽנוּ מִטּוּבֶךָ—let us be satisfied with Your goodness. It’s so easy to disregard the goodness in front of us, in search of that one more thing that we think will make it all lock into place.

And when Moses asks for that one more thing, saying, אֶעְבְּרָה־נָּא—please let me cross over—you can hear the pain in his voice. Between the alef and the ayin, it’s almost impossible to pronounce this phrase without a little catch in the throat.

The unfinished business of Moses’s world threatens to overcome him in this moment. And yet, as I said, in our times of transition we all tend to think of what is still unfinished, no matter how much wisdom and experience we’ve accrued, no matter how deep and rich our relationships are.

I’m feeling this acutely as the summer passes. In less than a month, my younger son will be starting college. There is nothing like preparing to send your youngest off to college to get you thinking about the passage of time. Looking back on these past two decades, what stays in my mind—more than the cliches of baby’s first steps or first words—are all the things I’ve tried to tuck into my childrens’ souls on the off beats. The summer days of Ima Day Camp, when we went looking at bugs or walking to the local deli for a root beer to share: those days were not about the bugs and the root beer floats per se (although the latter were delicious!) but rather about trying to teach the boys to notice the world around them, to attend to even the smallest creatures, to delight in simple treats that we could prepare together. All those years, we were accruing life experience and deepening our tender connections. And the day when I tossed them the house key so they could tumble home through the woods without me for a Brother Party was more about allowing them the right amount of freedom than it was about the key or the woods.

And still it feels like so much is unfinished. How have we not yet watched The Shawshank Redemption together? When will I teach him how to whistle? Have I imparted enough of our Jewish values to enable both boys to lead lives of kindness and usefulness? No matter how much I’ve tried, I always wish for more time together. Like Moses’, my voice will surely crack as I say goodbye to him and leave him on campus that first time.

Through the story of Moshe Rabeinu—Moses, our teacher—the Torah gives over this bittersweet lesson: that nobody, even the greatest and most revered person, gets everything they want. All of us, as we move from stage to stage, want to have more, do more, be more. Like Moses, we watch helplessly as the past shrinks too quickly into the distance. Like Moses, we long for one more chance. And like Moses, eventually, we accept what’s real, stir up our courage and our אֶמֻנָה—our faith—and lovingly toss the house key to the next generation.

Shabbat shalom!

Dvarim for TAA

(Delivered July 18, 2026)

There is something in the air at this time of year, and I don’t mean the yellow haze we’ve been experiencing. Although on the one hand it seems incongruous to think of teshuvah in the middle of summer, the High Holidays have a long on-ramp. On purpose. It’s hard and painstaking work to prepare ourselves, not to mention preparing to prepare ourselves. So we start early.

With Tisha b’Av this Wednesday night, the bottom is about to drop out. And then the pull starts to get stronger and stronger over the coming two months. Somehow we need all that time.

In rabbinical school and out, there is typically a sense of frenzy and overwhelm in the fall. Between regular work and gearing up for holiday pulpit work, the vibe among rabbis is joyful but stressful. Students and rabbis alike find that there’s a lot of energy around—what tune do you use here? How in the world am I going to get all these verses of Al Chet Shechatanu L’fanecha to sound fluent enough? Will my voice get tired and start to fade by N’ilah? Will I remember the right tunes at the right moments?

For clergy—and perhaps especially for student clergy—preparing for the holidays feels like standing at the base of a mountain that we’re both required and terrified to climb.

My wonderful teacher, Rabbi Allan Lehmann, taught me a lot about this during my time at Hebrew College. Allan had served as a congregational rabbi for over 40 years, and even after he left his pulpit to do other kinds of rabbinic work, he continued to lead high holidays in various communities, basically wherever he found himself. That’s almost half a century worth of carrying a community through the cycle of rebuke, consolation, return, and atonement.

One fall, Allan—who was not doing high holidays that year for the first time in basically forever—commented that he was still experiencing the symptoms, the old familiar worry and overwhelm. This was a guy who had led more services than anyone I know, and who knew every word and every nuance…and who wasn’t even scheduled to lead that year… and he was feeling stressed out.

He said to me, I thought when I retired from doing this stuff that I would be able to relax in this season. But I still feel it in my guts. I still feel the angst.

Allan’s wisdom was this: It’s not just about the standing in front of the community and leading. It’s about the meaning within the holidays themselves. We feel anxious because that’s the design of this time of year. It’s topical, and it’s inherent. We can’t help thinking: Is this going to be the year that God says my time is ending? Is this going to be the year I lose someone dear?

The more we are attuned to Jewish life and Jewish rhythm, the more the cadence of the calendar evokes this inner churning. The tug of this season is strong—like the tides we live by in our beautiful seaside community.

It’s not the yellow fog at all, but there IS something in the air… about needing to face ourselves and our mistakes. When we think of what teshuvah—real teshuvah—entails, it’s unsurprising that we need this on-ramp. Even admitting a small mistake can be hard for many of us. To face our most consequential errors—the ones that have resulted in hurt feelings or in shattered relationships—that takes a good deal of courage and readiness.

And so we take our time to find our way.

Our parsha this week, which is always read on the Shabbat before Tisha b’Av, suggests the model and tries to give us the push we need. The entirety of Sefer Dvarim (the book of Deuteronomy) consists of Moses looking back over the story of the Israelites—retelling, recasting, rethinking—as he reckons with the reality that he will not be privy to how the story ends. He describes many of the misdeeds of the Israelites as he sifts through the shards of the eventful journey he’s led and tries to make meaning of it. In the chaplaincy world, this is called life review and is a normative part of aging.

In a way, life review is also what we do in our souls in this long leadup to and through the High Holidays. We look carefully at our past and try to make meaning of it, searching for ways to make peace where needed.

So our parsha gives us a role model, fallible as he may be. And still, the language needs to noodge us along. Three times in our Torah portion, we encounter the phrase רַב־לָכֶם indicating a kind of too-much-ness. Two of the three are direct orders to get moving!

Dvarim chapter 1, verse 6 reads:

ה’ אֱלֹהֵינוּ דִּבֶּר אֵלֵינוּ בְּחֹרֵב לֵאמֹר רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּה׃
Adonai your God spoke to you at Horev, saying,
“You have stayed too long at this mountain.”

In the next chapter, verse 3 reads:

רַב־לָכֶם סֹב אֶת־הָהָר הַזֶּה פְּנוּ לָכֶם צָפֹנָה׃
You have circled this mountain too long; turn northward.

On the one hand, Moses is deep in reflection. On the other, the story he’s telling is one of pushing on, making our way. The parsha is balancing ruminating and movement, in a way that speaks to us if we listen.

And yet, listening is hard. And this is where the magic of Shabbat Chazon comes into focus. The call to movement, toward the work of teshuvah begins this week, with a faint whisper. Rather than coming at us with a blunt force, the wave of self-reflection starts as something like the still small voice we read about in the story of Eliahu haNavi.

It enters like a distant music that gradually but insistently comes closer, like a spiritual doppler effect. This Shabbat, we turn that corner not only through words (dvarim, ironically) but through melody. As you probably noticed, both the Torah and the Haftarah readings contained interpolations of a less-familiar sound, the sound of Eicha trope. I’ve mentioned before that Jewish liturgical music helps us tell time, and this is a beautiful example. The elegiac tone of the musical expression hits us in a place where resistance is lowered. The mournful tune cracks our defenses, allowing us to break, so we can heal.

The music speaks to us in a language that bypasses language. And so our tradition offers a multi-modal invitation into the work of teshuvah. Where words might tell us it’s time to move; it’s melody that actually moves us.

Shabbat shalom!

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!