Vayishlach for TAA

(Delivered December 6, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Earlier this week, on a night when sleep eluded me, despite soul-crushing fatigue, I started to ponder Jacob’s second inexplicable night-time encounter. This second encounter is quite unlike the starry-eyed, angel-filled aha moment from last week’s parsha, Vayetze—the God-wink that awoke Jacob to the divinity that he didn’t previously recognize was available to him.

The words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Truly there is God in this place, and I didn’t even know it

are words of a young man just leaving his family to make his own way. Jacob’s moment of discovery in Parshat Vayetze is full of possibility, of angels moving freely between earth and heaven, between here and there. There is possibility everywhere in this touch of God; the radiance of it practically leaps out of the scroll.

But now, in Vayishlach? As Jacob churns over the prospect of reckoning with his twin brother Esav, a shiny, star-dusted God is not on the menu, no matter how much he wishes it were. Like many of us, he can no longer believe in a simple God. Indeed, if Parshat Vayishlach had a subtitle, it might be God for Grownups.

Jacob is not the young man first awakening to wide-eyed wonder. He is different now. He is in a different place in his life, rundown by the strains of work and family—an unfair and unscrupulous boss who also happens to be his father-in-law, four wives, many children, complicated relationships and competing interests.

Jacob is weathered.

As he girds himself to reconnect with the brother whose detached nature he took advantage of, at great emotional cost, he is filled with misgiving. By this time, he’s been cheated himself, by Lavan’s greed and trickery. He has been robbed of blessing himself, through his beloved Rachel’s prolonged difficulty in conceiving. Jacob has absorbed on the molecular level that life is full of heartbreaks and injustices.

When he learns that Esav, his brother, is coming to meet him, with a retinue of four hundred men:

וַיִּירָא יַעֲקֹב מְאֹד וַיֵּצֶר לוֹ
Jacob was very afraid, and in distress

In his state of foreboding over how his brother would receive him, and perhaps (as Rashi teaches) fearing that he might cause Esav further harm, Jacob goes into crisis mode. He divides his entourage into groups, imagining the worst: that perhaps Esav and his army of 400 will attack, and leave him with nothing. In a classic, “the heir and the spare” move, Jacob hedges his bets in the hopes that he can diminish risk, and perhaps stave off the disaster he deep down feels like he deserves. He sets his various groups in motion—some animals and servants being sent as a peace offering to his brother, closer family members spirited off across the river for safekeeping, eventually to be subdivided again with respect to where they fall in his hierarchy of love—all the while praying for God’s protection from the brother he presumes the worst of.

Eventually Jacob finds himself alone. And then not alone. A mysterious presence tugs at the strings of his disquiet all night long, as Jacob tosses and turns. The text is thrillingly unclear as to what is happening. Is there actually another person there, or is Jacob wrestling with his own conscience? Is it a ladderless angel? The Hebrew slips through our fingers, like so much dust.

What remains is the theological lesson. The text goes on to say that the stranger renames Jacob as Yisrael:

כִּי־שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁים וַתּוּכָל
For you have contended with God and with people and prevailed

This word שָׂרִיתָ contains multitudes: you have contended, you have wrestled, you have exerted your power. The sin and the resh bring us to top of the food chain (think שַׂר הַטַּבָּחִים, Pharaoh’s chief officer) or even to the realm of royalty. שָׂרָה, after all, means princess. So whatever the physical or psychological nature of Jacob’s dustup, the text seems to want us to categorize it in the sweep of divinity. Perhaps, then, all the better that its nature is unclear. The ambiguity is part of the message.

And afterward, Jacob names the spot Peniel—the face of God. Or is it Penuel—God turned away? Clearly Jacob’s crisis of faith makes an opening for both sensations. He has felt the presence of the divine, and he has felt it vanish. The ephemerality of it, the strenuousness of holding onto that sense of connection leaves him damaged, with a limp that makes the phrase ‘crippled with anxiety’ all too real.

I personally am grateful for this confusing, opaque, non-reassuring description of encountering God. I’m grateful to read of the hair’s breadth distance—literally a verse—between seeing the face of God and feeling God turn away. I’m grateful that all this turmoil and searching is depicted as happening in the dark of night.

Isn’t that what it’s really like?

Faith takes work. It takes wrestling. It’s hardest in the dark.

To locate this spiky, destabilizing experience of God with Yaakov Avinu—Jacob our ancestor, someone whose name we invoke every time we open a siddur to pray—hammers home that message. When we are praying, we are invited to bring a Jacob-consciousness, a stance of searching and doubt. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And, of course, Jacob’s new name, Yisrael, is the name by which we come to know ourselves. In this haunting passage, our tradition gives us the gift of reassurance that our own uncertainties are part of the process, that our struggles are inherent in our identity as Jews. The moments when we see the face of God, and the moments when God turns away are all with us in our prayers, as in our lives.

We are alone. And then not alone.

Shabbat Shalom!

Vayetze for TAA

(Delivered November 29, 2025)

One of the many things the Jewish community will probably never agree about is how to answer the question, “Where is God?”

Ask someone who’s spiritual but not religious and they are likely to say God is everywhere. Ask an atheist or a cynic and they’ll say God is nowhere. A reading in the Reform siddur describes God as, “closer than the air we breathe, yet further than the furthermost star.” So where is that, exactly?

The opening of Parshat Vayetze invites us into this unanswerable question with its famous image of Jacob’s Ladder. On the run from his murderous twin brother, Jacob lies down out in the open, and dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder that reaches all the way to the sky. This electrifying vision jolts him into a different realm of consciousness, and when he wakes up he says the famous words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Indeed there was divinity in this place, and I didn’t even know

It’s easy to credit Jacob’s realization to the vision of that ladder teeming with angels. It’s an incredibly powerful image, which has found its way into all manner of artistic representation. And as a concept, it has plenty of crossover appeal. A quick AI search on the phrase ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ yields this: ”Jacob’s Ladder” most commonly refers to a biblical dream about a ladder to heaven, a 1990 psychological horror film starring Tim Robbins, or a type of wildflower with ladder-like leaves. It can also refer to a specific type of toy, a staircase in the Peak District of England, or a symbol in Freemasonry. In other words, Jacob’s isn’t the only imagination captured by the angel-filled ladder.

Jacob is a character who doesn’t appear to have much of a spiritual life prior to this encounter. He has so far come across as cunning and manipulative, not as a person in touch with a spiritual core that would prompt him to reflect on morality. In Parshat Toldot, he’s described as an אִישׁ תָּם—a simple man, which calls to mind the comparison with the simple child in the Haggadah. We can easily picture Jacob, when confronted with a spiritual question, responding like that simple child and saying מַה זּאֹת—what’s this?

So God has to hit Jacob over the head, with a vivid, unforgettable impression. But if we slow down over the passage, we can put together some of the unsung pieces of holiness.

Take, for example, Jacob’s physical experience and surroundings. The same verse that tells us he is an אִישׁ תָּם also describes his happy place: יֹשֵׁב אֹהָלִים—dwelling in tents. Unlike his twin brother, he’s almost an indoorsman and stays close to home. But at the beginning of Vayetze, he finds himself sleeping outside on the hard ground, out in the open, with a rock for a pillow. Like many of us, he resists going outside but when he finally ventures out, he finds something both grounding and uplifting. (Kind of like a ladder, if you think about it.) Getting closer to the natural world allows Jacob—and us—easier access to the divine. Encountering the mystery of creation invites us to ask מַה זּאֹת—what is this?—and increases the chance that we might sense the presence of the Creator.

There’s more to it still: in verse 11, the text specifies that when Jacob arrives at the place, he stops for the night because the sun has set. Rashi comments that the word order suggests something unusual about the sunset. Had things been as normal, the text would have said: וַיָּבֹא הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וַיָּלֶן שָׁם—the sun was setting, so he lay down for the night. According to Rashi, the text reverses the order to say he lay down because the sun had set, implying that the sun set suddenly for Jacob, not at its usual time, forcing him to stay in that exact place overnight. In Rashi’s reading, Jacob was taken aback by the sunset. It stopped him in his tracks.

In a different comment on the same verse, Rashi also specifies the place where Jacob stops. Because it is designated with the word מָּקוֹם, Rashi connects it to these words of Parshat Lech L’cha וַיַּרְא אֶת הַמָּקוֹם מֵרָחֹק—and he saw the place from afar—meaning Mount Moriah, the location of the עַקֵידָה—the binding of Isaac. That Jacob would experience the divine in the location of his father’s trauma opens the possibility of a kind of tikkun, a redemption of the horror of the earlier experience.

To our question of where is God, though, this connection offers yet another layer. In Jewish tradition, the word מָּקוֹם is sometimes used to refer to God. Substituting it in, we can read the verse in Lech L’cha וַיַּרְא אֶת הַמָּקוֹם מֵרָחֹק—as he [maybe Abraham, maybe Isaac] saw God from afar. And here in Vayetze, Jacob gets a closer encounter: וַיִּפְגַּע בַּמָּקוֹם—and he met God.

Jacob’s conflicting impulses show some of his theological confusion: when he makes his vow to God after receiving the vision, his goal is to return to his father’s house. Yet he names the place where he is Beit El—House of God. For Jacob, there is confusion as to where God is: at home with his complicated family, or out in the open, in this special place that, despite its association with some of what makes his family so complicated, becomes a מָּקוֹם, a stand-in for divinity itself.

It’s a little bit of both, as I suspect is the case for many of us. Jacob definitely taps into something larger than himself in the solitude of nature, aided and abetted by an extravagant vision of the holiness that he could access if he knew how. Yet he remains rooted to his family and his past, with all its competition and missed connections and hurt feelings and drama. Home and away. Isaac’s house and Beit El. Both speak to something essential in Jacob.

Ultimately, I think the parsha wants us to pause and locate God in each moment. The word וְהִנֵּה—and here—shows up eleven times in Parshat Vayetze. And so it is with God. God is here. And here. And here and here.

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

Midweek Musings from Gloucester Daily Times

(This weekly column rotates among local clergy members on Cape Ann. This week it was my turn. Read it on the GDT site here.)

Jewish tradition makes a big deal about gratitude. The first words (or at least, the first official words) that we say each morning are words of thanks. Modeh ani l’fanecha—I am grateful before you, eternal giver of life, who has mercifully returned my soul to me. Your trust in me is great. This blessing we recite daily reminds us that, as one of my congregants likes to say, every day we get to wake up is a good day. The gratitude continues throughout the day, with some Jews holding to the tradition of saying 100 blessings per day. Any moment can be a source of appreciation, elevated from its daily-ness through the conscious act of blessing.

Of course, we know that life is complicated. It’s true that every day we get to wake up is a good day, but many of us wake up to physical or psychic pain, or we wake up to difficult relationships or uncertain economic circumstances. Being grateful is easy when everything is going well, when the world outside our windows is lovely and makes sense. But sometimes the landscape is blurred by disappointment, insufficiency, and regret.

It has been a difficult period for the Jewish community. Since October 7 of last year, we have been reeling from Hamas’s ruthless attack, and from the slow but quickening boil of antisemitism that has followed. This antisemitism has been at times merely rhetorical and at times shockingly violent. Even in wonderful, peaceful Gloucester, the echoes of world events are cause for concern, and for reawakened trauma.

The warning attributed to George Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” turns in my mind as I rearrange the words. Perhaps the Jewish version might be: Those who cannot forget the past are doomed to relive it.

They say that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. For my people, that means an age-old pattern of making our way in a society, settling into a community, only to watch relationships curdle and our safety come into question. When the world gets unsettled, so do the Jews. We know all too well that things can be going along well, until suddenly we’re in first century Rome, or in fifth century Minorca, or in eleventh century Mainz, or thirteenth century England, or seventeenth century Vienna, or Kentucky in 1862, or Kishinev, or Weimar, or waking up to the sound of explosions and gunshots one October morning in southern Israel, after a night of dancing to trance music at the Nova Music Festival.

To be Jewish is to carry this history in your bones.

And yet to be Jewish is also to say a hundred blessings every day. Telling the lachrymose version of the Jewish story is one way, but turn the lens and you see things differently. This people, this culture I cherish, has survived for millennia. Another way to see Jewish history is as a tale of innovation and thriving, of faith and vitality, punctuated by occasional catastrophe. Our sorrows are ancient, but so is our resilience.

The great first-century sage known as Rabbi Akiva was no stranger to loss, uncertainty and heartbreak, having lived in the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which was itself a violent antisemitic attack. In Mishnah Brachot (6:8), Rabbi Akiva taught, “Even if a person’s entire meal is overboiled vegetables (shelek), they should make three blessings afterward, [i.e. the traditional Jewish grace after meals].”

When I first encountered this text, I was puzzled. I hadn’t given much thought to blessing things that were unappealing. And yet—upon reflection, I began to see Rabbi Akiva’s wisdom. You might not enjoy the soggy vegetables as you’re eating them, but afterward, your belly is full. Sometimes having enough is truly enough. Stirring up our gratitude in the complicated moments can help us notice what’s worth blessing.

When life is difficult and anxious-making—as it surely is for the Jewish community at this moment in history—leaning on our practice of blessing can help us to hold steady. Blessing what is before us—even blessing the difficult—is like a lifeboat in a stormy sea. It cannot change the weather, but it gives us something to hold onto.

Yom Kippur Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 12, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

דְּרָכָיו רָאִיתִי וְאֶרְפָּאֵהוּ וְאַנְחֵהוּ וַאֲשַׁלֵּם נִחֻמִים לוֹ וְלַאֲבֵלָיו׃

בּוֹרֵא נִיב שְׂפָתָיִם שָׁלוֹם שָׁלוֹם לָרָחוֹק וְלַקָּרוֹב אָמַר יי וּרְפָאתִיו׃

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

and comfort the mourners among them.

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

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

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

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

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

עֹשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט לָעֲשׁוּקִים נֹתֵן לֶחֶם לָרְעֵבִים [יי] מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים

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

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

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

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

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

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

אַתָּה הוּא עַד שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם

אַתָּה הוּא מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא הָעוֹלָם

אַתָּה הוּא בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה

וְאַתָּה הוּא לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

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

Let me repeat that in all its gorgeousness:

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

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

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

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

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

G’mar tov and shanah tovah!