Lech l’cha (short) for TAA

(Delivered October 23, 2026)

When I was in rabbinical school, one of the concepts that we played with a lot was different notions of time. Many of us live our lives unquestioningly in the realm of everyday time. We busy ourselves with tasks and appointments, we monitor how quickly we walk, the pace of our beating hearts, and how many things we can fit into a 50-minute hour. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we measure out our lives in coffee spoons. This is a mode that can feel energizing, and deeply alive. But also when busy-ness masquerades as fullness, we can grow numb and weary.

But every week our tradition invites us to take on a different understanding of time. From sunset on Friday through sheer darkness on Saturday, a full twenty-five hours as measured by everyday time, we enter a space that is anything but everyday. In this other world, time is measured not in coffee spoons but in deep breaths, in songs, in prayers, in moments of profound connection. On Shabbat, we can connect to one another, to ourselves, to our tradition, and to the divine. Shabbat opens up a space inside us and around us that fills not with busyness, but with fullness itself.

Our Torah portion this week, Parshat Lech Lecha, begins with God speaking to Abraham—here still called Avram—and saying לֶךְ־לְךָ. Go, go! Famously, the grammatical construction of the phrase לֶךְ־לְךָ is curious. Dayeinu—it would have been sufficient for God to say לֶךְ—go! The second part of the phrase, לְךָ is a little harder to translate. It can be merely a particle of emphasis, a sort of “this means you.” But many commentators rightly point out that there’s a suggestion of reflection or even mysticism in this emphasis. The word לְךָ can mean to yourself, or for yourself, or toward yourself.

These shades of meaning open the possibility that God’s instruction to Avram is a spiritual invitation as much as a geographical one. God is telling him, there’s more to you than you know, more to this world than you realize. And finding it will mean finding yourself. Later in the parsha, in the section we’ll read tomorrow morning, Avram is called עִבְרִי—boundary crosser.

If we braid these valences together, the ideas of going to ourselves and of crossing boundaries, Shabbat Lech Lecha becomes an invitation to move beyond the everyday routines and rhythms, to cross a boundary in time, and to find ourselves in a place of stillness and peace. And when we do this, when we go to ourselves, perhaps it feels like coming home.

Noach for TAA

(Delivered October 17, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

I have been writing divrei Torah for several years now but strangely, I have never written one on Noach before. Somehow, despite my immersion in Jewish life all this time, I was never scheduled to offer the sermon the week when Noach was read.

Imagine my surprise, then, as I set about finding a subject for writing, to discover just how dark it is. Like really dark. Despite the many beautifully-illustrated children’s books depicting Noah’s Ark, and the cutesy songs about the flood, this is really a parsha for mature audiences.

Let’s start with the part that Noach is most famous for: the flood. At the edge between Breishit and Noach, God looks at the state of humanity—the destruction and violence, the חָמָס—the lawlessless—of it all, and falls into a divine depression. Feeling profound regret at having created the world in the first place just one parsha back, God slips into a funk. Sad and hopeless, God decides that there is only one person who is even remotely worth saving, the namesake of our parsha.

So God speaks to Noach and tells him disaster is coming, instructing him on what to do to survive. Noach himself may be the most righteous of his generation, the best of a bad lot, but the truth is, in a different generation he probably wouldn’t be thought of as a paragon. He might not even be thought of at all. After all, when God intimates that things are about to get bad, Noach doesn’t think to try to save humanity. He’s got his own, he’s allowed to take his family with him and that’s it. That’s all he cares about.

And so, God’s sadness turns to violence and the world that was created from water just last week, to water it returns.

The flood comes: endless days of rain, the whole world drowning in its own sinfulness. Even after the rains slow, the land is soggy for much longer. All together, Noach and his family and the menagerie of animals are on the תֵּבָה—the ark—for over a year. Finally, they come out, and face the task of rebuilding and repopulating. So that’s Exhibit Alef in the darkness of Parshat Noach.

Exhibit Bet is what happens with these traumatized people in the aftermath of the flood. Months and months of isolation and uncertainty couldn’t not take a toll. Noach himself kind of falls apart. Having had more than enough of water, thank-you-very-much, he clings to the land, planting a vineyard and becoming a winemaker. But the trauma and survivor guilt catch up to him, and he struggles with alcohol and with sexual impropriety. When his immorality is discovered, it’s hard to discern who is the more correct—the descendants who protect his reputation, or the ones who allow the truth to be the truth. Were Noach’s vices better off swept under the carpet, as Shem and Yefet delicately tried to do, covering him tactfully with a blanket when he was found drunk and naked in his tent? Or were Cham and Canaan right to point out his failures?

The news these past weeks has forced us to reckon with the question of what happens when the wrong person‘s dignity is protected. The story of Jane Doe and what happened to her at Cornell is tragically not unique; indeed it’s only the latest such offense to come to light. And all the cosmetic changes to Cornell’s policy regarding fraternities won’t get at the cultural forces that allow certain kinds of people to do horrible things while the suffering and the soul-searching fall to the victims rather than the perpetrators. The fact that this event is not sparking a moment of painful reckoning on the part of men is hard to fathom; then again, the question of who is deserving of dignity is apparently as old as the Bible.

And then there’s the matter of the preview of some of the seven tribes that the Israelites will conquer in their progress to the Promised Land. Like Chekhov’s first-act gun, we know that the mention of the Jebusites and the Amorites and so on in act one will result in horrific violence before the curtain falls. Between siblings and between tribes there is already the intimation that humanity really doesn’t know how to do conflict well.

In all, Parshat Noach takes a very dim view of humankind. It starts in lawlessness and degradation and, despite the potentially cleansing waters, finds its way back to more degradation.

Eventually, God comes to the dark realization that יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַע מִנְּעֻרָיו—the formation of the human heart is evil from the beginning. Basically, humanity is rotten to the core, but, like Noach, the צַדִּיק of his generation, it’s still the best we have.

And so, the sadder-but-wiser God acknowledges the complexity of being human, the difficulty of free will, the orneriness of the human heart and makes the Torah’s first בְּרִיתִ—its first covenant. Unlike most covenants, which typically mark an agreement where each side has something to offer the other, this one is unconditional. Knowing all too well the limitations of the human race, God nonetheless places the rainbow in the sky as a sign that the catastrophic flood will not be repeated.

In Breishit, when the pre-world was תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ—a wild, watery mess—God looked at it and said, I think I can do something with this…I just need a little light. And here, in Noach, God looks to a new wild, watery mess, acknowledges the truth in the darkness, the human consequences from said mess, and says, OK, this is what I have to work with. Let Me see what I can do. Let Me make it beautiful despite.

Shabbat shalom!

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!

Behar (Bechukotai) for TAA

(Delivered May 9, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

We find ourselves today at the end of Sefer Vayikra, the Book of Leviticus, which I must admit is almost nobody’s favorite book. The text of Leviticus בְּגָדול—overall—is full of rules and regulations, blood and guts, sacrifices, rituals, restrictions.

My teacher, Rabbi Nehemia Polen, on the other hand, loves Leviticus. Loves it, loves it, loves it.

In Nehemia’s world, Leviticus becomes almost romantic: he reads it as a tender description of acts of profound devotion: of the gifts that God asks of humanity and that humanity lovingly offers. Where the rest of us see the mind-numbing details of alienating ritual, Nehemia sees care and softness, a desire for deeper connection and partnership.

The emotional drama underneath those boring details is of God and humanity reaching toward each other, repairing the sense of abandonment arising from centuries of enslavement, moving past the savagery of the Golden Calf, dwelling in sacred companionship in a holy place, that God designs and the Israelites construct. To put it another way, the Mishkan and the many elaborate religious practices that take place within it are the embodied expression of the covenant that defines the Jewish people.

Although I passed Nehemia’s class and wrote a pretty good final essay, I have some lingering skepticism for this reading.

But Parshat Behar-Bechukotai, particularly what we encounter in the first shlish—the first triennial reading—offers a wink here and there of the passion and adoration that my teacher sees in the book overall.

Consider the loving care that God commands us to have for one another and for the land. The system of שְׁמִיטָה and יוֹבֵל—of letting the land rest every seven years, and of rebalancing wealth inequities every fifty—speaks to a strong theme of generosity and good will toward one another. It also demands a level of faith in the unseen, to be able to accept the enforced no-harvest period. Between us and God, and amongst ourselves, these principles teach and demand a kind of tenderness.

The parsha’s many lessons about economic justice likewise point to an ethic of love and חֶסֶד, commanding us to uphold the dignity of the migrant or the servant with as much energy as we would do for our own kin. It would be enough that the parsha forbids taking economic advantage of someone who is struggling. But our Torah goes further, to command that if we see someone beginning to struggle, we must intervene to support and strengthen them (וְהֶחֱזַקְתָּ בּוֹ). Rashi compares this to a heavy load on an animal. If the load begins to wobble, it’s better to catch it quickly before it falls to the ground. Once it has fallen all the way, it’s that much harder to lift it up. With this teaching, the Torah is demanding that we not look away from suffering, that we see the struggles of the world as our own and labor to help. That these teachings are couched in the refrain: אֲנִי ה’ אֱלֹהֵיכֶם—I am Adonai your God—completes the circuit of love and compassion. The more empathic the human-to-human interaction, the more it aligns with God’s primary principle of עָרֵֵבוּת—of taking responsibility for one another.

But let me tell you about one particular pasuk that encapsulates the divine-human connection and love that Nehemia believes permeates Vayikra. In chapter 25, verse 23, God says:

וְהָאָרֶץ לֹא תִמָּכֵר לִצְמִתֻת כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ כִּי־גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי׃
But the land will not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine.
You are strangers and sojourners with Me.

The final word of that pasuk עִמָּדִי—with Me—opens a world of theological questions and possibilities. When the verse says we are with God, what is the quality of that with-ness? Are we wanderers being accompanied by God, our footsteps monitored from the middle distance by an all-knowing presence? Or is God also a stranger and sojourner, wandering alongside us as we go about our lives?

Surely the ambiguity is not an accident.

It is comforting enough to imagine the former: that God is watching peacefully over us, guiding our every choice. The strangeness and the sojourn never get out of hand because God is with us. Yet if God is also a stranger and sojourner, if we are walking beside God in wonder and sometimes bewilderment, how does that obligate us, to God and to one another?

This, I believe, is the sense of depth and companionship that makes Nehemia Polen so devoted to Sefer Vayikra. Ultimately, it’s the idea that God and we are sojourners together, learning from one another and holding one another steady in the whirlwind of life. As the spiritual teacher Ram Dass—born Richard Alpert—said, “We are all just walking each other home.”

We are all just walking each other home.

May our footsteps be guided by kindness.

Shmini for TAA

(Delivered April 11, 2026)

The nature of God: a lesson in three parts.

Part One.

כִּי הַיּוֹם ה’ נִרְאָה אֲלֵיכֶם
For today God will be revealed to you (Vayikra 9:4)

Could any phrase be more promising? At the opening of Parshat Shmini, we find ourselves at a moment of new beginning. The labor that has taken up the last half of Sefer Shmot—the Book of Exodus—and the beginning of Vayikra—is, at long last, complete. The Mishkan is ready, along with the vessels and utensils of the sacrificial rite. The Priestly garments are woven and sewn, with embroidered bells and pomegranates, and twisted threads of crimson and blue and eggplant purple. The Kohanim are trained. They have completed the seven day period of מִלּוּאִם—of ordination, with its isolation, reflection, and preparation. They are poised now, arrayed in their finery.

The day has arrived, and God will be revealed.

There’s nothing like a clean slate. New beginnings offer us a sense of freshness and possibility. They whisper to us, making us think that optimism is earned and that nothing will ever change or decay. In the world of new beginnings, life is perennially rosy and sweet, we are young and full of potential, easily convinced of our rightness.

It’s opening day and your team hasn’t lost a game. It’s the day of your first child’s birth and you have neither changed a single diaper nor startled awake at 3am in their teen years wondering when they are going to be home. It’s the moment of your first kiss, and you haven’t discovered your love’s actual humanity.

As the Mishkan opens for business, Aaron and the priests begin to place holy offerings on the altar: a young calf, a ram without blemish, a grain offering. Everything is as it should be.

Everything is perfect.

כִּי־יָשָׁר ה’ צוּרִי וְלֹא־עַוְלָתָה בּוֹ
For God is upright, my rock, in whom there is no wrong (Psalms 92:16)

Part Two.

כִּי הַיּוֹם ה’ נִרְאָה אֲלֵיכֶם
For today God will be revealed to you (Vayikra 9:4)

Everything is perfect. Until it isn’t.

Next, Parshat Shmini takes us into one of the most horrifying, inexplicable scenes in the Torah—a catastrophe so unthinkable that most of us can barely get the words out to talk about it. The priestly rite begins as anticipated, and then goes horribly wrong. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, approach the altar with אֵשׁ זָרָה—with a strange fire.

Once, back in Parshat Mishpatim, they had sat at the foot of the divine, on a surface blue like sapphire.

And now, memories of eating and drinking with their father and the elders of the community in the presence of God spark them to come closer than they should, to love God more than they should, to make their own path. They break the boundaries of their roles as Kohanim, and are put to the flame. In an instant, they are gone. וַיִּדֹּם אַהֲרֹן—and Aaron did not speak. In the face of such a thing, their shellshocked father can only be silent.

The sudden misfortune is impossible to explain, yet it sends us, in all our story-seeking humanity, flailing about, searching for reasons. Rabbi Yishmael suggests they were drunk. Rabbi Eliezer says they dared to render halachic rulings in the presence of Moses their Elder and Teacher. Big-hearted Ibn Ezra wonders if perhaps they thought they were doing something favorable towards God; maybe they were just misunderstood.

Something else occurred to me, a thought almost too painful to articulate. Maybe Aaron, who sinned so grievously in creating the Golden Calf, has become the embodiment of

פֹּקֵד עֲוֹן אָבֹת עַל־בָּנִים
God visits the misdeeds of the parents on the children (Shmot 20:5)

Ultimately the reasons don’t matter. The implacable situation remains. Aaron started the day with four sons and ends it with two.

The mystery of God’s decrees—who shall live and who shall die—is not for us to know or understand. The mind of God cannot be fathomed in the human realm.

Part Three.

כִּי הַיּוֹם ה’ נִרְאָה אֲלֵיכֶם
For today God will be revealed to you (Vayikra 9:4)

Immediately after the calamity come halting attempts at recovery. Moses—already known for not being a good talker—struggles to find the right words, offering explanations where none could possibly satisfy. Still, he attempts to move forward, ordering the removal of the bodies.

Moses tries to relieve Aaron and his remaining sons Elazar and Itamar of the burden of mourning but the words don’t come easily. Eventually he says what many readers probably wish he’d led with: אֲחֵיכֶם כָּל־בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל יִבְכּוּ—your brothers, the whole house of Israel weep. Moses and the community proceed to feed the bewildered survivors and to offer them a place of honor as befitting their status as Kohanim in mourning.

As the Torah unfurls, the names of Nadav and Avihu are not forgotten. The two remain threads in the fabric of the Israelite community.

This, too, is an aspect of the divine: יָתוֹם וְאַלְמָנָה יְעוֹדֵד—God gives courage to the orphan and the widow. (Psalms 146:7)

Epilogue.

Parshat Shmini takes us to the terrifying core of the human relationship with God, the mystery at the heart of our existence. It asks us to bear the unbearable, to struggle with what truths might be hidden inside this story of wild, unfathomable loss. The lesson, I think, is that God is the unifying logic underneath each and every moment in this chaotic, unfolding universe.

כִּי הַיּוֹם ה’ נִרְאָה אֲלֵיכֶם
For today God will be revealed to you (Vayikra 9:4)

Shabbat Chol haMoed Pesach for TAA

(Delivered April 4, 2026)

Shabbat shalom & moadim l’simcha!

So yesterday, in a panic to write the introductions for the aliyot, I discovered quite by accident that the Torah readings for Shabbat Chol haMoed Pesach for Shabbat Chol haMoed Sukkot are exactly the same. In Sukkot’s moment of embracing the impermanence of life and in Pesach’s moment of exulting in liberation, we scroll back to the same place, to witness God and Moses repairing their connection following the abasement of the Golden Calf. On the face of it, it seems incongruous. Insecurity and freedom take us to the same place. Why? What makes these Torah readings wink at each other from halfway across the calendar? Why might we turn to them in these two different but both liminal moments?

The connection to Sukkot is easier to grasp. Sukkot puts us in a mind of vulnerability—at Sukkot we purposely abandon our shelters and routines to subject ourselves to the elements. We read world-weary Kohelet. We enact all manner of rain-seeking ritual in order to try to influence what cannot be influenced. We make it a point to remind ourselves that we are at the mercy of forces much larger than us, and instead of cowering in a corner with this knowledge, we go outside for the week and enjoy the moonlight. This seems a perfect time to engage a Torah reading that gives us Moses at his most anxious and God saying, in so many words, I’m here. Hold on.

The connection of the exact same Torah reading to Pesach feels a little more tenuous on first glance. Why, with the taste of liberation on our lips, do we pause during the days of Moed and remind ourselves of just how quickly that liberation went wrong, of just how unprepared we actually were for freedom and how foolishly we navigated it?

At our seders, when we heard Moses say in our mind’s ear, “Let My people go!” we might or might not have thought about what he said next. The full phrase that God thunders, through Moses, is שלח את עמי ויעבדוני—let My people go and they will serve Me. The end goal of freedom wasn’t about sleeping late in the morning or heading to the beach at a moment’s notice or (my personal favorite) driving fast with the wind in your face. Rather it was about becoming fully-realized spiritual beings, about committing ourselves to God.

Let’s listen carefully to the Hebrew. In leaving Egypt we go מעבדות לחירות; and what God tells Moses to demand of Pharaoh is שלח את עמי ויעבדוני. You hear it, right? The connection between slavery עבדות and sacred obligation עבודה, are both derived from the same root letters—ayin, bet, daled.

The exodus was about exchanging the עבדות of enslavement to Pharaoh for the עבדות of serving God. I like to say we traded up!

Still, what followed after the exodus was neither easy nor simple. Our feet had barely dried after crossing Yam Suf when the complaining and the doubt and the rose-colored memories of the good old days of slavery started. Then, when Moses went up Mount Sinai to be with God, and to receive the teachings that would guide our lives for generations to come, the Israelites panicked and made a huge communal mistake. Our Torah reading picks up the story in the aftermath of this mass hysteria, and asks us to explore the question of what comes next after such a rupture.

The scene between Moses and God reads a little bit like a dialogue between lovers who have just had their first real fight: Moses pleads for more reassurance, testing over and over again to find out—have I really found grace in your eyes? Meanwhile, God offers presence and promises. Back and forth they go, trying to rebuild what has been shaken by a staggering breach of trust. Reconciliation doesn’t come all at once but rather on its own schedule, in this halting, slightly desperate exchange. On it goes until Moses asks the impossible.

וַיֹּאמַר הַרְאֵנִי נָא אֶת־כְּבֹדֶךָ׃
And he said: oh please show me Your presence.

We know—as God reiterates in verse 20—that humans cannot actually see God and live, but Moses in this moment is standing in for an entire traumatized community. He needs to be strengthened for continued leadership, and he intuits that the Israelites’ slide into idolatry was partly informed by the sheer difficulty of believing in a God they could not see. He needs to know that what he’s teaching the Israelites is going to hold them—and him—steady until they can finally reach their promised destination.

The best that God can offer, though, is a compromise: that Moses can come close, nestle into a crevice of the rock, and then get a glimpse from behind as God passes by. God says, essentially, Look, there’s a place near Me. Come stand in this crag,

וְשַׂכֹּתִי כַפִּי עָלֶיךָ עַד־עָבְרִי׃
And I will shelter you with My hand until I have passed by.

This is a gesture of surpassing tenderness. It says: You need something I can’t give. Let’s find another way; let me take care of you in the ways I can, and hope that it’s enough. You may not see me where I am, but you will see where I’ve been.

In fact this seems just the thought to call back to mind in moments of insecurity or transition, in the literal Chol haMoeds of Sukkot or Pesach as much as in the figurative Chol haMoeds of life. These moments when we have lost our way are exactly the moments when it’s comforting to remember our ancestors coped with doubt and trouble as well, and that despite everything, they found a way back to the presence of the divine.

To think of this reconciliation during Sukkot is to reassure ourselves that the unpredictability we experience in our flimsy shelters is countered by a force far greater than ourselves, something we can return to at any moment to knit ourselves back into the fabric of certainty. And reflecting on this reconciliation in the middle of Pesach helps to remind us that there’s more to the God Whose power can bring about a series of plagues—each one more horrific than the last—and lead the Israelites from degradation to exaltation. The mighty hand that pulled the Israelites from the trap of hopelessness and enslavement, and the tender hand that sheltered a shellshocked and grieving Moses are one and the same.

Terumah for TAA

(Delivered February 21, 2026)

We live in a noisy world. Having just spent a few days in New York this week, I can attest to the near-constant cacophony of voices that permeates the streets there. Voices wooing, voices arguing, voices philosophizing, so many voices preparing for auditions. Our media environment, social and otherwise, offers more of the same. The sheer number of issues about which people are raising their voices is staggering.

Is the new mayor of New York a dangerous antisemite? Is the former Prince Andrew guilty as charged? What, as a society, should we be doing with respect to revelations of rampant sexual abuse and trafficking? What are the merits of the Board of Peace? Can we even give credence to a Board of Peace while simultaneously executing a military buildup in the Middle East? Can the founding of a country be canceled because its origin story is one-sided? Because we don’t like its current policy? Was the late Jesse Jackson a visionary for equality or an unrepentant antisemite?

Just how many servings of vegetables are required per day? Is wine good for you or bad for you? Were the American ice dancers robbed of a gold medal by nationalistic favoritism from the French judge?

You probably have opinions about many, if not most, of these things. So do I. In the cacophony of voices that comprises our world today, it feels increasingly difficult to discern where the truth is. With so much shouting and fist-shaking, with bumper-sticker slogans replacing nuanced discourse, how do we begin to bring order to the cacophony? Which is the voice of ultimate truth, and how do we know it when we hear it?

Our parsha this week, Terumah, is inviting us to think about what that might look like, and offers a fantastical image that could shed some light.

Beginning at chapter 25, verse 17, we read:

וְעָשִׂיתָ כַפֹּרֶת זָהָב טָהוֹר אַמָּתַיִם וָחֵצִי אָרְכָּהּ וְאַמָּה וָחֵצִי רָחְבָּהּ:
וְעָשִׂיתָ שְׁנַיִם כְּרֻבִים זָהָב מִקְשָׁה תַּעֲשֶׂה אֹתָם מִשְּׁנֵי קְצוֹת הַכַּפֹּרֶת׃
Make a covering of pure gold, 2 ½ cubits long and a cubit and a half wide
And make two כְּרֻבִים of hammered gold at the two ends of the covering.

The passage continues with more specifics about the כְּרֻבִים or cherubs: they should be fashioned of a single piece of gold, one כְּרֻב facing the other, with their wings spread out to form a canopy over them and over the covering. This covering will be set over the Aron after the tablets containing the commandments are placed inside it.

And God says:

וְנוֹעַדְתִּי לְךָ שָׁם וְדִבַּרְתִּי אִתְּךָ מֵעַל הַכַּפֹּרֶת מִבֵּין שְׁנֵי הַכְּרֻבִים
And I will meet you there, and I will speak to you from the covering,
from between the two כְּרֻבִים

Digging into this image as metaphor, we can begin to discern a teaching about listening.

Firstly, the two angels face one another. Their posture is one of focus and attention. Neither one is looking at a screen or otherwise distracted by the surroundings; rather each of them is locked in on the other. They have their wings raised above themselves, to create a mutual shelter. These two כְּרֻבִים are tuning out the cacophony to invest in hearing one another. They are not interested in 500 cable channels or what this or that pundit said on X. They model the choice of real listening. Everything about their physical position suggests care, trust, and respect. The Kitzur Ba’al haTurim writes:

וּפְנֵיהֶם אִיש אֶל אַחִיו כְּמוֹ שְׁנֵי חַבֵרִים שֶׁנוֹשְׂאִין וְנוֹתְנִין בְּדִבְרֵי תּוֹרָה
And their faces, each toward his brother,
are like two friends exchanging words of Torah

The voice of the divine is embodied in this image of two equals engaged in speaking about holy things.

Additionally, verse 19 teaches that the two כְּרֻבִים are to be made from the same piece of gold. Taken metaphorically, this is a reminder to us that the deepest truths contain internal contradictions. That a single piece of gold could hold space for opposites squaring off in dialogue should give us a sense of the possibility of finding something of value across a continuum of opinion.

Verse 19 is also phrased in a way that scrupulously avoids taking sides:

וַעֲשֵׂה כְּרוּב אֶחָד מִקָּצָה מִזֶּה וּכְרוּב־אֶחָד מִקָּצָה מִזֶּה
Make one כְּרֻב at one end, and one כְּרֻב at one end

The language is important. It’s not one and the other; there is no other. Each כְּרֻב is its own thing and is offered at least the validity of a hearing. This may be hard for us to translate into our current-day environment, when polarization is the name of the game and admitting to any ambivalence is seen as a sign of weakness. Yet the Torah does not speak in pithy slogans. It isn’t interested in easy answers, nor in black and white. This model of the one and the one is telling us that there can be something worthy of consideration in a wide range of positions. Even someone with whom we deeply disagree deserves a hearing.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying this means everybody is right, or that every opinion is of equal validity. What I am saying is that everybody’s viewpoint is real to them. What I am saying is that if someone has come by an opinion through genuine reflection and humble consideration, we may learn from hearing what they’ve discerned. What I am saying is that there is little to be learned in shouting someone down, or in flattening their viewpoint into something easily swept away, or in dismissing the possibility that the world looks different depending on where we’re standing, that there could be something we’ve missed.

Parshat Terumah, in its description of how we can hear God’s voice, demands courage and tenderness in equal part. It asks us to imagine that God’s voice comes through the middle, the ultimate in balance and in-between-ness. The כְּרֻבִים are one and one—each with its own internal integrity. And by facing one another and sheltering themselves and one another, they form an amplifying shell around the One.

Shabbat shalom!

Beshallach for TAA

(Delivered January 31, 2026)

Maybe it’s the soul-deadening effects of constant blaring media, social and otherwise. Maybe it’s the political polarization. Maybe it’s the violent immigration enforcement and the overheated rhetoric around it, including the targeting of journalists. Maybe it’s the crackdown in Iran, or the attack on the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, or the devastating floods in southern Africa, or the endless war in Ukraine. Maybe it’s just the late January two snowstorms in and waiting for the third, and the nasty flu bugs going around. Whatever it is, it seems like just about everybody I’ve encountered this week is upset about something. The individual contours of our discontent will vary, but it seems that discontent is in the air.

In so many parts of our lives, we are caught between, as we ask ourselves how this will all play out, as we wonder what comes next. These are times that call for courage.

Parshat Beshallach gives us much to think about in this regard. We pick up the story with the Israelites, newly released from Egypt, but far from free. With each turn of the scroll, we find yet another crisis of faith. And yet with each turn of the scroll, we find another miracle.

The push and pull of this parsha—from the first breath of freedom to the winding path of the wilderness. And from the terror of being caught between the roiling waters and the Egyptian army made mad with rage and loss, to the astonishment and exultation of the water splitting open to take us in. And from that narrow escape, with water all around, to the crisis of no water to drink. From the question of what to eat, to the miracle of manna and from the sneak attack of Amalek, to Moses and the Israelites’ improbable victory. Throughout the parsha, we are constantly between the frying pan and the inferno. The narrative rolls and swells like the waves of the sea. It’s all about change and moving relentlessly through and being in between.

And the quintessential miracle—of crossing יָם סוּף the Sea of Reeds—this is the centerpiece of our parsha, when the in between-ness is embodied in the scroll as it is in the tale itself. The words spread out over the scroll with undulating waves, while in the story, walls of water surround the Israelites, echoing the narrowness of enslavement. And then, something different happens.

What haunts me about this passage is the way the situation seems fully impossible… until it isn’t. It reminds me of laboring to give birth, when there comes a moment when you want to give up. It hurts, it’s hard, it feels like you’ve been laboring forever. You want so much to just quit. But you can’t because there’s a baby who needs to be born and you’re the only one who can make it happen.

The theological and philosophical work of Parshat Beshallach is in interrogating that moment of between-ness: What is it we need and what is it we bring to the process of moving through? Like a baby waiting to be born, or like a people struggling to become free, we pass through narrowness. Even the Hebrew name of Egypt—מִצְרָיִם—speaks to this narrowness, the root letters pointing to confinement, restriction, limitation.

In the moment of release, God separates water from water and the Israelites discover a path forward.

וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל הָלְכוּ בַיַּבָּשָׁה בְּתוֹךְ הַיָּם
And the Israelites walked on the dry land within the water

The Hebrew subtly indicates that the path was there all along, waiting to emerge. And the rarely-encountered word יַּבָּשָׁה—dry land—brings us back to another instance of God separating water from water. All the way back in the story of creation, in Parshat Breishit,

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד
וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן׃
And God said, let the waters beneath the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And truly it did.

Here too, the land was there all along.

And then there’s how it all began: with תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ—variously translated as unformed and void, formless and empty, welter and waste, chaos and catastrophe. The birth of the world begins in this chaos and catastrophe and, through God’s ineffable movement, becomes substance and form, becomes a world that can support life and growth and progress. From what seemed impossible, comes something new.

It’s the same in Beshallach: the chaos and catastrophe of enslavement give way to something new, a way of being that binds the Israelites to God so strongly that we, their descendants, sing of this moment every week, some of us every day. In fact, our Sages, in Mishnah Brachot, instruct us to recall the flight from Egypt כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ—all the days of your life. This foundational story is a metaphor on how to live our lives. It’s not just a tale of miracles, but also a tale of the impossible becoming real. In both passages, the waters part to make space for life to flourish.

Both the Midrash and the Talmud teach the story of Nachshon ben Aminadav, a story so familiar and convincing that it feels like it comes from the Torah. In Tractate Sotah, according to Rabbi Yehudah, tribe after tribe, facing the waters of יָם סוּף, said,

We’re not going in first.

We’re not going in first.

We’re definitely not going in first.

Then Nachshon ben Aminadav gathered his courage and went first. Some say he jumped into the waves; some say he walked, step by step, until the water came up to his nostrils. And here again, at the moment of impossibility, when one more step would have meant drowning, the waters split just in time.

With Nachshon as our teacher, the lesson of Beshallach is that when the chaos and catastrophe seem at their worst, when obstacles crowd the way forward and all seems lost; that’s the moment when the tide turns. It has to.

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!