(Delivered July 26, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I almost didn’t write this dvar Torah. All week, I’ve been avoiding the parsha like kryptonite. Truth to tell, I almost didn’t even get past the first aliyah, with its sharp and troubling teaching about the moment we’d been waiting for throughout the entirety of Sefer Bamidbar—The Book of Numbers. 

Think of it: we’ve walked the desert for forty years, a trek which we imagined would have been much shorter and simpler. And during those years, the Israelites have faced hardship, sudden loss, rebellion, sneak attacks, and multiple crises of faith. And through it all, we’ve held to the notion that there was a purpose to all that wandering, that at some point, maybe soon, we’d have a place to be at peace.

Yet what feels clear as we come to the end of Sefer Bamidbar is that there is a moral price for that peace, and it may ultimately be too high.  

Given my own theological inclinations, it’s hard for me even to recognize God here: a God who commands the Israelites to go up and take the land that was promised 

וְהוֹרַשְׁתֶּם אֶת־כָּל־יֹשְׁבֵי הָאָרֶץ מִפְּנֵיכֶם
And dispossess all who are dwelling in the land from before you

Who is this God of dispossession? How can we hold this idea against the Torah’s previous teachings of loving our neighbor, welcoming the stranger, not standing idly by while others bleed?

We are a people that has known dispossession; I suspect nearly everyone in this room has a story. And so, knowing what we know—the wondering if the moment has come, the sudden flights in the middle of the night, the relatives who didn’t get out in time—reading this passage carries a special kind of pain. 

Now I know that we have a range of political persuasions in this room, and I truly regard that as a blessing. When it comes to world affairs, I am no strategist, I make no claims, and, in all honesty, my moments of true certainty are few and far between. But as a person of conscience and a spiritual leader, I think part of my job is to be willing to confront the unbearable. Thinking about the language of dispossession in the parsha has kept me on edge all week. Because it’s hard to read this parsha and not think that what was written about in the Torah all those millennia ago is still playing out. Every day brings new waves of revulsion, terror, and grief as we see news of both Israelis and Palestinians suffering loss upon loss. The images of starving children amidst the ruins of Gaza, the settler violence in the West Bank, and the nearly two years of captivity for our hostages as well as the antisemitism that threatens to boil over, all point back to this notion of dispossession and the consequences it carries. The chicken and the egg are fighting it out, to the death. Dispossession begets dispossession begets dispossession, until there’s nothing left.

The Torah perhaps saw this coming. It isn’t just the prediction that, unless the Israelites fully obliterate the idolaters in the land, there will be generational hell to pay. It’s also in the language. The word וְהוֹרַשְׁתֶּם—and you shall dispossess—comes from the root letters ירש (yud-resh-shin) and here’s where it gets complicated: those root letters mean both to dispossess and to inherit. These two opposing meanings are forcing us to consider the two sides of the coin of possession: that for one people to inherit requires for another to be dispossessed.

As I said before, our people is all too well-schooled in dispossession and displacement. My father’s parents made the long journey from Poland to Australia in the 1930s. His grandfather, a Hazzan, stayed behind for the chaggim. But the unbearable truth is that there exists on this planet a people who felt the late 1940s the way my grandparents felt the late 1930s. The circumstances are different, but the sense of dispossession is more similar than some of us would like to imagine. 

Believe it or not, I’m not here to argue one side of the conflict over the other. I am a Zionist through and through AND I believe the Palestinians also have a legitimate claim to the land. I deplore October 7 and all the attacks that preceded and followed it AND I cannot stand to see starvation used as a tactic of war. I condemn Hamas and its cynical exploitation of the Palestinian cause without reservation AND I think this war has outlived its own usefulness and is now making Jews everywhere less safe.

Our Haftarah today, one of the three haftarot of rebuke leading up to Tisha b’Av, is a stinging condemnation of an Israelite population that has fallen into sin and idolatry. In chapter 2, verse 13 we read:

כִּי־שְׁתַּיִם רָעוֹת עָשָׂה עַמִּי אֹתִי עָזְבוּ מְקוֹר  מַיִם חַיִּים
לַחְצֹב לָהֶם בֹּארוֹת בֹּארֹת נִשְׁבָּרִים אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָכִלוּ הַמָּיִם׃
For my people has committed two wrongs: abandoned the Source of living waters,
and built cisterns that cannot even hold water.

That is to say, not only have the Israelites rejected God, but they’ve doubled down on it, creating social structures that reinforce their original mistake. This is an ancient warning that moral injury can be fatal.

What I want to tell you is subtle and difficult. The haftarah confirms what the linguistics of dispossession and inheritance in the parsha posit. The agonizing contradiction in any conflict is that both sides of the coin exist; everyone’s story is real to them. With respect to the relentless fighting and suffering in Israel, I am beginning to think that the only moral starting point is accepting that Jews exist and are not going anywhere, and Palestinians exist and are not going anywhere. The work before us is to stand the coin on its edge in search of a way forward that reclaims humanity on both sides and starts from there. 

Those root letters we discussed before ירש—letters that intertwine around dispossession and inheritance—are also present in perhaps one of the most treasured words in the Hebrew language: יְרוּשָׁלַיִם—Yerushalayim. But notice—the end of the word has the characteristic suffix indicating a pair. (Think יָדָיִם—two hands, or יוֹמָיִם—two days.) Extending the logic of pairs, we can dare to imagine: Not one people but two, not one narrative but two. We can interpret יְרוּשָׁלַיִם as יְרוּשָׁת שָׁלָיִם—the inheritance of two shaloms, of peace and wholeness for both. 

כֵּן יְהִי רָצוֹן May this be God’s desire.

Shabbat shalom!