Breishit for TAA

(Delivered October 17, 2025)

We begin again. The cycle of the year has had its way with us: we have celebrated; we have examined our deeds, confessed and atoned; we have made space for weeping and grieving; we have taken to the moonlight in our trembling sukkot; we have rejoiced with Hallel and danced with the Torah and even then made space for weeping and grieving.

We begin again.

The sense of new beginning is ripe in the air, as we absorb the astonishing news that after more than two years, the remaining living hostages who were taken on October 7 have returned to the embrace of their families.

For much of that time, many of us were counting the days. Following the model of the extraordinary modern-day prophetess Rachel Goldberg, Hersh’s mother, we kept track and tried to keep the world accountable by publicly wearing the number of days somewhere on our garments. Many displayed a piece of masking tape on their shirts with that number; some used numbered beads on a safety pin. Some posted every day on social media how many days had passed; some programmed automated counters on their websites to show the same. However, we did it, the point was to keep the hostages ever at the front of our minds, and perhaps to spark questions and awareness for those who found it too easy to forget.

Psalm 90, the only psalm credited to Moses, teaches us:

לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע וְנָבִא לְבַב חָכְמָה׃
Teach us well to number our days
that we may bring about a heart of wisdom.

Jewish tradition often turns to counting days: we count the days of the Omer as we transition from being a quavering flood of refugees—free, but just barely—into a people ready to receive the teaching that will define our lives and our history. Some women keep the practice of niddah, counting the days of our cycles, to know when it’s time to visit the mikveh. We use candles to count the days of Hanukkah as we commemorate our unlikely triumph over those who would destroy us.

Counting and counting and counting the days of the past two years, grounded us in the reality that we faced. We hoped and prayed it would help us in our search for wisdom of heart. Surely, if we kept the hostages in mind, surely if we kept reminding the world, this is happening to our people, we could bring about some kind of resolution. Surely we weren’t entirely powerless. Counting our days gave us at least the illusion that we were in it with them, that thousands of miles away, we were pulling for our hostages—and we did begin to think of them as our hostages—to be rescued, to come home. We were, of course, powerless to end the nightmare, but at least we counters kept Hersh and Kfir and Eden and Omer and Itai and Gali and Shiri and all the rest present with us.

So it seems fitting that as we begin again, as we scroll the Torah back around to that first parsha, we start by counting.

God looks at the watery mess and says יהי אור there will be light. And separates light from darkness. There is evening, there is morning, one day. יוֹם אֶחָד. But it isn’t really counting until there’s a second. Having the context and the contrast is what gives form to our narrative.

And still, the Torah only really counts the first six days. There’s no וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר—there is evening, and there is morning—for the seventh day. The seventh day isn’t really created so much as it’s implied. It just is. And once the pattern of six and one, six and one, six and one, is set in motion, the Torah stops counting. The implication is: the cycle will continue, life will become normal. We’ll get into a routine.

And so we begin again.

The Torah doesn’t actually tell us what happens after the first Shabbat, a day for God to rest. The eighth day is not specified, at least not directly. But there’s a hint and maybe a warning in the ellipsis. We do get the teaching of Parshat Shmini, that on the eighth day the sacrifices begin. Aaron and the Kohanim take up their work. And no sooner do they start—just one chapter in—than it all goes wrong. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, come too close, bring too much fire, take the priestly process for granted and are consumed in the very fire that animated them.

Another eighth day comes in Parshat Emor, where it says:

שׁוֹר אוֹ־כֶשֶׂב אוֹ־עֵז כִּי יִוָּלֵד וְהָיָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תַּחַת אִמּוֹ
וּמִיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי וָהָלְאָה יֵרָצֶה לְקָרְבַּן אִשֶּׁה לַיי׃
A newborn ox or sheep or goat remains with its mother seven days;
on the eighth day and after, it can be accepted as a fire offering to God

Another eighth day, another child separated from parent.

Although the story of Creation makes nothing explicit, pausing after the first seven days, the Torah hints darkly by these examples that the eighth day and following can be dangerous, especially to children. Returning to routine is soothing in a way, but complacency is a minefield. The lull of the everyday opens us to take the routine for granted and find ourselves consumed in the very fire that animates us.

After the elation of the high holidays, after the excitement of the hostages coming home—and perhaps a raw glimmer of hope that this brutal war might end—comes the routine, comes the everyday, comes the real work. A ceasefire is not peace, and homecoming in and of itself is not healing.

If we look at the events of the past week and say, Right, it’s finished now, more and more children will be consumed. After our heart rates return to normal and the flush of sheer relief settles, there are things we must reckon with if we want the fragile peace to be sustained, if we want to move beyond the hateful patterns that keep repeating themselves.

It isn’t only that Hamas must never be allowed to hold any power, although that would be a very good start. Such catastrophic failures of leadership must never happen again. The hostages themselves will need care in order to reintegrate into society. And we must come to understand and accept—in our bones—that the Palestinians exist, that they have a plausible claim to the land, that, like the Jews, they are not going anywhere. Indeed, Parshat Breishit teaches us that each and every human being is created in the precious, complicated image of God.

Breishit begins by counting days; Psalm 90 elevates the counting of days to לְבַב חָכְמָה—linking heart and mind. Matters of great importance require great attention. Teach us well to number our days: to keep trying, to keep searching. Teach us well to bring heart and wisdom to the urgent work of making peace.

We begin.

Sukkot for TAA

(Delivered October 7, 2025)

Two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, I got an abnormal mammogram result. The day before Yom Kippur, I got the all clear. In the three weeks in between, I was living a double life. In my head, I was writing the happy ending and the tragic ending at the same time. On the one hand: reminding myself that abnormal test results are not uncommon; noting that for now at least, I felt fine; reassuring myself that nothing had happened yet. On the other hand: imagining myself telling my children the sobering news; picturing my family rallying around me; envisioning the community bringing me meals and holding my burdens with me, while I bravely faced my fate. I was living in the question mark opened up by that unsettling message in my doctor’s online portal, but I was also living my life: preparing Rosh Hashanah sermons, attending to the needs of the community, planning and working and eating and sometimes sleeping and reflecting and walking in the sunshine. The world kept turning, history kept churning.

So it did. So it does.

And here we are at Sukkot. We are, still and always, living a double life, and the world keeps turning in its never-ending cycle.

As so beautifully conceived by Rabbi Alan Lew in his book This is Real and you are Completely Unprepared, the cycle begins at Tisha b’Av, as the destruction of the ancient Temple is symbolically echoed in our own inner breaking—a breaking that teaches us to begin again, to strengthen our structures from the inside, through the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the days that separate them. Through that process we are forged anew: we look carefully at what we’ve lost, where we’ve gone astray, whom we’ve hurt, the shards of what, when it remains unexamined, seems unbreakable. When we force ourselves to look, though, we notice the cracks. When we slow down over the difficult places, our stomachs howling with fasting, we learn where we need to rethink our approach. We allow regret to be our teacher. The breaking is as essential as the repair. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah teaches:

שׁוֹפָר שֶׁנִּסְדַּק וְדִבְּקוֹ פָּסוּל
A shofar that was cracked and glued back together, is unfit to use.

But we are not shofarot. We are constantly in the process of cracking and reassembling ourselves. Breaking and repair is the natural order of things.

And as soon as the repair is complete, the cracks begin to form again. This is the story of being human. The Book of Kohelet, which we turn to during Sukkot, reminds us over and over:

הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃
Vaporous mist, says Kohelet, vaporous mist. Everything is vapor.

The mist of impermanence hangs over the Book of Kohelet, the word הֲבֵל appearing 30 times in that short book. Likewise, the impermanence pervades Chag Sukkot, our flimsy huts as tentative as our souls. If we’re lucky, the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have broken us open, so that we feel the wind in our very beings, as we feel it in our sukkot. If we did it right, our atoning shows us we’ve made mistakes and we’re still here. We’re worthy, we’re weak, we’re thoroughly human.

There was a video that went around the internet at this time last year, featuring the great Broadway performer Gavin Creel, who had died last fall at the cruel age of 48. In the video, Creel recited a passage he’d found on a scrap of paper in a secondhand art shop. It read:

Everything is both
Wonderful and terrible
Boring and exciting
It’s OK that it’s both
Obvious and hidden
Simple and complicated
What a relief that everything can be both
Light and dark
Celebratory and melancholy

This passage meant so much to Creel that he had the word BOTH tattooed on his wrist. The both-ness of life can be hard to keep in mind; holding it close lends a sense of meaning to the churn.

The overlap of Zman Simchateinu and October 7 could hardly make the point more starkly. During Sukkot, tradition commands us to be joyful before God for seven days, but these anniversaries—first day of Sukkot on October 7, the secular anniversary, plus the Hebrew anniversary which will always be Simchat Torah—these anniversaries press us to the bone.

Yet as I so often say, our joy is our secret weapon. We Jews do not simply survive, we crawl our way back to thriving. There was a slogan that arose out of the Nova Music Festival—at which, on that hateful day, over 350 young revelers were murdered while dancing, and another 40 kidnapped into Gaza. The slogan said, We will dance again. Not just, “We will survive, we will limp through the rest of our lives, hollowed by trauma and rage.” We will dance. Zman Simchateinu, the time of our joy, is now. Our Jewish spirit is renewed by doing Jewish things with Jewish people. The world will keep turning, history will keep churning, and we will dance again.

Chag sameach.

Yom Kippur for TAA

Delivered October 2, 2025

Imagine you wake up at the same time every day, make the same breakfast, drive the same route, do the same work, come home, same dinner, same bedtime, rinse and repeat. Then one morning a pipe bursts. Your kitchen floods. Everything is a mess, and your routine is hopelessly disrupted. You call plumbers; you have to eat out; you can’t do your kids’ drop-off; your plans crumble. The chaos jolts you out of your rhythms, and you start to notice things differently. You see what you take for granted; you ask for help; you reconsider priorities.

Similarly, Yom Kippur bursts our life’s patterns. So much of what we do by habit during the rest of the year is altered today—from speaking Baruch Shem Kvod Malchuto aloud, to fasting, to fixating on our own mortality. On this day, God orchestrates a “flood” in our internal life, forcing us to attend to what really matters.

The liturgy today takes us to dark places, describing in excruciating detail the many ways that we could have, and probably did, go off the rails over the past year. We stand for long intervals of time, beating our chests, naming every imaginable human frailty. And then we do it again, and again, and again. We grapple with the imagery of God weighing our lives in the balance over the past 10 days, and deciding before havdalah, whether we will live or whether we will die. And if we die, in what manner.

And then there’s the Torah reading that picks up after the sudden, shocking deaths of Aaron‘s sons, Nadav and Avihu, and asks Aaron to go on as normal, to resume his priestly duties with precision and dispassion.

Not to mention the haftarah, with its disdain for the Israelites’ insincere attempts at atonement.

The eye of the needle we are hoping to thread with our teshuvah is very thin indeed.

Back in July, I attended the funeral of my teacher Judith Kates’ beloved husband Bill. Now Bill was the kind of person about whom everybody felt like they were his best friend. He managed to find time and authentic attention for each person: not just skimming the surface, but allowing a depth of connection to blossom with each encounter. It didn’t take a burst pipe to get him to pay attention to what matters.

One of his friends, speaking at the funeral, said something which is still with me months later: the unbearable was always part of the conversation. The friend meant this as the highest compliment. He was talking about how Bill had the capacity to face what most of us avoid. The unbearable was always part of the conversation.

Yom Kippur, more than any other holiday, forces us to confront the unbearable. The restrictions of this long day give us no way to distract ourselves from hard truths: no food, no electronics, no idle chitchat. Our purpose today is clear, almost too clear. There is no escaping the unbearable on Yom Kippur.

The menu of unbearable things is unusually robust this year: for the US, for the world, and for the Jewish people as a whole. Without breaking a sweat, I’m sure any one of us could come up with a fistful of unbearables: war in Ukraine, soon to enter its fourth year; spiraling violence, including the attack on the Mormon church in Michigan this week that left five dead and the church badly damaged and the attack just this morning in Manchester England, whose details are not yet known; the dysfunctional American leadership that squanders the privilege of their position to engage in callous brinksmanship, playing Russian roulette with our lives; the indiscriminate crackdown on immigrants in the US and elsewhere; and of course, perhaps the most unbearable for many of us in this room: the catastrophic war in Gaza that has the Jewish community on the defensive both internally and on the global stage.

Judging by the tone of the Rosh Hashanah sermons from other rabbis that have been forwarded to me in the past ten days, it seems that many of us feel the urgency of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. I know our community is not uniform in its point of view about the crisis, nor should it be. And as I write this, just days before unplugging for the holiday, it’s impossible to predict whether the Trump-Netanyahu peace plan on the table will actually settle things down or serve as yet another spark to further ignite an already terrifying conflagration. I genuinely don’t know what will happen next and if it will be to the good. Nobody does. But taking to heart Bill Kates’s practice of allowing the unbearable to be part of the conversation, what feels important is that we allow ourselves to talk about it, even if we don’t have all the answers, even if it feels almost unbearable.

And as I am your no-longer-quite-so-new rabbi, you should know who I am and where I struggle. You should know what I find unbearable. We should be able to have this conversation, despite how much it hurts, despite it revealing some tensions. We should address it, knowing that we will be called upon to be there for each other in community even where we disagree. As I said last night, our task is to make a heart of many rooms. Let me show you around some of the rooms of my heart.

Like many rabbis, I find myself paralyzed at the crossroads of loving Israel and feeling deep misgivings about the direction of Israeli policy. I believe without question in Israel’s right to exist, just as I believe in Israel’s responsibility to be the embodiment of Jewish values. I say all this with a good deal of humility, knowing that I don’t live there and don’t face the rammings, bombings, and daily rocket attacks (which had been going on long before October 7).

The devastation of Hamas’s barbaric attack, and the ongoing hostage situation, now 727 days in, is impossible to overstate. In those first horrific days and months, I was blind with rage and pain. No amount of warfare would have felt like too much. Yet as the war grinds on, I have come to feel that it is no longer serving a purpose. In fact, it seems more and more that the war in Gaza is making Jews less safe everywhere, and is doing nothing to bring home the remaining hostages.

Meanwhile Gaza is in ruins and another generation of Palestinians is in the position of seeing Israelis and Jews as oppressors—and their advocates are forcefully making that case to the world at large. Whether or not this is objectively accurate is of no consequence when, aided and abetted by simple-minded but extremely effective propaganda and slogans, Israel’s detractors are growing ever more strident with their conviction that the very existence of the Jewish state is untenable.

These lines from the Haftarah:

הֲכָזֶה יִהְיֶה צוֹם אֶבְחָרֵהוּ
Have I chosen a fast like this?

are impossible to hear without thinking of the starvation taking hold in Gaza.

The words:

וְעַל חֵטְא שֶׁחָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ בְּאִמּוּץ הַלֵּב
And for the sin we have committed before you by hardening our hearts

are impossible to hear without thinking of how easy it is to turn away from the suffering of hostage families and Gazans alike.

The words:

אֵין דָּבָר נֶעְלָם מִמֶּךָּ וְאֵין נִסְתָּר מִנֶּגֶד עֵינֶיךָ
There is nothing hidden from You, and there is nothing secret in Your eyes

are impossible to hear without wondering how all this will turn out, or even what’s true amidst the swirl of impassioned polemics.

Having encountered each of these phrases and many more that trouble me over the course of this solemn day of soul searching, I wonder—and perhaps you do too—where to draw courage from as we navigate so much that is unbearable.

One resource is teshuvah itself, the reason for the season, so to say. Breishit Rabbah, a collection of Midrashic literature from the fifth century, teaches in the name of Rabbi Abahu bar Ze’ira: ”Great is teshuvah, for it existed in the world before Creation.” What this says to me is that the work of teshuvah is foundational. It’s part of the makeup of this world; the work of teshuvah is eternal, woven into the fabric of all creation. Human beings are made to sin, to regret, to try to make it right. That we, as Jews, choose to make it a core practice in our lives and to surface it in particular at this season is reinforced by its origin story in our tradition.

Another resource takes us back to that funeral I attended over the summer. The unbearable was always part of the conversation. Part of what made Bill Kates so special was his ability to accompany the people he cared about into the realm of the unbearable. Indeed we can bear so much more when we bear it together in relationship and in community. The conversation is more than just talking together. It is the way we meet one another with care, bring out one another’s deepest concerns, hold one another’s needs with gentleness and curiosity. The conversation is a million invisible threads that weave us together in our vulnerability and our striving toward wholeness.

As we confront the too many unbearables of the current moment, let us do so in conversation and in community. Let us allow the stark Yom Kippur liturgy, with its insistence on the first person plural—Ashamnu—WE have been guilty; al Chet shechatanu, for the sins which WE have committed—let’s allow that sense of “we” to do its work on us and forge us into a collective. Let us hold each other, regardless of our individual political orientations, in the crucible of teshuvah and hold ourselves accountable for discerning how we can most be of use in this tragic but redeemable world.

Shanah tovah.

Matot-Masei for TAA

(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!

Letter to TAA Community following the attack in Boulder

June 2, 2025

My dear Community:

A mere ten days ago, we mourned the loss of two young Israeli Embassy staffers, who were shot dead as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Just yesterday, as Shavuot was setting in, I got word of another attack, this time in Boulder, Colorado, directed at a peaceful demonstration calling for the return of the remaining October 7 hostages to their families (or their mourners, as the case may be).

It’s clear we are living in serious times, for which there are no easy solutions. In such moments, the temptation to despair can be overwhelming. Indeed it can seem like the only sensible response.

And yet, our tradition teaches us that, even in the face of such horror, there is ever the possibility of hope, of redemption. The Piasceczner Rebbe, the Rabbi who served in the Warsaw Ghetto wrote: Even in a time when a person sees, God forbid, no logical opening for faith, they still believe that God will save them, and they draw strength through this faith and trust.

We have the Piasceczner Rebbe’s writings because someone thought to preserve them. This is an act of wild hope, of which we are the beneficiaries. We owe it to future generations to hold the same wild hope, for their sake.

On this Shavuot, as we celebrate the gift of Torah—defiantly joyful—let us give one another the gift of not giving up. Not on each other. Not on our tradition. Not on the possibility of a more peaceful way forward.

May we pull one another through to better times.

As always, I am here for you if you need to talk.

Yours in sorrow and hope,

Rav Naomi

(Behar) Bechukotai for TAA

(Delivered May 24, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. The Torah is right on time. On this singular day—the one and only day before my one and only ordination—our triennial reading concerns itself with the practice of dedication to the Temple. It could hardly be more fitting to talk about consecration and vows and the certainty underneath them.

But by now, you know me well enough to know that I think certainty is, at best, overrated. I like the complication, the nuance, the eternal question, “What else does it mean?” And part of dedicating oneself to leadership lies in being willing to sit with unanswerable questions and painful truths. I will get to both of these in this drasha, which I’d like to dedicate to the memories of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram, the two young people who were murdered in DC this week at an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.

So, as I was studying this week, I happened upon a teaching from Rabbi David Silber, which inspired me to pause over this challenging and ambiguous verse from the final aliyah. Chapter 27, verse 29 reads:

כָּל־חֵרֶם אֲשֶׁר יָחֳרַם מִן־הָאָדָם לֹא יִפָּדֶה מוֹת יוּמָת׃
All who have been proscribed cannot be redeemed;
they must surely die.

Proscribed and redeemed are both rather slippery terms, making the verse a minefield—or maybe a treasure chest—of potential interpretations. Let’s look at the word חֵרֶם—which takes on a variety of meanings throughout Jewish literature and thought, depending on the setting and the interpreter. It can mean dedicated, set aside, utterly destroyed, banned, or proscribed. Also, curiously, it can mean a net, like for fishing.

Rashi reads חֵרֶם in this verse to mean a person who has been sentenced to death: such a person cannot be redeemed through payment. Rather, their fate is already sealed, they must surely die. But, reading metaphorically, I can easily imagine our pasuk—our verse—to say that anything that is dedicated to God can’t be redeemed. Once we’ve chosen to vow something for the greater good, in the service of God, we can’t bargain our way out of it. A commitment is a commitment.

Several centuries before Rashi, in the Rabbinic literature, חֵרֶם refers to the status of having been forced out of the community. The Talmud tells the heartbreaking story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurkanos, who was so convinced of his own rightness and so unwilling to admit when he was outvoted, that he was placed in חֵרֶם and expelled from the Beit Midrash. The intellectual life of his colleagues continued without him, while he languished in isolation and defeat.

His exile was long and painful. Eventually, as Rabbi Eliezer grew weak with illness and his death approached, his former colleagues softened, and they came to pay tribute to this formidable scholar. As Rabbi Eliezer wept for all the teaching he never got to do, the visitors asked him to teach them all he could, in the time that remained. He taught and taught and taught, many fine points of Levitical law, but of course the end always comes. His last words were words of teaching, and just as he died, the חֵרֶם was lifted.

For the Sages of the Rabbinic age, חֵרֶם was a fate worse than death. A person placed in חֵרֶם belonged to a caste of unredeemables, people who are excluded from learning and from social interaction. They become non-persons, stripped of their humanity.

Yet another usage of חֵרֶם is what it means in wartime, in which context it refers to military siege. The Book of Joshua, for example, teaches about the Battle of Jericho as an instance of חֵרֶם. This was an all-out war, which could only end in utter destruction.

Here’s the thing, though. The Ramban on our verse from the parsha points in a very different direction, citing Shmuel Alef, the First Book of Samuel, which tells of a time when Saul had ordered that his soldiers would not eat, in preparation for battle. The troops came upon a honeycomb, and Saul’s son, Jonathan, unaware of the orders, ate some of the honey that had overflowed the comb. While Saul intended to carry out the punishment for breaking the חֵרֶם, by putting his own son to death, the other soldiers spoke up for Jonathan. Saul tempered justice with mercy, and he relented. Ramban cites this as a complication to Rashi’s more straightforward reading of the verse. Reading with deeper nuance, Ramban is pointing out that even חֵרֶם can be reversible. Even the harshest decree can be subdued.

These two contrasting descriptions of the military use of חֵרֶם feel all too relevant to us in the current day. The echoes are too loud to ignore, and I can’t help but think how the war in Gaza—a war I initially supported with a heavy but committed heart—seems to have taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It pains me to say this, but many authorities believe the Israeli government’s blockade of humanitarian assistance appears to be leading to widespread starvation of innocent people in Gaza. It’s important to note that not everybody agrees on this, and the fog of war makes it hard for even the most well-meaning and well-informed people to discern the truth. Even so, I fear the pain of our losses has been so great that it has caused us to embroil ourselves in an unwinnable war. I am no military strategist and speak only from the reflections of my own conscience, but it sometimes feels to me that continuing on the road we are on carries the risk of humanitarian, military, societal, and moral catastrophe.

I want to say this clearly: you can be Zionist (as I am), you can be pro-Israel (as I am), you can reject the rhetoric about Israeli oppression and other mindless generalizations (as I do), and you can still think that starvation as a tactic of war is immoral. The fact that Hamas has been engaging in the same sort of tactics should give us pause. The Torah teaches us to apply our ethics even in wartime.

There are moments—more and more all the time—when I question whether this war is still serving to make Israelis safer, or whether it is moving us toward bringing the hostages home. The level of aggression that made sense in October of 2023 does not, to me, make sense in May of 2025. Just as the Torah eased its stance on חֵרֶם, from the Book of Leviticus to the Book of Samuel, so too, must we at least be prepared, when faced with new information and new circumstances, to question our own certainty.

Indeed, the two young Israeli diplomats who were gunned down in DC just a few days ago, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram, were involved in the work of peace. The event at which the shooting took place was dedicated to cooperative, cross-cultural diplomacy in the service of solving humanitarian crises throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It adds heartbreak to heartbreak that we lost people who had been engaged in this holy work.

Remember that outlying definition of חֵרֶם—the mesh of a net? Sometimes we can’t catch everything; there are always loose threads and ambiguities—things we wish were more neatly tied together. Our task as Jews, as citizens, and as humans is to hold the pieces with open hands, to continually ask ourselves, “What else might it mean?” We live in complex times, and integrity demands this of us. The one thing I’m certain of is that certainty is temporary.

During his period of חֵרֶם, Rabbi Eliezer’s attitude tempered over time. One of the sayings attributed to him in Pirkei Avot, which is inscribed on his memorial stone in Tiverias, is:

יְהִי כְבוֹד חֲבֵרְךָ חָבִיב עָלֶיךָ כְּשֶׁלָּךְ
Let the dignity of your friend be as dear to you as your own.

There is much hard work ahead, and no doubt devastating heartbreaks to come. I pray that we can continue striving to embrace the ethical standards that make us who we are as a people. Torah teaches us that circumstances alter cases, that few things are exactly all one way, and that sometimes the strongest thing to do is to soften a little.

Shabbat shalom! May the memories of Yaron and Sarah be a blessing and an inspiration.

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.

Petition

I wrote this poem in response to the Hamas Simchat Torah attack on Israel (2023) and the ensuing violence. I originally shared it in my Rosh Hodesh Heshvan message, and some readers suggested posting it for wider readership.

Petition

Pardon me?
Excuse me?
Please stop walking.
Look at me!

Do you have a minute to sign my petition
to say I don’t know anymore
I can’t read any more special messages and perfect poems and heartfelt prayers
We need approximately a billion signatures
to say it’s all too much
there must be space for not knowing
I’m collecting signatures for a petition
to stop reposting memes as if they’re news
to stop sloganizing the world’s most enduring conflict
to stop with the words
too many words
to stop
just
stop

Could I interest you in a little calm and reflection?

Hi, would you be willing to sign a petition
to elect the Ukrainian stranger in Whole Foods who offered me a hug
to some position of high honor?
Or at least to provide her with an endless supply of
the overpriced potato salad she was eyeing?

Would you like to sign this petition in support of confusion
We’re trying to inform the public that it’s just not that simple
Could I ask for a minute of your time to

Yes, sign here
And print
Yes

No I’m not asking for money, just for your signature to get this on the ballot
Let’s just let the people decide
whether we really can afford to keep doing this

A Kippah in the Trader Joe’s Parking Lot

“Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me!”

I turn around. It’s pandemic springtime, and the Trader Joe’s parking lot is bustling. What does this stranger want from me?

“Do you always wear … [gesturing at my kippah]?” Aged perhaps in his mid to late 60s, friendly but not smiling, he speaks with an Israeli accent.

“I do. I mean, not while I’m sleeping, but yeah. I wear it regularly.”

“Can you tell me why?”

I have been wearing a kippah daily for over a year. In all that time, I’ve never been asked this question so bluntly. People have commented that they noticed, but never asked me to explain myself.

I stammer a moment.

Why indeed?

And why is he asking?

Lacking any ability to size him up or assess his motivation for asking, I plunge in awkwardly. “I wear it to remind myself that there’s something much larger than me, to remind myself that this is God’s world, not mine. שְׁכִינָה לְמַעְלָה מֵרֹאשִׁי [God’s presence is above my head, BT Kiddushin 31b] you know?”

“That’s… interesting,” he says, not walking away. He clearly wants to talk.

“There was another attack on a rabbi recently. Why are you tempting fate, wearing a kippah? Are you scared,” he asks.

“I sometimes think I should be, but so far, I’m not.”

When the Chabad attacks happened, I thought about stopping, about putting it away for a while. When the Colleyville synagogue attack happened, I again considered changing my habits, but for now I’m holding steady. I don’t want to be fearful, and I don’t want to lean on the privilege to hide what makes me a potential target, when so many people can’t hide what makes them targets. I am not a Jew of convenience. This is who I am.

A few weeks back I had been in a different part of the country, in a semi-rural area, and I thought long and hard about whether to put it away for the sake of not riling up people I thought might be anti-Semitic. In the end I didn’t, and I’m glad. The locals were friendly and respectful. It taught me something about stereotyping and how it goes both ways.

“What about respect for the tradition?” When his Holocaust-survivor mother came to visit from Israel several months ago, he wanted to show her how it really is here, so he took her to a local Conservative synagogue. She was so offended by the sight of men and women sitting together, all wearing tallit and kippah, that she didn’t speak to him for a week.

“Are you offended by my wearing a kippah,” I asked him.

“No, but my mother probably would be.”

What would she think about me, a woman pursuing rabbinic ordination? Would she even have a box to put me in? I am not Jewish the way she is Jewish, his story made that clear. My kippah would be the least of her objections, or maybe the most. In her world, I am perhaps barely Jewish — a novice Hebrew speaker, who doesn’t know how to keep kosher and who routinely watches a family movie after Shabbat dinner for the sake of sh’lom bayit. She and I have gender in common, and motherhood, but what would we find to share about our respective Jewishness?

“There’s a group of women,” he said. He invoked Sarah Silverman so he could leverage my familiarity with the comedian to refer me to her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman. He seemed surprised when I was familiar with both Silvermans. (I didn’t blow his mind by saying that one of Rabbi Silverman’s children had once babysat mine.) “It’s provocative, who do they think they are, coming to pray, disrupting the men’s prayers?”

He asked if I would come to the Kotel to pray, and I said yes. “Would you come with the disrupters?”

“Of course. I want to pray with my people.”

“But that’s what the women’s section is for!”

I started to wonder about the power of religious symbols. When I wear a kippah, what it means to me and what it means to others varies widely. Who gets to own the meaning of these symbols? Who owns that pile of golden stones, the last surviving wall of our people’s ancient place? Who gets to say who prays there?

We are family and perhaps fellow believers, but we are not having the same conversation, most of the time.

I also wonder, why am I freer to be the kind of Jewish I am, here in the US than I would be in the Jewish Homeland?

“Listen, I hate the ultra-Orthodox,” he says. “Most Israelis do. But let me tell you. If you go to Jerusalem wearing a kippah, they will stone you. Believe me. I’m not even kidding. They will stone you.”

Where does stoning fall, in the rubric of klal Yisrael, I wonder.

If most Israelis hate the ultra-Orthodox, why don’t they speak up? Why doesn’t he speak up? He warns me about them, but he wouldn’t stand up to them for my right to be Jewish the way I am Jewish?

Who’s in and who’s out?

Would he stand up against a non-Jew in my defense? Where are the places where we are the same? What’s the boundary of peoplehood, and does it shift according to who’s issuing the threats?

And what does he expect from me? Do I have a say, since I am not in Israel, facing the dangers that Israelis face on a daily basis?

The man and I have a long conversation, right there in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Midway through, a friend I hadn’t seen in many months approaches and gives me a hug. “So good to see you!” “So good to see you, too! It’s been a long time.”

I consider saying Shehecheyanu, just to see how he would respond.

I turn back. He’s still there.