pluralism

Vayeshev for TAA

(Delivered December 13, 2025)

The Torah is at it again with a nice bait and switch. At the opening of Parshat Vayeshev, Jacob settles in בארץ מגורי אביו in the land where his father had been a foreigner. With Jacob settling in, surely things will begin to fall into a groove, as he completes the journey begun by his grandfather. By birds-eye view, the progression seems smooth: God tells Abraham to begin the journey; Isaac becomes the placeholder in Canaan, there but not quite, still a stranger; and then Jacob settles there in the first word we read from the scroll this week. So we might expect that the Torah is setting us up for something like a cozy bedtime story. אלה תולדות יעקב This is the story of Jacob. 

What follows is no more smooth and serene than what came before: Jacob, the grieving husband, deals with his children in ways that are clumsy at best, turning brother against brother and studiously avoiding any kind of reckoning with the dynamics of conflict within the family, dynamics that pick up steam with each verse. Meanwhile, Josef, the favored son, wears his elevated status both literally and figuratively, and shows no regard for how it might be affecting his brothers. Inevitably the brothers, already known in the episode of Dinah’s rape to be capable of real violence, live up to (or down to) their reputation and gang up on Josef with seeming callousness. Sitting down to a meal after ditching their brother is not their finest hour. Furthermore their lack of consideration for what it would do to Jacob to lose Josef means they go right ahead and enact the ruse. There are so many moments when they could have made less harmful choices. Instead, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

Studying the Parsha this week, I have been struck by how distasteful I’ve found all of the characters. Even Josef comes across as vain, spoiled, gossipy, and clueless. It’s very telling that, after his brothers respond so angrily after hearing about his first dream, he still goes ahead and shares the second one. He is, it seems, incapable of reading the room. 

And the way that Jacob’s other sons behave is equally disturbing. Indeed their vendetta is as much against their father as against their brother. Plucking Josef out of the way serves their immediate interests, but they can’t seem to see that causing their father grievous pain will not make him love them more. But within this family system, it’s impossible to talk about the dynamics in play, impossible to articulate the ways emotional distress is inflicted over and over and over. A culture of silence prevails. There are no words, only hurtful behaviors.

Interestingly, though, some of our sages are at great pains to preserve the reputations of the brothers. Ovadia Sforno, the sixteenth-century rabbi and physician who lived and worked in Bologna, neatly defines the problem before them in his comment on verse 18. The verse reads:

וַיִּרְאוּ אֹתוֹ מֵרָחֹק וּבְטֶרֶם יִקְרַב אֲלֵיהֶם וַיִּתְנַכְּלוּ אֹתוֹ לַהֲמִיתוֹ
They saw him from afar, and before he approached them,
they conspired to kill him. 

Sforno notes that in future parts of the Torah it’s drilled into us that the names of all twelve of Jacob’s sons are inscribed on the ephod and memorialized as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Given that after all these episodes of genuine cruelty they become somewhat exalted figures meant to inspire us, Sforno searches for the humanity in their hateful actions.

He writes: We must try to understand the collective feelings of the brothers as being that they actually felt themselves threatened by Joseph’s aspirations, and they were convinced that when one feels threatened, one is entitled or even obliged to take measures to neutralize the source of the danger. Thus, by Sforno’s lights, Josef’s approach felt to his brothers like a threat, and therefore their impulse to conspire to kill him was valid within their world view.

Later, Sforno posits that when the brothers sit down to eat after throwing Josef in the pit—even though they are doing something fairly heartless toward Josef, their actions make sense in their own minds. Sforno writes: If the brothers sat down to eat immediately after throwing Joseph into the pit, this is clear evidence that in their minds they had certainly not committed any wrong. WE, who were not part of Jacob’s household, and who know that these brothers were unanimously elevated to become the founding fathers of the Jewish nation, must therefore accept the premise underlying their actions as being that they had truly felt themselves personally threatened by Joseph. 

Other commentators try to redeem the brothers’ pausing for a meal in different ways. In Breishit Rabbah 84:17 Rabbi Achvah bar Zeira reads it as metaphor and foreshadowing: that this seemingly cavalier deed is meant to allude to the fact that Josef would eventually (in the coming chapters) be in the position to feed the world precisely because he ends up in Egypt. And the Midrash Sechel Tov says that even as the brothers were dining, they still invited passersby to join them in their meal. 

These explanations are not intuitive to me, but I see why Sforno and the midrashists are working with the story in this way. Indeed, for me, their efforts resonate as I reflect on the current-day divisions within the Jewish community: it makes me think of the ways that Jews with strong opinions (which is, possibly, all of us!) are tending more and more to assume the worst of those with whom they profoundly disagree. It is easier and easier to say to ourselves or to like-minded people, “I can’t believe a Jew would say such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would think such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would vote that way!” Which leads to, “I can’t even talk to that person, we disagree too profoundly.”

Yet Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: “When words fail, violence begins.” Ultimately, our commentators who search for a reasonable explanation for Josef’s brothers’ worst acts are teaching us from centuries ago that we can never fully know another person’s mind, but that it’s worth trying to discover what we can. We can never fully grasp what makes people do what they do, but if we start with the assumption of their humanity, if we approach with gentle curiosity, we might begin to untangle the roots of enmity.

Those of us who have read ahead or remember the coming parshiot from previous years know that eventually Josef will forgive his brothers and move forward in peace with them. In one of the most beloved moments in the Torah, Josef and his brothers will fully show one another who they are, through acts of vulnerability, care and generosity. They will overcome the culture of silence in their family and embrace one another, despite what came before. Eventually they will all set aside their grievances and become a family again. Josef and his brothers will be able to do what Jacob and Esav could not: stay together after reconciliation. 

So the birds-eye view of the progression from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob finds its resolution through this sequence of difficult but ultimately humanizing events. This family learns to do differently.

This is the story of Jacob.

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.

Kol Nidrei / Erev Yom Kippur for TAA

(Delivered October 1, 2025)

When I was little, my mom had a cute habit of pretending she couldn’t quite make me out. I’d get up in the morning and go find her, and she’d say, “Is that you?” Although I do have three siblings, we are different enough from each other and far enough apart in age that I’m pretty sure my mom knew it was actually me. But still, it was fun to play the game, and to get that delicious moment of recognition when she would act like she couldn’t believe her luck at running into me, as if we’d been apart for decades, not hours. 

Looking back on it as an adult, I can see in her question, “Is that you?” more depth of meaning than either of us probably imagined during those days of practiced silliness.

The world we live in today seems designed to prevent us—parents and children, friends, partners, and strangers alike—from truly seeing one another. So many aspects of our lives are mediated: by the screens that dominate our waking hours; by the modern definition of work, which presses us to keep up a punishing pace, with no room for reflection or connection; by a poisonous algorithm that daily divides us into sharp categories designed for maximum agitation and isolation. Day by day, I encounter people who are even considering cutting off ties with someone they went to high school with, or with a co-worker, or, God forbid, with a child or a parent, because their political beliefs are so far apart as to make it impossible to talk without opening up a painful, unbridgeable chasm between them. Throughout these recent years of recreational rage, controversy and contention, I pride myself on not having broken off any relationships, but even I have to admit to a whole lot of avoidance. The much-talked-about polarization of American discourse has led to too many slammed doors, literal and figurative. As Rabbi Tali Adler puts it, “We have started to see each other … not as neighbors but as people who think the wrong things.” 

As always, I look to our tradition for guidance, if not precedent. As folks who participated in Backyard Mishnah this summer may remember, I have a fondness and an emotional connection with the Sages of the Rabbinic period. Even as foreign as it feels to us in terms of daily life, the world of the ancient Rabbis had more than a little bit in common with our world today. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves facing prejudices and violence because of who they were. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves in a place of profound alienation from cultural norms that had once seemed unbreakable. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves navigating profound communal disagreements that could have broken them apart. But also they found themselves with a sense of purpose: having lost their Temple and their homeland, they sought to reimagine every aspect of the world from the vantage point of their exile, as they built a new Judaism from the broken shards of the old one.

Despite the fact that we live very different lives from theirs—not many of us are blacksmiths or ride to and from work on a donkey, much less spend all our days reading, reciting, and memorizing Torah—even so, perhaps some of the principles they derived speak to our current day.

One core teaching comes to us from chapter 7 of Tosefta Sotah, a compilation of Jewish law from the second century. In the chapter, the Rabbis are grappling with ambiguities of meaning in the Torah and looking for a way to resolve the contradictions. In a mysterious and perhaps slightly maddening example, they look at the appearance of these three similar but different citations from Parshat Yitro: דברים  הדברים & אלה הדברים—words, the words, and these are the words. To the Rabbis, these almost-repetitions are different enough to raise curiosity, and so they wondered together, why the difference? Is one expression more valid than another, and if so, why? Which is the right one, the authoritative one? 

The way they resolve the question is subtle, and opens a way to abide this and other disagreements: כָּל הַדְּבָרִים נִתְּנוּ מֵרֹעֶה אֶחָד—All these things / words were given by one Shepherd. That is to say, the Torah can refer to things in different ways because it’s all part of a greater whole. There doesn’t have to be one and only one way to understand something. And from that, the Rabbis offer a gorgeous image to harmonize the principle:

 אַף אַתָּה עָשָׂה לִבְּךָ חַדְרֵי חֲדָרִים—Only make yourself a heart of many rooms.

A spacious heart, with capacity for understanding multiple viewpoints, can hold the uncertainty of not knowing, can open the imagination to a deeper understanding of the role that perspective plays in our experience.

Luckily for us, the Rabbis didn’t insist on unanimity—or worse, on one opinion being right and the rest being thrown out. Instead, as even a cursory look at a page of Talmud will show, they kept everything, almost like hoarders of ideas. Text and commentary, argument and counterargument, secondary and tertiary conclusions and legal derivations are all present on the page, allowing us to access a conversation across time and space, a conversation we are invited to join. Had the Rabbis looked for a single answer, the beauty and richness of our tradition would have been watered down to nothing, and it’s quite possible that Judaism as we understand it would not have survived. 

Holding one another’s perspectives with reverence in a time of upheaval  required the Rabbis to overcome their impulse toward avoidance. Instead, they made a spiritual practice of getting closer, of listening with curiosity about what was underneath their disagreements. Masechet Brachot page 9b finds them considering the question of when to say the morning Shema. That is to say, when is the light sufficient to be defined as morning? A few possibilities are offered in the Mishnah’s argument: Perhaps morning is defined as the moment when a person can distinguish blue from white. Or perhaps, as Rabbi Eliezer says, it’s when one can distinguish blue from green. The Gemara carries the discussion forward, with different voices introducing different possibilities: Rabbi Meir suggests it’s when you can distinguish two similar animals, like a wolf and a dog. Rabbi Akiva narrows the difference, saying when you can distinguish a donkey from a wild donkey. Still others say that morning comes when you can recognize the face of a neighbor from four cubits (or six feet) away. Ultimately the halachic ruling is with this final position. 

The Rabbis’ concern here is not just to button down when to say their prayers; we wouldn’t be so interested in this text thousands of years later, if that were the case. Rather, they’re teaching us the value of truly seeing. They’re teaching us how to pay attention, how to treat the moment, and one another, with reverence. In a similar vein, the Torah teaches in Exodus chapter 10 verse 23 that during the plague of darkness (familiar to us from the Pesach Haggadah) neighbor lost sight of neighbor, such that everyone was immobilized during the time of darkness. The physical darkness became a kind of existential metaphor: it’s not just tripping over the furniture, it’s that everyone became unhinged without the reference point of other people.

In our own time, as it grows harder and harder to see one another clearly through the distorting lenses of social media, a poisonous political discourse, and disproportionate representation in the public square from the toxic fringes; our timeless tradition offers an antidote. Indeed, it’s at the moment of the morning Shema—the moment the passage in Brachot is referring to—when we gather the fringes of our tallitot to symbolize the reunion of our entire fractious people. We declare the unity of God with all those fringes in our left hands—closer to the heart!—with threads of hope binding us together. We have no illusion that all of those fringes will all point in the same direction, but we do know: the vastness of God is able to contain their variation.

The Rabbis of the Talmud modeled for us the capacity not only to tolerate different points of view, but to learn from them. They implore us to teach our mouths to say, “I might be wrong.” And, “Tell me more.” And, “What I’m hearing from you doesn’t align with how I’ve been thinking about this, can you help me understand how you got there?” 

I want to be clear that I’m not advocating for changing our minds with every conversation, or for moral relativism. In the words of Dylan Marron of the podcast Conversations with People who Hate Me, “Empathy is not endorsement.” What I am advocating for is meeting one another with the courage to listen for the sake of understanding: for protecting our own humanity by acknowledging the other’s humanity.

Our Rabbinic literature is itself a conversation that’s been preserved because of the Sages’ open, searching minds, and their dogged determination that what we shared as a people was worth saving, despite the violence done to us and the destruction we suffered. Our ancestors invite us, in turn, to imitate their dogged determination—to see and hear one another, the better to save what can be saved. The better to save what can be saved.

The Rabbis offer a cautionary tale as to what can be lost when we stop seeking one another out, when we let insult and stereotype close off the doors of our hearts. In Masechet Baba Metzia 84a we encounter Rabbi Yochanan and his protege and havruta (study partner) Reish Lakish. When they first meet, Reish Lakish is a career criminal. Rabbi Yochanan sees his intellectual potential and convinces him to leave the bandit life and become a Torah scholar. They enjoy years of passionate yet respectful disagreement in their learning together, until in one debate about weaponry, Rabbi Yochanan blurts out a reminder of Reish Lakish’s past as a criminal. This vicious insult causes Reish Lakish so much emotional pain that he falls ill. Even then, Rabbi Yochanan refuses to apologize for his hurtful comments. It’s only after Reish Lakish dies that Rabbi Yochanan realizes the consequences of his harsh words, and laments the heartbreaking loss of his beloved partner in respectful dispute. He tries to find a new havruta, but nobody is able to challenge him the way Reish Lakish had done. Filled with remorse for having broken what was most important to him by allowing for an element of contempt to bubble up in their productive disagreements, Rabbi Yohanan himself goes mad and dies.

The ancient Rabbis saw their world shattered; they knew the perils of conflict in which respect is not a touchstone. And so, in addition to reinventing Jewish practice, in addition to preserving and elevating the work of their learning—the Sages also sounded a warning as piercing as a shofar call. Even, or especially, in times of moral degradation, seeing the divine image in one another—and acting in the image of God—are non-negotiable.

As we read in Pirkei Avot,

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Let this be our watchword as we navigate our ever more fragmented world: to strive to be human, to cherish the infinite variety within the human family, and even in the deepest conflicts, to remember that they, that you, that we, are all created in the divine image. 

Shanah tovah!

Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 23, 2025)

Shanah tovah! 

It is so good to be together as a community; these times when we are all gathered are a dream come true for me. Let’s take a moment to feel the sweetness of it.

OK. I’m going to start with a little survey. Listen carefully. […] Blink once if you feel totally comfortable in High Holiday services and know what’s going on at every single moment. […] Blink twice if you feel like everybody around you just blinked once. […] I’m not 100% sure of the survey results because I was … blinking twice. 

This fall season wouldn’t be the same without the High Holidays. The best-known verse from the psalm for the season says:

אַחַת  שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת־יי אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ
שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יי כּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי לַחֲזוֹת בְּנֹעַם־יי וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ
One thing I ask of Adonai, this is what I seek: to dwell in the house of God
all the days of my life, to gaze upon God’s beauty, and to visit God’s temple

And indeed as summer turns to fall, an invisible thread starts to tug at our hearts to bring us here, to our human approximation of God’s temple. Yet for all our longing to be here, for all that mysteriously pulls us in, these services can be as alienating as they are uplifting. For folks who are regular synagogue-goers, the services are different enough from the usual Shabbat service to be strange and destabilizing. And for folks whose primary engagement with prayer comes only at this time of year, the services can be long, confusing, and repetitive. If we have memories of childhood High Holiday services, they are definitionally different from this—different tunes, different people, a different rabbi. And if people don’t have those childhood associations—becase they came to this tradition with a partner or through their own journeys in life, or because they are still children—this all can feel very foreign. Objectively: catching up with old friends we haven’t seen all year by reflecting together on the fragility of life and the passage of time, and meditating on the nature of sin and the challenge of forgiveness, is kind of a weird combination.

Yet both culturally and religiously, something calls us back every year. The concept of תשובה—of return or repentance—is woven throughout the season and throughout the liturgy. 

The imagery of return is with us in the structure of the shofar service that the students just led with me. Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a 17th-century European sage, noted that there is a pattern of departure and return in the order of the shofar calls: tekiyah, shevarim, t’ruah, and back to tekiyah, like a baseball player taking off from home plate, and then returning to the same place having accomplished something. In Horowitz’s framework, the first tekiyah represents us when we feel whole and sure of ourselves. Shevarim, the slightly elongated broken sound, shows us the cracks just beneath the surface, the places where we are not quite aligned, or have done things we regret. Going deeper still, the t’ruah, those sobbing, shattered calls, show us the parts of us that are truly broken. Horowitz teaches that by coming to terms with the aspects of ourselves represented by the t’ruah call, we can return to the wholeness of tekiyah, stronger for having reckoned with our own brokenness. 

Another way we reflect on departure and return at this time of year is through the words, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם—renew our days, like before. It’s a funny phrase. We want something new, but we want it to be similar to the past. Even when we seek new experiences, we crave the security of being able to recognize them like familiar faces and connect them to our experience. The idea that something can be both new and old is central to our holiday cycle, as we shed the old year’s hard words and cruel deeds and, as I spoke about last night, renew our hopes for the coming year.

We come home to ourselves through these rituals and words, and through the very act of entering this space as a community.

And yet for all this spiritual uplift, there are moments for many of us when, for one reason or another, we don’t quite feel like we belong here, don’t quite feel like all this belongs to us. 

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, a Hasidic rabbi who lived in 18th-century Ukraine, was one of our wisest and most sensitive teachers. He told the following story:

One time, a certain man in a certain city dreamed that in the city of Vienna, under a bridge, there was a treasure. He went there and stood by the bridge and asked around as to how to dig there. A soldier came by and said to him, What are you doing standing here and thinking? And he thought that it would be good to tell the soldier his dream so maybe the other man could help him in exchange for a share of the treasure. So he told him.

The soldier answered saying: Oy, stupid Jew! Why do you pay attention to dreams? Couldn’t I dream a dream that there was a treasure underneath the oven in the house of a certain Jew who lives in your home town? Do you really think I’d travel there for a treasure?

The Jew was taken aback and went home to his house. He dug in the kitchen under the oven, and found the treasure. Afterward, he remarked: I had to travel to Vienna in order to know there was a treasure right near me, in my own house. 

My beloved friends, each one of us is on a journey throughout our lifetimes of going away and coming back and going away and coming back, of searching for a treasure somewhere else, and then finding that it was close by the whole time. Finding that treasure isn’t easy, and making sense of it isn’t either. I can imagine the man in our story digging underneath the oven to find the treasure and then needing to figure out how to put his kitchen back together. Teshuvah is not neat and tidy. 

My own story is full of those zigzags, from the first time I got sent to the principal’s office in religious school because, having started in 5th grade, I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t understand why I was there. The zigzags continued for decades: from refusing to schedule a Bat Mitzvah and dropping out of religious school, to putting off rabbinical school for some years because I thought it was too late for me to learn and I’d have to be alienated forever. 

But the beauty of our tradition of תשובה is that we have a whole entire framework for coming back. There will always be aspects of Jewish tradition that feel uncomfortable—I’ve got a couple myself—but תשובה invites us back and encourages us to find our way. The root letters of the word תשובה—shin vav bet—speak of return, but they are close cousins of another root word, yud shin bet meaning, to stay. Teshuvah is not only an invitation to come back, but to stay, to settle in and explore.

To be Jewish is to wrestle with God, and sometimes with ourselves. It’s there in the word ישראל—God-wrestler. Our tradition expects us: to interpret the text, to ask hard questions, to argue with God. Digging up the kitchen is bound to kick up some dust.

So for folks who are counting the pages till the end of the service, or squirming in your seats, or wondering just who is this God that keeps accounts with such coldness, what I want most to say to you is: you belong here. All this—

the long, confusing services, 
the ambiguous teachings, 
the endless details and variations,
the arguments and the counter-arguments,
the words with multiple meanings,
the melodies that float around in your head for days and weeks, 
the shofar and the honey cake, 
the grownups who pat your head and tell you how tall you’ve gotten, 
the children who make you think—sometimes too much,
the soft heart and the sharp points,
the community that loves you—

All of it. This is your treasure. 

Welcome home. Shanah tovah.

(Acharei Mot) Kedoshim for TAA

(Delivered May 9, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Yesterday I attended my last class of my last semester of rabbinical school. Hold your applause; I still have to write two papers before my course work is complete. But in the past week or so, I feel like I’ve moved into a different time zone: let’s call it the reflection time zone. It’s not quite nostalgia but something nostalgia-adjacent, as I look back on the moments and relationships that have filled my last six years with so much meaning. 

My time at Hebrew College has offered lesson after lesson in careful listening and in bridge-building across profound difference. As a pluralistic Jewish institution, the College community is made up of people who are all passionate about Judaism but who express it in many different ways. Under one roof we have Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews. We have farm Jews and poetry Jews and queer theory Jews and anthropology Jews. We have lovers of Israel, we have Israel-skeptics, and we have full-on anti-Zionists. 

This diversity has been a strength but it’s not always been easy. After the attacks on October 7, and throughout the war in Gaza, it’s been tense and at times painful to realize the gulf that exists between and among many in my community. Our perspectives about the world are shockingly different! And yet, it’s also been inspiring to be part of a community so fiercely committed to remaining in relationship despite these sharp differences. 

People are often incredulous when I mention the coexistence of political disagreements and deep love that characterizes my school community. The responses range from, “How do you manage to learn together when you see the world so differently?” to, “How can you possibly talk to those people?” 

This week’s parsha points the way. Parshat Kedoshim, the second half of our double portion this week, contains one of the most famous verses in all of scripture—actually the famous part of the verse is just three words. But these three magic words carry great power: as we discussed in Torah study this morning, many rabbis—both ancient and modern—consider them to be the essential message of the Torah. These three words, from Leviticus 19:18 read:

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

And you shall love your neighbor as yourself 

Sounds great, right? More good advice that’s deceptively hard to follow. In fact, the three little words by themselves are not much more than a dorm room platitude. It’s the words surrounding them that give them texture and meaning. The full passage reads:

לֹא־תִשְׂנָא אֶת־אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ
הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶךָ וְלֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא׃
לֹא־תִקֹּם וְלֹא־תִטֹּר אֶת־בְּנֵי עַמֶּךָ וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ אֲנִי יי׃

Do not hate your neighbor in your heart; rather admonish them and do not bear sin on their account. Do not be vengeful or grudging toward your tribe. Love your neighbor as yourself. I am God.

Seen in its full context, this pasuk shows that to love our neighbor involves not just a tender feeling that magically arises. Rather, this holy love is earned, through self-awareness and principled disagreement. We’re taught not to allow hateful feelings to fester in our hearts, but to speak them out loud. 

Commentators have a wide range of explanations of what it might mean to bear sin because of our kinsmen. Is the sin we avoid, as Rashi said, not to embarrass the person in public? Is it, as Ibn Ezra said, not to falsely accuse someone, such that you end up being the one who is punished? I rather think—using an admittedly twenty-first century lens—that the sin we bear is in the hate itself. If we are carrying animosity toward another person and keep it inside, it starts to poison our interactions, which in turn can lead to לשון הרע—disparaging speech—and much worse.

The Torah teaches us instead to have the courage to admonish the offending person, which, when we do it effectively and they are able to truly take us in, allows us to move forward in relationship without the cloud of resentment hanging over our heads. It is only then that we can love our neighbor as ourselves. Having the self-respect to speak up when something isn’t right is a prerequisite to the kind of interaction that the Torah is advocating. And part of giving that תוכחה— admonishment or rebuke—is in being able to hear what the other person might need to say. An effective תוכחה conversation is predicated on having the humility to know that you might ALSO have to change. 

The great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai wrote: 
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

It’s easy to shake our fists at all that we think is wrong in this world. Holding our own certainty with a light grip, though, allows us to see the humanity of others and move toward it like a magnet. 

This is what the Torah demands of us, and as the last two words of this passage, אֲנִי יי—I am God—imply, the whole process is a pathway to connection with the divine, a recipe for holiness. The presence of God is the umbrella under which we undertake the mitzvot, and God’s teaching for righteous living is the reason we do.

And this ultimately has been the approach that made the complicated environment at Hebrew College beneficial for all. Through respectful, open-hearted listening, predicated on integrity and trust, we built, each day anew, a community that could not just withstand difference but find holiness in it.

Shabbat shalom!

Acharon shel Pesach for TAA

(Delivered April 19, 2025)

Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach!

Sometimes it seems like Pesach is one big game of “I Spy.” Or for the younger set, “Where’s Waldo?” The opportunity to step off the usual path to notice what’s different is inherent in Pesach—after all, much of what we do at seder is expressly so that children will take note of the strangeness and ask questions. Opening our eyes to our surroundings leads to a deep, rich experience, and allows us to reflect on the familiar with fresh perspective. 

Our holiday Torah readings likewise take us out of the flow of time, inviting us to re-examine familiar passages that we’ve already seen in the course of our regular weekly parsha study. Somehow, they seem to catch the light differently in a different season. 

For example, the words of שירת הים—the Song of the Sea, which daily daveners say every morning and which we chant here every Shabbat, are at risk of becoming so familiar that we don’t even notice them anymore. Hearing them chanted in the context of the story they come from invites us to consider them anew. And hearing them chanted in the context of that story and in the context of the holiday that celebrates that story adds another layer of richness.

Something that struck me this year is that שיר, the Hebrew root word for song, appears for the first time in the entire Torah at this passage. The creation of the world—and all of the miraculous, beautiful, sorrowful, connective things that follow—go unsung. There is plenty of beautiful text, but it’s only after the Israelites cross the sea that they, and the text, burst into song. Imagine it! The creation of the world merits no song. Noah’s emergence from the Ark merits no song. Avram becoming Avraham, Yitzhak escaping the knife, Yaakov meeting his love, Josef forgiving his brothers. All these are described in gorgeous poetry but the voice never lifts into song. 

As Rabbi Lewis taught us a few months ago, the first word of the Torah בראשית can be anagrammed to say שיר תאב, thus reinterpreting the Torah’s first pasuk from the familiar, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, 

to 

With an appetite for song, God created the heavens and the earth. If indeed God desired song from the beginning, it’s all the more telling that it isn’t until the moment of crossing the sea that something breaks open and song pours forth.

The sound of liberation is musical.

And yet this glorious riot of song poses a theological and moral question. The basis of the freedom that we sing about so robustly is found a little further back, in Parshat Vaera. In chapter 9 verse 1, God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh:

שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיַעַבְדֻנִי
Let My people go, that they may worship Me

Though we may be tempted to think that the text is saying the Israelites are Moses’s people, the completion of the sentence makes it clear that in fact we are God’s people, and that the gist of the liberation Moses and we seek is not necessarily a life of ease, but rather a life of theological purpose. Thus Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, is the expression of a new kind of relationship with the divine.

Why, then, do we use this new-found gift of song to rejoice at the death of our enemies? Dayeinu that we would have escaped with our lives, but then we go on at length with detailed descriptions of Pharaoh and his men, just recently bereaved of their first born sons, now drowning in the very waters that parted for us. We gloat at the sight of Pharaoh’s highest officers meeting their watery doom. We refer to God as אִישׁ מִלְחָמָה—a warrior. Why does triumph so often curdle into an appetite for vengeance? And why, even as I feel mildly embarrassed at this war cry, do I also feel a kinship with it?

If it’s uncomfortable to witness this in our ancestors, it’s probably because we recognize all too well the human impulse that drives it. I, too, have moments of wishing the worst on people whose actions have caused pain to the Jewish community; I imagine the same is true of everyone in this room. I grew up holding the contradiction that I should try to see the best in everyone… except Hitler. Today, that small carve-out category includes the Hamas leadership as well. There are people—people who are fully devoted to destruction—who seem to be beyond the pale of sympathy; and yet if we delight in the downfall of those who would destroy us, what does that say about us? What does it say about God? Where are the boundaries of צֶלֶם אֶלֹהִים?

Obviously these questions resonate with a lot of what I’ve been feeling lately as I look out from my happy little bubble at the bigger world. As the soul-wracking war in Israel and Gaza grinds on; as summary deportation becomes normalized here at home purportedly in the name of protecting the Jewish community; as antisemitism continues to surge—it’s all too easy to see the work of dehumanization. And it isn’t just “major social issues” where we see it. Even in our everyday lives, it’s the mechanics of dehumanization that make us decide we can no longer talk to, say, a high school friend whose political orientation we disagree with, or a family member whose sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not aligned with our own. These divisions are painful and growing ever wider. And when the Israelites burst into full-throated song to celebrate the deaths of the Egyptians, despite their justifiable rage at their oppressors, there’s more than a whiff of dehumanization in the song.

There is a teaching from the Talmud that speaks to this question. On Brachot 10a, we find Beruria, a great Rabbinic scholar of the first and second centuries, in conversation with her husband, Rabbi Meir. He is troubled by a gang of criminals in their neighborhood and, out of exasperation, prays for their death. Beruria chides him, using an ingenious reading of a verse from Psalm 104, to teach that he should pray not for the death of the sinner, but for the death of the sin. Convinced, Rabbi Meir instead prays on behalf of the hoodlums, and they repent. Beruria’s wisdom in this instance lay in her capacity to separate the action from the person.

Elsewhere in Tractate Brachot, the rabbis discuss the proper time to say the morning Shema. Their purpose is to describe just how much light is needed in order to say it’s light enough to be morning. They offer a few possibilities: when you can see the difference between blue and green; or the difference between sky blue and white; or the difference between a dog and a wolf. Finally they land on a distinction that speaks straight to my soul:

 מִשֶּׁיִּרְאֶה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ רָחוֹק אַרְבַּע אַמּוֹת, וְיַכִּירֶנּוּ
When you can see a friend from a short distance away,
and recognize them. 

Our capacity and willingness to see one another and recognize one another’s humanity is our best hope for singing a song that seeks only the death of sin, and that ultimately liberates us all.

Shmot for TAA

I’ve been a little sick, so the service was lay-led this week. This is the drasha I would have given, had I been in shul January 18, 2025.

Some years ago, when I was relatively new to Torah learning and eager to explore, I was doing parsha study with a group of friends, and we came to Shmot chapter 1, verse 8. 

וַיָּקׇם מֶלֶךְ־חָדָשׁ עַל־מִצְרָיִם אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדַע אֶת־יוֹסֵף׃
And there arose over Egypt a new king who knew not Josef. 

Familiar from my family’s rendering of the Pesach seder, this was a verse that felt like I’d always known it; but that day, for some reason I saw something radically different from our normative understanding. Cautiously at first, and then with the unearned confidence of the misguided, I made an impassioned argument that this pasuk—I would have called it a line back then—was full of rosy optimism. It speaks, I said, of the possibility of new beginnings. Perhaps it was because I grew up in the shadow of an extravagantly talented older brother, a spectacularly gracious older sister, and a brilliant and adorable younger sister. The idea of finding myself in a place where I wasn’t automatically filed under the category of So-and-so’s Sister sounded refreshing. I thought: maybe it was good that the new king didn’t know Josef; maybe it would give the Israelites a chance to reinvent themselves, independent of Josef’s skill, cunning, and power. It’s good to wipe the slate clean and start fresh, right?

We kept reading that day, and I began to see it differently. 

The new king who knew Josef neither by deed nor by reputation had no way of understanding that it was because of Josef’s skill and foresight that famine didn’t wipe out the entire known world. To this new king, Josef’s descendents—the Israelites, our people—were a nuisance, a growing minority, a foreign presence. To this new king, they were immigrants, outsiders. 

The language in the passage is telling. The verse right before the new king is mentioned, says:

וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל פָּרוּ וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ וַיִּרְבּוּ וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד וַתִּמָּלֵא הָאָרֶץ אֹתָם׃
And the Israelites multiplied and swarmed and increased and grew strong very very much. And the land filled with them. (Exodus 1:7)

The careful reader might remember the word יִשְׁרְצוּ from the story of creation, day five, when God fills the seas and the earth with, among other things, creatures that creep and crawl. The dehumanization begins.

The fifteenth-century Rabbi Avraham Saba, known as the Tzror haMor, interprets the new king with great disdain for the Egyptian citizenry. His view was that the Egyptians wanted nothing to do with any king who might have favored Josef. Therefore they purposely disrupted the typical hereditary transfer of power and installed a new king, one who was purposely chosen because he knew not Josef.

The Tosafists of Da’at Zkenim suggest something darker still. Because the text doesn’t explicitly say that the old king has died, these medieval scholars imagine that the so-called new king isn’t even new. Rather, they suggest a scenario where the citizens try to influence their ruler to attack the Israelites. He resists their suggestion, and so they depose him. Three months later he makes his way back to power by promising to attack. Under the influence of mob rule, the king renounces his own principles and becomes a new person, giving up some of his own humanity in the process. As we’ve talked about before, dehumanization cuts both ways.

Each of these commentaries is grappling with the question of how societies come to turn against outsiders. Sadly their dim view of the Egyptians echoes their contemporary real-life experience: during the Tosafist period, the study of Talmud was outlawed by the church and volumes of our sacred texts were burned in the street. And the Tzror haMor spent much of his life fleeing persecution and expulsion. Not unlike what happened to the Israelites toward the beginning of Shmot, his children were taken from him and forcibly converted to Christianity. 

It must have been all too easy for these sages to take the Hebrew name for Egyptians—Mitzrim—literally. The root word צר—narrow—practically shouts that the Israelites were squeezed into a corner. The narrow-minded people in power, and the narrow-minded people who influenced them, replaced knowledge and relationship with fear and contempt, resulting in a new king who did not know the worth of Josef’s years of service.

Clearly, the relationships we form and the reputations we earn can protect us. And in their absence, all too often, dehumanization takes root. Knowing is a potential antidote to the harm that dehumanization can cause. In people of good will, knowing one another and understanding each other’s stories can help us to see the best in each other, even when we disagree. This is the approach I am continuing to take with regard to the questions around antisemitism that have cropped up in recent months. The Beverly arrest last week brings home the fact that helping our well-intentioned neighbors to understand the role of antisemitism in Jewish history may be one of the most important tasks on my agenda these days. 

In times of narrowness, it takes courage to allow ourselves to be known, but it could be our best hope. The moment may not call for grand gestures—after all, the quiet, subversive heroism of the midwives Shifra and Puah is a reflection of tremendous courage. Rather, what I believe this moment demands of us is to gently and thoughtfully articulate why antisemitism is a problem that merits earnest attention—whether it’s in the form of online threats backed up with a supply of ammunition or in the form of local government wavering on its commitment to stand up side by side with the Jewish community. The more we cultivate our allies—in relationship, through quiet conversation—the deeper we can sink our roots into this place we love.

In about two months’ time, we will recall Queen Esther’s courage in letting herself be known, when Haman’s ruthlessness and hatred, coupled with Achashverosh’s gullibility threatened the safety of the Jews of Shushan. Soon we will read this famous line evoking the power of knowing: 

מִי יוֹדֵעַ אִם־לְעֵת כָּזֹאת הִגַּעַתְּ לַמַּלְכוּת
Who knows if perhaps you reached your royal position for such a time as this. (Esther 4:14)

Who knows indeed? My teacher Nehemia Polen taught me that the world can change on a dime, maybe even for the good. Perhaps in such a time as this, our courage in allowing ourselves to be known can lay the groundwork for that very change. Perhaps my naive understanding of the new king who knew not Josef can be redeemed, to reveal the possibility of a renewed energy for genuine connection and sincere solidarity.

Vayigash for TAA

(Delivered January 4, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Years ago, before I had children, I used to spend a lot of time hanging around in my local independent bookstore. For those of you familiar with Newton, it was the old Newtonville Books, back when it was actually in Newtonville. It was the kind of place where the booksellers chatted with the customers and so the eavesdropping was usually pretty good.

One winter morning, as I was browsing the shelves, I overheard the store owner shooting the breeze with another customer, a man wearing a woolen ski cap pulled low over his ears. They were talking about the then-recent David Mamet movie State and Main, which I had also seen. Their comments ranged from enthusiastic to rapturous. Truth is, I had a dissenting opinion, but despite the bookstore’s general approval of banter, I didn’t speak up. This might have been a stroke of luck for me. A few moments later, someone else entered the store and joined the conversation. The owner introduced the new person to the man in the woolen hat he’d been talking to. You guessed it: David Mamet.

Mamet has been on my mind ever since I read his op-ed in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. In it, he likens the Jews to the world’s foster children: at times flourishing, when in the context of a healthy “family”—and at times abused and persecuted, when not. In either paradigm there is a sense of wariness due to the rupture of having been displaced to begin with. The Jew is likely to, as Mamet puts it, “accept any indignity rather than risk a tenuous momentary acceptance. He has no voice at the kitchen table.” Whether or not one agrees with everything in his essay, I think Mamet’s metaphor of complicated family dynamics raises a good point about the realities of our being a minority in a majority culture. The pressure to assimilate in order to survive is always there, and we all make our choices as to whether and how much to do so. Sadly, history teaches us repeatedly about the limits of assimilation as a survival strategy. 

With this in mind, it’s interesting to look closely at the scene in Parshat Vayigash where Josef’s family joins him in Egypt. Once father and son are reunited, Josef immediately goes into practical mode. He shares his plan to settle his family in Goshen, instructs his brothers on how to introduce themselves, and sets out to go speak with the Pharaoh, bringing a few of the brothers along with him. 

In Chapter 47 Verse 2 we read:

וּמִקְצֵה אֶחָיו לָקַח חֲמִשָּׁה אֲנָשִׁים וַיַּצִּגֵם לִפְנֵי פַרְעֹה׃
He chose five from among his brothers and set them before the Pharaoh.

Many translations interpolate the word carefully, as in he carefully chose five from among his brothers, and indeed Rashi reads this ambiguous pasuk to suggest that Josef purposely chose the brothers who looked the weakest, wanting to make the newcomers appear as non-threatening as possible. Perhaps to reinforce the message that they are mere shepherds as opposed to conquerors, or perhaps to ensure that they would not appear strapping enough to risk being conscripted as soldiers. Whatever the reason may be, it’s clear that as an insider, Josef knows his way around the Pharaoh’s inclinations and is working the system to advantage his long-lost family. Josef, with his Egyptian wife and his high government position, has a foot in two worlds. Although he is not fully Egyptian, he has a voice at the kitchen table, so to say, and he uses it to help his birth family settle in Goshen in order to survive the famine.

Jacob, on the other hand, understands that he is an outsider, and when Josef brings his father to meet the Pharaoh, Jacob knows his place. The Jacob who manipulated his brother and father to serve his own purposes, the Jacob who stood up to Lavan demanding his rightful wages, the Jacob who wrestled with the divine and prevailed—this same Jacob behaves quite differently upon encountering the Pharaoh. In their short first meeting, Jacob only speaks three times. Two of these times are to bless the king, or to genuflect. And in the third, when the Pharaoh asks how old he is, here is his response:

וַיֹּאמֶר יַעֲקֹב אֶל־פַּרְעֹה יְמֵי שְׁנֵי מְגוּרַי שְׁלֹשִׁים וּמְאַת שָׁנָה
מְעַט וְרָעִים הָיוּ יְמֵי שְׁנֵי חַיַּי וְלֹא הִשִּׂיגוּ אֶת־יְמֵי שְׁנֵי חַיֵּי אֲבֹתַי בִּימֵי מְגוּרֵיהֶם׃
And Jacob said to the Pharaoh: the years of my sojourn are 130. The days of my life have been short and difficult, and I have not achieved the lifespan of my ancestors in the days of their sojourns.

When asked a simple question, Jacob responds awkwardly, essentially making apologies for the length and quality of his life. Formerly fiery Jacob, in this unfamiliar context, has become deferential to the point of indignity. He is painfully aware in this conversation that he does not, in Mamet’s metaphor, have a voice at the kitchen table.

As the story continues, the assimilated Josef rises to ever greater status in the Egyptian hierarchy. In my friend Matthew Schultz’s phrase, over and over Josef plays Pharaoh like a harmonica. This works out well for Josef and his brothers, but not so much for the rest of the Egyptian population as Josef amasses all the wealth in Egypt and forces the local residents into servitude. 

And in just a few short weeks, we will see what happens when there arises a Pharaoh who knows not Josef. 

With this episode, I believe the Torah is asking us to think long and hard about assimilation and its limits. Is there such a thing as the right amount of assimilation? Is there a way to be in the minority and not compromise our integrity? Where are we at home, and where are we visitors? In a time when antisemitism is on the upswing, these are not idle questions. In a moment that finds the Jewish people—both within and outside the Land of Israel—increasingly the subject of cynical scrutiny, harsh rhetoric, and sometimes outright violence, what does having a voice at the kitchen table sound like?

I don’t presume to answer for all places and all times, but what I have experienced in my role thus far, as Gloucester’s sole pulpit rabbi, is that knowing when and how to speak up is essential. My experience with the interfaith Thanksgiving service is a case in point. As you might remember, the folks planning the service made sincere efforts to be inclusive, but did so at first without consulting me. The result was a first draft that missed the mark of being authentically interfaith, for a host of innocent reasons. Until I articulated for them why that original service plan was not fully inclusive, they had no way of knowing. I’d even go further, to say they had no reason to know. But once they did, all kinds of doors opened, and relationships amongst the group deepened. A bit of open-hearted education changed the tenor of the discussion and brought the service much closer to the standard we all held for ourselves.

And now, with the flap over the City Council’s antisemitism resolution and concerns about its inclusiveness, the same principles apply. The general public—and even the activists calling for rescinding the original resolution—may have no way of knowing the role antisemitism has played in the sweep of Jewish history. Our task in this moment is to educate: calmly, clearly, and with an approach that takes to heart the teaching from Pirkei Avot Chapter 1, Mishnah 6.

הֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת
Judge every person on the side of their merits

I was recently invited to speak with the folks down the street at St John’s Episcopal Church. In the course of the conversation it became clear to me that most of the parishioners there had never thought about antisemitism as a repeating pattern in Jewish history. Tears formed in their eyes as I shared what the world looks and feels like to the Jewish community right now, and the sense of trauma that seems to lurk in every corner. Hearing their sincere offers of allyship and support taught me the value of speaking up, and showed me that between assimilation and isolation there is a middle path.

Building authentic relationships with people of other cultures expands our perspectives and gives us a platform for helping others to see things they don’t even know to look for. This work is more important than ever in this complicated and scary time. 

Ultimately it is not the Jews’ job to solve the problem of antisemitism, any more than it’s the responsibility of the Black community to end racism. We can, however, play a role in educating others. With trust, good will, and thoughtful communication, we can—and must—fortify our relationships in this community. 

May we go from strength to strength, and from isolation to integration. And over time, with gentle candor and open hearts, may we build up our courage to find our collective voice at the kitchen table.

Shabbat shalom!

Vayetze for TAA

(Delivered on December 7, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

Settle in, I’m going to tell you the story of the Jewish people. The Jewish people has a tragic history, following a familiar and terrible pattern. For as long as anyone can remember, the pattern has consisted of the Jews settling in a place, making it home, and then… something snaps. It starts with a vicious rumor or an unsettling event that can’t be explained. The malice swirls into a storm of hate, the Jews are blamed, and violence erupts. Innocent people are driven out or brutalized or even slaughtered. Those who can escape in time run for their lives. Eventually equilibrium returns, at least for a while, and we settle in again somewhere else. The destruction of the Temple. The Inquisition. Kishinev. The Holocaust. October Seventh. The story of the Jewish people is mournful in the extreme, a tale of unending woe.

Or is it?

Settle in, I’m going to tell you the story of the Jewish people. The Jewish people is known for its resilience, its cleverness, its adaptability. No matter what challenges crop up, the Jews find a way to move forward, innovating when disaster strikes and caring for one another in times of hardship. When the Temples were destroyed and the Jews exiled to Babylonia, they established an institute at Yavneh in order to preserve what remained of their tradition. In their project of preservation, the rabbis of that time period developed a new way to think about the teachings of the Torah, and a new way to engage in study. They developed spiritual practices that could be performed in the absence of the original Temples. The underpinnings of these practices became the prayer service we do here each week. In times of relative calm, Jewish people have become prominent writers, doctors, Supreme Court Justices, artists, and inventors. The polio vaccine and the Theory of Relativity and West Side Story all came from brilliant Jewish minds. The story of the Jewish people is exhilarating, a tale of progress and triumph.

Jews are a hapless people, lurching from disaster to disaster. Jews are a glorious people, contributing to world history and culture.

In the words of the brilliant educator Zohar Raviv: The Jews are an ever-dying people, and the Jews are an ever-living people.

Obviously both of these narratives are true. 

Opposites can be true, more often than we’d like to acknowledge.

Indeed, toward the end of Parshat Vayetze, Yaakov and Lavan have a knock-down, drag-out fight, laying into each other about all the wrongs, real and perceived, that each has done to the other, twenty years worth of resentments and demands. Also toward the end of Parshat Vayetze, Yaakov and Lavan make a covenant with each other, an agreement to let each other be. Together they gather stones and construct a monument delineating the boundary between them. Lavan calls the monument Yegar-Sahaduta; Yaakov calls it Gal Ed. The two names mean the same thing: mound of witness. It’s the same pile of rocks but each man sees it differently, according to his own perception and experience.

Yegar-Sahaduta. Gal Ed. Mound of witness. In this place where Yaakov and Lavan have it all out and then determine not to fight anymore, this jumble of stones takes on the role of witness, these inanimate objects somehow seeing that both the quarrel and the covenant are true, that the Aramaic name and the Hebrew name say the same thing.

This week my teacher Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld reminded me of the phrase geologic time. For while we are busy with our human lives, thinking in days or weeks, or occasionally decades, the earth is forming and reforming on a much grander scale. Rocks are changing all the time, but they do so at a pace slow enough to be imperceptible to humans. Geologic time reminds us that we are part of a much larger narrative, one that plays out over generations or even millennia. The things we perceive as outcomes are no more than an eye-blink in geologic time. 

The story goes on. Yaakov and Lavan part. Lavan says an affectionate goodbye to his daughters and his many grandchildren and heads home, while Yaakov goes on his path. As it turns out, the rocks are not the only witnesses, for as Yaakov sets out he encounters מַלְאֲכֵי אֱלֹהִים—messengers of God. Yaakov sees the angels and remarks, מַחֲנֵה אֱלֹהִים זֶה—this is God’s camp. In this place where two people manage to embrace the multiple narratives of their relationship, gather stones to mark their differences, and then move on, the presence of God can be felt.

And Yaakov names the place Machanayim—two camps, the duality enshrined in the place, where—over the course of geologic time—these two antagonists will not matter one bit as individuals. Only their two stories and the stones will remain.

Chayei Sarah for TAA

(Delivered November 23, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

What I’m about to say this week might be troubling or uncomfortable for some of you to hear. Some of you may even be offended, for the same reasons or maybe for opposite ones. I’m going to have to let that be, in the hopes that something in it may also inspire you. As always, I’m happy to talk and, more importantly, to listen. But we’ll get to that.

As you know, there is an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service on Monday afternoon at the Episcopal Church just down the street from us. I’m looking forward to sharing this experience with my new colleagues, with our fellow citizens of Cape Ann, and, of course, with you. But getting to this point has not been simple. The planning process has been filled with misunderstanding, awkwardness, and some well-intentioned cultural appropriation. Knowing that it’s worked out well, I want to share a bit about how it unfolded and what it’s taught me. 

Believe it or not, this will tie back to the parsha. 

When I first saw the service plan for the interfaith event, my heart sank: the primary musical expression was hymns; some of the names for God were atypical in Jewish parlance; there was an offertory planned, complete with collection plates! And the only explicitly Jewish thing was something that’s so out of place for this season and setting as to be absurd. My well-intentioned colleagues, knowing that we Jews don’t believe in Jesus as a divine figure, had studiously avoided any reference to him. But still, the absence of Jesus did not make it authentically interfaith. In that first iteration, this was clearly a Christian service at which I was to be a welcome guest. 

I knew I couldn’t participate in something like that, but also—once I cooled down—I knew that if I just walked away and didn’t speak up, not only would I be the one who was unable to do interfaith work, but I would be giving up on the chance to help our treasured Jewish values and culture be more known. So with my heart in my throat, I wrote a message to articulate all the ways in which the service as it was then configured missed the mark as an authentically interfaith endeavor. And, not wanting to just point out the problems, I offered some suggestions for how to bring it more into alignment with our shared intention.

Thankfully, my colleagues were more than receptive, and eager to learn why elements of the service—things that are totally normal to them because of the world we live in—were actually just not quite right. They took my feedback without defensiveness, and what we’ve gone on to create feels like a truly interfaith effort. And in the meanwhile, these folks who couldn’t have known any better about what they were doing wrong, now know a little bit more and will surely do better next time.

That feeling of misalignment, of being a minority in a majority culture is something that we as Jews experience all the time. Although we are blessed to live in less difficult times than many of our ancestors did, there are still occasions, such as my experience with the interfaith clergy, when the dominance of the dominant culture is so strong that it begins to seem more like wallpaper. We don’t even notice it. All the more so, the folks who hung the wallpaper in the first place really don’t notice it.

This feeling of being slightly out of step with our surroundings, the sense of being here but not here, is part of the Jewish soul. I think it has always been with us in one way or another. We see it in the opening of our parsha, Chayei Sarah. Avraham, who has made his way to Eretz Cana’an—the land of Canaan—in fulfillment of the divine message he heard years ago, pauses from mourning his wife Sarah. Then, he sets about finding a place to bury her. Seeing as he has no ancestors and no land holding of his own in that region, he has to seek assistance from the Hittites, the very people God has told him to supplant. He begins:

גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב אָנֹכִי עִמָּכֶם
I am a stranger dwelling among you

Ger: stranger, toshav: dweller, these two words pulling in opposite directions. Even the calligraphy in the scroll shows it, connecting the two words with a makef, a slight horizontal line that visually counteracts their inherent tension. There’s a whole world in that makef, a sense of the paradox that so many of us live inside. 

From the stories I’ve heard, both past and present, the experience of being Jewish on the North Shore, of being Jewish in Gloucester, has a lot of resonance with that makef. In decades past, there was a thriving Jewish merchant presence in downtown Gloucester and, at the same time, the beach clubs didn’t allow Jews on the premises. Ger v’toshav. Here and not here.

Perhaps that tension is still present today, as evidenced by my experience with the Thanksgiving service, and as evidenced by the strong feelings that are surfacing with respect to the Gloucester City Council’s back-and-forthing about whether and how to both acknowledge the realities of antisemitism and be even-handed in the matter of rejecting all forms of bigotry and hatred. Both of these are important values that deserve to be uplifted. Antisemitic attacks and rhetoric have increased at alarming rates in the past year. This needs our attention and advocacy. But surely that does not negate the necessity to vigorously reject other forms of bigotry and hatred like Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. While local City Council votes don’t appear to have a great deal of influence on the course of history, the manner in which this debate plays out will tell us a lot about the community we share, both within these walls and outside them. 

This is a matter about which there can be a wide range of reasonable, ethical, well-considered, and deeply-felt responses. If there were one obvious response, we would all agree on it, because we are all good and moral people. The fact that there is disagreement indicates that it’s complex and doesn’t lend itself to slogans or sound bites or oversimplification. What this moment demands of us is not to silo ourselves with our own ideas but rather to listen for what we might be missing. Our tradition makes a spiritual practice of considering multiple viewpoints, as even a cursory glance at a page of Talmud will demonstrate. Our core theological teaching begins with the word שמע—listen! Our way of being in community asks us to remain in conversation, even when what we hear challenges our own assumptions and preferences. 

Going back to the matter of ger v’toshav: the 12th century French commentator, the Bechor Shor, reads our pasuk along with the one after it, in which the Hittites answer Avraham saying, oh no, you are no stranger but a prince of God among us. The Bechor Shor fills in the space between psukim, making this lovely connection. He writes: 

גר שבאתי מארץ אחרת ותושב שדעתי להתיישב עמכם 
והם השיבו אין אתה גר בעינינו רק נשיא אלקים 
Stranger: for I came from a different land. Resident: because I intend to settle here with you. And they answered him: you are not a stranger in our eyes, but rather a prince of God.

Avraham, the stranger who dwells among, the figure known for his own sense of hospitality and capacity to connect, had become known in the eyes of the Hittites and, for the Bechor Shor at least, this made all the difference. I imagine them listening well enough to get beyond the trap of thinking he is completely different and therefore unreachable—and also to get beyond the trap of thinking he’s just a slightly different version of themselves. 

By working through those misconceptions, they are able to see his humanity, and thereby to soften the strangeness with which they’d regarded him prior. They come to see the צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—the divine image—within him. He becomes, in their eyes, a prince of God.

As we face the gathering darkness, may we meet it with the courage to allow ourselves to be known by those whose intentions are wholesome, and may we listen carefully to the voices around us that challenge us, locating the divine every place it can be found. As we read in Avot chapter 2, mishnah 5:

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Shabbat shalom!