torah

Kol Nidrei Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 11, 2024)

Shabbat shalom & Shanah Tovah!

A saying in the recovery community that has jumped the tracks to mainstream usage holds that doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is the definition of insanity. Turns out it’s also an uncomfortably accurate description of how we humans sometimes approach the process of teshuvah. Maybe it’s different for you, but every year around this time, I settle in and focus on what went wrong in the past year and what I hope to improve in myself. I talk to the people in my life that I think I may have hurt and ask to make peace. I resolve to be more patient, more thoughtful, more generous. I plan all the ways I’m going to contribute to my communities: the meals I’ll deliver, the people I’ll call, the donations to worthy causes I will make. I imagine myself a year from now, glowing with the shine of authentic virtue. And then, even so, somehow my humanity gets the better of me every single year. 

I first started to realize this while doing a family Tashlich several years ago, when Akiva and Gideon were little. Bill and I scouted out a place in Newton near a body of water, packed some snacks, got everyone dressed and into the car, and headed over. After a short walk, we found ourselves in a clearing in the woods and talked earnestly about what we wanted to throw away from the past year and what we wanted to do better. What struck me—with both hope and rue—was how much our comments resembled those of years past. The things we wanted less of in the new year—arguing, thoughtlessness, impatience, meanness—were exactly the things we had wanted less of in the year just ended. Did we really do such a bad job of it the last time (and the time before and the time before the time before) that we’d have to work on the same things yet again this year? It’s discouraging to name the same errors year after year, to set the same intentions as the year before and know that we’re likely to be setting (or re-setting) them—same time, next year.

But our wise liturgy already knows this about us. Kol Nidrei is literally a legal formula that admits to failure before we’ve even started. It says, essentially, we have the noblest of ambitions and incredibly good intentions. But we don’t really have such high hopes that we’ll fulfill them. In fact, our expectations are so muted that we’re saying out loud—three times—that we are going to do our best but we already know we’re going to miss. 

Because missing is what humans do. 

In tomorrow morning’s Torah reading, we’ll hear about the origins of Yom Kippur: the High Priest’s ritual for taking on and discharging the whole community’s errors. We’ll hear about his sacrificing animals, about his sending off a goat invested with all the sins of the Israelite people, about his entering the Holy of Holies to encounter God and make atonement on behalf of his community. And the final move we’ll hear about is the commandment to do it again every year, for all time. From the beginning, teshuvah was destined to bear repeating. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If you’re feeling cynical, you might start to think: Teshuvah doesn’t work! So why do we do it?!

After the realization I just mentioned, I wondered the same thing. A lot. What is the point of all this self-reflection, all this redirection, all this apologizing? Where’s the payoff if I still have to do it next year, sometimes with the same people, and about the same issues? 

Little by little, I’m coming to see that when it comes to teshuvah, process and results are both important—and in fact, process has its own unique value. It’s the process of heshbon ha-nefesh, literally the accounting of our souls, that helps us improve. That is to say, while the things we resolve to do differently may or may not come to fruition exactly as we imagine them, the process of soul-searching wears away at our inner defenses in a way that helps us grow. Widening our perspective to truly understand how something we have said or done was harmful helps us grow. Finding the humility to offer a sincere apology helps us grow. Like so much in our tradition, it’s not about instant results but rather about the long game. Even though we may never fully overcome our worst instincts, even though we won’t completely stop making mistakes, this process of working towards teshuvah offers the possibility that in the future we can, at least, make different or softer mistakes, and perhaps move sooner and more devotedly toward making amends when we do.

Despite our best and most earnest wishes, and our most focused efforts at teshuvah, the existence and structure of Yom Kippur remind us that it’s part of being human to need regular reminders and scaffolding for the process of resetting our moral compasses. Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, located teshuvah at the core of creation: just as the purpose of creation is its ongoing striving to return to the perfection of Gan Eden, so too the human work of teshuvah is seen as an ongoing, ever spiraling endeavor. It is, like each of us, always in the process of becoming. 

Or perhaps even in the process of being. I sometimes liken the inner work of Yom Kippur to that moment in meditation when you realize your mind has gone away, and you simply bring it back. That moment of homecoming doesn’t mean you’ve “achieved” meditation and can wash your hands of it. And the moments of monkey-mind don’t mean you stink at meditation and shouldn’t even bother. Rather that moment of return means simply, for that moment, you’ve come home to yourself. You’ve exercised the muscle of return. And every time you exercise that muscle, it… gets a little more exercise. 

In his teaching about Parshat Tzav, the late nineteenth century Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet, spins out a beautiful metaphor for the ashes that remain after the completion of the korban olah—the burnt offering. In the Sfat Emet’s rendering, the final mitzvah of that offering is תְּרומָת הַדֶשֶן—elevating the ashes. Rather than being a mere cleanup operation, removing the residue of the ashes becomes a way of lifting up to God even the parts of ourselves that we might imagine have no value: the hard edges, the self-involvement, the dark thoughts. But in the Sfat Emet’s words:

הֲרֵי הַכֹּל בִּכְלָל בְּרִיאַת השי”ת

See, all of this is included in the creation of the Holy Blessed One

Every aspect of us, like every aspect of the world, is part of the work of creation, and as such has intrinsic value. Even those things that appear to be, in my teacher Nehemia Polen’s phrase, unassimilable into goodness, are part of the divine labor and have the potential for transformation and renewal. The dark sides of human nature—those things we wrestle with each year as we do teshuvah—are also reflections of God, waiting to be uplifted and made whole. This is the work of teshuvah, and it is more urgent than ever. The ashes of our lives, this is what we confront every year at this time. Lifting up the parts of ourselves that we wish were different and the actions we’ve taken—that we wish we hadn’t—is a way of acknowledging our humanity, God’s divinity, and the holy power of trying again. 

So while I wish I could promise you that I will always be nice to my spouse and patient with my children and attentive to my parents, while I wish I could tell you that I will give tzedakah as often as the thought arises in my mind and tend to the planet as much as it deserves, past years and my own humanity suggest that I will try and fail and try again. We can’t erase our past mistakes and walk away as if they never happened, and we can’t look at our future mistakes with a casual “oops, oh well” and move on. Instead we keep the mistakes for learning, like the Israelites kept the broken tablets in the Ark along with the new ones. Both the shards and the unbroken tablets remind us what we’re capable of—the countless and even terrible mistakes we will continue to make, and the repair for which we will continue to reach. Over the course of this challenging day of reflection, self-denial, and soul-searching—let’s come back to ourselves. And let’s support each other, as we attend to the ways that our ever-broken lives are dreaming of wholeness and holiness.

Gmar tov and shanah tovah!

Rosh Hashanah Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 3, 2024)

“How are you?” 

“How are you?” 

“Rav Naomi, so good to see you, how are you?”

How are you, how are you, how are you, how are you? […]

I never thought I would dread a question more. 

How am I? 

Exhausted. Full. Empty. 

It’s complicated. 

For the last almost-year, the world has felt both amazing and terrible. On the amazing side, I have rejoiced at so many things: watching my children grow beautifully into their own interests and pursuits, my own learning at Hebrew College, and of course being swept up into a job process that landed me literally in paradise. 

Yet meanwhile, there has been deep suffering both communally and globally. Our congregation has suffered many losses, including several in the past week. Each of us carries our own private griefs, some of them very fresh. And of course, over the past year, the Jewish world has faced unspeakable violence, terror, antisemitism, confusion, and moral injury. The heartless attacks on October 7, 2023—last year at Simchat Torah—have opened up a wound in the Jewish soul, and the months of war and conflict that followed have poured bleach into that wound on a daily basis. The unfolding catastrophe in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon holds horrors and traumas that are hard to fathom.

Once the initial period of rawness after October 7 subsided, and for most of the past year—actually for many years—I have resolutely preached, and practiced, Jewish resilience. Like many of my friends and colleagues, the basic plan is this: do the work, meet the obligations, take care of business, do the needful. Just keep going. I often say that we Jews have a practice of moving forward, even with tears in our eyes. 

I am starting to see the limits of this strategy. In one of the saddest years in memory for my generation of Jews, my tears seem to have gone underground. I hold my grief—about the October 7 attack and the horrific war that is unfolding in its wake, about the explosion of antisemitism and other hatreds, about the way my sons’ high school and college years have been colored first by a global pandemic and now by a global political crisis that places our people at the center of some heartbreaking dynamics […]—all this grief I keep somehow at arm’s length, titrating it so as to prevent it from taking over every corner of my life. Although it’s with me constantly, it’s always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Even when I allow myself to be on the verge of tears, both the enormity of the circumstances and the urgency of the next deadline keep it in check. All this moving forward might be more like running in circles than I realized. 

When it comes to expressing our heartbreak, many Jewish texts, including those we heard chanted today, point us in a different direction. Both our Torah and our Haftarah readings show us women—in particular—in the grip of deep, uncontainable emotion. Where heartbreak can sometimes leave us in a defensive crouch, protecting ourselves from our own depth of feeling, for Hagar and Chana both, that depth of feeling simply is. They don’t shy away from it or control it. When stranded in the wilderness and faced with what seems like the imminent death of Ishmael, her only child, Hagar lays down his weary, dehydrated little body and goes a distance away: 

וַתִּשָּׂא אֶת־קֹלָהּ וַתֵּבְךְּ

And she lifted up her voice and wept

In this remote environment, having finished the bread and water Avraham supplied them with, no other tools at her disposal to help her son survive, she has nothing left but her tears.

Then, in the Haftarah, childless Chana, wounded by her sister-wife Penina’s cruel gloating, goes to the Temple to pour out her sorrow and frustration about her infertility. 

וְהִיא מָרַת נָפֶשׁ וַתִּתְפַּלֵּל עַל־יי וּבָכֹה תִבְכֶּה

And her soul was embittered, and she prayed to God and she wept

This repetitive grammatical form “vacho-tivkeh” is used for emphasis, to show the hearer the depth of Chana’s pain, a pain that bursts out in inevitable weeping. Having opened herself to the tears begging to be shed, she moves, as the brilliant Torah scholar Dr. Judith Kates writes, “from that wordless expression of her inner reality to giving eloquent and even daring voice to her needs, desires, and hopes for the future.  … She creates a previously unknown pathway to God.”

The Sages of the rabbinic period regard Chana as a teacher in this way; in her vulnerability and authenticity, she shows us how to pray. The rabbis come to regard the expression of emotion as a pathway to the divine. From Masechet Brachot 32b comes the poignant teaching: 

מִיּוֹם שֶׁחָרַב בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ נִנְעֲלוּ שַׁעֲרֵי תְּפִלָּה

Since the destruction of the Beit haMikdash—the ancient Temple—
the gates of prayer have been locked

וְאַף עַל פִּי שֶׁשַּׁעֲרֵי תְפִילָּה נִנְעֲלוּ, שַׁעֲרֵי דִמְעָה לֹא נִנְעֲלוּ

But despite the gates of prayer being locked,
the gates of tears remain unlocked

For these devoted scholars and preservers of the tradition, these innovators who lost everything and started again, there were times when praying didn’t feel like enough, but weeping did. Elsewhere in the Talmud—on Bava Batra 15a—there is a tradition that Moses—who arguably was closer to God than any human being—wrote the last few chapters of the Torah not in ink but with his own tears. 

Our society tells us—either explicitly or implicitly—that crying is a sign of weakness. We are taught to keep it under wraps; some of us have learned this lesson so well that we can’t cry even when we want to or need to. Somehow we feel shame either way; whether we’re crying too much or not enough. In either case, the tears seem like an embarrassment. Think how often you see someone making a big speech on a big occasion preface their talk by saying, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” or, “I might cry.” The tendency to announce that we’re going to cry—as if our audience wouldn’t recognize it and might mistake it for sneezing or tap dancing—feels like a way of distancing ourselves at the very moment we are actually getting closer to ourselves. There’s something about a good cry that resets our systems and opens the channel for something new to happen. Think of the toddlers in your life, those people who have no problem bursting into un-self-conscious, full-throated tears. Then, when the storm has passed, they simply move onto the next thing, refreshed and aligned.

Rather than being a sign of weakness, can we instead see crying as a sign of wholeness, or even holiness? For both Hagar and Chana, those moments of deep emotion, of the waters overflowing their banks, are met by divine reassurance, a sense of being caught like a newborn and held when they most need it. 

Which might explain why, on Rosh Hashanah, a day of return, and renewal, and even rebirth, we read these two texts which speak of moments of overwhelming heartache. Something about their pain awakens us to the fullness of life. Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as the Arizal was quoted by one of his students as saying, 

מִי שֶׁאֵין בֶּכִיָּה נוֹפֶלֶת עָלָיו בַּיָּמִים הָאֵלּוּ
הוּא הוֹרָאָה שֶׁאֵין נִשְׁמָתוֹ הֲגוּנָה וּשׁלֵּימָה

A person for whom weeping doesn’t befall them in these days,
it is a sign that their soul is not respectable and complete.

When the moment requires it, when the era requires it, weeping can help us to keep our souls intact. I’m not saying that you have to cry to do this right, but I am saying that there may be a part of your soul that is looking for permission. 

The season of teshuvah—of return—invites us into a space of reflection and soul-searching, asks us to take hold of our selves and find our way back into wholeness. There’s a teaching from Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of what was then called Palestine, in which he says: It is only through the great truth of returning to oneself that the person and the people, the world and all of existence, will return to their Creator, to be illumined by the light of life. 

A few weeks ago, we read in Parshat Shoftim:

תָּמִים תִּהְיֶה עִם יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ

Be wholesome with Adonai your God

This sense of being fully present with the divine is the reason for our teshuvah, and its goal. Teshuvah is the how; a deeper relationship with God is the why. In this time of deep emotional and moral distress, may we allow ourselves to feel what needs feeling and be renewed by it. May these lines, excerpted from the poem Sadness by Daniel Joel Cohen, fill us with the courage to embrace our tears and let them teach us. He writes:

Tears—please do not wipe them away,
Do not rush for tissues.
We will not melt.
Life is not meant to be dry.

You must step into the waters
Before the sea parts and the way clears.

Insisting on staying on dry land
Will keep you safe
From the miracle.

Courage rewards those who are willing
To feel,
Tenderly,
Together.

Welcomed into the arms of loving presence,
Sadness, this sadness in my being,
Can finally come home.

Shanah tovah!

Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 2, 2024)

Shanah Tovah! It is so good to be here with you, to be your rabbi, and to begin this new year together as a community. 

A few years back, before I ever could have imagined moving to Gloucester, my family and I spent a week in North Carolina by the beach, visiting with relatives. As everybody in this room knows, ocean has a rhythm all its own and while I’m not the biggest fan of sand, the roll and swell of the ever-changing sea is a source of constant wonder and inspiration.

So during that week in North Carolina, the four of us—me, my husband Bill, and our two sons Akiva & Gideon—spent a day at the beach. We had a great time, jumping the waves, goofing around. The afternoon went by in a golden haze as we just played in the ocean. At a certain point we looked up, and we realized we had drifted a couple of house-widths down the beach. It wasn’t a huge distance—maybe a hundred fifty feet—but none of us had noticed our orientation shifting as it was happening. 

This is the point of teshuvah. Most of us, most of the time, are not slipping that far off course. But we do drift, despite our best intentions, and the reflective nature of Rosh Hashanah invites us to notice and return home to ourselves.

So we come together here, to retune our instruments, remember who we were and who we can be, to reconnect with ourselves and each other. And so here we are, not a minute too soon, facing a moment rich with meaning and possibility, and also with sorrow and worry. 

With war grinding on in Gaza and now boiling over on Israel’s northern border, and Lebanon taking center stage while Gaza remains unresolved; with the missile attack from Iran just two days ago; with a contentious election season unfolding; with hostages still in captivity—not to mention the several losses and illnesses this community has sustained in recent weeks and months—I doubt anyone in this room feels uncomplicatedly upbeat about the world right now. Our Machzor has a one-liner, a kind of floating zinger, that could not possibly be more apt:

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ תָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ

May the old year and its curses end,
and may the new year and its blessings begin.

I enter this space, and this new year, with deep ambivalence. It is wonderful—really, really, truly wonderful—to be your rabbi and to be embarking on this relationship together. And you have no idea how much I wish we were beginning this new stage of our relationship in a less complicated world, in a world that felt as shiny and optimistic as the words הַיּוֹם הֲרַת עוֹלָם—Today the world was born!—seem to promise. In a world in which that line from the Machzor about the old year and its curses didn’t feel so immediately recognizable. 

Many in the Jewish community are experiencing this time with a sense of near-existential dread. Disaster is not upon us, but it feels more plausible than ever before in my lifetime. Even as reasonable people may—and do—disagree about how we got here or what “the solution” is—any way we look at it, there is more than enough reason to locate ourselves somewhere along the continuum between unsettled and despairing. 

If you came to synagogue tonight hoping that your new rabbi would make sense of the events of the past year and either tell you what to think about the historical swirl unfolding around us or reinforce your already-strong opinion about the historical swirl, I’m afraid I have some disappointing news. I live in a state of near-perpetual uncertainty about המצב—the situation. I have a whole range of contradictory beliefs and opinions. I am devastated and furious at the murderous rampage of October 7th and the ongoing captivity of our hostages. I’m heartbroken at the loss of innocent life in Gaza. I’m ashamed of the settler violence that plagues the West Bank. I’m terrified at this week’s escalation with Lebanon and Iran. What I feel truly certain about is that the whole thing is awful, it’s complex, and it has a history that’s at least several centuries long. A simple answer has never felt further off.

We live in a world often governed by the false assumption that things are all one way: that there is, in any given situation, a good guy and a bad guy, a victim and an oppressor, and that it’s easy to recognize who is playing which part. But, most of the time, that’s not real life. So much depends on where you stand and which way you’re looking. And within this room, there are bound to be folks on the right and on the left and in between. Our tradition doesn’t have a central arbiter of opinions, thank God. Rather, we make it a spiritual practice to listen across difference, and to remain in community regardless. Looking at our sacred rabbinic texts, we see multiple viewpoints represented, disagreements preserved, minority opinions articulated and commented on. We don’t mind the messiness of multivocality, in fact we embrace it. 

What I really want to say to you tonight is that our purpose as a community is not uniformity, but solidarity. Regardless of the ways in which we may differ, our task is to be there for one another, a source of support in times of joy and sorrow and change. The war in Israel and Gaza and now Lebanon is far away but it implicates us all, in the ways that some in the non-Jewish world are perceiving us, and perhaps even in the ways we are seeing ourselves. In some sense, the Jewish people as a whole is at war, and as such, we need one another more than ever. We can’t afford to be fractious. We need gathering places like TAA, where we can be unapologetically Jewish, where we are not tempted to downplay our identities or tuck our Magen David necklaces into our shirts to draw as little attention as possible. We need places where, in the words of Rabbi Menachem Creditor, we don’t have to live in translation.

We find in Bamidbar chapter 23, verse 9 a phrase that has become a kind of watchword for the experience of being a tiny minority that often feels misunderstood and unwelcome in the wider world. 

הֶן־עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב

Indeed this is a people that dwells apart,
and is not counted among the nations.

This poignant phrase is spoken by Bil’am, who is hired to curse the Israelites but instead winds up blessing us. Something in this outsider’s perception rings true; from his vantage point high above the Israelite camp, he can perceive the individuality that is inherent in our people, as well as the isolation that often comes with that individuality. Bil’am’s words feel so real to me these days. In the months since October 7, and after the fresh wound of the murder of the six hostages, I have been pained by the “split-screen” effect of my social media. While my Jewish friends have been mourning and grieving—albeit in different keys according to their political leanings—my non-Jewish friends have been deeply engaged in living a normal life. Stories of cute kids and hilarious puppies, vacation photos, the occasional gripe about an obnoxious in-law. This is the experience of being a people that dwells apart, uncounted amongst the nations. At times like this, I regard the mainstream regular world with wariness and a sensibility that says we’re here but not totally. 

So where can we feel truly at home? Where do we turn in times of alienation and distress? Synagogue is the easy and expected answer—what else would your rabbi say?— but there’s something to it. I think there’s a way to look at this question through the lens of teshuvah—of return. That is, there’s a way in which we have to labor to create that sense of home. Making a space for teshuvah—for finding our way home—is something we do for one another. Think of Shmot chapter 25, verse 8, where God says:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם

Let them make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell amidst them.

Both verses play on the root letters—shin chaf nun—to dwell. The Bamidbar verse teaches about how we Jews dwell apart from other peoples; the Shmot verse shows the other side of the coin, about how building something together can awaken the divine presence. In a very real way, when the going gets tough, the Jews get … together. 

Situated in a passage describing God’s instructions for forming the Israelites’ gifts into the mishkan, the traveling structure that will hold the divine presence, the Shmot verse implicates each and every community member in the mission of drawing God’s holy presence into the world. What connects it to teshuvah is that the Hebrew in the second half of the verse is ambiguous. You could translate it as I will dwell amidst them or, I will dwell within them. The spiritual task of returning to our truest selves brings us home to God; the spiritual task of gathering in community brings us home to one another. 

At our best, in community—in this community—these threads are intertwined, braided together like the challot we enjoy at our Shabbat and holiday tables. By investing in one another and the work of sustaining our community, we can bring more kedushah—more holiness—into a world that badly needs it. This is the teshuvah that is calling to me the loudest this year—addressing the ways in which we are feeling alienated and alone through jointly creating a home in which to share our lives together, accessing the divine through deepening our commitments to one another.

Parshat Nitzavim-Vayelech for Temple Ahavat Achim

(Delivered September 28, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! 

It’s possible you might have noticed this already, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I like to look good, not in the sense of physical beauty but rather in the sense of seeming to know what I’m doing. I don’t have an easy time letting people see my flaws. Not to say I’m a control freak, but maybe I am just a bissl. There is, in fact, a member of this community, a fellow perfectionist, (you know who you are) who has been giving me a hard time, encouraging me to write a mediocre dvar Torah, just to get the congregation used to the occasional dog. Well, my friend. This is your moment!

It wasn’t entirely clear to me that I’d even write a dvar Torah this week. With Rosh Hashanah breathing down our necks and several deaths in the community, plus two presentations to make at rabbinical school, I thought, Nah. Let someone else do it. Although a volunteer darshan didn’t miraculously appear, I figured, as my sweet, 91-year-old dad often says, God will provide. I wasn’t quite sure what that would look like—God providing—but guess what. Dad was right!

This week’s Torah verses seem tailor designed for perfectionist control freaks like me. So many passages spoke directly to my heart as I was learning the portion this week, all the more so as responsibilities kept piling up and it became clear that I was going to fall over if I didn’t ask for and accept help.

Look, for example, at chapter 29 verse 28, which says, in part, 

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ

Hidden matters are for Adonai our God,
but revealed matters are for us, and for our children.

Rashi points out this verse is referring to sins, those that are known in public and those that are only known to the sinner. Yet in these words, in the realm of metaphor, we perfectionists can find a sense of relief, as we imagine the hidden things that only God knows: our struggles and our good intentions, our ambitions and our utterly unrealistic standards. Perhaps, knowing that God can see the best in us can help us both to allow our own imperfections to be revealed, and to be at peace with being known and seen in all our messiness and humanity. Not to mention: to allow for our children to see us that way too.

And yet when all is said and done, and our faults land us in moral dilemmas, with our virtues scattered to the winds. Then we do the work of repair, and return to God בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשֶׁךָ—with commitment of heart and soul—and God meets us halfway. At such time, chapter 30 verse three, says:

וְשָׁב יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶת־שְׁבוּתְךָ וְרִחֲמֶךָ
וְשָׁב וְקִבֶּצְךָ מִכׇּל־הָעַמִּים אֲשֶׁר הֱפִיצְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ שָׁמָּה

And Adonai your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love;
and will return your estranged from all the peoples amongst whom God scattered them.

The notion that God could and would gather us back in love, even when we have lost our own center, gives us a sense of hope and possibility when we need it the most.

Likewise, the repetition of the covenant that opens Parshat Nitzavim offers deep relief for those of us with too-high standards. When Moses says, 

וְלֹא אִתְּכֶם לְבַדְּכֶם אָנֹכִי כֹּרֵת אֶת־הַבְּרִית הַזֹּאת וְאֶת־הָאָלָה הַזֹּאת׃

כִּי אֶת־אֲשֶׁר יֶשְׁנוֹ פֹּה עִמָּנוּ עֹמֵד הַיּוֹם לִפְנֵי יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ
וְאֵת אֲשֶׁר אֵינֶנּוּ פֹּה עִמָּנוּ הַיּוֹם׃

Not only with you do I make this covenant and this oath, but with those who are here with us today before Adonai our God
and those who are not here with us today.

This covenant between God and the Israelites applies to all of us: whether we are doing everything perfectly or barely holding on, whether we write brilliant divrei Torah or just dig out a few gems worth sharing. In this season of teshuvah as we gather up our errors and missteps, it’s worth remembering the God who takes us back in love, the God who counts us even when we cannot count ourselves.

At the end of Vayelech, God demands that Moses write a poem that will somehow magically keep the Israelites in line after Moses is gone and Joshua has taken over leadership. (Talk about unrealistic standards!) My friend, Rabbi Joey Glick offers a radical reading of this passage. The last section of the parsha repeats the phrase הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת—this song—almost as if the phrase is itself a melody that keeps coming back. Citing the Ibn Ezra comment that picks up on a grammatical quirk, Joey writes, in part: Ibn Ezra deduces from this plural that the task is not given to Moses alone but rather, in the words of the commentator, to anyone—מבין לכתוב—who understands how to write. As Moses penned and then sang out the empty words “this song,” he might have been calling out … not only to the Israelites in the desert with him, but up through the generations to us today. He might have been inviting all of us to write a song, for Moshe, for God, and for our own hearts, that could provide love and strength to all.

In short, in Joey’s interpretation, Moses writes what he can and then steps aside. He asks for and accepts help, much as I have had to do this week. Thankfully, members of this wonderful community have shown their care for me: with hugs, practical suggestions—like don’t forget to eat, words of support, and offers to host me for meals. What I’m saying is, our Torah teaches us, and we teach one another, to take care of each other, and this lightens our burdens, always.

In thinking about perfectionism, I started to muse that back in Breishit, when God created the world, it doesn’t say, “God saw that it was perfect.” Rather, God said וְהִנֵּה־טוֹב מְאֹד—look, this is very good. 

I have always loved the passage in our parsha today that says לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא—the Torah is not too abstruse or mysterious that it resides only in heaven or across a mighty sea. Rather it is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart. Ultimately, Torah is in our best thoughts and our kindest actions. It’s in the ways in which we support one another in good times and in hard times, the ways in which we allow for one anothers’ imperfections to be incidental, normal, and even… טוֹב מְאֹד

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Ki Tetzei for Temple Ahavat Achim

(delivered September 14, 2024)

You’ve probably noticed that my sense of time is not my greatest asset. I sometimes forget to eat lunch, I daven on the slowish side and don’t really like to skip things, and I am occasionally late for appointments, despite my best efforts. We have this whole joke about Jewish Time, but I actually think there’s something to it. Jewish tradition doesn’t tell time by the clock—or doesn’t ONLY tell time by the clock. We tell time through what tunes we sing, so that weekday services sound different from Shabbat services, which in turn sound different from Festival services. We tell time by looking at the sky to see how much of the moon is visible. We tell time through what, how, and when we eat—or don’t. And we tell time through the words we say. 

One obvious example is the siddur and the weekly Torah reading. Just as we don’t say Kabbalat Shabbat on Tuesday; it would feel weird to read, say, Parashat Breishit at Pesach or Parashat Ki Tavo in January. But in addition to the regular texts for regular, non-holiday time, we fold other texts into the mix for different seasons.

For instance: As you probably noticed, we said Psalm 27 this morning as part of Psukei de Zimrah, the opening section of the service. Psalm 27 is associated with the Season of Teshuvah—return—and so it’s traditional in many Jewish spaces to read it every day from Rosh Hodesh Elul through Simchat Torah. 

The overlap of different readings at various times, like different-sized orbits that occasionally synch up, can open up new layers of meaning and raise ideas that take us deep into life’s most essential questions. When this happens, the Torah seems ancient and vast, and simultaneously near enough to put in our pockets. 

It happened to me this week, as a verse from Psalm 27 and a verse from our weekly portion, Ki Tetzei, started a conversation with each other.

In Psalm 27, verse 10 we read:

כִּי־אָבִי וְאִמִּי עֲזָבוּנִי וַיי יַאַסְפֵנִי׃

Though my father and my mother abandon me, Adonai will gather me in.

And in Dvarim, chapter 24, verse 16 we read: 

לֹא־יוּמְתוּ אָבוֹת עַל־בָּנִים וּבָנִים לֹא־יוּמְתוּ עַל־אָבוֹת אִישׁ בְּחֶטְאוֹ יוּמָתוּ׃

Parents shall not be put to death on account of their children,
nor shall children be put to death on account of their parents:
each shall be put to death only for their own crime.

These two different—and, honestly, fairly bleak—visions of parents and children got me thinking about the ways we are responsible for one another across generations. 

Sometimes the answer is easy. When my children were too little to have the capacity to make good decisions—of course I was responsible for them. I tried to teach them as we went, but when it came to things that could be consequential, I knew it was my job to make the right decision because they weren’t yet ready to do so. 

There’s a tradition for a parent to say at their child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah: 

בָּרוּךְ שֶׁפְּטָרַנִי מֵעָנְשׁוֹ שֶל זֶה

Blessed are you for relieving me of this child’s punishment.

In other words, now that my child has attained the age of mitzvot, it’s no longer my role to discipline them. Presumably by taking on the mitzvot, this brand new Jewish adult is capable of disciplining themselves. 

This tracks, then, with the verse from our parashah: once a person reaches halachic maturity, they are accountable for their own crimes. No problem. But given what we know about brain science, it’s probably a rare teenager who actually has this capacity. And sadly, current-day news reports bear this out, as some details of the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia begin to emerge. Much of the story is unknown, and may remain so, outside the people who were directly involved. But we do know that authorities decided the shooter’s father was responsible enough for the murders—of two students and two teachers—to be charged with the crime alongside his son. Looking at the photos from the courtroom is heartbreaking. Politics aside, the shooter looks tiny, dwarfed by the judge’s bench and the adult-sized institutional furniture. No doubt he has done something with adult consequences and will have to face up to that, but, in some essential ways, he is a child. And in some essential ways, his parents bear some responsibility. The pasuk from our parashah that says each person is the sole owner of their own crimes is applicable here but incomplete. 

By keeping unsecured guns in the home, by buying the boy a gun as a present and not requiring it to be stored appropriately as a condition of ownership, the parents’ behavior falls under a different category in Jewish thought: לִפְנֵי עִוֵּר לֹא תִתֵּן מִכְשֹׁל—do not place a stumbling block before the blind. A teenager who has been struggling socially and who is already known to police as having talked about school shootings on social media simply should not have unlimited access to firearms. This is a person who needed supervision and didn’t get it. This is a person who needed guidance and didn’t get it. This is a person who, quite possibly, needed mental health care and didn’t get it. Through the lens of Psalm 27, his father and his mother abandoned him, and tragically he snapped before God could gather him in.

We often read about the limits of God’s compassion: in the י״ג מידות—the Thirteen Attributes of God—we have an image of God as compassionate and full of grace, endlessly patient and kind. Yet if we read those words in their original context in chapter 34 of Shmot—the Book of Exodus—it goes on to say that God extends the iniquity of parents onto the third and fourth generations. 

So while ultimately we may all be responsible only for ourselves, our lives are lived entangled with others, always. If we are unlucky, this can result in multi-generational threads of inherited trauma and chaos. And if we are lucky, this can result in happy, healthy lives with wholesome family relationships. Witnessing the suffering that can explode in those unlucky families makes me ever more appreciative of my own luck, and ever more committed to a universalized theory of responsibility, a concept that comes up in Jewish texts, from halacha to Hasidut: 

כָּל יִשְרָאֵל עָרֵבִים זֶה בַּזֶה

All of Israel is responsible, one for another.

We are each other’s guarantors, in ease and hardship, until such time as God gathers us in.

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Re’eh for Temple Ahavat Achim

(delivered August 31, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! It’s so good to be back.

While I was away I went to visit my parents in Michigan for a few days. Because I took a very early flight, I didn’t ask anyone to pick me up at the airport, figuring it would be easier to take a cab or an Uber. After getting off the plane and collecting my stuff, I made my way to ground transportation, to the rideshare waiting area. I opened the app and requested an Uber and waited semi-patiently for my driver to pull up. 

The next part of the story doesn’t look good on me, but I think it’s important to talk about. My randomly assigned driver had a clearly Arabic-sounding name, and as I waited for his arrival, I formed all kinds of stereotypes in my mind about what the ride would be like. I imagined he would be brusque. I imagined he would give me a hard time about being Jewish. I imagined he would drive recklessly. Standing there on the sidewalk I started to consider, maybe I should cancel this Uber and try my luck again. Maybe I should call my sister to pick me up. 

Maybe I should take off my kippah. 

But inertia—or maybe stubbornness—won out, and I did none of those things. In any event, the driver was not like I imagined. He was polite, friendly, and an excellent driver. (Better than me, frankly.) He greeted me warmly, put my bag in the trunk and we settled in for the ride, with the car radio playing the equivalent of elevator music. At first we didn’t converse at all, but eventually, right toward the end of the ride, as we were stopped at a traffic light, he turned to me and apologized. Ma’am, I am sorry. I didn’t ask what kind of music you like. What do you like to listen to? 

Still living inside my black-and-white world of stereotypes, I stumbled. Well, I listen to a lot of classical music. (Barely true.) And, I’m studying to become a rabbi, so I listen to a lot of Jewish music.

A peaceful smile came over his face. He said quietly: I love the Jewish people. I am Iranian and we love the Jewish people.

Now I’ve been paying attention to the news and something about this statement felt impossible to me. There was a pause. Then he murmured, The Iranian government and the Iranian people are two different things. Everyday Iranians can remember what it was like before the Revolution, and we have deep respect and love for the Jewish people. 

In the remaining few minutes of the ride, he opened up about the struggles his family had experienced due to the extremist takeover, and the ways in which that persecution and the need to flee had awakened his sympathy and empathy for the Jewish story. And I sat there in the backseat thinking, how silly I was for thinking that I knew anything about this person, just based on his name and my assumptions about his national origin. And how much I might have missed, how much I did miss, for having this foolish reaction.

I bring it up today because we are learning Parashat Re’eh this week, and there’s a passage in Re’eh that has been troubling me all week. In describing the importance of not falling into idolatry after conquering the land and dispossessing all the peoples currently there, Moses warns:

 הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ פֶּן־תִּנָּקֵשׁ אַחֲרֵיהֶם
Be careful that you not be ensnared after them. 

He goes on: watch out not to fall into their ways. For their rituals are anathema to God, everything they do is hateful in God’s eyes. 

They even sacrifice their children. 

Historical evidence suggests that this may be a true statement, but I want to invite you into the realm of metaphor to consider the relevance of these psukim in our modern world. This statement

כִּי גַם אֶת־בְּנֵיהֶם וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵיהֶם יִשְׂרְפוּ בָאֵשׁ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶם
For they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire

sounds like something you might hear blaring on a particularly partisan news network, or whispered conspiratorially amongst People With Strong Opinions. To be honest, it’s a more extreme version of what you might have heard if you had been listening to my thoughts as I awaited my Uber driver. The toxic combination of a difficult and polarized political climate, social isolation and technology dependence, overheated media coverage, and our own unfortunate impulse to fear the unknown adds up to an ever increasing diet of dehumanization. And this practice of dehumanization has brought us to a place, as a society, where we can all too easily imagine the most scurrilous things about other people. 

Of course, it didn’t start with us. Rashi, our great Torah commentator from the 11th century, interpreted that phrase from verse 31

כִּי גַם אֶת־בְּנֵיהֶם וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵיהֶם יִשְׂרְפוּ בָאֵשׁ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶם

by focusing in on the word גַם (also). In Rashi’s reading, the גַם means not only did they burn their children in fire but ALSO their parents, an idea for which Rashi cites a still-older precedent, from the Rabbinic period.

 אָמַר רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא אֲנִי רָאִיתִי גוֹי שֶׁכְּפָתוֹ לְאָבִיו לִפְנֵי כַלְבּוֹ וַאֲכָלוֹ
Rabbi Akiva said, I saw a non-Israelite who bound his father in the presence of his dog,
which devoured him.

And Isaac Samuel Reggio, the nineteenth century Italian scholar tightens the screws on the dehumanization by saying of this foreign practice of child sacrifice

 וְהוּא נֶגֶד טֶבַע הָרַחֲמִים הַנְּטוּעָה בְּכָל אָדָם
This is against the merciful nature implanted in every human

Obviously if an entire people—conveniently the Israelites’ enemies—lacks even the natural mercy implanted in every human, they must themselves not be fully human.

But here’s what I want to say to you. Dehumanization has two victims: the one whose very being is belittled by being considered as less than human, and the one who does the belittling. When we permit ourselves to believe the worst about others, because of their identity rather than because of their actions, we end up diminishing our own humanity, too. We deny ourselves the dignity of having empathy and mercy for all of God’s creations. When we begin to see all Democrats, or all Republicans, or all Palestinians, or all Israelis, or all [fill-in-the-blank] as a caricature of evil, not because of anything they’ve done but because they seem to fit into a category, we give up some of our own humanity in dehumanizing them. 

It is, of course, part of the mechanics of dehumanization that the cycle continues, and that it’s always the most vulnerable who suffer in the most grievous ways: the poor, the historically marginalized, children. In this way, the notion that there could be people who sacrifice their children turns out to be self-fulfilling. For speaking and thinking and hearing such things drives us humans to imagine that we are separate from those people, that we could never be like that. And from that vantage, we teach our children the same hateful values that we decry. Another generation is sacrificed at the altar of degradation and objectification.

In the here and now, there are large forces of dehumanization in play, and I don’t pretend that one well-intentioned dvar Torah will change that. What can any one of us do as individuals against the swirling currents of hatred and extremism? The task is more than we can imagine, yet the consequences of doing nothing are more than we can bear.

Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum of Kehillat Tzion in Jerusalem has said that people—and American Jews in particular—need to let go of the habit of trying to fix everything. The problems of the world started long before all of us and will continue long into the future. Our role is simply to make a little more peace and good will where we can: as my Uber driver did last week, in his sweet unguardedness and willingness to stay in the conversation. Clearly, painfully, we cannot fix everything. For now, not breaking it any further will have to be good enough.

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Dvarim for Temple Ahavat Achim

(Delivered August 10, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! 

My mother often says, If three people tell you you’re drunk, you better go lie down. Now I’m not much for drinking alcohol, but I take her point. If you keep getting the same message from a variety of sources, there’s probably something to it. Sometimes we need to get clobbered over the head with it, but I guess Mom’s point is it’s better if we don’t. 

This week, we study Dvarim, the first parsha in the Book of Deuteronomy. As I said before, there is basically no new narrative material in this fifth of the Five Books of Moses. At this point, Moshe Rabeinu is in the mode of life review: going back over the story, sifting and filtering and trying to make sense of it all. And so are we. 

And indeed Parshat Dvarim has a couple of themes that keep re-sounding, frequently enough that I want us to take a close look at them and take in their message. Although these repeating themes mostly don’t come in the part of the scroll that we chant this year, they spoke to me deeply as I studied this week. Over and over, this summative parsha—the beginning of this summative book—is whispering, or maybe even shouting, Keep going! Don’t be afraid!

Keep going! Don’t be afraid!

So let’s look into it. Twice in the parsha we are told רַב־לָכֶם, enough. רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּֽה in chapter 1, verse 6 and רַב־לָכֶם סֹב אֶת־הָהָר הַזֶּה פְּנוּ לָכֶם צָפֹֽנָה in chapter 2, verse 3. Rav lachem: it’s a lot, it’s enough, it’s maybe even too much. You’ve stayed too long by this mountain. You’ve circled too long around this mountain. You’ve been here quite long enough—or perhaps too long—pick yourselves up and turn toward the north. The divine voice is speaking through Moses saying, Nu? It’s time for something different. This is a relatable stance: we stay in one place too long and it starts to feel like the world is moving away from us. And then we realize there’s more life out there and we want it. 

But it’s not always easy to break out of the perseveration of staying settled where we are, not so simple to move onto the next thing, even when we know that’s what’s called for. 

That’s where the Don’t be afraid part of this repeated message comes in. 

In chapter 1, verse 17, as Moses is reiterating the principles to keep in mind when judging legal cases, he says:

לֹא־תַכִּירוּ פָנִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט כַּקָּטֹן כַּגָּדֹל תִּשְׁמָעוּן 

לֹא תָגוּרוּ מִפְּנֵי־אִישׁ כִּי הַמִּשְׁפָּט לֵאלֹהִים הוּא

Do not differentiate individuals in judgment, hear the humble as you hear the great
Do not be afraid before any person, for judgment belongs to God alone

Chizkuni elaborates: don’t be afraid that the person you rule against will hate you, because it’s ultimately divine judgment that matters. The human judge is merely a representative, called upon to do God’s will. 

The next instance of Don’t be afraid! comes just a few verses later, in chapter 1, verse 21, which reads:

רְאֵה נָתַן יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְפָנֶיךָ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ 

עֲלֵה רֵשׁ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר יי אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֶיךָ לָךְ אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תֵּחָת׃

See, Adonai your God has given you the land before you,
Go up! Inherit it, as Adonai, God of your ancestors, said to you!
Do not fear and do not be dismayed.

The second part of the phrase אַל־תֵּחָת, is an unusual word choice, the root letters for תֵּחָת appear only twice in the Torah itself, though it does come up about 50 more times in the other parts of the Tanakh. It can mean dismayed or even shattered, and the 19th century Russian rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known familiarly as the Netziv, explains that it specifically means שלא תהיו נִשְבָּרִים בַּלֵב—that they not become broken-hearted. The Netziv connects it to a pasuk from Jeremiah, which also deals with hesitation before conflict: אַל־תֵּחַת מִפְּנֵיהֶם פֶּן־אֲחִתְּךָ לִפְנֵיהֶם—do not break down before them, lest I break you down before them. In Jeremiah, God is, I think, pointing to a familiar human habit, that of allowing fear of the unknown to make us think we can’t do something—essentially, volunteering for failure rather than taking the risk of trying. In its own way, though, even Jeremiah’s tough love speaks of faith, challenging the Israelites—that is to say, us—to hold our courage in our hands, to overcome our own self-destructive impulses and choose instead to be unafraid.

Our final example comes toward the end of chapter one, when Moses, in recounting the incident with the scouts, recalls encouraging the Israelites by saying: 

לֹא־תַעַרְצוּן וְלֹא־תִירְאוּן מֵהֶם

Do not tremble, and do not fear them.

Yet again, the message is Don’t be afraid, and both Ibn Ezra and the Netziv again associate this trembling and fear with broken-heartedness. There is something about experiencing fear that breaks us, that deflates our self-respect and sense of our own value. By facing and overcoming our fears, we become whole. Our hearts heal.

Of course, it’s easy to say don’t be afraid, but much harder to actually do it. It is a human thing to panic in the face of new or unpleasant or challenging experiences. So when, in this third instance, Moses tells the Israelites not to be afraid, he then follows it with one of the most gorgeous images in the Torah: After urging the Israelites to be courageous, Moses reassures them that God will fight for them, just as they have already seen in the land of Egypt, and that God will carry them through the wilderness as a father carries his son. 

And this really is the point, the message that the parsha clobbers us over the head with, much like the three people telling you you’re drunk: that the antidote to fear is not braggadocio, it’s not posturing, it’s certainly not pretending to more bravery than we possess. Rather the antidote to fear is courage, and courage comes from faith, from the sense of God’s presence. These texts in Dvarim are locating courage in the practice of the nearness of God. It’s interesting to me that one of the synonyms for courage listed on thesaurus.com is… spirit. There is some essential overlap between being with the divine and being able to be truly fearless. 

And in a time when there is ample reason to fear—when our beloved Holy Land, the land the Israelites have been wandering toward these past four books of the Torah and which they are poised to enter imminently—is in the present day under constant threat and coping with massive undigested trauma, there is still this. With all that we face that is uncertain, we know that we have endured harsh trials before and gone on to recover. What keeps us going is this faith, this feeling that somehow our people will prevail, and with God’s help, move from strength to strength. As the words of the last stanza of Adon Olam teach us, each and every Shabbat: יי לִי וְלא אִירָא. When God is with me, I have no fear.

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Mattot-Masei for Temple Ahavat Achim

(Delivered August 3, 2024)

Are we there yet?

This is an age-old question. It comes up, of course, on car trips with children, on a fairly regular basis, almost like clockwork. It also came up for me a lot as I was studying our Torah portion this week. We are winding down Sefer Bamidbar—the Book of Numbers—and with it, the narrative substance of the Torah. Yes, of course, there is another book in the Five Books of Moses, but Sefer Dvarim—Deuteronomy—is a retelling of the first four books, punctuated by Moses’s long goodbye. So for all intents and purposes, this week finds us at a major moment of transition. Here at the end of Mattot-Masei, the Israelites are poised to enter the Promised Land, seemingly about to fulfill the beautiful dream that Avraham had back in Parshat Lech L’cha. This is the longed-for culmination of forty years of wandering and bickering and searching and giving up and starting again. This is the fulfillment of a vision, the anticipation of which spurred the harrowing journey out of enslavement. Here we are, witnessing the Israelites, our ancestors, ready at last, to attain what they have been yearning for, what their parents toiled for, what their grandparents could only dream about. 

Are we there yet?

But in this seeming moment of triumph, this double portion of Torah finds Moses and the Israelites not looking back with a sense of satisfaction and contentment. Rather, they come to the unpleasant realization that getting there is significantly less than half the fun, and by the way, there’s no there there. In Parshat Mattot-Masei, Moses has meltdown after meltdown, becoming increasingly unhinged just when the story should cloak him in triumph. In the first part of the parsha, which we don’t read this year, he becomes furious that in conquering the Midianites, the fighters allowed the women to live rather than slaughtering them. This is not the righteous, moral Moses we have come to admire as our teacher and leader. His twisted rationale is that the seductiveness of the Midianite women had caused the plague that had decimated the Israelite camp until Pinchas’s act of vigilantism. Even if this had been the case with every single Midianite woman, and even if it didn’t take two to tango, is this a reason for such wild destruction?

Then, in the part we do read today, Moses goes ballistic on the Gadites and Reubenites, assuming that their apparently sensible request to remain in Moav with their cattle and not cross the Jordan into the Holy Land was evidence of treachery that would lead to a repeat of the incident with the scouts—and perhaps an additional forty years of wandering as yet another generation might prove unworthy to enter the Land. Again, his logic makes a certain amount of sense on paper, but the way he handles himself …really doesn’t look good. It seems all this conquest does not bring out the best in the Israelites, nor in their leadership. 

Just as they seem to be about to enter the land and fulfill the desire they have held in their hearts for nearly half a century, they decompensate in spectacular fashion. It makes me wonder. 

Maybe, Are we there yet? is the wrong question.

I have a dear friend, a brilliant writer and composer, more extravagantly talented than most of us could ever hope to be. When he was in his early thirties, he wrote a show that was produced on Broadway, starring people you and I have heard of. It was nominated for a Tony Award. It was a big deal. He and I didn’t meet and become friends until some years later, and when we were reflecting together about that early success, he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “Don’t climb the mountain too soon. Because you think that when you climb the mountain everything is going to be perfect. But actually, what you find at the top is a bigger, gnarlier, higher mountain.”

Likewise, those of us blessed with children in our lives experience this phenomenon over and over. When they are in utero, we imagine life will be perfect when they are finally born. When they are infants, we imagine life will be perfect when they sleep through the night. When they are toddlers, we imagine life will be perfect when they go to school. You get the idea. And then, when they set out on their own, we imagine life will be perfect when they come back to visit. Each phase brings something delicious and something more to want. And much as we long to see their children and their children’s children, it is in the nature of being human to leave question marks and ellipses in our wake. The promised future is always out of reach.

I think also of 1948. When the modern state of Israel was established, I imagine many Jews felt that finally we’re coming home. Finally, we can be safe. Finally, we can occupy the high moral ground we envision for ourselves. The truth, as we agonizingly know, is much more complicated than that. Yes, we are home. But safety and high moral ground are much more thorny than we allowed ourselves to imagine for all those generations when we didn’t have a Jewish homeland. October 7 taught us—again—how unsafe we truly are, even in our own country. And the incident at Sde Teiman this past week—in which the arrest of a handful of IDF soldiers who brutalized a Palestinian prisoner sparked rioting by settlers in protest of their being punished—has shown us that although Am Yisrael is one people, we are not all speaking the same moral language or holding ourselves to the same standards. In 1948, when our beloved Israel was founded, I doubt we could have imagined that such depravity and pain would still be ours. 

And as we navigate these weeks leading up to Tish’ah b’Av, the weight of our historical trauma feels awfully heavy indeed, and the pasuk from our haftarah this week,

לָכֵן עֹד אָרִיב אִתְּכֶם נְאֻם־יי      וְאֶת־בְּנֵי בְנֵיכֶם אָרִיב׃

Oh, I will keep rebuking you, says Adonai,
and your children’s children I will rebuke.

curdles in our ears. Over and over, as our history unspools, our highest aspirations become muddier as they draw closer. The Torah seems to be telling us—over and over, because we are human and need to keep hearing it—that dreams take work, that the ideals we picture have a cost we can’t always recognize until it comes due. 

And yet we journey. 

The second part of our double-portion of Torah today, Parshat Masei, goes to great lengths to look back and name each and every stop along the way of those forty years of wandering. 

From the departure that caps the Pesach story, as the Egyptians are burying their dead, the Israelites journey. They journey to Sukkot, and Eisam, and Pi haChirot, and Migdol. To Marah and Eilim and Dofkah. And on and on. 

Always journeying. 

The sages wonder: why name all these places? Rashi takes comfort in knowing that as forty-two places are named to describe a period of forty years’ wandering, it must mean that the Israelites had moments when they settled in and stayed. Moments to pause for breath and reflection. The Midrash Tanchuma offers a parable: the articulation of place name after place name is like a King who is traveling with an ill child and as he recounts the story many years later, he lovingly names the places where they paused: here is where we slept, here is where we were cold, here is where you had a headache. Even though there was this terrible divine decree that there would be four decades of uncertainty for the Israelites, God was still paying attention. God kept an eye out.

But if we look closely at the verse that introduces this travelogue, there’s something else too. Chapter 33 verse 2 reads: 

וַיִּכְתֹּב מֹשֶׁה אֶת־מוֹצָאֵיהֶם לְמַסְעֵיהֶם עַל־פִּי יי וְאֵלֶּה מַסְעֵיהֶם לְמוֹצָאֵיהֶם׃

And Moses wrote down their departures for their journeys at the command of Adonai;
these were their departures and their goings out. 

The verse emphasizes the going, not the arrival. In other words: not comings and goings, but goings and goings. Our Torah tells us that setting out, looking forward, holding aspiration is essential. That even in the hardest of times, we set our sights on the horizon and keep moving. There will always be a tension between present and future, between what we have and what we think we need. The lesson is to remember and respect the past, see the imperfect present for what it is, and keep striving, even knowing that when we get there, we’ll set out again.

There is, perhaps, something to be said for unrealized dreams, for having something more to hope for and work toward. 

So. Are we there yet?

No. But we’re still journeying.

Shabbat shalom!

Love your Neighbor

My drasha on Parshat Kedoshim, delivered May 11, 2024 at Congregation Shirat Hayam in Swampscott, Massachusetts.

הֲרֵינִי מְקַבֵּל עָלַי את מִצְוַת הַבּוֹרֵא וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

Here I am to take on the Creator’s commandment: love your neighbor as yourself

The sixteenth century Rabbi, Isaac Luria, one of the early mystics of the Kabbalistic tradition, had a practice of reciting these words before he entered into prayer. I picture him making the blessing over his tallit, tucking himself underneath to say the שמע and then reminding himself that the unity of God extends to the people around him. Imagine this mitzvah—God’s own mitzvah—to love each and every person as yourself! The sweet friend who’s always there for you when you need someone to talk to, and the annoying shopkeeper who gives you the fish eye when you pay for a three-dollar purchase by credit card, the shy but kindly woman who just smiles and never talks, and the judgey colleague who never stops talking: each of these we are commanded to love. This is a beautiful and profound message, a familiar but necessary reminder of what some people call the Golden Rule.

Those famous words וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ (love your neighbor as yourself) are part of our Torah portion this week and based on what I’ve just said, it’s easy to imagine that we know exactly what they mean. It’s even tempting to flatten them into a feel-good slogan just right for a dorm room poster or an embroidered sampler pillow, but when we look at the words directly and in the context of the verses that surround them, a much more textured picture arises. 

In Leviticus chapter 19 verses 17 and 18, God instructs the Israelites: 

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 kin in your heart; rather rebuke them and don’t sin on their account. Do not avenge and do not hold a grudge against one of your people; love your neighbor as yourself. I am God.

These verses suggest a framework in which the antidote to hate is rebuke, and the opposite of love is vengeance. And all of it under the banner of a familiar refrain from the parsha: Ani Adonai; I am God. That last part raises the stakes pretty high for untangling the interplay of love and hate, revenge and reproach. The times when emotions are at their most intense… seem to be the ones at which we are commanded not only to modulate our emotions but to communicate them effectively.

Honestly it’s a tall order. Sometimes it seems easier to carry that hate in our hearts rather than to speak up with what our tradition calls tochecha, the righteous reproach that the verse requires. And yet: the words לֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא (do not sin on their account) teach that there is the risk of sin—sin!—if this isn’t handled correctly. 

Our commentators wrestle with the idea. What is the nature of the sin the verse warns about? Is it to do with how we issue our rebuke, or with whether we do so at all? Rashi writes לֹא תַלְבִּין אֶת פָּנָיו בָּרַבִּים—literally, do not whiten his face in public, explaining that the sin arises from a rebuke that causes shame or embarrassment. Hearing a chastisement is hard enough; preserving dignity through making it a private conversation softens it. So for Rashi, speaking up is assumed, but the question of sin is in how to do it effectively, and how not to cause further harm in the process. 

Other parts of our tradition teach similarly about the work of tochecha: Proverbs, for example, chapter 9 verse 8 says, 

אַל־תּוֹכַח לֵץ פֶּן־יִשְׂנָאֶךָּ הוֹכַח לְחָכָם וְיֶאֱהָבֶךָּ׃

Do not admonish a scoffer, they will only hate you. Admonish a wise person, and they will love you.

But as I implied, it’s not just a question of who and how, but also a question of whether you do it at all. Rashbam’s reading of our verse says essentially: If someone does something to you and you act like nothing’s wrong, all the while stewing in your own resentment, it’s no good. Rather, reproach them about what they did and thereby restore a sense of peace.

Our Talmud teaches on Shabbat 54b: Whoever can stop the members of their household from committing a sin, and does not, is held responsible for their sins. If one can stop the people of their city from sinning, but does not, they are held responsible for the sins of the people of the city. If they can stop the whole world from sinning, and do not act, they are held responsible for the sins of the whole world.

These lines suggest that the meaning of our pasuk לֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא includes the idea that the sin actually lies in our silence. If we know we can have a positive influence on a person who is acting unjustly, we are not merely encouraged but required to speak up. And a line from a midrash in Breishit Rabbah brings it to the doorstep of the very passage we’re discussing: 

אָמַר רֵישׁ לָקִישׁ תּוֹכָחָה מְבִיאָה לִידֵי שָׁלוֹם

Resh Lakish said: Tochecha brings about peace.

When we offer thoughtful, righteous admonishment—to the wise—it brings us into the realm of peace and love. And when we ourselves are capable of hearing a tochecha that someone else brings us, we too enter that realm. 

This has been on my mind a lot lately. As calamity unfolds in the Holy Land, and as that conflict echoes on college campuses across this nation, it feels as though that delicate practice of tochecha that enables us to continue to love is in jeopardy of being engulfed in harsh, ugly words and dehumanizing stereotypes. I wonder often how this fragile world can hold, when opinions are so sharply divided and there is so little communication and search for common cause. Looking at how people are, at best, talking past each other and at worst, shrieking into the echo chamber, has been discouraging for me as a citizen, as a Jew, as an aspiring leader in the Jewish community, and as a mother.

But something from this week is giving me hope. As pro-Palestinian tent cities have cropped up on college campuses, I have to admit my heart has been in my throat. I have a child in college—Akiva, my elder son—and some of what he reports to me is profoundly worrying. But last week, my wonderful boy made it a point to have a conversation with one of his friends who is participating in the encampment. Clearly, the two of them have very different approaches to the issues surrounding the war in the Holy Land, but they wanted to talk—not to try to change each other’s minds, but to approach one another with curiosity and respect, in the hopes of avoiding the incipient dehumanization that is making some campuses feel truly dangerous. I’m immensely proud of Akiva, that he was willing to enter into a civil conversation with someone whose viewpoint is radically different from his own. 

Prior to their meeting, Akiva told me that he and his fellow student were going to search for common ground first, and having established that, they would talk about the issues solely for the sake of learning. Rather than hating in their hearts, rather than cherishing their conflicting values and stoking the animosity that pervades this topic, they took the parsha seriously (perhaps without realizing it) and entered the world of tochecha, or at least respectful disagreement. Although neither one of them changed his mind over the course of their conversation, both stopped to think and consider the other’s viewpoint. 

I can’t help thinking that this is what our parsha is asking: not that everybody agree all the time, but that everybody take the effort to hear one another, to acknowledge the humanity and kind intentions that most people are operating from. It isn’t that all opinions are equal or right, but rather that all opinions are sincerely held. If we can decrease the hate that’s in our hearts by earnestly listening for the good will in others, perhaps we can approach fulfillment of the mitzvah of our creator: to love our neighbor—in all their complicated humanity—as ourselves. And in so doing we approach the holiness that the parsha lays out for us.

הֲרֵינִי מְקַבֵּל עָלַי את מִצְוַת הַבּוֹרֵא וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

Shabbat shalom!