Shabbat Chol haMoed Pesach for TAA

(Delivered April 4, 2026)

Shabbat shalom & moadim l’simcha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tzav for TAA

(Delivered March 28, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

At the risk of annoying my Torah study folks, I have to say it again. You might even want to say it with me: The Torah is always right on time.

This week our reading, from Parshat Tzav, is teaching us about offerings, about fire and purification and even chametz. As the taxonomy of different offerings takes shape, Aaron and the Kohanim are downloading instruction for how to make different kinds of offerings, how to take on the mantle of Priesthood: what to offer, what to keep and what to take elsewhere.

Meanwhile the calendar is teaching us that it’s time to clean out our kitchens to prepare for Pesach. We are engaged in sorting and switching and cooking and planning and consulting a taxonomy of what’s allowed and what’s not. Like the ancient Priests, we, too, are downloading instruction. Like the ancient Priests, we, too, find ourselves discerning what to offer, what to keep, and what to take elsewhere.

The fact that the word chametz comes up in the parsha; the fact that there is an aliyah which seems so clearly to be about matzah brei in this parsha that always occurs around this time of year, can certainly start to make you wonder. What’s the link? Other than the literal קָרְבַּן פֶּסַח—one of the three essential elements of the seder, according to Rabban Gamliel—what does the ancient system of offerings have to do with Pesach? Why does our tradition throw them together?

This question came up in Torah study the other day, but I didn’t quite know how to address it. Of course there are the obvious links, but why are they there? The Torah is generally not for the obvious, not for the easy answers. The conversation Thursday moved on unconcluded, but I couldn’t shake the subtle question from my mind.

Why are the offerings and the holiday of Pesach so entangled?

As it says in the הַגָּדָה, we begin to answer.

The link I’m starting to make out, as if through fog, comes through the Kabbalistic teaching that chametz can be interpreted metaphorically, as an excess of ego. Just as leavening causes breads to rise and puff up, so too our own egos can cause us to get puffed-up, to become arrogant and full of ourselves. When we invest too much in shallow or self-serving ideas and actions, we tend to lose sight of what’s important. Preparing for Pesach is a way to take stock of the excesses in our lives, in the kitchen, and in our very selves. It’s like a tune-up for the work of teshuvah that we do in the sweep from Elul into the fall holidays.

In the springtime, as we seek out the chametz in our kitchens, we also examine our own attitudes and temptations: Where am I sliding into self-regard? Where am I turning my compass toward praise and ego-gratification, rather than integrity and service?

And then, when we’ve sought out all those places of puffery and hubris, when we’ve gathered them together, we sweep them out. What we do in our physical homes, we do for our spiritual selves.

The tradition of Biur Chametz (burning chametz) calls us, on the morning of the day of the first Seder, to collect, disavow, and burn any remaining chametz in our kitchens. After we’ve gathered all the crumbs, we place them on a pan, light a fire, and turn them into smoke, enacting a kind of mini קָרְבַּן of all that we must avoid during Pesach. As with our crumbs, so too with our own failings. If chametz represents our vanity, burning our chametz represents trimming our egos back down to size.

Biur Chametz recalls the burnt offerings of the parsha, and indeed when we look at the practice outlined in the first aliyah, of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן—raising up the ashes—we can begin to flesh out the analogy. The act of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן involves the Kohen, dressed in his priestly finery, beginning each morning by sweeping up the ashes of the previous day’s offerings. The work of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן is unglamorous; it’s simply what needs to be done. In the same way that the world is created anew each morning, the Kohen wiping the slate clean of ashes around the altar makes it possible to start afresh ritually each morning. The picture of such an exalted figure as a Kohen basically relegated to cleanup duty is a powerful call to examine our relationship with status. The medieval Jewish scholar, Bahya Ibn Pekuda describes the spiritual valence of תְּרוּמָת הַדֶּשֶׁן as, “forsaking greatness and honor by serving God.” And after lifting up the ashes, the Kohen changes into the Priestly equivalent of his dungarees and does the even less exalted part, of taking the ashes outside the camp to a place of purity for disposal. That the primary religious leaders of the time were implicated in this mundane and messy task tells us a lot about how our tradition wants us to deal with our egos.

Elsewhere in the parsha we encounter the description of the butchery of the guilt offering: what to do with the various animal parts like the blood and the fat and the kidneys. Tucked into this alienatingly exacting—and graphic— passage is the phrase הַיֹּתֶרֶת עַל־הַכָּבֵד—the protuberance on the liver. Playing with the language, we can wander into the realm of allegory to discover yet another wink at controlling our own egos. If we repoint the vowels, it reads הַיֹּתֶרֶת עַל־הַכָּבֹד—the excess of glory. This excess of glory, like the fat and the kidneys, is ultimately burned up, as an offering to something larger than the self.

So with respect to our original question about what’s underneath the subtle alignment of Torah reading and calendar, I suspect it has to do with inviting us to open the metaphor of Pesach preparation and allow it to work on our souls as much as on our kitchens. Turning a process that could be just a panicked scramble into something rich with meaning is one way for us to fulfill the principle that comes to us from the Mishnah by way of the Haggadah:

בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ כְאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם
In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally went out from Egypt.

Preparing our homes, burning our chametz: these are a way of making an offering to God, of connecting with our ancient practices and investing them with modern, personal meaning.

Bechol dor vador indeed.

Shabbat shalom!

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.

Nitzavim for TAA

(Delivered September 20, 2025)

I still remember where I was when I learned. It was a silvery spring day, the first really warm day. Sunshine, buds, short sleeves. My siblings and their spouses and Bill and I went for a nice long walk in the Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of my favorite places on this planet or any other.

I don’t know why, but we decided on a little game of hide-and-seek. I hadn’t played for years. There’s not much opportunity to, as a self-serious music student with ambitions as high as my vocal range. But we were getting pretty silly that day—must have been the spring air—and a game of hide-and-seek seemed like just the thing.

We decided who was “It” and scattered amongst the trees to hide while they counted. I found my spot and settled in. Then came the lesson. Having not played in a long while, and having been a very rule-obedient child, I was shocked and thrilled when I saw one of my brothers-in-law sneak out of his hiding place, run behind the “It” person and switch trees, while I crouched seemingly for an eternity behind one single oak tree.

It had never occurred to me before that minute that I wasn’t glued to my hiding place like a sitting duck. It had never occurred to me that switching hiding places was a strategy. It had never occurred to me that hidden things could change.

The whole episode came to mind this week as I was studying Parshat Nitzavim. As we’ve just heard, the parsha mainly revisits laws and teachings given in the service of the covenant that frames and permeates the book of Deuteronomy. Again, we receive the sharp warnings about what will happen, should we get caught up in idolatry, and again, we receive the gentle promises that returning to the fold is always possible, that if only we restore ourselves and our children to the right path, God will take us back in love.

And in the midst of this push and pull of sin and repentance, comes the mysterious pasuk that finds the hidden and the visible in a subtle dance. Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 28 reads:

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד־עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת
What is hidden is for Adonai our God, and what is revealed is for us and our children eternally,
to do all of this instruction

The commentators make the logical connection that the word נִּסְתָּרֹת—that which is hidden—refers to secret idolatry. The bigger lesson, though, is that there are things that are known only to God.

One of my earliest teachers taught me this—although neither he nor I knew he was my teacher as it happened. In a moment of teenage discombobulation, I went to stay for a few days with our longtime family friends, Jerry and Roberta Goldman, to recover from a broken heart. One afternoon, sitting in the backyard, I poured out my uncertainties and sadness, and Jerry, a rabbi who is as sensitive as he is brilliant, gently said, “Life is like a tapestry we can only see the back of. We see the knots and the clusters of threads tangled together and, sometimes if we’re lucky, the barest hints of what the picture on the other side might be. Only God sees the whole thing, and somehow, from God’s side, it makes sense.”

When it was first offered, Jerry’s lesson was one of hope and perspective, a grownup’s thoughtful advice to an overwrought teenager. Only later have I begun to see it also as a teaching about humility. Each and every one of us, no matter how curious and knowledgeable we might be, is limited in what we can observe. Countless factors contribute to this, from temperament to environment to the thousand quirks of the moment. The plain truth is that we can only ever see a small part of the world around us, and everything we perceive is a product of our experiences, expectations, and biases. It’s easiest and most normal for us to see what we’ve always seen, what we plan to see.

This is all the more so in the current polarized media environment, as we’ve witnessed to a horrifying degree in recent weeks. The shocking murder of Conservative media personality Charlie Kirk is only the latest Rorschach Test that maps political and social orientations onto the very perception of reality. While folks to my left have been excoriating Kirk as one of the most vile people ever to walk the earth, folks to my right have been canonizing him. The government’s policies on immigration, free speech, and gender issues are similarly met with cheering in some quarters and loathing in others. Many believe we are edging toward fascism; many believe we’re finally cleaning things up. Families and communities are navigating real schisms based on the American political scene, based on the situation in Israel and Gaza, based on world views about gender, sexuality, and race, based on beliefs about the rights and freedoms and responsibilities we regard as sacrosanct. The point is that in a feverish environment like the current moment, in which we don’t talk to one another across difference, the things we might be able to agree about remain hidden. And what’s revealed is so skewed as to be cartoonish.

Between the technology that dominates so much of our waking lives, and the algorithm that offers us refills on what we already have decided is truth, and simple social isolation, we, as a society, have lost the thread of what constitutes fact, much less nuance. Each of us comes to conclusions that make sense, based on the information we’ve been fed. But we are not ordering from the full menu, and we are not asking questions of one another across the table.

I often lament how disheartening it is to hear people say they just can’t talk to so-and-so because their politics are not aligned. The less we hear ideas and viewpoints that challenge us, the more convinced we become not only of our rightness but of the essential wrongness of anyone who thinks differently. The middle space where we talk things over and consider multiple angles hollows out, while the habit of dehumanization gets ever more ingrained in us. There’s an arrogance to the whole vicious cycle, a knee-jerk dismissal of anything from the so-called other side. And what I want to say to you is that yes, there may be things about the ideology on the other side that are disagreeable or even hateful, but much of what we’re tagging as hateful is being fed to us in a way designed to make us think that. The same is true for the person you most vividly differ with.

For the most part, the places where we get information are curating content and viewpoints for maximum agitation, at once disparaging those who see things differently and flattering our assumptions. All this is a very effective way of keeping us scrolling so they can generate more ad revenue. Our very humanity is being bought and sold, while our capacity for holding multiple perspectives with curiosity erodes with every conversation we avoid.

But the hidden things, the nuances of who we are, away from political argument, are known to God alone. What’s revealed is very much at the human level, and we simply can’t see the whole thing. Yet that long-ago game of hide-and-seek holds a lesson too. Hidden things can change, and we always have the choice to look harder at what’s revealed and wonder, together and apart, What is it that God sees in all this? What else is it that God sees in all this? And how can I teach my children to return to a stable path, so God can take us back in love?

We can never know the fullness of this world, but we can respect the not knowing, hold our convictions with humility and others’ with curiosity, and, in the words of Leonard Cohen, bless the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.

Shabbat Shalom!

Eikev for TAA

(Delivered August 16, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’d like to start with a quick survey. Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a mistake. Great. I’m not the only one.

Mistakes, as I often tell my children (and myself), are part of life. We all make them, for all kinds of reasons. And if you were to take the third triennial of Parshat Eikev as the entirety of the parsha, you would make the mistake of thinking the covenant with God was much simpler than it actually is. There is a broader context for the question that opens our reading, a whole framework that brings that question to life.

We come into the conversation in the middle, so to speak, as the Torah raises the topic of what God wants from us in order to uphold our end of the covenant. The expectation from God is high: יראת השם—fear or reverence for God—plus loving and serving God and walking the paths of the divine. This is a relational way of thinking about something ephemeral. It’s quite a tall order, and maddeningly hard to measure in terms of success. Relationship-building is full of challenges, even with tangible, proximate humans. How much more difficult, then, to be in this kind of relationship with … an idea, an abstraction which is definitionally out of reach.

The missing context, which complicates the discussion, is that there has been a breach prior to this. Earlier in the parsha, Moses recounts the story of חטא העגל—the sin of the Golden Calf originally told in the Book of Exodus. While Moses is up on Mount Sinai getting the tablets inscribed with God’s teachings, the Israelites have a spectacular meltdown, panicking at the sheer difficulty of their newfound monotheism. They crave something—anything— to give them a sense of divine presence, and so they take all their gold and turn it into a statue of a calf to worship. Moses describes the aftermath of this episode in excruciating detail: God’s furious desire to punish the Israelites, Moses smashing the tablets, and then grinding the idol to dust. This is a terrible rupture, a grievous mistake.

It seems irreparable. Our worst mistakes often do.

I spoke with someone this week who shared their own story of a grievous mistake, something that came about in a time when their mental health was compromised, leaving them susceptible to unwise decisions. As they spoke, I thought: this is so human. This is a person of deep integrity and compassion who had fallen into a situation that caused harm. It could happen with any of us, and perhaps it even has.

To reflect on this person’s story in the same week as I was preparing Parshat Eikev was instructive. Because the Torah teaches us that while our mistakes—even the worst ones—are real, and consequential, they are not unforgivable. Our tradition doesn’t shy away from the harm that human behavior can cause, but neither does it insist that we remain in a state of degradation forever. Even the Israelites’ act of עבודה זרה—idolatry—a sin which is considered in the same category as murder and adultery, does not define the trajectory of our people for all time.

The parsha goes on to describe a second set of tablets, a second chance to engage with our side of the covenant. God allows Moses to come back up to the top of Mount Sinai, offering a fresh start. Moses brings down the new tablets and places them in the Aron, the holiest place in the mishkan, so that the Israelites can keep this holy teaching with them as they go. But the repair doesn’t end with that. The Gemara states, on Menachot 99a:

רַב יוסֵף מְלַמֵד שֶהַלוּחוֹת וְשִבְרֵי לוּחוֹת מוֹנַחִין בַּאַרוֹן
Rav Yosef teaches that the tablets
and the shards of the tablets rest in the Aron.

Rav Yosef’s statement might seem counterintuitive. Surely carrying around our worst mistake can only be discouraging and burdensome. What could possibly be the benefit of having to live with the reminder of ourselves at our lowest and most vulnerable moment?

I think Rav Yosef’s profound teaching is that retaining the vision of the worst thing we’ve ever done, keeping it close by, allows us to see how far we’ve come. Our mistakes are a record of our growth, like the rings of a tree. Erase the memory of all the bumps in the road, and what remains is a falsified, whitewashed history—a curated image that has nothing to do with reality. We are formed by our deeds—even the ones that cause us the most pain to think about. And if our worst errors give us a chance to learn, they are not a waste.

In fact the rabbis posit in a few different places in the literature that perhaps God is, in some way, glad of our mistakes: יישר כח ששתרת—it’s good that you broke them. It isn’t that God relished the sin of the Golden Calf—surely not! But that horrific episode gave the Israelites a sense of what was at stake, and gave them a chance to know God in a different way: as a presence that offered a new beginning. The two sets of tablets together are a symbol for moving past heartbreak and self-recrimination into a stronger commitment to what’s important. Breaking makes room for something new, for something to grow where perhaps stagnation had taken hold.

As we move into the season of the Days of Awe, thoughts of repentance begin to crowd our minds. What are the deeds we feel ashamed of, and how can we move beyond them? As we take on the work of תשובה—of return—we reset our moral compasses to direct us away from all the wrong paths onto which we might have strayed. But as we examine our past failures, let’s carry them lightly alongside us and allow them to teach us—to bear our lapses with grace, to draw courage from the ways we’ve overcome our lesser selves, and to move forward, the stronger for having been broken.

Shabbat shalom!

Yom Kippur Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 12, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

In one of my previous incarnations, I worked as a singer and actor, and as such, I became deeply devoted to the TV show, “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” On the show, host James Lipton would interview high-profile actors about their approach to the craft, citing examples from their work and talking about how they built this or that character. The conversations were individual to whichever actor was in the hot seat, but each episode ended the same way, with Lipton giving his guest a questionnaire consisting of, I don’t know, seven or eight questions—what sound or noise do you love? What is your favorite word? Your least favorite word? And so on. Lipton’s final question was the most intriguing: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Admittedly, the Christian image of the pearly gates might not resonate. But even if we don’t relate to the mental picture, we can surely relate to the question: If we had a chance to meet God panim el panim—face to face—what might we wish for God to say to us? What would we like to learn is God’s essence, God’s true nature, God’s message for us?

In my days of watching Inside the Actor’s Studio religiously, I was not in the habit of thinking about God, much less imagining a personal meeting. But also, in those days, my sense of God’s nature was fairly one-dimensional, a very conventional one in our culture: I pictured an old white guy with a long beard and billowy robes, either sitting on a throne or floating around on a cloud. This image in my head was informed by children’s books and the occasional New Yorker cartoon, and had so little to do with my actual experience as to be laughable. Although I was an adult by then, my idea of God hadn’t really changed since I was about six.

Over the ensuing decade or so, I guess I got a system upgrade when it comes to how I think about God. And so, with more trepidation than you might think, I’d like to use this time to talk about God. I figure since I’ve already talked about Israel and Gaza, I might as well take a real risk. But all kidding aside, if your rabbi doesn’t take God seriously, who will?

The image called up by James Lipton’s “pearly gates” question is in tension with today’s Torah and Haftarah readings, and with the depth and breadth of the universe of Jewish thought. So let’s look at the readings first.

This morning, in Parashat Acharei Mot, we meet a rather forbidding God, a God who, after the sudden and unexplained deaths of Nadav and Avihu, seems to return to business as usual, giving instruction about the proper way to approach the Beit haMikdash (the ancient Temple). This leads into a fairly detailed imagining of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, encountering God—not in the heavens, but rather in the earthly realm, in the innermost chamber of the Beit haMikdash, the Holy of Holies. In this moment of solitude and heightened occasion, with the weight of the community and its sins on his back, the Kohen Gadol will have a fleeting encounter with the presence of God. And because he will be entirely alone—he being the only human with this security clearance—we are left on the outside to wonder what it might be like. This exclusivity is in sharp contrast to the Haftarah, in which we read:

דְּרָכָיו רָאִיתִי וְאֶרְפָּאֵהוּ וְאַנְחֵהוּ וַאֲשַׁלֵּם נִחֻמִים לוֹ וְלַאֲבֵלָיו׃

בּוֹרֵא נִיב שְׂפָתָיִם שָׁלוֹם שָׁלוֹם לָרָחוֹק וְלַקָּרוֹב אָמַר יי וּרְפָאתִיו׃

I have seen their ways, and will heal them: I will guide them,

and comfort the mourners among them.

Create consoling words, bring peace, peace to far and near,
and heal them, says Adonai.

The Haftarah’s God is a God who sees human imperfection with compassion. In contrast to the Torah reading, we find here a God who is present with the people, a God who heals and consoles, a God who makes a particular point of offering peace and consolation to those who need it. Rashi doubles down on this more accessible God, saying that the “near and far” refers to those who are accustomed to the ways of Torah and to those who are either new to it or have fallen away and returned. Importantly, by Rashi’s estimation, שְׁנֵיהֶם שָוִין—the far and the near are equal.

The mincha Torah reading this afternoon will add another layer to consider, with instructions for holiness punctuated by the repeating refrain of אֲנִי יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם—I am Adonai, your God. Be holy, because I am holy, and here’s how. The mincha Torah reading lays out standards for behavior that, if followed, allow for us to become more like God. By honoring parents, rejecting idolatry, cherishing the dignity of the economically needy, treating all with integrity, including speaking up rather than letting resentments fester, we are emulating God. The face of God that emerges from this description is one of high ethical and moral standards.

Our final scriptural reading of the day, the Haftarah for mincha, is the Book of Jonah. There we find a God who performs an improbable rescue, redeeming Jonah from the belly of a huge fish. Of course, Jonah is in there in the first place because he runs away from God’s instruction to serve as a prophet, so God decides to teach him a lesson. The teaching doesn’t stop there. When, later, Jonah is angry with God for accepting the teshuvah of the citizens of Nineveh and therefore not destroying them, God gives Jonah a profound teaching in empathy. So now to the images of God as stern rule-giver, or as comforter of mourners, or as moral exemplar, we add the idea of God as teacher.

Expanding our vision beyond today’s readings to the biblical corpus as a whole, we discover seemingly endless dimensions of—and metaphors for—the nature of God. In Psalm 146 God is One who

עֹשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט לָעֲשׁוּקִים נֹתֵן לֶחֶם לָרְעֵבִים [יי] מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים

יי] פֹּקֵחַ עִוְרִים [יי] זֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים [יי] אֹהֵב צַדִּיקִים]

Brings justice to the oppressed, gives bread to the hungry,
frees the captive, restores sight to the blind,
lifts those who are stooped over,
and loves the righteous.

Then again, God is also creator of the natural world, as we’ll read in the opening chapters of Breishit in a couple of weeks. Many of us, unlike the Kohen Gadol, find God’s abiding presence in the woods, by the ocean, or surrounded by living beings.

God as bringer of justice, feeder of the hungry, healer of life’s wounds, author of creation… These hopeful images work well when things are going well. But I have to admit they are a tough sell in this moment of deepening crisis in the Jewish world. When Israel is under attack from multiple fronts, when many both in Israel and the diaspora worry that the current leadership has lost its moral footing, when antisemitic rhetoric becomes less and less unacceptable, when the world feels perilous for us, the notion of God coming to the rescue can be eclipsed by the sense of הֶסְתֶר פָּנִים—that God’s face is hidden. A concept rooted in a verse from Parshat Vayelech, הֶסְתֶר פָּנִים has become a way to talk about those historical periods when God seemed absent from the scene, a way of addressing the question of how God could allow great tragedy or unbearable pain in a world which is supposedly suffused with God’s glory.

This past Monday was the secular anniversary of the barbaric October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. Seeing photos of the destruction, hearing survivor stories, remembering the hostages who were killed and those who may yet be alive but are surely suffering, it’s all too easy to wonder, where is God in all this? Where do we turn when catastrophe is suddenly plausible?

For this, we need to resort to the long view, the eternal nature of God that we encounter in daily prayer when we say:

אַתָּה הוּא עַד שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם

אַתָּה הוּא מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא הָעוֹלָם

אַתָּה הוּא בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה

וְאַתָּה הוּא לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

It was You before the world was created
It is You who created the world
It is You in this world
And it will be You in the world to come

Let me repeat that in all its gorgeousness:

It was You before the world was created
It is You who created the world
It is You in this world
And it will be You in the world to come

This beautiful verse locates the unity of God, and God’s enduring nature, in the ever unfolding universe, in the passage of time. As we learned from the Sfat Emet last night, the unity of God encompasses that which appears good and that which is not yet assimilated into goodness. Even the ashes of the burnt offering—an image that may make us shudder a bit—might unlock something good in the future. The world and its goodness are ever unfolding.

This is not an easy metaphor to get close to; we may long for a less abstract sense of God, for a God who is right here by our side. And the idea that horrific tragedy might someday give rise to something better runs the risk of sounding like justification. I know I’m treading dangerously close to “everything happens for a reason” territory, and I want to be clear that’s not what I mean. But things are happening all the time, and the happening itself is an aspect of God, and what it will come to mean is often still being revealed and created.

To have a non-corporeal, singular, unfolding God means that sometimes God seems hidden or distant. Think about a folded piece of paper. As it unfolds, different shapes manifest themselves. Edges and planes move away as a natural part of that process; geometry demands it. That moving away can really sting. But inevitably things change and change again. Time does its magic. The unfolding continues.

And as this beautiful, terrible, mysterious world unfolds, we can find our connection to the divine in so many ways: in nature, in the riches of our tradition, and in one another. To paraphrase the Sefer Hasidim, a 19th-century halachic work by Yehuda HeHasid: “Two people carrying a load would not be able to carry it as well separately, as together. Two people raising their voices are more apt to be heard than if they cry separately.” If each and every one of us is created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—in the image of God—then every encounter with another person has the potential for holiness, for the experience of God’s presence. Singing together, praying together, laughing, crying, talking about things that matter, or simply being together in companionable silence can all draw us closer to the divine, and draw the divine closer to us. I think of the last words of Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh of Liska, as reported by his grandson Rabbi Zev Wolf. As he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by several generations of his beloved family, Tzvi Hirsh, the Lisker Rebbe, said: “My children, if you cling to God, it will be good for you.” My dear community, may it be good for you, and may you find the face of God that can hold you close and that you can hold close in these trying times.

G’mar tov and shanah tovah!

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!

Jewish Themes: A Blog by Rabbi Naomi Gurt Lind

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