Claiming Judaism: A Response to Rabbi Buchdahl

Without a doubt, Central Synagogue has become the flagship Reform community in the country. People all over the world consider it their Jewish home, from those who attend in person in Manhattan, to those connecting online for whom it is their lifeline to Jewish communal practice. I served at Central as an educator for two years prior to enrolling at HUC-JIR to become a rabbi, and, in a beshert turn of events, the current senior rabbi, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, grew up in the same congregation as I did in Tacoma, Washington. I have fond memories of my early childhood at our synagogue day camp where she, as a teen, helped lead the younger generation in song as we visited the local Jewish elder care home–I even still remember the words to the camp theme song she wrote!

It is with this sense of connection and care I want to respond to her recent sermon on Yom Kippur, “Claiming Zionism.” She compares our moment to a debate between two 19th century New York based rabbis: Alexander Kohut, one of her predecessors at a synagogue that became part of Central Synagogue down the line, and Kaufmann Kohler, one of the chief architects of Reform Judaism in America, who served at a predecessor synagogue to Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. Referring to a New York Times article about their public debate from 1885, she relates that these two rabbis were contesting the nature of what it meant to be Jewish. In the article itself, the debate is clear: Kohut was defending his position that “anyone who on principle discards and disregards any ordinance of Mosaic rabbinical Judaism has ceased to be a Jew,” while Kohler was suggesting that “all these laws of Moses, as far as they are of a mere ceremonial character and not moral and perpetual statutes, are subject to change.” 

She sees echoes of this debate in our moment today, arguing that her belief that all Jews are connected via a national character, which the Reform Movement under Kohler rejected, is in line with her predecessor Kohut. But the debate between these two rabbis was entirely different in nature. They were deliberating the question of religious orthodoxy versus reform. These are lower-case on purpose. At the time, Reform and Orthodox Judaism didn’t exist as movements. They existed as approaches to how people understood the nature of Judaism and who is included and excluded.

Central Synagogue is a great example of the power of reform. Over the past 30 years, Central has changed from a Classical Reform synagogue with robes and liturgical organ and choir music, to the model for creative contemporary services we see today. Its congregants are, by and large, not adherents to the laws of kashrut in the way that Kohut suggested was necessary to remain a Jew. And, Central’s great work towards social justice and tikkun olam is grounded in the very ethos of the Reform Judaism of Kohler. All of these elements of Central Synagogue’s great success are, in fact, because they moved beyond the insularity of leaders like Kohut, towards leaders like Kohler. So why did she frame the debate this way? I would guess the answer is in the part of the Pittsburgh Platform quote that was excised from her sermon: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” 

This explicitly anti-Zionist statement well predated the Soviet Union, or any kind of antisemitic modes of anti-Zionism that Rabbi Buchdahl referred to in her sermon. It was core to Reform Judaism at its birth, which the organization I currently helm, the American Council for Judaism, has maintained as a primary tenet. Jews cannot be reduced down to something as material and tangible as a nation. We are much more, and our connection is via Torah, not via an imposed blood-and-soil identity. This is our anti-Zionism, one approach to Judaism among many. What holds Jews together, if not nationhood, is the subject of a longer essay of mine, forthcoming soon. There I apply Kohler's own method to Kohler's conclusions and argue that Jews are a collective of many peoples, bound together by a shared and evolving engagement with Torah: its texts, its local practices, and its calendar.

And there is the rub. Her argument is one of orthodoxy versus reform. Over the past 60 years, Zionism has slowly encroached from its position as one of the many possible collective sources of inspiration for Reform Jews to its primary orthodoxy. When there are no requirements for religious belief or practice within the walls of a synagogue like Central (an approach Kohut would have rejected), the one orthodox requirement for belonging is now an affirmation that you “believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state.” Setting aside that a state’s existence does not require belief, this tenet of orthodoxy is not reflective of American Jewry. As Rabbi Buchdahl said herself, only a third of American Jews identify as Zionists. The same poll may suggest that 88% believe Israel has “a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state,” but the reality is that “Jewish and democratic” is an ill defined myth. Those who otherwise accept the terminology reject it once material implications are examined. The contemporary material reality of Israel also contests this formulation. A majority of the population under Israel’s control from the river to the sea is not Jewish, and an enormous percentage of the non-Jewish Palestinian people living under its legal system aren’t given basic rights, but are instead living under military occupation and apartheid. 

Zionism is Jewish nationalism. It is the belief that Jews exist singularly as a nation, akin to the Spanish nation, the Italian nation, or the German nation, and that due to this, Jews should have a nation state that is majority Jewish. The attendant belief is that all Jews, whether they live in this nation state or not, see it as their “homeland.” The state, then, is the central piece of being Jewish, and Jews worldwide are responsible for it for good or for ill. This is the prevailing form of Zionist orthodoxy, supported both by the WZO’s definition of Zionism, and the definition inherent to the state of Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law. These two institutions which have the power and authority to act on behalf of Zionism are the ones capable of truly defining it; no amount of nuance or pointing to past eras or future possibilities changes these material expressions of Zionism. Most importantly, the material expressions are why people are increasingly uncomfortable with the term.

As we look at the world around us spinning out of control, with antisemitic attacks on the rise, I would suggest Rabbi Buchdahl reconsider the parable she quoted from Kohut’s speech. His suggestion was that the individual drilling a hole in the boat was the Reformers who were allowing for greater flexibility and creativity within Judaism, the very flexibility and creativity that has given rise to the powerful pulpit Rabbi Buchdahl occupies. I would turn it around: Those who proclaim that Zionism is intrinsic to Judaism, while the state of Israel as the primary expression of Zionism in the world continues a genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, are drilling a hole in the boat of Judaism. They are creating a narrative in which she, and I, and every Jew in America are responsible for the worst excesses of the Israeli government because of this connection of peoplehood. The logic suggests that the government of our so-called “homeland” does, in fact, represent a core aspect of what it means to be Jewish worldwide, and we are culpable for its actions. I cannot imagine a more destructive approach to take in this moment of global crisis, with Israel’s fascist regime partnering with our own in America to commit mass-murder and destabilize the entire region.

I pray that as we begin 5787, you, Rabbi Buchdahl, and those who share your view, can spend time reflecting on the overall impact of your words, and please do the work to hear from us Jews who defy your orthodoxy. You are free, of course, to commit your Jewish lives to Zionism, but please: if you choose to do so, make it clear that your boat is Zionism, not Judaism.

A Shelter Big Enough for Everyone: Judaism Beyond Nationalism for Sukkot

On Yom Kippur afternoon, nearly 1500 of us lay face down in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. As part of the third annual Rabbis for Ceasefire Yizkor, we embodied the ancient ritual of koreim, fully prostrating, as part of the Great Aleinu. We recited the Yizkor blessing, heard El Malei Rachamim chanted, and joined together to commemorate this moment in the Jewish calendar.  We also heard from Mahmoud Khalil, Hala Alyan, and Hana Masud about their experiences of being Palestinian: Of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing, going back to the 1948 Nakba; of the struggles of keeping the steadfastness of Palestinian culture alive, while living in exile, unable to visit their homes. We then left stones behind, holding down cards bearing the names of Palestinians murdered in Gaza over the past three years as a memorial. Some of them are probably still there. 

Tonight, Jews around the world will go back outside, this time into their sukkot, temporary dwellings with roofs that give more shade than sun, but are open enough to show the stars in the sky. They must be fragile; a sukkah built too much like a house is invalid.

The Torah gives a reason for all this: "so that your generations may know that I made the Israelites dwell in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt" (Leviticus 23:43). A debate, as usually occurs amongst the rabbis, ensued as to what these sukkot were. In the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 11b), while Rabbi Akiva says they were real booths, Rabbi Eliezer says they were ananei hakavod, clouds of glory. He believed that the Israelites crossed the wilderness sheltered by a Divine presence that they could not even touch, and Sukkot celebrates that intangible shelter.

I have been thinking about those clouds all week, because the story behind so many rabbinic High Holidays sermons this season has been one that rejects the clouds of glory, and instead asserts Jews are bound together by the need for a physical, tangible shelter from other people. I was raised and educated inside that story, usually taught as tough historical realism. Upholding it was a way of honoring those who died in the past as each tragedy unfolded, and the idea of the inevitability of those tragedies became the ongoing justification for a Jewish State: a place where "the Jewish people" couldn't be expelled, where neighbors would never turn on neighbors, where the hardened walls of a man-made sukkah would protect all Jews everywhere. This story grounds being Jewish in the historical actions of those who want us dead. It keeps fear of others at its center, and a child raised inside it learns that the first fact of being Jewish is being hated. 

Prayer, study, argument, the long ethical labor of Torah: all of our beautiful tradition becomes secondary to a single question, whether you believe in the need for a human-made militarized Jewish nation-state to be the shelter in the wilderness: A sukkah with walls and roof so rigid and thick that it is invalid.

At the end of the day, the logic of this stance also requires a belief in Jews as a singular nation, with blood-based roots in a singular place. Nationalism just like this is metastasizing into its most virulent modes around the world, and the modern categories it sorted humanity into are coming apart everywhere. All groups were slotted into various descriptors by modernity, be it race, ethnicity, religion, or otherwise, and these categories have begun to fail at containing the incredible complexity that is human experience. So maybe we ought to move from category to action.

Our Yizkor service was the perfect example of what an active Liberatory Judaism can look like which overcomes these truncating categories. During the bright, sunny day of our outdoor service, occasionally we’d get a respite from the sun through a light cloud cover. The shade it granted us meant we could see the crowd standing in grief together, as diverse as any gathering in Brooklyn. We could see what the ananei hakavod must have been for the Israelites wandering in the wilderness: A beautiful, collective shelter, big enough for everyone, and, by including everyone, creating a sense of shared destiny that bound them all together. 

Sukkot, of all our festivals, is grounded in this deep universal, liberatory frame of Judaism. During the week of the holiday in ancient Jerusalem, the priests in the Temple offered seventy bulls on behalf of all the seventy nations of the world, as the Talmud explains, with the conclusion of the holiday, Shemini Atzeret, offering a final bull for Jews (Sukkah 55b). As all Jewish tradition has been transformed from its earlier iterations, we learn from this not that we ought to sacrifice bulls, but that our practices are for the whole world, not just for us. Rather than the holiday being specifically about building a connection between Jews and God, it is about maintaining the connection with the Creator of All; all humanity under the shelter of ananei hakavod.

When you sit in the sukkah this week and see the stars through the roof, remember that our ancestors were sheltered by clouds. We do not need the blood and the soil. We need the intangible light of Torah, spread over us and over all our neighbors alike.

Who Is In and Who Is Out in 5787?

By Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove's accounting delivered in his Rosh Hashanah sermon this year, only a third of American Jews positively identify as Zionists. A similarly large share say they're unsure or don't claim any label at all. Another 15% identify outright as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, rising to 14% anti-Zionist alone among Jews under 35. By these numbers, cited from a JFNA poll, most American Jews do not hold Zionism as central to their Judaism. What do these figures mean, then, for American rabbis’ responsibilities to this population?

On a recent podcast, Rabbi Sharon Brous said, of anti-Zionist Jews, "I don't think the answer is to write them off," arguing that Jewish leaders need to engage with Jews for whom Zionism and Israel aren't part of their Judaism. Her Rosh haShanah sermon asserted that staying at the table with extremists is the only way to make change. Cosgrove’s sermon continued on to suggest that the Jewish tent needs expanding, and that we all need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Reform Rabbi Josh Weinberg, president of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, has written about staying in relationship with people who see the world differently, and cited settler violence among the things he remains vigilant about.

There is no public record of Brous, Cosgrove, or Weinberg convening with individuals or any organization representing the Jews who don't hold a relationship to Israel and Zionism as core to their identity. But two months before this Rosh Hashanah, though, at the Anu Museum in Tel Aviv, these three rabbis, as part of a delegation of a dozen American non-Orthodox rabbis, met a dozen Israeli religious nationalist leaders to "build unity" ahead of Tisha b'Av. Brous closed the convening by leading everyone in Acheinu, "our brothers," a traditional prayer that since October 7th has become the anthem of hostage solidarity and wartime Zionist Jewish unity. Weinberg told the room "we are all religious Zionists." Cosgrove described the evening afterward as free of any real friction: "No one was confrontational." This meeting was featured in the publication eJewishPhilanthropy, and the managing editor who wrote the coverage had helped decide who was on the list for the event.

Two of the Israelis in the room were Rabbanit Yafa Giser and Rabbi Doron Perez. Giser lives in Ofra, the largest unauthorized outpost in the West Bank, built substantially on land registered to Palestinians. Her organization, Yesodot, is headquartered in the settlement of Alon Shevut. It has published a framework it calls the "equitable landlord," holding that Jews own the state, non-Jews are merely tenants for whom Jews should be good landlords. and that the idea of equal standing between all residents is more extreme than telling a minority to leave. This is, ultimately, the hilltop youth's ideology dressed up in a fancy metaphor. 

Perez runs World Mizrachi, founded explicitly around support for the settlement enterprise, whose Canadian arm has sent millions to settlement groups, and now also runs the World Zionist Organization, whose Settlement Division has funded and expanded West Bank settlements, including illegal outposts, since 1971, using government money while dodging the oversight that would apply if the government did it directly. The event is described as bringing together two equal sides who don't see eye to eye, but one side runs the institutions maintaining and expanding the occupation. The other side was simply American rabbis who sat, listened, and asked nothing of them. Palestinians, either Israeli citizens or otherwise, were not in the room at all.

In her sermon, Brous cited a Talmudic story against extremism. If we actually read the story, she stands on the very side she denounces. The rabbis of besieged Jerusalem weren't condemned for holding too few listening circles with the zealots. The story's turning point comes when Yohanan Ben Zakkai stopped talking and acted, smuggling himself out and negotiating a new future. The moral is that talk without action is what let the crisis metastasize. These three have given the majority of American Jews plenty of talk. The action went to the settlers.

When the words and the actions point in opposite directions, the words tell you what these three leaders want to be seen believing. The actions tell you who they actually are. One of the primary purposes of the High Holidays is to help us reflect on how we have fallen short of our own values, stated and unstated. My hope is that for these rabbis, this season of teshuvah will help them see how the mismatch between their words and actions have extremely damaging impacts.

Ask who is in the tent this year, and who is out. The architects of the Israeli religious nationalist project in the West Bank were in in July. American Jews who do not identify with Israel have been discussed while being left out of the conversation. May we see, in 5787, the outcomes of teshuvah that these rabbis can still accomplish by aligning their words and their deeds.

Shavuot 2026: Striving for the Messiah

As we say goodbye to this year’s counting of the Omer and the celebration of the giving of Torah at Sinai, we take one last look at the themes of Shavuot through the parshah for this Shabbat. Part of this reading includes one of the most fascinating inner contradictions in the Torah. In Deuteronomy 15:4-11, it reads:

There shall be no needy among you…if only you heed the ETERNAL your God and take care to keep all this Instruction that I enjoin upon you this day…

If, however, there is a needy person among you...do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kindred. Rather, you must open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the needs…

For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kindred in your land.

Obviously there is a deep problem here: First it says there shall be no need among you, then suggests there might be, then says there will never cease being. What are we to do with this, especially given that it is presented as a rationale for maintaining our observance of Torah?

Dania Rajendra and I wrote elsewhere about the relationship a secure social safety net for all people, the holiday of Shavuot, the book of Ruth, and the messianic era. This conjunction within the holiday is taken to a new layer by the Shabbat reading. It suggests that the demand to strive for economic justice in our societies is constant. There is no time in which this will end; in fact, it is one aspect of our world that is unchangeable. 

In Tractate Berakhot 34b, Shmuel shares that the only difference between this world and the days of the Messiah is an end to servitude to foreign kingdoms alone, as it is stated: “For the poor shall not cease from the land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).

The theology of Reform Judaism has, for hundreds of years, held that the Messiah is not coming to save us. It is we who must bring about the messianic age. They believed that this change described by Shmuel had begun for Jews through emancipation in various countries; we were no longer in servitude to foreign kingdoms, we were free to enact the Torah. In the earliest editions of the first American Reform prayerbook, the Union Prayer Book, part of the reading of the Geulah portion of the Shema and its Blessings was translated as such, “And now that we live in a land of freedom, may we continue to be faithful to Thee and Thy word.” 

This drives home the Torah underlying the responsibilities we hold in today’s world. So different from that of the ancient Israelites; so different from that of the ancient rabbis, today, we emancipated Jews, are obligated to self-actualize in order to implement the Torah throughout the land. 

May we live into existence the purpose of our covenant in this world of freedom, articulated over a century ago by the founders of American Reform Judaism: In full accordance with the spirit of the Mosaic legislation, which strives to regulate the relations between rich and poor, we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.

As If: A Meditation for Passover 2026

Scholar Andrew Tobolowsky, in his recent book The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, goes to great lengths to show the way in which the concept of “becoming Israel” has been used over and over again throughout history, and perhaps first by the Judahites themselves, in various and even competing ways, during the construction of the Hebrew Bible. Going back to the 6th century BCE, there was already a debate about the relationship between the Judahites who had been exiled to Babylonia, the Israelites who had earlier been removed by Assyria, and the community of Babylonian Jews that returned to ancient Jerusalem. This question of authenticity, of who is the real Jew, becomes almost moot. From the first steps into self-definition, the Judahites of the Hebrew Bible were already competing amongst each other, and with outside forces, to claim the mantle of “Israel.”

One of the core components of the Passover seder, articulated in the Mishna, is the directive that, in every generation, we are to see ourselves as if we were brought out of Egypt. Not to claim that we literally did; not to claim our ancestors authentically did; but, to see ourselves as if. The as if, k’ilu in Hebrew, is the crux of the phrase. As Tobolowsky makes clear, there are many people who see themselves as if they are Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who received the Torah and the special covenant with God. The Judahites were, perhaps, just the first to articulate this as if. The history of Judaism itself is a continual renegotiation of this as if, as different communities moved around the world, integrating other people and practices into their modes of Torah, and, every so often, adopting a new layer of worldwide canon that acts as a fundamental basis for Judaism. If the Passover holiday is one of the defining moments of Jewish self conception, then it teaches us this simple lesson: We are deriving life-altering meaning from ritual, which transports us to an experience of our core ethics through symbols. It leads us to express gratitude for our experience today, hallowing the ultimate value of freedom, joy, celebration, and redemption. The message of the Seder isn’t “Our ancestors literally left Egypt and made it to the Promised Land, because that is where they and we belong.” It is, “We have learned the value, from generation to generation, of a world more liberated than the one that came before us, and we must continue devoting ourselves to That Which Brings About Freedom.” 

As we finish our yearly retelling of the legend of the Torah, the mythic story that Jews worldwide use to ground their as if, let us remember that Judaism is not about a literal matter of ancestral descent, or a true belief in the historicity of the stories of our past. Judaism is about passing down, from generation to generation, the knowledge that we, each of us, must act as if this is our inheritance. We must acknowledge that this as if binds us into a covenant with those who, too, act as if this is their inheritance, and that inheritance is geared towards a clear goal: to raise up as an ideal That Which moves the world from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to Festival, from darkness to a great light, and from enslavement to redemption.

One of the core components of the Passover seder, articulated in the Mishna, is the directive that, in every generation, we are to see ourselves as if we were brought out of Egypt. The message of the Seder isn’t “Our ancestors literally left Egypt and made it to the Promised Land, because that is where they and we belong.” It is, “We have learned the value, from generation to generation, of a world more liberated than the one that came before us, and we must continue devoting ourselves to That Which Brings About Freedom.” 

Judaism is not about a literal matter of ancestral descent, or a true belief in the historicity of the stories of our past. Judaism is about passing down, from generation to generation, the knowledge that we, each of us, must act as if this is our inheritance. 

That inheritance is geared towards a clear goal: to raise up as an ideal That Which moves the world from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to Festival, from darkness to a great light, and from enslavement to redemption.

Toldot 2025: Jacob and Israel

This past week was one of the largest gatherings of Jewish people and power in the world - the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly. For those who may now know, the Federation system distributes over 2.3 billion dollars a year worldwide. That’s more money than all but the top 10 countries’ GDPs. A particular recording from the GA has been making the rounds. Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for both Obamas, and the writer of the book “Here All Along,” and the new “As a Jew,” speaks quite clearly about her take on this moment:
“The very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this 

new media environment…may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism…when they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.’ That’s not how the Holocaust happened…The Germans insisted that the Jews, about 1% of their population, were responsible for all of their problems, just like Israel, the size of New Jersey, is responsible for all the world’s problems today.”

To her, the lesson of the Holocaust is that non-Jews hate Jews, that the state of Israel is the bulwark against that hatred, so it, too, is hated. What she is saying functions as a sort of smoke screen for the genocide Israel is enacting - she is claiming that the reason people seek to fight Israel is antisemitism, not because of the tangible actions Israel has been undertaking. 

The story of Jacob and Esau, as it goes in the Torah, is that Jacob defrauded his brother of his inheritance and birthright - this week’s portion gives all the details. When you read the rabbinic commentaries, they try to construct an excuse for Jacob’s deception - providing flimsy midrash to show that he didn’t lie; he just allowed Isaac to come to his own conclusions. For instance, when Isaac asks Jacob, “Esau, is it you, my son? In the text, Jacob responds, “Ani,” “I am.” But Rashi twists it to overcome this lie, claiming, ”Jacob did not say, “I am Esau”, but “It is I”.

The true p’shat, simple, reading is clear - Jacob tricked Esau and Isaac in order to inherit both the power and the wealth of Abraham. After this trick, Esau, in utter dismay, says to his father, “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” And wept aloud.

The rabbis, continuing in their attempt to absolve Jacob of his own wrongdoing, eventually come to a conclusion, found in the midrash, “It is halachah (a clear and unalterable law) that Esau hates Jacob.” As Professor Shaul Magid writes, “In traditional Jewish circles, the phrase “Esau hates Jacob” is often deployed as a theological maxim to define antisemitism…but (quoting Malachi Hacohen), Russian and Polish acculturated Jewish writers . . . adopted popular conceptions of Esau from the rabbinic idiom and turned them into ethnic ones. Esau emerged as the Goy, the non- Jew, the quintessential Other. Zionist writer Hayim Nahman Bialik provided the equivalent in Hebrew, as did other authors.”

In short, the “why” of antisemitism here is that inherent to Esau, the goy, or non-Jews, is a hatred of Jews. The obverse, in this line of thinking, is true as well- Jewish existence is predicated upon this same universal, eternal hatred. The founder of Political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, concurred, saying:

“We are a group, a historical group of people who clearly belong together and have a common enemy; this seems to me an adequate definition of a nation. We are a historical group held together by a common foe. This is what we are, whether we know it or not, and whether we desire it or not.”

This construction of antisemitism is one that does not base itself in material reality - it does not seek to understand the wider contexts and forces at play which lead to such hatred; it does not wish to actually overcome antisemitism, because if it did, the binding force of what is understood to be a Jew would lose its coherence. And, so, antisemitism must be an eternal reality - it must be halachah. It must be that Esau always has, and always will, hate Jacob.

In the plain reading of the ongoing Torah story, Jacob knows his own guilt, and, in the course of many years, works to overcome this impulse within him. In doing so, as beautifully literary as the Torah ever is, he is given a new name which is the opposite of his old name. The commentator Ibn Ezra notes that the Hebrew root (Akov) of Jacob can be read to mean “deceptive.” He also alludes to a reading of the root of the name Israel, which Jacob receives in having overcome his deceptive nature, is Yashar, related to being upright, or straightforward.

Esau had good reason to hate Jacob for his deception. Jacob overcame the nature that led to his behavior, received a new name, and then, we will see later in the Torah, they reconciled. This is not to say that the parallel with antisemitism works here, too - of course, antisemitism does not exist because Jews did something wrong. But the way in which Sarah Hurwitz, and others, seek to use antisemitism as a cover for true wrongdoings committed by Jews is mirrored in this historical idea. Antisemitism, of course, should not be used to dodge and evade responsibility. Had Jacob continued to evade his responsibility, the name Israel would not even exist - the only reason it does was his willingness to take responsibility for his own actions, and to be righteous. Perhaps, then, that is our path as well - even in the face of the bigoted hatreds of antisemitism that do certainly exist, we must follow Yashar-El - the God of uprightness, and be the ones to live in the image of Jacob, the true Israel.

Vayeitzei 2024: Jacob's Boundaryless Blessing

There's very little that all human civilizations agree upon but looking at the mythic record universally humans believed they were made from the earth. The list of human civilizations which include myths of humanity being molded from some form of dirt is global. Obviously, the Torah teaches this as well:

וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה

God formed the human from the humus of the earth. The humus, the thin layer of topsoil, is afar in Hebrew. This word is more often translated as dust.

In this week's Torah portion God reiterates the promise to Jacob that was made to Isaac and Abraham before. God promised Isaac and Abraham that their descendants shall possess the land upon which they wandered, but for Jacob it is modified greatly, saying: Your descendants shall be as the aphar of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants.

The word aphar here, is the same word used in the creation of Adam. Again, it is most often translated as dust, but dust doesn't make sense in the context of the blessing. It could be that I've just spent too long living in prewar apartments in New York, but dust doesn't have a positive valence to me. To say your descendents will be like dust, sounds like a curse, not a blessing, and further, to say that their dustiness will be a blessing to all families of the earth, simply doesn't compute. To translate it as humus, the most fertile part of the soil, makes more sense. It is also the topmost layer that most easily moves. By this time in human history fertilizer was already in use. So, it's possible to read this blessing quite differently than one might assume based on the English translation. God is promising Jacob that his descendents will be spread out throughout the world as a blessing to all of the nations, just as fertilizer is spread across the fields to help them bear fruit.

I can not speak to the way that other human cultures may have valenced the earth they were made from but I can say in this instance the Torah is being specific for a reason. It teaches that all humanity is made from this substance, at the same time that it teaches us that humanity's role on the planet is to till and tend the earth - to aid in the abundance of nature. The descendants of Jacob, though, were assigned to fulfill a specific mode of this mission: to aid in the abundance of humanity.

We will not be packed earth settled in one place but instead be everywhere helping the people where we live to thrive.

We will not be settled in one land ascribed boundaries to delimit our identities but be blessings to people the world over through our presence amongst them, enriching them, just as one would spread humus to enrich soil elsewhere.

But how will we do this? The Talmud teaches that this iteration of the covenant that started with Abraham continued with Isaac, and found its ultimate expression in Jacob, and has ostensibly passed down to all Jews is rooted in Shabbat.

Rabbi Yohanan said: The reward for delighting in Shabbat is specifically the inheritance of Jacob. Not that of Abraham and Isaac, for whom the promise was bordered; There are no boundaries for Jacob's portion. Part of our blessing of all the families of the earth is then our delighting in Shabbat.

This is an incredible idea. Rabbi Yohanan here is saying that the boundarylessness of Shabbat is the key of the blessing of the Jacob's covenant. That we, bringing Shabbat throughout the world, are blessing all of the families of the earth with this Divine inheritance; that, in fact, abundance will come from rest.

I think this means a couple of things. One, it means that we are teaching those around us that sacred rest is necessary. The late capitalist drive towards endless work as the way to make one's life meaningful is inherently undermined by the importance of Shabbat, and the early capitalist drive in this country was actively impeded by Jewish activists who lobbied first, via an organization called the Sabbath Alliance, for a 6 day work week then for a more ecumenical 5 day work week as a way for both Jews and Christians to observe their Sabbaths.

These activists were embodying the blessing of Jacob here in America. May we here today continue doing the work of being a blessing wherever we are. May we take to heart the notion that the descendents of Jacob are a force for abundance throughout the world. And may we remember that sometimes it is Divine rest that is needed to find the boundarylessness of our inheritance.

Rosh haShanah 2024: The Day of Creation

Rosh haShanah has many meanings within it - the Celebration of the New Year, Day of Remembrance, Day of the Shofar's Blast. One of the ways the traditional prayer book refers to Rosh haShanah is "Yom haRat Olam." This is often translated as "The Birthday of the World," but that's not quite correct. The phrase, "Yom haRat" really means "day of conception." The world has not yet been born - but is on the verge of being born.

The phrase "haRat Olam" are originally the words of the prophet Jeremiah - and in that context the meaning is quite different. It does not mean "The world is born." The Hebrew word Olam has two meanings, in fact - it can mean "universe" but it can also mean "forever."

In Jeremiah, the prophet is mourning his own birth, due to the suffering he has faced for standing up and speaking truth against the powers of his day. He is, in fact, wishing that he be forever conceived but never born.

We see two opposite metaphors occurring to describe the meaning of this day. One is hopeful - it is a day of possibility; a new beginning is on the horizon. The other, the opposite - it is a day of desolation, in which the world to be born may never see the light of day.

I think we, gathered here today, are feeling this mixture. After this year of unending horror, in which not only our country has funded the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but that the genocide is being committed in the name of our safety as Jews; a year where many of us were punished, like Jeremiah, for speaking out against power; a year where it seemed things couldn't get worse, and then they have continued to; it may be that many of us stand in fear of what is to come in the new year, many of us may not want it born at all.

And, for some of us, there is a glimmer of hope. That, perhaps in this new year ready to be born, a new beginning is possible. Perhaps something subtle, something imperceivable, will change in the world along with the turning of the calendar, and we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps.

A step further into the metaphor of the day. Our tradition tells us that it was on Rosh haShanah that the first human was created. This could mean, then, that it is not about the literal world's creation, but instead about the promise of human creativity - not until humanity was created was the world truly ready to begin. It wasn't yet alive. And now, we are here, and it is our job to make it alive. This, too, is why our tradition tells us that saving a human life is like saving a whole world, and taking a human life is like destroying a whole world.

This means that each of us, today, are generating a new world. Each and every human being is on the precipice of a brand new beginning; conversely, we can hold that world back. We can keep it from ever emerging.

This idea - each human producing their own new world - can resonate with a capitalistic sense of separateness that blinds us to the true nature of our worlds. They overlap. They intersect. And, in fact, they even collide, and combine with other worlds we find anathema. Worlds we find completely unacceptable. Each and every one of us has experienced this. Our vision of the world, of what is right and just, is whole in our minds and in our bodies. And sometimes we encounter someone who, just as whole in mind and body, contains the precise opposite vision. Abjection occurs - disgust - a desire to fully separate; to draw a thick barrier; perhaps even to destroy.

Now, I'm not suggesting every world is equally valid and good. I am suggesting, though, that they each must be acknowledged, and even approached, if only to combat them. But how we do that, and with whom, is a major question. And, in so doing, our own worlds are always altered. We can not enter into relation, even a combative one, with someone or something without being changed by it. We must be careful of how we can be changed to more closely resemble that which we loathe, simply by being in a combative relationship with it, and therefore create a world in their mirror image, but still their image. We must remain aware of how we are changing even as we work to change others.

As we step into this moment, this new year, this opportunity to birth our world anew, let's discuss what it means to be in relationship with those we find completely antithetical to us. Who and what have you encountered this year that have made you feel that abjection, that sense of total revulsion? How has that feeling changed your own vision for the world, or affected your approach to your vision? How would you want to revise that experience now, as we have an opportunity to reconceive of the world we are bringing into being?

Vaera 2023: Fear and its Wisdom

The beginning of wisdom is the fear of Adonai; all who practice it gain sound understanding.

This line from Psalm 111 has always puzzled me. My contemporary mind and experience chafe at the idea that fearing God is central to our religion; central to our existence. Many suggest we translate that discomfort out of the phrase, by claiming that, in fact, the word means “awe,” not fear. But that is a spurious attempt at comforting our modern sensibilities, which I think ends up avoiding an integral part of our tradition.

In our Torah portion this week, we bump up against this question. God, while charging him with his sacred duty to lead the Israelites out of slavery, says to Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name יהוה.”

The ancient rabbis were completely bowled over by this. What? Somehow Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob didn’t know the true God? And what of the places all over Genesis where it says that they used Adonai as God’s name? 

One of the most central sages of Torah, Ramban, writes: What the text really means is that God appeared to the Patriarchs as El Shaddai, the name by which God can overcome astrological forces and perform miracles that are great, but do not upset the natural order of things. 

Our tradition has always been uncomfortable with astrology. ultimately our sources believe astrology does, indeed, work, but does not wholly apply to the people of Israel. Rambans’s interpretation brings out the stark relief of God’s miracles in this week’s Torah portion to that which came before. We read about the nature-defying plagues raining down upon the Egyptians, amongst other wholly supernatural occurrences. 

In contrast, the great miracle performed for Abraham was the elderly pregnancy of Sarah. If, according to this understanding, Abraham had known God as Moses did,  perhaps Isaac would have miraculously appeared fully formed, rather than going through the normal gestational process. 

On a similar note, Ibn Ezra, another of our most central commentators, adds this idea: Cleaving to God in order to overcome one’s predetermined fate is the mystery underlying the entire Torah. This difference between relating to these two aspects of God is integral to understanding fear of Adonai.

Judaism writ large, as Ibn Ezra puts it, is about creating a relationship with the Divine that allows us to move beyond the normal conception of what is possible; to accept the limitations of our own knowledge, and see that, in fact, the patterns and forms that we believe to be immutable can be absolutely changed by God.

Many of you may be thrown off by the talk of astrology and miracles as part of this underlying theology, but let me try to clarify with contemporary science. In her book, 

Understanding Our Unseen Reality, Dr. Ruth Kastner explains quantum theory this way:

Let us recall Plato’s Cave…There are prisoners chained in the cave so that they can only see the wall in front of them, which has shadows dancing across it. The prisoners take the shadows as real, because to them they are the only things that are observable…Now, suppose the light is turned off. There are no shadows; but those objects which could cast shadows if the light were turned on, still exist…In a similar way, quantum possibilities are necessary precursors to spacetime events…quantum possibilities are not contained within spacetime, and are not certain to give rise to specific spacetime events, but they are necessary precursors to any such event.

Similar to the dynamic between the two kinds of miracles above, we find here a frame for understanding “fear of Adonai” as related to our own ignorance. The Patriarchs, in their relationship to God as El Shaddai, would have been like the prisoners in the cave, like many of us, attributing God to the shadows dancing in the light. Moses, on the other hand, would have turned around, and seen the objects which cast the shadows, and the source of the light itself: The quantum possibilities outside of spacetime. 

Underlying the whole Torah, is this idea: Those objects, and that light, is the ultimate source of all reality, and we are not capable of knowing precisely what they are, or how they will manifest. Just as quantum physics dwells in the realm of the unknowable, beyond that of tangible reality, so too does the Jewish conception of Adonai. Adonai is simply giving a name to that experience.

The Talmud teaches: Rava was wont to say: The objective of Torah wisdom is to achieve repentance and good deeds... as it is stated: “The beginning of wisdom is fear of Adonai, all who practice them gain sound understanding” (Psalms 111:10).

It is not stated simply: All who practice it, but rather: All who practice them, those who practice repentance and good deeds, as they ought to be performed, meaning those who do such deeds for their own sake, not those who do them not for their own sake. One who does them not for their own sake, it would have been preferable for them had they not been created.

Fear of Adonai is not fear of a vengeful man in the sky, liable to strike us down with a lightning bolt, but the fear that comes from looking directly into the darkness and realizing that we do not and can not truly know what will come of it. Let us remember that acknowledging our own ignorance, acknowledging our own limitations, is the beginning of wisdom. We may only see the shadows dancing on the wall and act accordingly, but if, regardless of how those shadows dance, we seek repentance and good deeds for their own sake, we are beginning to attain wisdom. 

Let us, in our days and our nights, see that fear of the unknown is the beginning, not the end of wisdom. Let us accept and move beyond that stage of fear, getting to the underlying mystery of Torah, and use this knowledge to guide our hearts and our words towards further wisdom.

Terumah 2023: The Torah of Media

Who hasn’t recently had a conversation about the media? Is the media too biased? What about social media? Is it destroying the world? It’s quite popular, especially within the media itself, to blame the media for all of the world’s ills. Media, as a word, has suffered from semantic drift. The word media is simply a plural of medium, while the word medium, at its core, is really just a word for that which is in between two things - which is to say, that space through which information is transmitted. 

Media do, in fact, affect the information that they transmit. The form they take shapes the information that passes through them, like a mold with molten metal poured inside - and then out comes the information in its new form. The original material remains, but in a new form that carries with it a new layer of meaning. 

It is not a coincidence that these particular forms - molten idols - are forbidden to the Jewish people. They were a stumbling block for us throughout history, as they distorted the message of God's oneness too dramatically. Yet, this week’s Torah portion is completely centered around building objects that are, themselves, media for God. 

The Tabernacle, a moveable sanctuary in which Moses and the priesthood could interact with God, is described in minute detail throughout the portion - its measurements, its required materials, and how it all fits together. It is quite easy to miss the forest for the trees as the portion lists each tiny piece of the Tabernacle and how it is to be constructed. Rather than throw our hands up at the mystery of why our ancestors included these arduously difficult to read verses, we have the gift of Torah. Torah is not just the words written in the scroll, but the ideas of those who came after, in their own forms of transmission, acting as molds themselves for the words that echo throughout eternity from the scroll.

Ibn Ezra, a prolific medieval rabbi, saw within the Tabernacle of our Torah portion a medium as well. In his commentary on the portion, he wrote, “the human is as a form of the upper world in miniature, as the human was the final point of God’s creation of the earth; and the Tabernacle is the medium form of the world, acting as an intermediary between the miniature form, that is the human, and the greatest form, that is the world itself, and each of the three have 18 corresponding features.”

Our tradition sees within the Tabernacle not just a place where the ancients  sacrificed animals, and where Moses went to speak face to face with God, but a message in its form. The Tabernacle, according to Ibn Ezra, corresponds to the human body, as well as the foundational forms of the universe, echoing a message of 18 parts through each of the media - from the highest point of the Divine, through the Tabernacle, to us. 

Setting aside the 18 specifics, what is it that we call this stream of Divine information which moves from the vast reaches of the Universe through our ancestors to us? We call it Torah. Moses, through his engagement with the Tabernacle, revealed Torah, and we, through our engagement with our senses, with the world, and the words of our ancestors, reveal Torah. Allow me a brief moment of mysticism. As many of you may know, the number 18 is often referred to as “chai,” as the Hebrew alphabet has both linguistic and numeric values, and the numeric value of the word “chai” is 18. Chai means life - Jews throughout the world will do things, such as donate money, in multiples of 18 as a way of charging their donations with extra blessing; for using their donations or gifts as a medium for something more than money; to make the act Jewish. 

And, famously, our Torah is referred to as “Eitz Chayyim” The Tree of Life, or Lives if you translate it literally. The tree of 18, or, 18s: plural. Torah is our medium for transmitting chai, that is, life; passed down to our ancestors through the Tabernacle, which itself transmitted life, chai. Today we shape it, we create it, and we place it in the world through speaking, through writing, and through action. In doing so, we, ourselves, build a Tabernacle, creating a place for God to dwell amongst us. When we align ourselves to occupy the proper role in relation to the universe and our tradition, we become bearers, channels of Torah, of Jewish life. We become the medium, but only through proper alignment.

Proper alignment in Judaism is called tzedek which is best translated in English as working towards clarity of what is most right in any situation and having the chutzpah to stand up for that clear rectitude without fear of the outcome. Our rabbis taught what an ish tzedek, a righteous persona tzadik, is also called “life” Chaiim. May each of you find your way into embodying, becoming the medium for your own branch of Eitz Chayim, the tree of life, the Torah. May our people become stronger for it, our world become richer, and may it lead us all to paths of peace. Shabbat Shalom.

Rosh haShanah 2022: Overcoming the Mindset

Since I was a young child, I’ve been hearing that climate change is the greatest risk to human longevity on this planet. There was different language for it - fighting global warming, or pollution, being an environmentalist, saving the ozone layer - but it was the same idea.  Growing up there were endless campaigns for recycling, for saving electricity, for cutting up the little rings that cans come connected in so as not to choke animals, to get rid of styrofoam. Some of these campaigns were effective, as the hole in the ozone we heard about so much for so long finally closed last year, but climate change still looms. 

I think that most people are a bit burned out on the patchwork system of actions that don’t feel like they’re helping; some may have even felt like giving up entirely. This is in part because the causes of climate change aren’t merely tangible. They are rooted in human psychology; in the story we tell about ourselves in relation to the world we live in. What we should do to respond to climate change is, in fact, as much a spiritual question as it is a scientific one.  

Rosh haShanah has a handful of meanings attributed to it, but the one that is most important to me is the commemoration of the birth of humanity; of God creating the first human being. This is why we call it “yom harat olam” - the day the world was created. For before there was a human being to witness and participate in the world, there was no world as-such. After, though, things changed. Our rabbis tell us that when God created the first human, and said “They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth,” that this truly meant that the human, and us as inheritors of this mitzvah, were being given a warning. If we merit to rule by living in God’s image, we will rule. But if we do not merit to rule by living in God’s image, we will be ruled in turn by the rest of God’s creation.

The idea of humanity ruling over the world, particularly since Modernity and the industrial revolution, has been core to the way our contemporary civilization has envisioned itself in relation to nature. When I first read that an unmeriting humanity would be “ruled by Creation” in this ancient rabbinic commentary, it sent shivers down my spine. It brought me back to the bus trips I took from Brooklyn through a darkened lower Manhattan in the wake of hurricane Sandy, when there was no electricity, when the national guard was deployed. It made me think of my friends and family who have had to flee wildfires in the American West; it brought to mind the drying rivers and the flooding in Pakistan which has displaced 11 million people. This rabbinic interpretation created a different relationship between humanity and the rest of Creation, and one we must reflect on. 

A story. One of my favorite thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff, recently released a book in which he tells the story of being paid to consult with a room full of very wealthy and powerful businessmen about how to survive the coming “Event.” These individuals believe that under the pressures we are all now feeling daily, particularly climate change, that in the near future a civilizational collapse will occur, and that they need to create their own ticket out of dodge. Rushkoff was brought in to help them think through the details - if they need a security force, how will they keep them loyal? Should they design collars for them? Should they just opt for robot security? If this line of questioning is disturbing to you, you’re not alone, and the thinking behind it is, itself, the spiritual malady we must wrestle with. 

Along with the idea of humanity needing to merit ruling over earth, our rabbis found another detail about humanity in the story of God’s Creation. Throughout the Creation story, God says that each step is “good,” and then, once all of the pieces are created, God says that the whole is “very good.” This shift has two layers of meaning. God is saying, on one level, that the complex interweaving of life, in which every piece is dependent on each other, and the whole is a beautiful, and dynamic system, is God’s ultimate source of pride. But the ancient rabbis found a completely different concept within - that prior to humanity, everything was simply “good,” and that the entrance of humanity led to a new, important complicating factor, which was “very good.” They referred to this factor as the “yetzer haRa,” often translated as the evil inclination. It is, in short, the inclination towards self interest and self enrichment, and self propagation.

In Douglas Rushkoff’s story, the Yetzer haRa taken over these wealthy and powerful individuals. They not only were knowingly contributing to creating “The Event,” or the civilizational collapse they foresaw and feared, but they were also responding to it with the same behavior that was leading to the Event in the first place. Rushkoff, too, sees this in their reaction, and he refers to the set of beliefs and impulses that are driving them, and much of America today, as “The Mindset.” The Mindset, he writes, “means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.”

The rabbis did not think we needed to, or even could, do away with our Yetzer HaRah, our inclination towards selfishness, but that, instead, we needed to maintain control over it and balance it. For them, the Yetzer HaRa was the underlying force leading humanity to marry and procreate, to build houses, and to do business. This means that all of these things are necessary and should not be avoided, but they must be done with consideration of our actions’ impacts upon the world. That is our responsibility; that is how we merit ruling rather than being ruled - not by becoming more powerful and by hoarding individual resources, but by broadening our horizons to include not only our own short-term goals and individual desires, but the long term health of the whole of God’s complex creation.

The Mindset, then, is a distilled version of the Yetzer haRa. It is the impulse to turn all other things in the world into objects that can be used to maintain individual enrichment and survival, at the expense of everything and everyone else. It is a mode of separating humanity from the intermeshing of the Divine Creation, and then the individual human entirely from the human collective itself. Their escape plans display this directly. For instance, rather than investing their large amounts of resources into working to help humanity, and the rest of our habitat,  adjust to the changing climate and perhaps slow it down, they would prefer to invest in figuring out how to colonize Mars using industry that worsens climate change on Earth in order to escape the planet from the effects of climate change altogether. 

A midrash, an ancient rabbinic story, teaches us that when God created the first human, God took Adam and led Adam around all the trees of the Garden of Eden and said: “Look at My works, how beautiful and praiseworthy they are! And all that I have created, it was for you that I created it. Pay attention that you do not corrupt and destroy My world: if you corrupt it, there is no one to repair it after you.”

We stand at a crossroads in our civilization. It is clear that The Mindset, or the Yetzer haRa, has taken hold over the levers of power, and that without a rapid and purposeful push to change direction, we will be driven off a cliff while those running the train attempt to escape before it crashes. But there is no escape. There is no one else that can repair it after us- it is up to us. 

So, what then? Although there are many small, symbolic steps we can take to disengage from the Mindset, we need to consider a more systemic response, and preferably one that engages those people driving this train. In the initial meeting that spurred Rushkoff’s book, he did give an answer as to how these escapees would be able to keep their security staff loyal 

after the Event. He told them, “Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships…the way to make sure your head of security doesn’t [turn on you] tomorrow is to pay for his daughter’s bat mitzvah today.” 

This pithy statement has a lot to it. It, in fact, undermines the whole question he was being asked. Rather than figuring out how to simply protect themselves, as if they are all that matter, or even capable of fully separating from the rest of humanity and the planet, they needed to more deeply connect with those around them, and to see how they are inextricably tied to others. We are all part of the network of life, and each of us has an important role to play in the ongoing unfolding of the cosmos. If we can integrate that thinking into a new mindset, we may find a way to move forward into the future without plummeting off the cliff together. Because wherever we’re going we’re going together.

We, in this community, have a particular responsibility to fight The Mindset. We exist in a seat of power and privilege, simply via location, that is rare in this world. We have influence and power, and if we are able to root out the most extreme versions of the mindset within ourselves, to broaden the scope of care, to teach ourselves and each other what it means to merit ruling, we can influence others to do the same as well.

In this new year of 5783, let us remember that our place in this diverse, beautiful system is not one of conquering emperors. If we continue on as we have, and put individual advancement above all else, we will be reigned over by that which we try to suppress. This is true of our engagement with other humans, and other cultures, as much as it is of our engagement with the non-human ecosystem around us. 

In 5783, let us look towards a way of living that reigns in the toxic extremes of the Mindset, of the Yezter HaRa, and instead help ourselves, each other, and all the rest of humanity see that each year, we have a chance to reset, to return to the moment of humanity’s creation, and attempt, once again, to see the beautiful, complex interweaving of our world as Very Good. Shanah tovah. 

Yitro 2021: You Cannot Do It Alone

In America, we have always valorized the idea of the strong, stoic individual who can lead the people. It is a cliche about us the world over. John Wayne exemplifies this American archetype, but we find it still today - in the lifting up of individuals as heroic for their solitary work. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, even Bill Gates are all seen as representing this individualistic ideal. But, one of the clearest lessons of this pandemic is that individualism has severe limitations - and limitations that we must move beyond. Luckily we have the Torah, which has already identified this issue.

In this week’s Torah portion, Moses learns this same lesson. He starts his role as leader of the Israelite nation by personally adjudicating every issue, even the most minor, that arises. Shortly after he begins, his father in law comes for a visit. A priest and leader himself, Yitro, for whom the portion is named, tells Moses what he’s doing is completely wrong headed. When he sees what Moses is doing, he says to Moses, “לֹא־טוֹב֙ הַדָּבָ֔ר אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַתָּ֖ה עֹשֶֽׂה׃” - It is not good, this thing that you are doing.

This may seem like a very basic statement, but hiding within it is a great secret - and one we Americans need to learn from. Lo tov - not good - is a rare phrase in the Torah. It is used only here, and one other place - when God sees Adam alone in the Garden and says, “לֹא־ט֛וֹב הֱי֥וֹת הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְבַדּ֑וֹ אֶֽעֱשֶׂהּ־לּ֥וֹ עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ׃”- It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make for him an “Ezer K’negdo” - a helper over against him.”

These two instances are clearly related. In both, one individual man is given to rule over all. In the instance in Genesis, God’s immediate response is to create the animal kingdom, as well as Eve, a human counterpart. In the instance on Exodus, Yitro gives Moses a structure for sharing his authority - taking his role as intermediary between God and the people as only a piece of a larger system.

A classical commentator picks up on this in an oblique way. Sforno, a 15th century Itaian rabbi, said of the necessity for a partner for Adam: an ezer k’negdo is a helpmate who will be equal to him, also reflecting the divine image. This is essential for him if he is to know what precisely his needs are and so that he can meet them in time. The reason why the Torah added the word כנגדו is that whenever one confronts someone of equal power, moral and ethical weight, such a confrontation is termed נגד. It is a head-on collision of will. It is in this sense that we have to understand such statements as משה שקול כנגד כל ישראל, “Moses’s voice was, k’neged, confronting the entire Jewish people.” (Mechilta Yitro 1)

We see a hint at the line of “Lo Tov” between Adam and Moses - Adam needed a reflection of the Divine Image, which was found in the creatures around him and his female counterpart, and Moses needed a reflection of the Divine Image, was found in the people Israel. Only by seeing each as an equal to them were they able to function correctly in their capacities. But we can also take from this that the same is true of the opposite. Eve needed an ezer k’negdo in Adam, as did the animal kingdom. And Israel needed an ezer k’negdo in Moses. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, one in which all parties necessitate the connection in order to be “tov” good, rather than “lo tov” - not good. 

Another aspect is at play here, too, that comes up more clearly in this week’s portion. Yitro goes on to say, 

“נָבֹ֣ל תִּבֹּ֔ל גַּם־אַתָּ֕ה גַּם־הָעָ֥ם הַזֶּ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר עִמָּ֑ךְ כִּֽי־כָבֵ֤ד מִמְּךָ֙ הַדָּבָ֔ר לֹא־תוּכַ֥ל עֲשֹׂ֖הוּ לְבַדֶּֽךָ׃” “

you will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well. For the task is too kaveid for you; you cannot do it alone.”

The word kaveid is usually translated as heavy in this instance, but it is more nuanced than that. It is the same Hebrew root used for how one must treat one’s parents, often translated as honor, and is also the same root used in multiple instances for Pharaoh’s stubborn response which inevitably led to the demise of many Egyptians, and his own great loss. It is also used by God to describe what God gains by publicly destroying the Egyptians and humiliating Pharaoh. 

The word is often translated as honor, but I believe this to be incorrect. Instead, I would suggest gravity, or gravitas.It holds the same sense of “weightiness,” while also referring to an individual’s responsibility. It connotes seriousness, as well as authority. It also connotes stubbornness - being stuck in one perspective, as was true of Pharaoh. In our contemporary day, it evokes the idea of interconnectedness. Gravity is that mysterious force which requires all things to move in relation to each other.

Our Torah is teaching us something very important - we can not give ourselves too much gravity. Not as individuals, as Moses had mistakenly done, and not as a species, as God’s creation of the animals in response to Adam’s own alone-ness makes clear. We can not give ourselves too much kavod - we must remember that it is not good, and that the real goal is for us to be in relationship, to be k’neged each other, and the world, honoring each piece with its own gravity, as a part of the Divine Image.

Martin Buber, in his seminal “I and Thou,” wrote: RELATION IS MUTUAL. My Thou affects me, as I affect it. We are molded by our pupils and built up by our works...How we are educated by children and by animals! We live our lives inscrutably included within the streaming mutual life of the universe.”

This mutuality is the way in which our own gravity and the gravity of those we stand k’neged meet. When we, each of us, maintain that it is lo tov to be alone, and instead follow the guidance of God, and Yitro, we stand in mutual relation to each other, and the world. We hold an awareness of our gravity, so that it doesn’t become too much to bear, so that it doesn’t wear us and others out, but instead, stands in relation to the gravity of others. 

As we live an altered existence in which our ability to connect with others directly is often stymied, and in which we see laid bare the ways in which we are reliant upon each other and our environment, may each of us remember that it is lo tov to go it alone - we must maintain our connection with the streaming mutual life of the universe. We must remember that individualism should not be held up as an ideal in and of itself, but instead used as a way to understand our mutual reliance upon each other and the environment. May we remember what is tov - what is good - shevet achim gam yachad - dwelling together as one.

Vayetse 2020: A Small Sanctuary

In our Torah portion this week, Vayetse, Jacob and his father in law Laban set up a matzeivah together in order to seal a pact of peace. This monument, a stone stood upright as a pillar surrounded by a mound of stones, serves two purposes. One, to memorialize the moment of the pact, and two, to act as a boundary marker. As Laban puts it, “Look, this mound, and, look, the pillar that I cast up between you and me, witness be the mound and witness the pillar, that I will not cross over to you past this mound and you will not cross over to me past this mound, and past this pillar, for harm.”

Our early ancestors like Jacob raised matzeivot all the time. At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Jacob sets one up to mark the spot of his famous dream of a ladder upon which angels entered and left our world, and calls this place Bet El. In next week’s portion, he sets one up as a memorial to Rachel after she dies. But we read in Deuteronomy, “You shall not...erect a standing stone (matzevah); for such Adonai your God detests.”

The rabbis of old are anything but clarifying as to this conflict about matzeivot - so many lauded characters in the Torah set them up, yet the Deuteronomy prohibits them. Some say that this prohibition is only with regard to idolatry, some say that it is only if one is going to use the matzevah to offer sacrifices of incense, while some say any matzevah at all is forbidden. 

Regardless of their estimation of the appropriateness of matzevot, the rabbis tend to agree that the one set up by Jacob in Bet El is a precursor to the Temple in Jerusalem which would be built on the very same spot. Midrash tells us that this pillar began as a mound of stones, which in their fervor to be a part of this sacred space, magically assembled together into a single pillar for him to set up. This means that the central location for connection with God, the place from which Torah would go forth, and the site which birthed the original unification of our people was built upon a forbidden structure.

The Temple, too, was seen as questionable by God in its founding. When David first suggested he build it, God responded, saying, “ Is it you who would build Me a house for Me to dwell in? For I have dwelled in no house from the day I brought up the Israelites out of Egypt until this day, but I have gone about in tent and tabernacle. Wherever I went about among all the Israelites, did I speak a word with any of the tribal chiefs of Israel whom I charged to shepherd My people Israel, saying, Why did you not build me a cedarwood house?”

God is clearly rebuking the idea that God would need a permanent home to dwell in at all. But we humans who dwell in time and space, stuck in material limitations, want something tangible and stable. So, God relented, and allowed the Temple to be built for our sake upon the similarly forbidden matzeivah of Jacob. 

With regards to the matzevah that Jacob and Laban made together, there was both a mound of stones, and a pillar. Quite different from the pillar that Jacob constructed at Bet El, these two monuments represent two different orientations towards the way in which the sacred impinges upon the normal. They act as guideposts, in order to allow for those who come across them to connect mindfully and differently with space, be it sacred or profane.

The matzevah of Jacob’s ladder is clearly in an up and down orientation, itself representing a meeting place between heaven and earth. The matzevah and mound of Laban and Jacob’s pact has multiple orientations - the pillar creates a sacred up and down axis, while the many different rocks around it create a permeable barrier between that sacred and profane. A chasidic master of the last generation, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, viewed this as a sacred barrier that allows Jacob to cross over into Laban’s land without being tainted by the negative influences of Laban’s corrupt philosophy of life. These structures connect two realms, while also setting a clear boundary between them.

The stones we set up in cemeteries, as Jacob does for Rachel next week, represent a similar impulse. They, themselves, reach downwards - down towards the remnants of the beloved dead, attempting to build a connection between us and them. Some, too, reach upwards - attempting to build a connection between the dead and the Divine. Some, though, are mausoleums. They are houses, not unlike the Temple in Jerusalem which was built upon the place Jacob stood up his first matzeivah.

This is a third kind of monument, not quite like the others. Rather than reaching down, up, or out, it invites us in. This third kind of monument is precisely the one which has become the essence of Jewish building. When the first Temple was destroyed, the Prophet Ezekiel referred to buildings such as these in the Diaspora as a “Mikdash m’at” - a small Temple. After the second destruction, our Rabbis took this phrase to refer to synagogues and Jewish houses of study worldwide, as well as individual Jewish homes that issue forth Torah. 

The sages went even further, suggesting that the dinner table in a Jewish home is parallel to the altar that once stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. This mikdash m’at, this small Temple, may actually be preferable to the large Jerusalem Temple of old. They create personal sacred space in which the Divine dwells. And, to reflect on the words of the Psalmist, 

טוֹב-מְעַט לַצַּדִּיק מֵהֲמוֹן רְשָׁעִים רַבִּים׃

כִּי זְרוֹעוֹת רְשָׁעִים תִּשָּׁבַרְנָה וְסוֹמֵךְ צַדִּיקִים יְהוָה

The small is better for the righteous than the great is for the evil, for the strength of the evil shall be broken, while the righteous rely on Adonai.

Today, in many ways, the difference between the houses of gathering and our homes has been eradicated. We, when we wish to connect Divinely, can set up our own matzeivah, within our own Temple. Just as Jacob’s matzeivah existed as part of the Temple in Jerusalem, be they a computer, tablet, or phone, our matzeivot bridge the gap of space between our own mikdashim m’atim with sacred intention and contemporary technology. 

These standing pillars of technology may not be permanent or stone structures, but they allow us to transcend our own small realms in order to reach into the wider sacred connection between all of us. Although we also use them for profane things like business, our homes, our individual mikdashim me’atim, can allow us to turn them into sacred objects. Our homes, which protect us, envelope us, and at their best allow us to feel the presence of God through their shalom, their wholeness of peace, can transform these profane matzeivot into tools that connect us to the Divine. 

I pray that this Shabbat, each of you have felt this connection as you have joined us to celebrate our day of sacred rest. May each of you, wherever you are, find ways to create a mikdash me’at out of your homes by centering your intention, seeking a sense of connection, and grounding your sacred mindset for Torah. Then, when we connect with each other through our matzeivot, we build a community of mikdashim me’atim, of small, sacred spaces, all connected in time and space through the Divine. Shabbat shalom. Please join me on page 104 for the Adoration.

Bereishit 2020: Co-Creating Justice

Bereishit bara elohim et ha shamayim v’et ha’aretz

In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth. Bara, created, the verb here, is what biblical grammarians call “perfect tense” meaning it refers to an action that was completed - not ongoing. Then, as we know, God went on to create other aspects of the universe via speech- God said let there be light, and there was light. Each time God spoke going forward, it was not in the “perfect” tense. It was imperfect jussive - meaning an ongoing invitation, one that does not “finish,” but is ever unfolding.

Now, when it comes to humanity, it’s a little more complicated. The first of the two Creation stories of humanity uses the verb “Bara” once again -we are created, finished. The second time it is described, though, an entirely different verb and tense are used - vaYitzeir, and God formed the first human out of the dust of the earth. This time, it is a special grammatical form in Hebrew, called the vav-consecutive, in which an imperfect verb’s meaning is changed to something akin to perfect. It alters the imperfect to appear perfect.

We learn from this that a deep aspect of our basic being is Divine, completed in the image of God, and therefore stable. But then there is the dust that we inhabit, that was formed, Yatzar, from our very environment, from the elements that were created using speech. These elements, our morning liturgy tells us, are in a constant process of creation - m’chadeish b’kol yom tamid ma’aseh b’reishit - God renews the acts of creation every day. We and the world we reside within, are in process always. Continually changing, growing, morphing. We are mutable forms like the endlessly rotating planets in the sky, like the unendingly spinning atoms that make up all material.

We, then, are beings of motion and change with a stable, Divine core. That stability, that anchoring in the Eternal, is what gives us our creative capacity - that is, our capacity for choice. Later in our Torah portion, the story continues to show us that the freedom for choice led humanity, unfortunately, down a path of bad choices. Choices, our sages tell us, that involved rampant abuse of power. These were the crimes that led to the Flood. 

Rabbi David Kimchi tells us that every single choice the antediluvian ancestors made was based on the yetzer ha ra-  the impulse towards selfishness. The word yetzer is the very same verbal root used to describe God’s imperfect creation of humanity from the dust of the earth. It is the element that filters our ability to make choices, for tov, those that benefit the collective, or for ra, those that benefit only the self.

Kimchi goes on to tell us that God wanted those with power to share that power. God wanted humanity to take responsibility for each other. God wanted humanity to find peace with each other. God, in short, wanted humanity to choose progress towards greater equality and equity. God wanted humanity to choose the yetzer ha tov.

We, today, stand on a precipice not unlike theirs. Each of us senses the fragility of the upside-down pyramid of our economy. We see it in the inability of our government to provide support for those most in need during a pandemic. We see it in the way our systems continue to disenfranchise and harm black and brown people in particular; in the way that the disabled are left to fend for themselves in a system already built without them in mind. 

We see it in the ongoing push towards further imbalancing our environment, which itself causes exponentially more harm to already impoverished and disenfranchised communities. We see it in a parochialism that seeks to build safety for one group on the backs of harm and pain for others.

We, unlike our antediluvian ancestors, have the benefit of the Torah. We can read what went wrong, and learn from it. The choices that were made using the yetzer haRa were based on our ancestors’ fear. Their fear was of losing power, so they sought to continue to concentrate power amongst the few. This concentration of power was an overreach of the bara, of the desire for a finalized state, in the world of yetzer, ever-changing and growing Creation. In the realm of yetzer, things that may at one point be good, tov, for the whole may cease being good when kept for the singular. 

We have to consistently develop and adjust along with the world as it changes, and this is painful and hard. It is especially painful and hard for people with power who find comfort and safety in their individual sense of control. And especially if that sense of power was hard won, on the backs of familial stories of powerlessness. But being part of an ever changing world means that power structures are challenged.

Those that seek to make things which God created to be imperfect into something constant or unchanging, risk falling into the trap of the yetzer haRa; they risk damaging the collective in the process of enforcing stability for themselves.

What our Torah portion asks of us is to remember both sides of humanity’s creation, and to fuse them together. We must honor the eternal and finished bara, but recognize it serves only as an anchor for the yetzer, our mode of interacting and dwelling with the ever-changing universe. The two together are in constant motion - changing, adapting, becoming, varying. 

Our options are simple: we can choose to act with the collective in mind leaning towards the yetzer haTov, or we can choose to build the world with the self in mind, leaning towards the yetzer haRa. We can try to entrench our individual power out of fear, leaning towards the yetzer haRa, or we can use our power to create equity, equality, and liberty for all people, leaning towards the yetzer haTov. The choices are up to us, and therefore the ultimate outcomes our responsibility. 

Let us honor the bara, the created and finished Divine spark within us, by seeking to bring it into the yetzer, the world which we participate in forming. Let us not allow the fear of personal powerlessness inhibit our work towards sharing this love with all around us. Let us, together with our neighbors, build this world from love.

Toldot 2019: A Jewish Thanksgiving

I received an email earlier this week from a Jewish organization with the subject line, “Is Thanksgiving a Jewish holiday?” To answer clearly yes or no would be an oversimplification at best. Sure, gratitude is a wonderful Jewish value, harvest holidays are a thing we - along with many others - do and have done over time but can we unilaterally declare a day a Jewish one without acting that out? 

Is Tuesday a Jewish day? What about Sunday, my kids go to religious school on Sunday...does that make it more Jewish than Tuesday when they go to public school followed by Taekwondo? 

The question I would like to ask this morning - and in full disclosure to, provide but one answer to - is how do we make it so? Not “Is Thanksgiving a Jewish holiday?” but how do we make it a Jewish holiday? Just as we make each of the moments of the rest our lives Jewish, the Sundays, the Mondays…and the 4th Thursdays of November. 

I propose that we make it so by acknowledging the difficult parts of our past, the reality of the present and the adaptations necessary to bring to life what some might call the messianic age, and others, a just, equitable future. Certainly there are other ways to make our days Jewish, having a gratitude practice, saying 100 blessings a day, maybe the motzi over challah rolls before you dig into the turkey - or today, the leftovers. 

But I would also say that making this holiday Jewish involves glancing back at the less savory elements of the origins of the Thanksgiving narrative, seeing how they still play out in the present, and then doing teshuva, making a turn in another direction, to evolve ourselves, our families and this country.

In this proposal for how we make our days ‘Jewish’, Torah is at the center. This week we read a story of our people receiving blessing and bounty through deception and exploitation of weakness. Jacob, in partnership with his mother, first exploits his elder brother Esau’s ravenous hunger by offering him lentil soup in return for his birthright and then later deceives his father Isaac by dressing up as Esau and receiving the blessing deemed for Esau in his stead. Isaac is ready to give a blessing of prosperity and plenty to what he assumed would be his eldest son, and instead it is given to Jacob. Instead, Jacob receives both the birthright and the blessing and flees for fear of retribution from an angry and now powerless Esau. 

There are some parts of this story that are compelling. Rebecca coaxed Jacob to game the system based on a prophecy given her while pregnant that her younger son would rule the elder. Rooting for the underdog and subverting hegemony are certainly something I can get behind, and are resonant with critical moments in the experience of Jews over time.. 

But the story of this family, a founding narrative of our people, is complex, and filled with imperfect characters and actions. Conspiring, lying, exploiting weakness. Every year, this too is handed down as part of our inheritance, to be discussed, debated and reflected upon. The rabbis of old, with great reverence, attempted to redeem the characters and try and smooth over the complexities. And we do this with our own families too - the difficult stories, of hurt, boundaries transgressed, we redeem the characters sometimes and try to smooth over those complexities, for a variety of reasons. It is understandable, and has its place, and is often done with good will, even forgiveness and perspective in mind.

However another option is to reflect upon these complex histories and imperfect characters and learn from their mistakes, perhaps choosing to do things differently. Think of it as a transgenerational project of teshuva, of trying to do better ‘next time,’ teshuva is sometimes framed as learning from a past mistake in such a way that when you encounter the same situation again later, you make a different, improved choice that redeems the past action. 

If it is a ‘Jewish’ practice to look at the stories and histories we inherit and not only try to smooth over the imperfections, but learn from them, even departing from the actions of those who came before, how do we make Thanksgiving a “Jewish holiday,” in THIS way?

David Silverman, Professor of History at George Washington University, in his recent book, This Land is Their Land obliges us to do so by doing something not easy, taking a critical look at the history of the holiday of Thanksgiving itself. He acknowledges this will be hard on the living and a New Yorker review of his academic work describes why, “this approach questions the creation stories that uphold traditional social orders, making the heroes less heroic, and asking readers to consider the villains as full and complicated human beings.”

This may be hard on the living, but it is something we do. We do this. We do it with ourselves on Yom Kippur. We do this with the Torah, with Rebecca, Jacob and Esau as they grapple with a prophecy that the traditional social order will be upended, and continuing with the deception and exploitation that results in one people receiving another’s blessing. 

So too with Thanksgiving. In Philip Deloria’s article “The invention of Thanksgiving” he writes that, “We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony. Perhaps we should recall instead how English settlers cheated, abused, killed, and eventually drove a Native tribe into a conflict, known as King Philip’s War, that exploded across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was one of the most devastating wars in the history of North American settlement.” 

The holiday of intercultural harmony and cornucopias of plenty on which I was raised, and to which I still hold a place in my heart because it is a source of memory, and family connection, was created

And not created on Plymouth Rock in 1621 but instead over 300 years, as various pieces of history were stitched together and leveraged at different moments in American history to serve wholly different agendas - to undergird principles of religious freedom, to reinforce an ideology of manifest destiny, or to sow unity during the Civil War, such as when Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

As one scholar points out, the Natives who showed up at the first Thanksgiving did so not because they were invited. It is more likely that they were honoring a mutual defense treaty with the pilgrims, one likely forged from their own weakness’ as a result of a devastating plague. When the Native Americans heard shouting and shooting in the camp, they recalled their obligation to defend the new arrivals, took up arms and approached the settlement cautiously. What they found instead was that the Pilgrims were having, not a solemn feast of gratitude but a raucous, drunken party. 

So, how do we make Thanksgiving “Jewish”? 

That holiday. The created one. The created one rooted nonetheless in a difficult but important to reconstruct, politically charged, perilous, even violent narrative? There is no single way and perhaps it is folly to try, but we start by seeing the ways in which these narratives, some stitched together and others muted by time, still play out today. By looking around with wide eyes and seeing very visibly, many of the elements of that narrative still present today:

• treaties honored, and those abandoned. 

• groups whose weaknesses are exploited for others’ gain, 

• those building questionable alliances when their power is at stake

• And still others struggling to preserve connection and culture, independence and dignity 

What if this story - as messy and yet as instructive as our Torah - is one we re-read each year around this time - in order to remind ourselves what has changed, and what is still the same? This, I believe is what Judaism has to offer to Thanksgiving, a critical look backwards and forwards. 

A chance at teshuva and change in the present and a rededication of self, family and country to a better future.

Kol Nidrei 2018: The Vow of Shalom

“All vows that we have vowed upon ourselves from this Yom Kippur until the following one - may it come upon us for good - all of these we regret. They shall be permitted, abandoned, put to rest, voided and made void, invalidated and made nonexistent. Our vows are not vows, and our oaths are not oaths.” 

This traditional text of Kol Nidrei has powerful folkloristic origins. It is said to be a relic of Medieval Spain, where Jews were being forced to convert to Christianity. The formula of the prayer annuls vows even before they are taken, alleviating fear for those who were living in a place and time where Jews were being made to recant their beliefs and identities under threat of death.

Kol Nidrei touches upon one of the most foundational aspects of the Jewish worldview- the power of words. By preemptively revoking vows and oaths for the coming year, Jews were able to heal the wounds of persecution before they happened- they were able to define their own identities, regardless of their contexts. Words build worlds- “God said let there be light, and behold, there was light.” Humanity may not be able to form things from thin air with our words, but we know that words have incredible power. The words we use to describe ourselves; basic identity markers, such as our gender, ethnicity, religion, or familial ties, hold within them commitments that we make to ourselves about who we are - that is, multitudes of vows. Each of these identity markers ascribe values and expectations to us based on social and cultural forces operating at often-subconscious levels. When our core values don’t align with those held within one of our identity markers, a dissonance arises within us that can be quite destructive. 

An example: 

A baby was born to a marginalized group of people, the Hebrews, who were being brutally oppressed and enslaved by an Egyptian ruler. His mother decided that, rather than risk her infant son be killed for his ethnicity, she would put him in a sealed basket in the river, in hopes that he would be found and adopted. As luck would have it, he was - by the daughter of the oppressive ruler. She raised him as her own, and he grew up knowing his original ethnic background, but very much a part of Egyptian culture, even as royalty within it. One day as he was out walking, he saw an Egyptian guard beating a Hebrew slave. Our hero was torn - which kind of person was he? Would he call himself a Hebrew, or an Egyptian? Would he stand idly by while the guard beat this man, or would he stand up for him? In his confusion, anger, and dissonance, he struck out at the guard and killed him, then hid the body. Fearing for his safety, he fled his home, the only place he had ever known, and found a new one - another country, not far away, where he met a woman, fell in love, got married, and became part of her family. His wife’s father just so happened to be the high priest of the Midianite people, and our hero learned all about his job and became enmeshed in their culture. In his new home he became a shepherd: A peaceful life. But nothing ever felt quite right. All of his history, all of the many vows he had taken, or that had been ascribed to him, to be this person or that person, would not stop crying out from within him. The dissonance was deafening - who was he to be?

Then, one day it came upon him. He had a vision while out shepherding his flock - a bush, burning, that was not being consumed by the flames. In it he saw the dissonance he felt. Fire, destruction, torment - but, it did not destroy him, just as it did not destroy the bush. Amidst this vision was unity - was consonance. He need not be only one of these things, he need not pretend that one of his vows could stand for his whole person. Instead, he could be all of them at once. He could find consonance by paying respect to each of them, and he decided to return to his home, to confront the Pharaoh, and to free the Israelite people. 

Kol Nidrei comes to teach us that vows are serious things, and that if we are not mindful of the vows we make, and careful with what they contain, we risk complete destabilization. Our hero, Moses, may have believed himself unable, or unwilling, to fill the expectations of the roles he encountered: Hebrew slave, Egyptian royalty, heir apparent to the high priest of Midian, or even simple shepherd. He could have continued to run from the vows he had taken, but instead he chose to rethink them all. Rather than just picking one, he was able to bring together the many dissonant pieces and become the prophet of the Israelites’ journey to freedom, the greatest hero of our people. He was able to bring shalom, peace and wholeness, to his seemingly conflicted identities.

We all have many vows and identities that compete within us, but let’s investigate one shared by a lot of people in this room. Close your eyes for a moment, and see what image pops into your mind when you think “an authentic Jew.” What do you see? How close are you to the image you see? What would it take for you to embody and fulfill that image? How does it feel to note these inconsistencies? 

This experiment shows us a deep truth about the vows that make up our identities. Rarely do we match up to the representational version of the things we vow that we are. And when we are confronted with an ideal that we can not live up to, yet are unable to separate our identities from that vow, it leaves a crack in our hearts, making us feel not quite whole. Or, it may lead us to attempt to separate ourselves from those vows in unhealthy ways. One can imagine that Moses’ killing of the Egyptian guard may have come from a very dark place, as opposed to just being a mistake. This could have been a reaction to his realizing that the identities projected upon him, the vows that he had been born and adopted into, were more than he could live up to. The internal conflict of being both a Hebrew slave and Egyptian royalty grew to be too much for him. 

That feeling of brokenness that accompanies such an experience can cause terrible dissonance in our lives.  It may start out as barely noticeable, but often it will grow, and plague us with doubts about who we are. The reflexive approach to feeling these inconsistencies is to hide, destroy, or change the aspects of ourselves that we feel we can not live up to, or that don’t fit within social expectations. The opposite, though - choosing to redefine ourselves towards consonance - is more effective, if more difficult. 

It is often very challenging to describe why or how we are Jewish. It is easy to identify the clearest outward performer of Judaism as the bearer of authentic Jewish identity, even if we do not feel any desire to emulate them. But, it is much more useful to deeply investigate the identity itself and to see what is making it tick. In doing so, we can heal our relationship with it, and bring about shalom for ourselves as Jews. So, to start:

Is Judaism a religion? If so, how can so many Jews identify as Jews of no religion, or even as atheists? And how can the Jewish people have so many irreconcilable opinions on what constitutes the religion? 

Is Judaism an ethnicity? If so, how is it possible to convert? And how is it possible that our ethnicity can be so diverse as to include every race on the planet? And can you be Jewish and another ethnicity?

Is Judaism a nation? If so, does that make us remiss in not moving to the Jewish nation state, the State of Israel? I know that I am very happy living in America as a Jew, and although I enjoy visiting Israel, I want to remain here.

Kol Nidrei recognizes the dissonance that vows can bring us, and allows us to forgive ourselves for trying to make ourselves into something we’re not. Yom Kippur gives us the opportunity to reconfigure what matters to us, to work on salvaging those pieces of ourselves that may simply need to be redefined. The vow we take to be Jews is the source of our Jewishness. We need not try to embody the most-often-represented version of the “authentic Jew.” Rather, the vow of Jewishness is the covenant which has been developing since the time of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, and has continued renewing and reforming until today - a covenant of shalom that can help us to find peace and wholeness amongst our many identities. 

The struggle to redefine and understand what it means to be a Jew is an age-old one. In a moment not too dissimilar from ours, one of the early rabbis of this congregation, Rabbi Kauffman Kohler, wrote, “Such is the problem Reform has to solve. Under the influence of time the old forms crumble and fall. We have to see to it/ that the fragrance, the spirit of the old be not lost as we pass on to the new.”

A new definition or conception of what constitutes an “authentic Jew” must be one that reaches well beyond our historically inherited forms, but can not exclude the spirit of those inherited values. We can proudly and publicly be Jews, we can be the representative face of what it means to be a Jew, without falling prey to traditionalisms that box out contemporary values and ideals. We can join together to work on refining and revisioning what it means to represent the Jewish people in America today, carrying forward the inherited spirit of the old without adhering to forms that bring us personal dissonance.

A large part of my work with the Young Members Initiative here at Temple Emanu-El will be helping young people find and create ways of being Jewish that fit our day and age. Through building strong, open, and caring community; through learning about the many pathways Judaism provides for daily meaning; and through empowering the young members of this community to build these things in their image, this Initiative will help guide the upcoming generation of Jewish leaders towards lives of shalom, wholeness and freedom, beyond vows that no longer serve them. But, I am also here as a rabbi to the entire community, and available to help all people seeking this shalom.  We can consciously and carefully work to weave a web of malleable communal Jewish vows that magnify our greatest visions for ourselves and the future, and that is open enough to include a wide variety of Jewish identities.

In this new year of 5779, take the opportunity of Kol Nidrei to discard or rethink those vows which only bring you dissonance, trouble or pain. Try to be mindful in choosing and defining the vows you live by - seek those that bring you a sense of consonance, wholeness- shalom. Seek, as well, both the new and the ancient vows of our people which can help you find this consonant version of yourself, and allow you to be proudly representative of what Judaism means to you, while making room for others to do so in their own ways as well. May our personal works of healing towards shalom bring shalom to our communities, the Jewish people as a whole, our nation, and the world beyond.

B’hukotai: Sing Unto God a New Song

This D’var Torah was given at the final Shabbat service of my first year of rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem campus, May 2014.

Shiru l’adonai shir hadash. These words of the ancient Psalmist are some of the most beloved today, especially because of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s beautiful rendition that is now sung worldwide during Kabbalat Shabbat. We all know Rabbi Carlebach from his renowned rejuvenation of Jewish music, but we tend to forget his other accomplishment of helping to bring Chasidic thought into mainstream Judaism. The power of the transformation he affected in our own movement is so clear that his own daughter Neshama recently declared her “aliyah” to Reform Judaism. His ability to radicalize Jewish mystical thought is well attested. Some may even say that he went too far at times. 

Once, before leading a community in his rendition of Psalm 96, he asked, “How could it be that with all the Torah that was being studied and all the great luminaries in Europe, this tragic event could have occurred?”

We tend to shy away from answering this question when it comes to the Holocaust, or really any tragedy that has stricken the Jewish people in Modern times. Rabbi Carlebach was not so shy. “Perhaps,” he said, “The Torah being studied there was not good enough. Perhaps we need a new Torah.”

Alongside the transformational work he did throughout the Jewish world that raised him to fame, we also now know that he used the power that came along with that fame for abusive purposes, particularly towards women. While acknowledging the harm he did in his life, and accepting that we must now understand all of his work within the context of that harm, we may also be able to still derive new Torah from that which is now irrevocably colored by his abuse.

Shiru l’adonai shir hadash.

In our Torah portion this week, B’hukotai, we are regaled with a whole host of blessings and curses based on whether or not the Israelites follow God’s laws. Of course, one must immediately ask which laws. Reliable as always, Rashi jumps right in stating that what the Israelites, and therefore we, are commanded to do is toil in the study of Torah. This study is described by Rashi to be the foundation for maintaining the covenant with God, as he states that one who does not toil over the Torah, will then not fulfill the commandments, which leads to despising those who do follow the commandments and hating the Sages, which itself will lead to preventing others from fulfilling the commandments, and eventually ends with denying the authenticity of the commandments and God as well.

If there’s one thing I really don’t like, it’s a slippery slope argument. Yeah, I know, mitzvah goreret mitzvah, aveirah goreret aveirah, but I’d rather flip Rashi on his head here and declare these things in the positive. To keep the covenant we must toil over Torah, which will lead us to following the commandments, loving those others who also do, and our Sages, and so on and so on, until through our embracing of our tradition we finally see, understand, and accept the omnipotence of God.

By flipping this around, we end up with a totally different relationship to God and the commandments. Our first step, which we have all embarked upon in earnest this year, is toiling over the Torah. We’ve toiled over the Torah of Moses, the Torah of Hazal,  the individual Torah of each individual’s personal experience, and the wonderful Torah brought to us by all of our faculty. Sounds like we’re on our way to some blessings, right? The rest of the path will just flow naturally out of our learning. And, following this, one of the blessings our Torah portion says we will receive for doing as God commands is that God will set up a covenant with us, with God’s people. In Rashi’s interpretation of this blessing, he sees the promise of a new covenant with the Israelites once they settle in their land, studying the Torah that had yet to be fully written.

Funny enough, in the narrative of the Torah, we’re just now ending Leviticus, which means the first covenant has only just now been established. In conjunction with this fact, the Israelites still have two books worth left of trekking before they reach the destination in which this whole blessing and curse formula will take effect. They are still a full generation out of their Promised Land, and are already being dealt out the stipulations for their descendent’s eventual habitation there.

We too are in a similar situation. We’ve just finished the first leg of our journey towards a lifetime of devotion to the Jewish people, and we know that there’s an endpoint to this training somewhere out there, but we may as well have the Sinai desert, checkpoints, border crossings, and all, between us and the endpoints of our programs.

We’ve also received quite a few warnings of blessings and curses that may come during the rest of our long haul in regards to our levels of toiling. Sure, we haven’t been threatened with having our sky turned to iron and our ground to copper like God threatened the Israelites, but I’ve got a feeling that our administration has some serious smiting power. So we’d better be toiling over that Torah. The question, though, is which Torah?

Rabbi Carlebach’s question about the Holocaust, and suggestion as to the answer, is rooted in a Kabbalistic teaching about the nature of Torah. According to the mystics, the Torah is to be renewed in every generation. It is remade by the masters for the students in a way that meets the needs of the particular time and place. One reading of his statement about the Torah of Europe prior to the Holocaust is that to make way for a new Torah, the old one had to be destroyed.

If we apply this idea to Rashi’s reading of the new covenant that was to be established should the Israelites follow all of God’s laws, what does this mean about the old covenant? Should we, as Reform Jews, be reimagining our covenant with God not only in terms of continuity with the past, but also to supersede the past? The first Reformers certainly did when they made their big break with the orthodoxies of their time, but what are the Reform orthodoxies of our time that make up our generation’s received, but yet to be renewed, Torah? What are we taking for granted?

I think that this question should be at the very core of each and every one of our minds. Ordained or still in school, part of the faculty or administration, if we are truly a community focused on Reform, the verb and the movement, our relationship to the past and the past’s relationship to the future should be weighed in every programmatic, theological, liturgical, and pedagogical decision we make. Shiru l’adonai shir hadash. Sing unto God a new song. We sing this regularly, often without considering the fact that it is a command. Even someone like me who doesn’t know the difference between soprano or tenor is commanded to sing a new song, in spite of the distress it might cause to everyone else’s ears.

Rashi, although obliquely, said the same thing: Toil over the Torah until a new covenant is made. Rabbi Carlebach said it much more directly: Sometimes the old Torah must make way for the new. Both of these men were ardently traditional, but both saw a path forward not through more of the same, but through the new.

This year in Israel I have been very lucky to be exposed to some wonderful new phenomena arising throughout the country. An attempt to renew the Israeli population’s relationship to Torah is under way. Dr. Ruth Calderon and those like her pushing for a renewal of the relationship of the hilonim to our textual traditions have made great strides. Yossi Klein Halevi sees hope in this renewal through the Israeli music scene, which we were lucky enough to experience first hand with Kobi Oz, System Ali, the rejuvenation of modern piyyutim, and countless other musical expressions of Judaism in Israel’s ever-growing music scene. I heard that some Israelis have even begun calling the people ordained here at HUC rabbis! The battle towards a new view on Progressive Judaism in Israel is underway, even if it sometimes seems bleak. The new Torah of the state of Israel is already being written, some of it right in these hallways.

Rabbi Carlebach’s reading of the Holocaust and its relationship to Jewish history and religion is definitely a radical one. There are many who would protest any such use of the Holocaust within a theological or religious framework due to the extremity and closeness of the event. These individuals would have a strong argument to do so. Regardless of the legitimacy of his thought, he made the statement. He taught new Torah from his heart.

Let us embarking upon a path of Jewish leadership not forget that we too can do this. We too can sing a new song, teach a new Torah. And not only can we, but we must. B’hukotai demands this of us, and so does the world. Let us teach a Torah of inclusion; a Torah of fearlessness in the face of change; a Torah no longer striving to maintain Jewish existence only for its own sake, but striving to make the Jewish people a blessing to all of the nations of the world; a Torah focused on how to bless our lives with meaning, not on a constant looming fear of curses. Wherever there is life, there is new Torah to be learned, and then to be taught. Let us never settle for teaching the same Torah that has been taught before. Let us teach a new Torah, each and every one, for the good of the Jewish people, and the good of the world. Shiru l’adonai shir hadash. Shabbat Shalom

Parashat Mikeitz: The Sons of Ya’akov, Am Yisrael

Parashat Mikeitz picks up right in the middle of the grand saga of Yoseph’s life. After having shared his prophetic dreams of glory with his family, and having been clearly favored by his father for reporting on his brothers, these brothers sold him into slavery. This section begins with Yoseph’s rise to power in the Pharaoh’s court as a dream interpreter, and the eventual appearance of his brothers in search of relief from the famine that had stricken the region. In this narrative, we see one of the greatest pieces of family drama in the Torah. Packaged in this story is a glimpse into the very nature of human experience and relationship.

Yoseph’s seat of power in the Pharaoh’s administration, and his adoption of Egyptian dress and custom, prevent his brothers from recognizing him. While the drama plays out we get a rare view of both sides of the story. The Torah is renowned for its pregnant silence in the background of ostensibly emotional scenes, most notably in the near silence between Avraham and Yitzhak during the Aqeidah, but here we are given a candid view of emotion attempting to be hidden by Yoseph and his brothers. We are not only shown Yoseph’s private tears in response to seeing his brothers and finding out that his father is still alive, but we are also shown many of the individual brothers’ responses to the situation they are in.

Throughout the rest of the parshah the narrative is one of manipulation, personal growth, and the beginnings of familial reconciliation. Dramas play out within the family between the patriarch and the many sons, and between Yoseph and his brothers. The most striking aspect of the whole process is the emotional development and exchange of these characters. Simultaneously, we get little to no hint of God throughout. God is evoked only in the speech of the characters and does nothing to intervene or affect the story. Instead we have pure human drama laid bare before us.

Rashi, the 11th century French interpreter of Torah, picked up on this trend as well. He noticed a slight grammatical switch in one line (Gen. 42:3). Rashi noticed that when the brothers decide to go down to Egypt to retrieve food, they are counted separately as Yoseph’s brothers, as opposed to Yaakov’s sons. Rashi sees this as hinting at the fact that each of the brothers had his own personal reaction to the situation due to their own individual relationships with Yoseph. This development of individual characters in their own private relation to their situations shows just how lost in ourselves we can get.

In a way, this is the first time we’re shown the truly individual aspect of human life in the Torah. Although the brothers are together, and Yoseph has his Egyptian helpers, these characters are all shown trapped in their own individual lives. Yoseph can not break character, the brothers individually try different ways to figure out how to work around the series of events orchestrated by Yoseph, and all the while all are struggling with the guilt and hurt of their past actions. This complex interweaving of personal responses to a collective past, from Yoseph’s alienation and hiding from his brothers to his brothers’ confusion and guilt,  is a parallel to our own relationship to Judaism.

In our story today we can see the roots of the conflicts in the Jewish world, be they personal or cultural, within our families and our relations between denominations. Guilt and lack of understanding, and the attempt to hide both of these emotions, pervade all of the conflicts that I have experienced within the contemporary Jewish world. These are the very themes underlying every moment of the drama between Yoseph and his brothers. I have certainly played both the part of the one hiding behind the other culture while trying to tease out the intentions of my more traditional brother, and I have played the role of the traditional element attempting to understand the hidden agenda of my hiding brother.

At the end of this week’s portion very little is resolved, but Yehudah, the brother whose idea it was to sell Yoseph into slavery, accepts responsibility for his brother Binyamin in the face of Yoseph’s demanding him as a slave. This one step into responsibility that ends the Parshah is the beginning of the end of the lies and deceit surrounding the brothers. Yehudah’s step in the right direction, displaying loyalty and the bravery to take responsibility for his brother rather than selling him into slavery, shows us our own path to resolution within our lives. In spite of our differences and the histories we may have, Am Yisrael is a family. It is a family with many facets which often clash and disagree. Today we are just like this first generation of the nation of Israel, Israel’s direct sons who are the main characters of this Torah portion. In this story, they show us that we needn’t agree, or be exactly the same, but that we must be responsible for each other, and have the bravery to display this responsibility. The future of today’s Jewish family has yet to be written, but let us use the example of the sons of Yaakov, the sons of Israel, to reconcile Am Yisrael once again.

Parashat Vayishlah – The Past is Never Behind You

This week’s Torah portion, Vayishlah, is the last act of the story of Yaakov. His transformation from trickster to prince, as the 11th century French interpreter Rashi puts it, is central to this parshah. Is it really a transformation, though? Is true transformation even really possible for us fickle human beings? Yaakov’s story gives a guide to the ways in which we do and do not change, and most importantly, how we can never truly be free of our past.

Vayishlah begins with Yaakov being confronted with the possibility of seeing his brother Esav again after many years apart. The last time they met, Yaakov tricked him out of his birthright and fled in the face of Esav’s death threats. Now, Yaakov is returning to the land of his father with wealth and a family, and sends gifts to attempt to appease Esav as still he fears his brother’s wrath. In spite of the many years spent away, marrying two women, and building a family and a fortune, Yaakov is forced to face his past, embodied in his brother.

Right before Yaakov finally meets with Esav again, a being comes and wrestles with him through the night. As dawn breaks, and Yaakov is winning, the being tells Yaakov to let him go. Yaakov refuses to until the being, often thought of in tradition as an angel, blesses him. The being then renames him Yisrael, proclaiming that it is a symbol of his successful struggles with men and with the divine.

Rashi interprets this name change from Yaakov, with a Hebrew root that is related to trickery and deceit, to Yisrael, with a Hebrew root related to nobility, as an integral shift in Yaakov’s character. Furthermore, he interprets the next line, when Yaakov asks the angel its name and the angel responds, “Why do you ask me my name?” as telling us that angels, in fact, have no fixed names and that they change according to the mission that they are on.

Angels, then, are bereft of past and future: Their names unfixed, their short-term purposes defining their very existence. In Jewish tradition humans and angels are often compared to each other with angels tending to complain about the humans silly choices. Here we may get a look into why our tradition would hold us up and against the angels. They help define our relationship to our world and to God by showing us what we aren’t. If angels are defined specifically for one purpose, with their very identities erased and changed at their purpose’s completion, we are the exact opposite. The rest of this week’s Torah portion displays this as Yaakov’s past as a trickster catches up to him in many different ways. In spite of his attempt to put the past behind him, and to even tell Esav that stealing the birthright wasn’t particularly beneficial to him anyway, Yaakov’s children reflect his trickster roots through multiples acts of deceit and trickery. Looking at Vayishlah from this perspective gives us a peek at our own relationship to our past and our future. Even if we make changes as drastic as those that Yaakov made, we can never escape our past. We can even confront our past and attempt to grow beyond the things we feel are holding us back, but still, we can never truly get rid of them. Unlike angels, our names don’t change based on our given objective at any individual time. Our past tails us, ever connected to our present, ever coloring our future. We can strive, and progress and improve so much that we may warrant a change of name like Yaakov, but even then we cannot simply detach from our past.

Although this may sound like we are trapped the other option is much less attractive. Without this continual growth and building of history attached to our names our lives would cease to have the deep meaning we can now derive from them. Without a past to regard and move forward from we too, like the angels, would be without identity, stuck in an ever-present now that changed our very essence every time we completed a task. But this is not the world assigned to us – this is the world, according to the Jewish tradition, assigned to angels.

We are instead gifted with the ability for growth in a long stream of acts and deeds that define us well after their completion. Interestingly enough, this Torah portion displays that through Yaakov’s name being changed. But is his name changed? Throughout the rest of Genesis, the character is still consistently referred to as Yaakov, alongside his new name Yisrael.

As I have grown older, and collected all the more experience and baggage, I’ve found that the past re-emerges in ways one would never expect. People you believed you would never see again reappear when least expected, words you let loose into the world come back to haunt you, and actions you thought would never have any consequence can return to shift your life’s path entirely. We are not independent agents, floating in an ever-present now like the angels, defined only by a singular task which upon completion will wipe out our very identities. Unlike an angel, Yaakov never transformed fully into Yisrael, but added an extra layer on to his person as he grew and changed. Just like Yaakov we are growing, evolving, and changing individuals, allowed to experience the shift from the past to the present to the future, all the while never leaving our past behind us, but instead continuing to learn and grow from these experiences.

Parashah Toldot: Dysfunction, Redemption and Learning to Swim

The story of Yitzhak and Rivkah’s sons Yaakov and Esav is a compelling and difficult one. In this week’s Torah portion Yaakov , the eventual namesake of the people of Israel, is seen committing some very questionable acts. His brother, Esav, is clearly not the brightest human being, and we see Yaakov tricking him out of all of the inheritance that he believed he was to receive from his father. The first time, Yaakov takes advantage of Esav’s ravenous hunger, and makes him pledge his birthright for a bowl of stew. The second time, under his mother Rivkah’s recommendation and with a great deal of her help, Yaakov tricks his now-blind father into believing that he is Esav coming for his deathbed blessing. Not quite the behavior we’d expect or desire from the person who gave his name to Israel.

The name of this week’s parshah is Toldot, or generations in English. Prior to the story of Yaakov and Esav, we are given a narrative of Yitzhak repeating almost exactly his own father Avraham’s ambulations around the land of Canaan. On the same theme, our introduction to the story of Yaakov and Esav is focused on parental favoritism, Yitzhak favoring Esav, and Rivkah favoring Yaakov. When looked at from a zoomed out lens, we see what this parsha is really about – trans-generational relationships.

If we accept this as being the main theme of Toldot, then we should take a step back and not just look at condemning Yaakov, but instead figure out what the generational factors here are. It is clear that Rivkah pushes him towards some of his behavior, and it is also quite clear that his father’s affections are showered upon his brother and withheld from him. It’s a common trope today, in our post-Freudian world, to focus on how our parents messed us up, and how our foibles and failings can be traced back to their foibles and failings. Looking at Toldot, we see that this certainly isn’t a new idea.

So was this behavior Yaakov’s fault? Was it Yitzhak and Rivkah’s? Even Avraham and Sarah’s? Are our own failings ours, or are they our parents’? The Babylonian Talmud teaches us that a father’s responsibility to his son is “to circumcise, redeem, teach him Torah, take a wife for him, and teach him a craft. Some say, to teach him to swim too“ (Kiddushin 29a).

The first three responsibilities are the religious traditions of circumcision, redemption of the firstborn from God via paying a Kohen, and teaching Torah, but the last three are quite practical. The Talmud goes on into pages and pages of debating and interpreting what each of these things means, except for the responsibility to teach a child to swim in which there is no debate, only an explanation that “his life may depend on it” (Kiddushin 30b).

So it goes with the relationship between parents and children. For every attempt to do the right thing, either by teaching your child correctly, or living up to your parents’ expectations, there is always another way to interpret or debate the outcome. It is always possible to blame yourself for your child’s failings, or take credit for your child’s successes. It is similarly always possible to blame your parents for your failings, or to credit them your successes. In the end, one can never truly know which pieces of their parents’ parenting or their own parenting have affected the eventual outcome. Foresight and hindsight are both almost impossible when attempting to uncover which pieces of these very basic relationships will be highlighted in the future or have colored our lives.

I think that we can absolve Yaakov of at least some of his guilt through an acknowledgment of this reality of the relationship between the parent and child. This trickster-like behavior was clearly being taught to him by his mother as a way of gaining the attention and affection of his aloof father. In a way, we can see this parshah as all prelude to the fruition of Yaakov into Yisrael which comes later in Bereishit. By suspending our own judgment we can see the tragedy in the way the portion, which is Yaakov’s entire youth, plays out.

What a child takes from a parent’s attempts at education is out of control of the parent; what a parent does to attempt to educate a child is out of control of the child. In spite of our choices to trick our brothers, push our children to do the wrong thing, or disrespectfully swindle our parents, as we continue to live we gain new chances to do the right thing. The Talmud’s clarity on why it is important to teach your child to swim is clear. In my opinion, though, the swimming that the Talmud is referring to is not simply swimming. It is the knowledge one needs to continue moving forward in the world; to continue receiving the chance to make the right choices that will redeem his or her life. Yaakov’s redemption through his own actions later in the Torah show us that the indiscretion of youth, or the damaging meddling of passive aggressive parents, is not something that stands alone as a root of human development and personality. In Yaakov’s youth and family we can see our own, and in his later redemption we see hope for ourselves and our own families.