Many years ago, during my first job out of college, I wound up at a meeting in the Fifth Avenue apartment of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It’s a long story for another time. But this was roughly 2000, and according to the internet that means they had been married for 42 years.

The meeting was with Joanne (she was the board chair of the Westport Country Playhouse, and I was on a consulting team helping them with a business plan). Fresh-squeezed orange juice was served.

At some point during the meeting, the apartment door opens and in walks Paul Newman, just returning from a run in Central Park. He had a towel around his neck.

But what I most remember is the buzz of electricity that visibly passed through the air as their eyes connected. They gave a cute little wave to each other that felt like a kind of intimate sign language. After four decades, it certainly felt like they were still very much in love.

My wife Natalie and I are coming up on our 25th wedding anniversary this spring. For as long as we’ve known each other, we have had different biorhythms. I have always been an early riser (I’m writing this reflection, as I often do, before 6 am), which means I also like to go to bed early. Natalie is the opposite.

This means that many mornings, after I’ve been up, had my coffee, done my morning routines, and am now ready to get dressed, I come back to our bedroom to find her waking up. At which point I say, with a delight that is both genuine and a little playful, “Look who’s here!” Our own daily Paul and Joanne moment, perhaps.

Naturally, perhaps, the approach of this anniversary leads me to reflect on our marriage and, more broadly, what supports longevity in relationships. Yes, there’s Tevye and Golda (“After 25 years it’s nice to know”), and there is a great deal of literature on the topic. In my own experience, there is some alchemic combination of both familiarity and freshness, routine (we have many) and spontaneity, known and unknown, that seems to have served us.

That, of course, can describe not just marriages, but other kinds of long-term commitments—including the ones we have with Jewish prayers, texts, rituals, mitzvot. As my father’s yahrtzeit approaches this coming week, I remember how supportive the framework of Jewish mourning practices was for me when he died, providing an infrastructure in the chaos of emotional quicksand. And yet at other times in my life that same Jewish infrastructure has felt like a straitjacket.

Rabbi Avrohom Bornsztain (1838-1910), the first Sokachover Rebbe, offers a beautiful reflection on this theme in connection with a verse from our parasha this week. He bases it on a midrashic understanding of the verse, “And he [Jacob] sent him Joseph] from the valley of Hebron” (Gen. 37:14). Rashi, quoting the midrash, reads emek not as valley, but as “depths” (amok means deep). “He sent him out from the deep wisdom of the one who is buried in Hebron (Abraham), to fulfill what had been promised to him… ‘Your descendants will be strangers’ (Gen. 15:13).”

The Sokochover elaborates: “Abraham realized that, unlike him, his descendants would grow up with an awareness of the Divine sanctity in the world. He was concerned that they would eventually lose the sense of freshness in their service of the Holy One, and that little by little they would cool off and leave the holy path. Thus he had the insight that his progeny should experience exile… so that the sense of desire for holiness would renew and grow within them” (quoted in Itturei Torah).

This is potentially a provocative comment, particularly in light of some deep debates happening now about Zionism and diasporism (if this is new to you, a Google search will yield plenty). Because I expect you’ll ask, I’ll summarize my own view as: 1) the Jewish people’s cultural homeland is the land of Israel; and, 2) in the very same breath, there are clearly deep creative possibilities in diasporic life, which is a great deal of Jewish history; and, 3) still in the same long breath, the precariousness of Jewish life in the diaspora is painfully real, and, 4) finally, the possibilities and challenges of Jewish sovereignty are enormous, as the contemporary state of Israel demonstrates on a daily basis. End breath.

But that isn’t really where I’m aiming this reflection. There are plenty of other people and organizations whose work focuses on those kinds of historical-political questions. For our purposes, I’d like to bring us back to the more everyday, personal, embodied ways we experience the Sokochover’s Torah. That moment of, “Look who’s here!” after 25 years; that bolt of spiritual lightning that passed between Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman; the feeling of (with apologies to Kellogg’s) “tasting it again for the first time”—these are personal moments of leaving and coming back, of galut and teshuva. They are moments of hitchadshut, renewal, or “beginner’s mind.” They are daily lived enactments of this Torah.

Hanukkah is about many things, but one of them is certainly this experience. The simple act of lighting a candle in the darkness, and of sharing that light with others—that itself is miraculous. As we begin the holiday next week, my blessing for all of us is that we might attune ourselves to the miracles that abound within our lives, that we be able to taste and savor and appreciate them. Nes gadol haya sham—a great miracle happened then and there, and, as Israeli dreidels say, nes gadol haya po—a great miracle happened, and happens, here too.

Last Shabbos was a snow day in Chicago. A big storm moved through and dumped nearly a foot on us. The weather folks said it was the biggest November snowfall in a decade.

On Sunday I dug out the snow blower from the back of the garage (we’ve had pretty light snow in recent years) and joined the lovely civic ritual wherein neighbors say hello to one another, commiserate a little bit, and help each other keep our driveways clear as the city trucks plow us back in while clearing the streets.

The days since have been cold, so the snow is still on the ground. And I’ve noticed that on my walks with the dog, I am drawn to keep the air pods out of my ears and just listen. It’s quieter when there’s snow, almost like there’s a blanket muffling the usual noises of cars and wildlife. Most of all, my ears are drawn to the sound and sensation of snow crunching under my boots. Combine that with the special kind of air that can follow a snow storm, the smell of a winter hat on my head and a scarf around my neck, and it transports me right back to being a little kid walking to elementary school in Ann Arbor. It’s fabulous.

As it happens, I spent my Shabbat snow day reading Rodger Kamenetz’s new book, Seeing Into the Life of Things. (I was cramming for the exam: I interviewed Rodger about the book on Wednesday night, ahead of his teaching an online IJS course about the book next month. I’ll be taking it, and I hope you will too.)

While I read plenty of books, and while many of them are wonderful, this one stood out. Why? I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.

It’s a smart book, for sure: There are discourses on Wordsworth (the source of the title) and Freud and Einstein. The Ba’al Shem Tov and Rabbi Isaac Luria make appearances, alongside Rumi and the Dalai Lama and other deep wells of insight. I like that kind of intellectual stimulation. And as one who writes myself, Rodger’s writing is like a cup of chamomile tea with honey on a cold day—warm and smooth and sweet, the kind of thing you drink in slowly and savor. (He said Wednesday he’s much more of a “re-writer”—revising and sculpting and crafting every page over and over again. I wish I had that kind of patience.)

But ultimately I think what drew me in was what Rodger invites us all to do: be present with our experiences without rushing to label and analyze them with words right away. When we do that—when we slap a label onto something or someone, when we reactively move to interpret a dream rather than lingering with the ineffable sensations it beckons us to dance with—we forfeit something precious: our imaginative capacity. As Rodger writes in his introduction, “The sacred takes place in the imagination. A poetic state of mind is the ground of visionary experience.” (Like I said, tea with honey.)

This week we reach the climax of the Jacob and Esau story, a story that is so much about this human challenge of knowing and not knowing—and how to hold, or even embrace, the not-knowingness. We sensed it in Isaac’s not-quite-knowing encounter with Jacob-dressed-as-Esau last week, and this week we touch it again with Jacob’s profound uncertainty about Esau’s intentions as he approaches with a small army.

“And Jacob feared greatly, and it troubled him, and he divided the people who were with him… into two camps.” (Gen. 32:8) Rashi, in one of his most famous comments, says: “He feared—that he would be killed; and it troubled—that he might kill others.” This is an ethical reading, highlighting what I certainly like to think of as a classically Jewish approach. It holds the fullness of the stakes without minimizing the positions.

Yet Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz, the Chozeh or Seer of Lublin (d. 1815), offers a different reading: “And Jacob feared—he experienced fear because of Esau, but immediately ‘and it troubled him’—the fact that he was fearful, particularly after the Holy One’s promise, ‘and I will protect you wherever you go’ (Gen. 28:15).” Jacob’s initial fear is a perfectly understandable one: It seems like his brother is coming to kill him. Yet the Chozeh turns the “troubling” of the verse into something like the “second arrow” in Buddhist teachings: Jacob is aware of his fear, and the fact that he’s afraid makes him even more upset—because he should be trusting in God.

I didn’t ask Rodger, so this is just me, but I sense an opening here to understand Jacob as struggling in the space between reactivity and wisdom, which might also be the space between analyzing and being-with, or between the illusion of knowing and the reality of not-knowing. Yes, Jacob needs to make a decision, and he needs to be careful—mindful, even. Can he do so in a non-reactive state?

I think that’s what the Seer of Lublin is asking of Jacob—and of we who are his descendants. As Rodger and I discussed on Wednesday, the age and world we live in is built on so much reactivity. (Jane Eisner told me this week that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year is “rage bait.” Q.E.D.) But we are so much more than that. So maybe stay close to your breath a little more. Linger with the taste of your coffee or the light of the Shabbat candles. And maybe take out the air pods when you’re walking and listen to the sound of the snow under your feet.

I recently downloaded an app called Flighty. As Ben Cohen described it in the The Wall Street Journal, “Flighty was built by aviation geeks for aviation geeks.” It uses all kinds of data to predict whether your flight will be on time or late, and if so by how much. It often beats the airline apps with updates. As an app it’s beautifully designed. And it’s insightful, showing your most frequent airports, the number of miles you flew last year—and how many times around the Earth (or the Moon) that represents. I’m hooked.

While I expected to travel a lot when I took this job nearly six years ago, the first couple of years I didn’t go anywhere because of the pandemic. But now the world has largely returned to its pre-Covid pace, and Flighty tells me that my 47 flights so far this year (and there are still a couple to come in December) have taken me 47,012 miles, which is 1.9x around the Earth. I’ve also evidently spent 10 hours in flight delays (which frankly ain’t bad given those numbers)—and 48 percent of my flights have actually landed early!

So that’s fun and all. But for a perhaps unexpected question, I want to ask you: How do you feel reading all that? What, if any, sensations do you notice arising?

There could be some judgment (“That’s a big carbon footprint”). There could be some envy (“You must have airline status”). There could be some pity (“Oy, that must suck to travel so much”). It could be something else, or a combination of multiple thoughts or feelings.

The French sociologist Pierre Bordieu coined a term he called “habitus.” Here’s a fairly standard definition of the idea: “A set of attitudes and beliefs embodied in how people think, feel, speak, and gesture. The habitus conditions and shapes how individuals perceive the world around them, their sense of place, and life choices.” Where a “vibe” in our contemporary parlance is a superficial, momentary feeling about the atmosphere in a particular setting, “habitus” gets at deeper structural stuff: the ways we’re conditioned to act and speak, the things we’re conditioned to value, within cultural structures from families to communities to societies.

Applying habitus to an analysis of Flighty, one might start to think about the culture (or cultures) of frequent flierdom. One can start to ask questions like, “What are we really talking about when we talk about this culture of airports and flights and airline rewards programs?”

Perhaps because of Flighty, perhaps because last week I was in fact on four flights in four days, all of this was in the background when I encountered Anand Giridharadas’s essay about the Epstein emails in the New York Times. Giridharadas has been issuing some deep and blistering critiques of philanthropy and elite culture for years, and he analyzed the situation with that in mind. While not undermining the culture of rape and abuse at the heart of the story, Giridharadas also aimed to flesh out the habitus illustrated in the emails. Here’s his central point:

What [Epstein’s] correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing, profiting, thinking and giving back.

I will be honest and say that I felt myself implicated in that, if not directly—I’m not jetting into and out of Davos or Aspen on a private jet; I fly commercial between O’Hare and LaGuardia; and I have told philanthropists directly when I thought they were misbehaving—then indirectly. I went to an elite private university (Yale) and received a Wexner Graduate Fellowship that paid my way through rabbinical school and had a large (and overwhelmingly positive) influence on my career. I’ve rubbed shoulders with people like the folks Giridharadas describes and, like many other nonprofit leaders, I have felt the gravitational pull of their philanthropy—again, if not directly, then indirectly.

But there is something about this depiction of flying around constantly, jetting in and out of cities and making that the basis of valuation, that is both a little familiar and a little icky. (“Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning,” Giridharadas notes: “The whereabouts update and inquiry… ‘Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,’ the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein.” And later: “Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite.”) Again, I don’t generally text people when I land and ask if they’re free—that reflects a pretty phenomenal level of presumptuousness/entitlement—but I recognize the conversation that involves a sentence like this: “I was in Manhattan to do a talk, then I went up to Westchester for an event, then back to Riverdale for a meeting, then flew back to Chicago in time for bedtime, and was on a plane to DC the next day.” That, in fact, was my first half of last week.

Where does the ick factor come from in all this? At root, I think, it’s the sense of rootlessness—the constant moving about, never being truly being at home anywhere, and the sense that these very powerful people were trying to fill the related spiritual abyss in their soul with power and domination. And that, of course, butts up against an antisemitic trope, most powerfully deployed by Josef Stalin against Russian Jews, who the Soviets referred to as “rootless cosmopolitans.” So on top of the original ickiness, there are layers of additional complication.

Jacob, whose story we come to focus on centrally in Parashat Vayetzei, is notable for many reasons, one of which is that he is our ancestor who struggles the most to be at home—with himself, his family, and his geographic place. Even more than his grandfather Abraham, Jacob moves around—from his childhood home in Be’er Sheva to his uncle’s home in Padan-Aram, then back to the land of Canaan, then finally to Egypt. His name Yisrael, of course, connotes his constant struggle: to come to terms with his twin brother, with himself, with his wives and children, with the Holy One. He is never settled, never at ease.

All of that can sometimes make it feel like Jacob is a rootless character. Yet our tradition suggests that Jacob’s lesson is precisely the opposite: What Jacob figures out is that, wherever he is, he can in fact be deeply rooted. This is the reading that Rabbi Aharon of Karlin offers on the words vayifga bamakom, which the Torah uses to describe Jacob’s encounter with Mount Moriah when he first sets out on his journey: “Pegiah connotes prayer [as the Talmud posits], but it also connotes a genuine, sudden, deep encounter. Thus a person should pray that they find the ‘place’ that is particularly their own… Here, in this world, we should try to be at one in whatever place we find ourselves… Your heart should not be separate from the actual place you are standing or sitting.”

A few years ago historian James Loeffler published a book about the creation of human rights law, which was largely led by Jews. In a rejoinder to Stalin, he called it “Rooted Cosmopolitans.” It’s a great phrase to consider, particularly at a moment when our community, our people, is engaged in deep and often contentious reflection about particularism and universalism—or, more simply, where and when we feel at home.

Here in the United States, many of us, including me, are celebrating Thanksgiving this week. As it does like clockwork every year, the holiday causes me, and perhaps you as well, to reflect on some key questions: Where, when, why, and how do we feel at home here, if at all? Do we feel at home as Jews today? If so, why? If not, why not?

But the holiday also offers us an opportunity to experience some deeper at-homeness, perhaps: The spiritual rootedness that’s available to us when we can gather with family and friends, when we can take a walk among trees whose leaves are falling away, when we can, in moments of stillness, express gratitude for the blessings in our lives. If we allow it to do so, Thanksgiving might remind us that we can, in fact, be spiritually at home in whatever moment we find ourselves. And there is nothing more Jewish than that.

Before my recent weeklong retreat, I was worried about a few things. As I wrote recently, being off the grid for that long is a significant absence for all involved, a rehearsal of death. So I was worried about the effect that would have on my family. And I was a little worried about being away from work for a week. But those were ultimately not major sources of concern. What had me really worried was my mother.

As I have shared in this space before, my Mom has Alzheimer’s, and it is now at a more advanced stage. She’s still her cheerful self, but her world is pretty small and focused at this point. The conversations, like her day to day activities, don’t take her very far.

My worry came from the fact that I have become something of a tether for her. I recently downloaded her cell phone activity and analyzed it with the help of AI. I found that over half of her outgoing calls are to my number. While that tracks with my experience, it didn’t do anything to allay my concern: If the main person you talk to outside your living quarters isn’t there to answer the phone, and you can’t remember why they’re not there, how would you feel?

I contemplated some solutions. The most elaborate started with the reality that we really do have the same conversation multiple times a day. So I thought that perhaps there was an AI out there that could record my voice and impersonate me while I was away. I mean, on the one hand, it’s not so crazy: If it could help allay her anxiety, then there’s a case to make. On the other, ick: there is something gross about the inauthenticity.

The central drama of Parashat Toldot revolves around Jacob’s deception of his elderly father Isaac. As Avivah Zornberg observes in her classic study of Genesis 27, the axis of tension lies in the collective worry—Jacob’s, Rebecca’s, Isaac’s, and the worry of we the readers—that Jacob is dissembling, and/or that he’ll be found out. “If my father touches me, I shall appear to him as a trickster,” Jacob frets when Rebecca introduces her plan (v.12). Isaac, suspicious that something is afoot, tells Jacob (who is dressed as Esau), “Come closer that I may feel you, my son—whether you are really my son Esau or not” (v.21). And then, when Jacob comes in for inspection, his father exclaims, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau” (v.22).

Zornberg quotes a midrash from Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer: “When Jacob left his father’s presence, he left adorned like a bridegroom and like a bride in her ornaments. And there descended on him reviving dew from heaven, and his bones were covered with fat; and he, too, became a champion fighter and athlete.” She comments: “The description suggests a radiant awareness of new possibilities that springs from deep within the self. The bones that are covered with fat evoke the text in Proverbs 15:30: ‘Good news puts fat on the bones.’ The ‘good news’ of the blessings — considered as an existential event, rather than merely as words spoken — gives Jacob a sense of health and power that affects his very bones. In Hebrew, the word for “bones” — atzamot— is closely related to the word for “self” — etzem. What is nourished — even created anew — in Jacob is the essence of his selfhood.” (Zornberg, 178) As she observes earlier on, Jacob “must enter the world of seeming, of enactment, of performance, in which authenticity can be defined only retroactively” (154).

For many people, the work of defining and understanding ourselves is the project of a lifetime. And as the story of Genesis 27 illustrates so profoundly, it is not work that belongs only to us: It is interpersonal, intergenerational, social, existential. That is, it isn’t only up to us. We do not want to understand ourselves to be tricksters, deceivers—and we don’t want to be seen that way by others. But the work of attuning our own voice to the voice of Divinity working within us is not easy, nor always necessarily pleasant. Much of life takes place within that tension. And as my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius might say, “What an opportunity for practice!”

Ultimately, just before my retreat, I recorded a new voicemail message: “Hi, this is Josh. I’m away on a silent retreat and will be back on November 2. If this is my mother, this is to remind you that I’m away and to tell you I love you very much. If it’s anyone else, leave a message.” She was fine. And I felt better knowing that it was my voice she’d hear.

Questions for Reflection & Conversation:

• Is there a moment (or moments) in your life when you struggled to discern something about your etzem, the “true you?”

• What was difficult about that moment?

• Who or what, if anything, helped you navigate it?

• Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

A pretty cool moment occurred the other day while I was walking the dog. It was a sunny but cold day and I was listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdal about Metta practice (Pali for lovingkindess, or perhaps what we would call Hesed). All fairly normal—for me, at any rate.

Early on in the talk, Gil uttered a casual line that, probably without intending it, lit me up. He observed that it generally just feels better when our hearts are open. They don’t naturally want to be constricted.

As I said, this was a casual line in a 45-minute talk. But it literally stopped me in my tracks. Why? Because it took me back to a podcast interview I did with Rabbi Shai Held a few months ago. The topic of that conversation was the Rabbinic phrase rachmana liba ba’ei, which is usually translated from the Aramaic as, “The Merciful One desires the heart.” Shai and I had a long and rich conversation unpacking that phrase. But here on the sidewalk on a cold day in November, it was like a lightning bolt shot through me with a new understanding.

That’s because just the night before I had been reading French rabbi-philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s The Burnt Book. Now, a warning: This is not a simple read. At all. There’s a lot of 20th century French philosophy—thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot (I happen to love that stuff, but I admit it’s an acquired taste). And there’s a lot of amazing but fairly esoteric Torah. This is not a beach read.

For the last few months I’ve been in a wonderful havruta about the book with two soul-friends. And the night before this dog walk I read a passage in which Ouaknin discusses Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav’s understanding of tzimtzum, or Divine self-contraction, which in Lurianic Kabbalah is essential for the creation of the world. Ouaknin points out that Rebbe Nachman introduces some slightly different, but quite significant, terminology in his rendering of this idea.

Significantly, he teaches that the Infinite One performed tzimtzum and created the universe out of rachmanut, i.e. rachamim, which we often render as “compassion.” But, Ouaknin observes, “Rachmanut comes from the term Rechem, the ‘womb,’ ‘uterus.’ He goes on to quote the French-Jewish thinker Shmuel Trigano: “It describes the uterine nature of the womb, that is to say, the capacity of the uterus to be what it is: to conceive the fetus… It is the capacity of the rehem to open up, to make an empty space in the heart of fullness of the person and to make room for the embryo, for a being Other. Rachmanut is essentially the ability to conceive someone other than oneself.” (273)

In Lurianic Kabbalah, the result of the tzimtzum is an empty space, within which creation occurs. For Ouaknin, the fact that Rebbe Nachman adds the dimension of rachamim, this “uterine” capacity to expand and be the bearer of something wholly other is monumental. It sets up an entire way of seeing the world, and an ethics that honors and makes space for the Other in a profound way (a la Levinas).

So all that was going through my mind as I walked the dog and heard this line about the heart naturally wanting to be more expansive than constrictive. And it made me re-think the line that Shai had started with: rachmana liba ba’ei. Yes, the most basic understanding of those words is that rachmana is Harachaman, the Merciful One. But a good Hasid would also be open to playing with the meaning slightly, in which case you might get: the heart wants to embody this quality of rachamim, i.e. the heart itself wants to be expansive, rather than constricted. To me, anyway, that was a hiddush, a new insight. Cherry on top: I delightedly recorded a voice memo and texted it to Shai to tell him, and we had a lovely exchange about it.

Isaac, about whom we read in Parashat Chayei Sarah, is the first character in the Torah who directly expresses love. While God assumes that Abraham loves his son (“Take your son, your only, the one whom you love” in Gen. 22:2), the Torah tells us explicitly that Isaac loved Rebecca: “Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebecca as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death” (Gen. 22:67).

Rashi, quoting Bereshit Rabbah, offers some additional color: “While Sarah was living, a light had burned in the tent from one Sabbath eve to the next, there was always a blessing in the dough (a miraculous increase) and a cloud was always hanging over the tent (as a divine protection), but since her death all these had stopped. However, when Rebecca came, they reappeared.” The midrash paints a picture of the re-emergence of openness and growth after a period of narrowness and constriction, and we extrapolate that, perhaps, the characters and their hearts likewise opened and expanded.

Rachmana liba ba’ei: The heart wants to be expansive. As Sylvia Boorstein told me once, “I don’t like how I feel when I’m pissed.” Yet it is so easy for our hearts to enter the metzarim, a state of closed-offness, a place of anger and pain. Sadly, we see that in abundance in our world.

May our mindful practice of Torah help us cultivate more rachmanut, more compassion and more expansiveness in our hearts. May those who are hurting be comforted, and may all who are in narrow places emerge into greater freedom, joy, and love.

Questions for Reflection:

• In your own life, when do you notice your heart feeling more constricted? What contributes to it? How does it feel in the rest of your body? What about when your heart is more expansive? 
• What, if anything, helps you to move from a constricted heart to an expansive one? 

Last Shabbat fell on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Marcheshvan, exactly a month after the tenth of Tishrei—which is better known as Yom Kippur. And while it was entirely a coincidence that last Shabbat was the culmination of a weeklong silent retreat I attended at the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, CA, the voice of Albert Einstein is chuckling inside my head, saying, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

At a certain point, it started to occur to me that this kind of retreat was a lot like an extended Yom Kippur. How so? The Mishnah lists five prohibitions we observe on Yom Kippur: 1) No eating and drinking. Okay, we do eat and drink on these kinds of retreats. But it’s a very different kind of consumption: Slow, mindful, intentional, and as a result a lot less than I normally eat at home. 2) No bathing. Again, yes there was bathing. But it was much less, and much less hurried or casual, than usual. Most folks showed up in the meditation hall in simple, baggy clothes—which reflected the general vibe that we don’t need to concern ourselves with appearance so much.

3) No anointing (wearing perfume). Like many retreat centers, this one stocked scent-free soaps and shampoos out of an inclusive sensibility, as there are folks who find those smells difficult to sit with. 4) No shoes. While most folks would wear shoes when going outside or working in the kitchen, one definitely does not wear shoes in the meditation hall or frankly in most of the retreat center. Just like on Yom Kippur, the idea here is to try to have direct contact with the ground. 5) No sexual activity. This is an explicit part of the expectations of the retreat—both for the safety and well-being of everyone participating, and as part of the practice. It’s an opportunity to notice, perhaps, when erotic or sexual impulses might arise—and then to let them fade away and not act on them.

Yom Kippur also includes the prohibitions of Shabbat, and in this case the parallel was most notable by way of refraining from technology use. We were off phones and screens for a week. We didn’t drive in cars or listen to music or podcasts or the radio. It was only on my long plane ride back to Chicago Sunday morning that I found out anything about the (truly epic!) World Series that had taken place that week—or any of the week’s other news. And while I’m used to doing that once a week from my own Shabbat practice, it’s quite a detox to do it seven days in a row.

Beyond all of this, the retreat evoked Yom Kippur most substantially in the fact that we spent virtually all of our waking hours in meditation of some kind. Each day there were nine or ten formal sits in the meditation hall, lasting 30 to 45 minutes. In between we did walking meditation indoors or on the beautiful grounds outside. For those of us who, like me, spend most of the day of Yom Kippur in shul, there can be a feeling of connection.

By Shabbat, the effect of all of this was that my sitting meditation had reached a really wonderful place. I was able to be very close and present with the breath, without a sense of mental noting (“I’m breathing in, I’m breathing out”) or intruding words or thoughts. I felt a deep sense of wholeness of body, mind, and spirit—perhaps what in Buddhism is termed samadhi, or what we might call yishuv hada’at (a settled mind) or meshivat nefesh (restoring the soul). During one of my sits on Shabbat afternoon, that closeness with the breath was such that I became aware that, when we get to the end of our lives, this is really all there is: just this breath, and then it will stop. It felt like I was rehearsing my own death—in the best possible way.

As Andrea Castillo, one of the retreat teachers, pointed out in a dharma talk that evening, that is exactly what we were all doing. Leaving everything and everyone behind for a week—loved ones, coworkers, pets—is a way of preparing them and us for the fact that eventually we will be gone. And getting to a point like that in meditation practice is a way of doing that for ourselves. If a retreat is about letting go, then this is the foundational letting go that all of us will eventually have to do.

Abraham is more associated with Rosh Hashanah than Yom Kippur, yet the word hineni, “I am here,” has become associated with both holidays. Hineni shows up three times in Genesis 22, the Binding of Isaac, which we read this week. Rashi, quoting Midrash Tanhuma (on Gen. 22:1), comments that Abraham’s hineni in response to the Divine call is a model for us: “Such is the answer of the pious,” he says. “It is an expression of humility and readiness.” Yes, hineni connotes fullness and even courage—but at its core, I think, Rashi is saying that hineni also evokes a kind of appropriate absence or emptiness too: We’ve let go of our clinging, of things that might delude us, and we’re able to see clearly that we are simply here. And then, just on the other side of hineni, will be einini: I am not here. The line is preciously thin.

This prompts me to pose two questions for all of us to consider:

1. When you are able to get quiet enough to really sense it, what, if anything, do you find yourself clinging to? What might you need or wish to let go of in order to live more simply and fully?

2. Does your practice of Torah and Judaism support you in that process of letting go? If so, how? If not, why not? And is there perhaps one practice that could help you do so a little more?

By the time you read this, I’ll be several days into a weeklong silent meditation retreat. Full disclosure: This isn’t a Jewish retreat. It’s at the Insight Meditation Center in the mountains above Santa Cruz, California, and it’s being led by Gil Fronsdal, a teacher I’ve come to deeply appreciate and learn from.

That may come as a bit of a surprise. Why is the head of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality going on a meditation retreat that isn’t Jewish?

There are a couple of reasons. The first is that I find that it’s hard for me to really quiet my work mind on a Jewish meditation retreat. There’s a loud voice in my mind that compares the experience with the retreats we teach at IJS. I can wind up thinking about whether there’s a partnership to be developed, or how a teacher might mesh in our lineup. So I decided that, if I really want to be as fully present on a retreat as I can be, it helps to be in more neutral territory.

But of course I’m also learning from the experience, even in an environment that isn’t Jewish. And that’s the second reason for me to go: In addition to my own experience, there is so much to learn from the wisdom of a master teacher like Gil. Yes, learning about myself. But also learning, through observing and experiencing, some ways I might improve my own teaching and leadership.

The relationship between Torah and wisdom from other sources and traditions has been a topic of conversation in Jewish life pretty much for as long as Jews have been around. It isn’t simple. For instance, the tradition honors Jethro as a great sage from outside the people of Israel, but it views Balaam as a sorceror who is part of a dangerous attempt to harm the Israelites. This reflects similar conflicting impulses about leaders of peoples and nations beyond our own: Cyrus (whose name is back in circulation these days) is celebrated as a great and wise king because of his magnanimity towards the Jews, while Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh are vilified because of their violence and cruelty.

Why does the Torah refer to Avram as Avram ha-Ivri, Abraham the Hebrew (Gen. 14:13)? The Midrash quotes Rabbi Yehudah: “All the world stood on one side (me-ever echad) and he stood on the other (me-ever echad).” According to this strain of thought, part of the essence of being a Jew is to be distinct and different—willing to stand over and against the world if necessary. In more recent times, this approach finds expression in the words of, for instance, Rabbi Boruch Ber Leibowitz (1862-1939), one of the great Torah scholars of the twentieth century: “There are two peoples in the world—Jews and non-Jews.” From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to Lenny Bruce.

Yet there’s a more complex picture that emerges from another midrash on the same verse: “A fugitive brought news to Avram HaIvri,” that his nephew Lot had been taken captive. Who, according to the midrash, is this news-bearing fugitive? None other than Og, future King of Bashan, who would wage war against the Israelites in the time of Moses. Surprising, yes. And in order to make sense of it, the midrash adds that what Og really wanted was that Avram would go to battle and be killed, leaving Sarai available for himself.

Rabbi Yosef Zundel of Salant (1786-1866), who was the rabbi of the Ashkenazi community of Jerusalem, further complicates the picture here. Before the Israelites’ war against Og, God reassures Moses, “Do not fear him” (Numbers 21:34). What would Moses and the Israelites have to fear? The Talmud answers: “Perhaps the merit of our forefather Abraham will stand for Og and save him” (Niddah 61a). Rabbi Zundel comments: “There is important mussar to learn here. If Og, who did just one good deed—and even then, had bad motivations—earned the merit of a great mitzvah to the point that it caused Moses and all of Israel to fear that they couldn’t stand against him, how much greater is the merit of one who does something good with good intention!” Note that Rabbi Zundel doesn’t limit the possibility of that merit only to Jews—it applies to anyone.

Our current moment is deeply inflected with this cultural legacy: What does it mean to be a Jew today? How do we understand, talk about, and act on the possibilities of threats and violence against Jews—and the possibilities of alliances, solidarity, and goodness? How do we hold the cultural legacies of traumas recent and ancient—and how do we try to live with them mindfully, wisely, skillfully?

These are not new questions. They have been our people’s questions since Abraham and Sarah. Just as in their time, the work of living these questions is, yes, work of the body—but also work of the heart and mind. While Abraham smashed the idols of his day, he also had spiritual friends and allies. As the rest of Genesis 14:13 points out, when the fugitive brought news to Abraham, he was dwelling “at the terebinths of Mamre the Amorite, kinsman of Eshkol and Aner, these being Abram’s allies,” who, according to Rashi, had “entered into a covenant with him.” They were, perhaps, the first allies of the Jews.

So I’m on my way to a meditation retreat with a wonderful Buddhist teacher, with the intention that what I learn and practice can deepen my life of Torah and mitzvot. I’ll look forward to sharing some reflections with you when I’m back.

Before I sign off, here are a couple of questions you might reflect on:

• I expect some of this conversation lands differently for different folks. What sensations, if any, did you notice arising as you read it? What do you think may have contributed to those feelings or responses?
• Consider Rabbi Yehudah’s comment, that to be an Ivri, a Hebrew, means to stand against the world. Consider also that another meaning of Ivri is “one who crosses over.” When, if ever, have you resonated with one, the other, or both?

One morning this week, on a visit to New York, I was walking down Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, en route to a fundraising meeting. A significant part of my job involves offering wealthy people the opportunity to support our work at IJS, and in this case I was headed to the apartment of one such person—who, I hasten to add, is not only a wonderful supporter, but also, unsurprisingly, a wonderful, caring, and generous soul.

It was a beautiful fall morning. The air was crisp and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was one of those mornings when, in my experience, New York itself can feel a little more generous.

That atmosphere of abundance may have contributed to a mitzvah I witnessed. An elderly man in an ill-fitting suit and a golf cap was walking slowly, pushing a cart. He appeared to be on his way to the drug store. As he came in my direction, he turned aside to another man who was camped out in a sleeping bag above the exhaust vent of a building. The old man took out a dollar bill and gave it to the man on the ground and said something kind to him.

I noticed this interaction as I kept walking towards my fundraising visit in a fancy apartment building with a doorman. And the questions began to churn: I wonder what motivated the old man to do that. I wonder how the guy on the ground felt. I wonder what that dollar means to each of them (given that there’s not a lot you can buy with a dollar these days).

And then some bigger ruminations began to take shape: The building whose grate was providing heat to the man on the ground cost tens of millions of dollars. The price of an apartment in that building is itself millions of dollars. And what am I doing? I didn’t stop to offer the guy a dollar. In fact, I’m on my way into one of those fancy apartments to perform what some of our donors lovingly refer to as a “cashectomy,” moving (with the patient’s consent, of course) dollars out of their account and into that of the not-for-profit I lead—a portion of which goes to pay my own salary.

The thoughts spun for a while, swirling around capitalism and inequality and the ways I’m personally caught up in the whole system. And then I took a breath, let the thoughts settle, and decided to keep a mental snapshot of the moment.

While I don’t live in Manhattan now, I did as a young adult. And the sense I get whenever I visit these days is a feeling of a hollowed out middle. You can see it in the skyline. You can certainly see it in the mayoral election, which is making the news well beyond the Hudson River. Before I moved to New York as a young person, a mentor of mine told me, “To live in New York you need to be young or wealthy.” From what I can tell, today it can feel like even the “young” part of that statement isn’t so true.

While we think of it as a story about an ark during a flood, if we read a little more deeply we may find that Parashat Noach is a reflection on what it takes to maintain a shared society. What does it mean to be created in God’s image? How do we think of human beings in relation to other species, and to the planet itself? What are the basic norms by which we’re going to live? And, in the story of the Tower of Babel that comes after the flood, how do we maintain the languages and cultures that make us unique while also abiding in a sense of shared humanity?

At the outset of the Torah portion, the Holy One tells Noah, “the world is filled with violence because of human beings” (Gen. 6:13). The Midrash comments that this verse teaches that the generation of the flood took corruption to a particularly sophisticated level, stealing from one another not only through brazen acts, but in less detectable ways: “This is what the members of the generation of the Flood would do: One of them would take out a basket filled with beans [to the marketplace]. Another person would come and take less than a peruta worth [of beans] and another one would come and take less than a peruta worth [i.e. less than the amount for which one would be able to collect compensation in court].”

The Saba of Slobodka, Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, observed that this midrash teaches how deeply we have to work on our character, our spiritual core: “How very much are we obligated to improve our actions!” On the one hand, it means letting go of the desire to hold on to even a peruta, the smallest amount of wealth. And on the other, I might suggest, and as the old man I saw on Broadway embodied, it could mean recognizing the value of that peruta to another—and freely and generously giving it away (much less giving many perutot).

The beginning of the verse from Genesis that I quoted above reads: “The end of all flesh has come before Me.” Perhaps on the deepest level, we read the story of the Flood to remind us that, while we may delude ourselves, ultimately we can’t take any of it with us. We are gifted the opportunity to sojourn on the planet for a short while. The question for each of us individually, and for all of us collectively, is, How can we be the best possible custodians of that gift—not only for ourselves, but for us all?

Perhaps, like me, you shed tears this week.

My first tears came as I watched video of the living Israeli hostages reunited with their families. I wept along with Einav Zangauker, one of the most outspoken advocates for the hostages, as she repeatedly cried out, “Chaim sheli!” “My life!” while embracing her son Matan. I cried as the father of Yosef-Chaim Ohana finished saying his prayers and emerged to tearfully embrace him. I sobbed at the cries of the parents of Eitan Mor as they were reunited with their son, and then again as I witnessed Eitan’s mother, Efrat, illuminate the deepest meanings of the shehechiyanu blessing.

The tears came again while reciting Hallel on Shemini Atzeret. Every line seemed to take on new significance. While I have recited these verses lines all my life, they revealed a new, visceral dimension on this day against this backdrop. Hodu ladonai ki tov, ki l’olam hasdo: Give thanks to YHVH for this goodness, God’s abundant love endures forever. Tears again.

And then we danced on Simchat Torah. If Heschel described marching for civil rights as praying with his feet, then this was the same theme in a different register. I had such an urge to dance, because just sitting or standing and praying or singing simply wasn’t enough. My body needed to move in order to express what I was feeling. When the circle moved slowly, I scooted to the center and found other people to dance faster. My eyes again filled with tears—of relief, of gratitude.

What added poignancy to everything, of course, was the fact that all this was happening precisely two years after we cried while dancing—a different dance and different tears. On Rosh Hashanah each of the last two years, I have choked up while reciting the prayer to the Holy One to “turn all our troubles and afflictions into joy and gladness, to life and peace.” And now there were tears that, after so much suffering and loss, so much war and death, at least for this moment, at least on some significant level, that prayer had indeed come true.

My last tears came the morning of Simchat Torah. Even though I know it’s coming, reading the death of Moses always pulls me up short. I get a lump in my throat. We have spent the last four books of the Torah with Moshe Rabbeinu, and every year I experience a pang of loss as we recite the final lines of the Torah. A tear comes.

And then, right away, we begin again with Bereshit.

The Midrash teaches that the word Yisrael is an acronym for Yesh Shishim Ribo Otoiot Latorah: “There are 600,000 letters in the Torah.” Bereshit, the first word of the Torah, is a related acronym: B’shishim Ribo Otiot Sheyisrael Yikablu Torah: “Israel will accept the Torah with 600,000 letters.” From these teachings, the Hasidic masters expounded the idea that every member of the Jewish people has a letter in the Torah. “Each Jew is connected to one letter in the Torah,” writes Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl in his Meor Einayim. “Each letter represents the divine element in each person. It is actually the very letter from which their soul derives. It is this letter that pours forth divine blessings and holy vital force.”

In my experience, we often explore this teaching with an emphasis on its personal nature: There’s a unique place for each one of us, and our avodah, our sacred service, is to find and inhabit it. I think that’s true. But at the same time, I might suggest that we’re only getting half the teaching through that understanding. Because here’s what the Meor Einayim says next: “A Torah scroll that is missing one letter is unfit for use. Indeed, it is not even considered a Torah, since each and every letter is considered a Torah, connecting with the others to make a complete unity… All Creation is a complete unity, like the Torah, which can only be called a Torah when all of its letters are present and united.”

The second part of the teaching here, I might suggest, is that our personal self-actualization is only part of the story. Yes, we need to find and be at home in our letter. But our letter is only truly our letter when it’s beside all the other letters in the Torah. We need every letter in order to make a Torah scroll. And we need every member of our community to constitute the Jewish people.

To put it another way: Torah and Jewish life are not things we can do on our own. We need the other 599,999 letters in order for our letter to mean something. So while we each have our special, unique individual journeys, those journeys are individual paths on an extraordinary highway that extends through space and time—back to the creation of the world and forward to its eventual redemption.

That brings me back to one more moment of tears. It came during the sixth of the seventh hakafot (dance sets) on Simchat Torah night. For the past two years, our synagogue has used the sixth hakafah as a moment to slow down the dancing a bit—in fact to stop. We form a large circle and sing slow songs, and we focus on the profound sense of connection and community that binds us and our entire people, not only in the synagogue, but across the world.

This year, as that singing took place, my 12-year old son Toby was on the bimah with a circle of kids spontaneously leading the hundreds of us in shul in singing a slow version of Am Yisrael Chai. Toby has come to love Simchat Torah, and he has come to love our special community in Skokie. Watching him up there with his friends, enacting the very words he was singing, I felt this incredible mixture of joy and pride, sadness and relief. As I welled up again, I spotted the parent of another of the kids on the bimah, and she had the same look on her face.

Over the coming months, I’m sure we will be unpacking a processing what the last two years have wrought for Jews and for Judaism. There’s a lot to work through. But one thing I hope we might be able to do is tap into the extraordinary spiritual power of our people. I hope we might be able to make space for every letter our collective Torah scroll. Indeed I believe we must do that. Because just as Torah lives, the Jewish people lives—in our uniqueness and our connectedness.

Before I sign off, I want to try out a new feature in these weekly messages: an invitation for you to reflect for a moment. Here are a couple of questions that can help you do so. You might consider them as journaling prompts or even as questions you can pose at your Shabbat table:

• As you think back on this fall holiday season, or even on these last two years, are there moments that stand out to you as particularly significant? Why?
• How do you relate to the teaching that every member of the Jewish people has a spiritual root in a letter of the Torah scroll? In particular, how does the idea of the Jewish people make you feel these days?

When I ask how the day is going, my friend Marvin, who is older and much wiser than me, often likes to say, “Good—so far.” By which he means something like: The day isn’t over yet, and while thankfully things have been good so far this day, who knows what might come next.

In the world of Torah, we generally associate the question “Who knows?” with Mordechai, who uses those very words to encourage his niece Esther to go to King Achashverosh and plead the case of the Jews before him: “Who knows if it were not for such a time as this that you became Queen?” (Esther 4:14)

Writing on the Book of Esther, Avivah Zornberg notes that it represents a hinge moment in not only Jewish history, but also our people’s collective understanding of our relationship with the Divine: “The world of the Bible, where God directly intervenes in history, has come to an end; even the restoration of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple follow no clear pattern of fulfillment… No longer one simple, consequential story, history divides into the age of Scripture, of the sacred texts, on the one hand, and present time, when Rabbinic Judaism arises to interpret those texts and detect the ways in which they may be seen to intersect with this quite different time.” (Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, 114)

Zornberg fleshes this out some more: “After Esther, the world of prophecy and miracles yields place to the world of chokhmah, of wisdom, of hints and interpretations. Instead of the overwhelming revelations of Sinai—with its visual, perhaps blinding manifestations of God’s presence—there is the world in which God and the human are separated and linked by a third force—by the text, the messenger, the transmission.” (Ibid., 126)

According to my quick search, Esther marks the last instance in which the phrase mi yodeah, “Who knows,” occurs in the Bible. Of the eleven other times we find this phrase, five of them appear in Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which we read on the Shabbat of Sukkot. Of course, we might say: it tracks with the book’s deeply existentialist vibe. In case you need help getting in the mood, I’ll list them:

“Who knows whether he will be wise or foolish?” (2:19) 

“Who knows if the lifebreath of humans does rise upward and if the breath of animals does sink down into the earth?” (3:21) 

“Who can possibly know what is best for people to do in life—the few days of this fleeting life? For who can tell what the future holds for them under the sun?” (6:12) 

“Who is like the sage, and who knows the meaning of the adage: ‘Wisdom lights up a person’s face, so that deep discontent is dissembled’?” (8:1) 

“Indeed, what is to happen is unknown; even when it is on the point of happening, who can tell?” (8:7)

When I asked Gemini AI to suggest some adjectives to describe Ecclesiastes, its number one recommendation was “pessimistic.” Here’s how it fleshed out its thinking: “The main speaker, Qoheleth (the Preacher), investigates virtually every human pursuit—wisdom, pleasure, wealth, labor, and power—only to conclude that they are all transient, empty, and ultimately fail to provide lasting significance under the sun. This general outlook on life’s lack of ultimate meaning and the inevitability of death is the very definition of a pessimistic viewpoint.”

That’s hard to argue with.

Yet if you go back a couple of paragraphs, you’ll see I didn’t choose “pessimistic,” but rather Gemini’s number four suggestion, “existential,” perhaps because it’s a notch or two less dour. Perhaps I was thinking of Marvin, who, as anyone who knows him will attest, is the farthest thing from a dour person I could imagine. Rather, he’s a realist who has acquired a good deal of wisdom through his many years on the planet—and that wisdom also enables him to be one of the most joyful, loving, and spiritually attuned people I know (it also helps that he’s got a million-watt smile that can light up a small city).

The precariousness of the sukkah, its ephemeral quality—here today, gone tomorrow—is of course deeply linked with Kohelet. There’s a reason we read this book on this holiday. It’s the harvest holiday, and while we are hopefully happy with our crop, we also know that winter is coming. Yet Sukkot is also zman simchateinu, the time of our rejoicing—not in spite of, perhaps, but actually because of the clearer lenses through which we can perceive our lives, especially on this side of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We are, hopefully, a bit clearer on what we can truly know and what we can’t—and we can let go of the resistance we grip (or that grips us?) in both past and future.

I write all of this at what feels like another hinge moment in Jewish history, as we mark the second anniversary of October 7 and hold our collective breath that the remaining hostages will come home, the killing will stop, and the dust might begin to settle. It is a moment of many mixed emotions, many conflicting realities, many truths we will have to work to hold and inspect simultaneously. (I include in those mixed emotions those we may feel about the President, to whom I certainly feel an enormous dose of gratitude for this—even as I strenuously object to so many of his other actions.)

Just a week ago, on Yom Kippur, we read the story of Jonah (who, my friend Rabbi Hody Nemes pointed out in a lovely sermon this week, builds a sukkah of his own—see Jonah 4:5). Among other things, Jonah is the survivor of a shipwreck. And that brings me to a passage from José Ortega y Gasset, which Avivah Zornberg quotes in her essay: “And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.”

Whether our sukkot have survived the holiday thus far intact or, perhaps, have experienced their own version of shipwreck, I expect we can probably all relate to the metaphor on some level. May this moment be one that brings the shipwreck to a close, may it be a moment that enables healing to begin.

The emotional summit of my spiritual year comes at the end of Yom Kippur. The liturgy for that moment is utterly unique, something we do at no other time of the year: Responsively crying out the Shema and then, seven times, “Adonai hu haelohim,” “YHVH is God.” Then, when we’ve reached the peak, the shofar sounds for a final time and we break out into an ecstatic dance as we sing, “L’shanah haba’ah b’yerushalaim habenuyah,” “Next year in a rebuilt Jerusalem.” 

While I and the people surrounding me have been fasting for 25 hours, we don’t seem to feel exhausted, but rather exultant: light as air, high on the palpable spiritual energy and presence we’ve tapped into. It’s a moment I try to savor every year.

Your own Yom Kippur experience may be like this, or it may be different. I’m in a privileged position of being deeply literate and familiar with the liturgy, having a Jewish spiritual practice in which this peak experience makes complete sense to me, and being physically able not only to sing and dance, but to fast and stand for much of the day. That’s not the case for everyone. 

Yet if we do it right, that final moment of Yom Kippur can be, and often is (I think), extraordinarily inclusive. The energy doesn’t just radiate out from the center, but suffuses the whole room. For this moment, perhaps, divisions can fall away– we can sense equality, we can feel embraced: Not so much “me” or “you,” “God” and “human,”  but rather a whole lot of “us.”

In his commentary on the Shulchan Arukh, Rabbi Moshe Isserlis (1520-1572) notes the custom to begin building one’s sukkah immediately after Yom Kippur, “so that we may go from one mitzvah to the next.” On one level, that might strike us a cute thing to tell children–because how could we imagine being so physically exhausted and then coming home and putting up a sukkah? It’s a nice idea, we might say, but no one really does that. (And, truth be told, I don’t know too many people who do.)

And yet I think the idea reflects a much deeper spiritual sensibility: Once we have reached this amazing point, the state we might analogize to the end of a spiritual retreat, we want to keep it alive–and we want to bring it into the world with us. 

In his Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger (1847-1905) comments on the Torah’s instruction that “every citizen of the people of Israel will dwell in sukkot” during the holiday (Leviticus 23:42). He cites the Talmud, which says that this verse teaches that “every member of the people of Israel is fit to reside in one sukkah.” The Sefat Emet elaborates: “For there is emunah (faith and trust) and there is bechira (choice and will). On the level of emunah, everyone is equal: we can all have faith and trust in the Creator. But when it comes to choice and will, each of us has our own abilities. In the Zohar, the sukkah is called ‘the shade of emunah,’ because when it comes to emnuah we are all fundamentally equal.”

We live in a time, of course, of profound division–in the Jewish people, in our nations and communities, even in our families, and perhaps even within ourselves. And while we can’t simply will into being the softening of divisions or the deep structural work of reform and renewal, this transition between Yom Kippur and Sukkot can remind us of how a repaired, renewed Jerusalem–by which we don’t only mean the physical city, but the spiritual vision it represents–might feel. May we continue on the journey toward it.

As I was walking to shul on Rosh Hashanah morning, I did some personal accounting (’tis the season and all). My first “High Holiday gig” was blowing shofar in our minyan in Ann Arbor around age 14. The first time I led Rosh Hashanah Musaf was at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New Haven in the fall of 1999, and I’ve continued doing that in various places nearly every year since.

But then it occurred to me that this year is my fiftieth experience of the High Holidays. (My father, may he rest in peace, always used to love wishing us a happy birthday by saying, “Mazal tov on entering your Xth year,” referring not to the number signified by our birthday, but by that number plus one: the year it ushers in.) And that kind of interrupted my nostalgic trip down memory lane (High Holidays version) and brought things into a different focus.

Fifty is traditionally thought of as one of life’s bigger birthdays, of course. While my own birthday is still more than six months away, my Rosh Hashanah realization led me to this association:

You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

It occurred to me that this is my Yovel, my jubilee year.

Now the Yovel is, of course, a communal enterprise. It really isn’t meant to be significant primarily for individuals. But I also thought of one of my favorite teachings of the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who addresses a good question: Why does the Torah prescribe blowing the shofar to proclaim the Yovel on Yom Kippur, and not on Rosh Hashanah? “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one,” he says. “For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)

The Maharal’s phrase that I’ve translated as “original place of security” is hezkat rishonah, which has a flavor that’s a little hard to capture in English. On a literal level, it’s probably better rendered as “original holding,” as in land holding, which is what the JPS Bible translation cited above does. But the word hazakah connotes something strong (hazak)–i.e. an assumption in which we can place our faith, a place of security.

So what does it mean that on Yom Kippur–whether it’s our first or our fiftieth–each of us returns to our original place, our place of security? Obviously we’re not making a physical return (that is left, in theory, for the Jubilee year). And it’s not as if we forget all that we have experienced and learned in the preceding year.

What I imagine the Maharal is getting at is the idea that Yom Kippur is a day of rebirth, a day the Rabbis understood to be a mikvah in time. At the conclusion of Tractate Yoma in the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiva quotes Jeremiah 17:13: Mikveh Yisrael, “O hope of Israel! O eternal one!” He then plays with the the similarity between the Hebrew root signifying hope, kaveh (like Hatikvah), and the word for ritual bath, mikvah. “Just as a ritual bath purifies the impure, so too, the Holy Blessed One, purifies Israel.” And just as someone who emerges from a mikvah is considered a renewed being–clean and pure–we, upon our emergence from Yom Kippur, are clean, pure, and renewed.

During these ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, we make reference to the Talmud’s teaching that the books of our lives are open and being written. That can sometimes feel disempowering: It’s all up to God. Or it can feel transactional: If I do good deeds now, then God will write me in the Book of Life. In my experience, that’s a theological posture likely to result in disappointment, if not shattered faith.

A perhaps more helpful alternative comes from the Maggid of Mezritch: “On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the ‘writing’ is the thoughts that we think” (Torat HaMaggid Rosh Hashanah). That is, the book is our book, the story of our lives. We are writing it. And the beautiful opportunity of this season is that, no matter what the story has been until now, it really can change with this new chapter.

Gemar chatima tova – May the chapter you write now be one of blessings for you and for all of us.

Reading my friend Jane Eisner’s wonderful new biography of Carole King, I learned about the Brill Building, which sits at 49th and Broadway in Manhattan and, in the 1960s, was the center of the American pop music world. There was King herself, of course, but reading through the list of songwriters and bands that centered around the building one gets the sense of just how extraordinary a place it was: Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Sonny Bono, Liza Minnelli, Dionne Warwick, and many many more.

(A plug: I’ll be doing a public book talk with Jane on October 23, a couple of weeks before we start teaching our IJS online course “Don’t Turn Away: Reading the News Without Losing Your Mind,” which begins November 3.)

One of the writers at the Brill Building not on the Wikipedia list is Fred Neil, whose song “Everybody’s Talkin'” was made famous by Harry Nilsson, whose version was featured in the 1969 movie “Midnight Cowboy,” and then again in “Forrest Gump” (1994). The song has been covered by over 100 other artists, from Stevie Wonder to Leonard Nimoy (!). (My personal favorite is sung by Jacqui Abbott with the English band The Beautiful South.) Here are its opening words:

Everybody’s talkin’ at me
I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’
Only the echoes of my mind
People stoppin’, starin’
I can’t see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes

On one level, of course, this is just excellent social commentary. Already by 1966, when Neil wrote the song, the modern world had produced such a cacophony for so many people that millions of Americans could identify with this sentiment. There was just so much noise in modern life, and people understandably longed for some kind of escape:

I’m goin’ where the sun keeps shinin’
Through the pourin’ rain

Goin’ where the weather suits my clothes
Bankin’ off of the northeast winds
Sailin’ on a summer breeze
And skippin’ over the ocean like a stone

Of course, the cacophony only feels like it has grown louder since. When I get on public transportation or an airplane these days, I, like so many others, pop in my noise-cancelling headphones to listen to a podcast, or a guided meditation, or, yes, this very song. Everybody seems to be talkin’ at me—in spoken words and flashing ads and emails and social media and notifications—and I just want to mentally take myself to a place where the sun keeps shining, skipping happily over the noisy ocean like a stone.

Yet Fred Neil knew, as you and I do, that simply escaping the noise isn’t really what we’re really trying to do. What I really want to do—and I expect you, as well—is hear our own voice. As the song’s first words say, it can often feel like we’re hearing only the echoes of our minds—but not the voice of our mind itself. In order to do that, we have to get quiet. And while escaping to someplace less noisy certainly helps with that, it’s no guarantee. Getting quiet is one thing; hearing the still, small voice within us is another.

The seventh Mishnah of the third chapter of tractate Rosh Hashanah reads as follows (based on Koren/Steinsaltz emended translation):

If one sounds a shofar into a pit, or into a cistern, or into a large jug: if they clearly heard the sound of the shofar, they have fulfilled the mitzvah; but if they heard the sound of an echo, they have not fulfilled the mitzvah. And similarly, if one was passing behind a synagogue, or their house was adjacent to the synagogue, and they heard the sound of the shofar… if they focused their heart, i.e. they established an intention to fulfill the mitzvah, they have fulfilled it; but if not, they have not fulfilled it. (It is therefore possible for two people to hear the shofar blasts, but only one of them fulfills the mitzvah.) Even though this one heard and also the other one heard, nevertheless, this one focused their heart to fulfill the mitzvah and has therefore indeed fulfilled it, but the other one did not focus their heart, and so has not fulfilled it.

There would seem to be two related big ideas here. The first is that, in order to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the sound of the shofar we have to make sure we’re hearing the actual sound and not an echo. Yet stop and think about that for a moment: How do we know what the “actual” sound is? Sound reverberates off the wall, the ceiling, the floor. Unless our ear is right up against the shofar, aren’t we always taking in some aspect of the sound that isn’t “pure?” (And even then: If our right ear is next to the shofar, our left is still picking up sounds that have reverberated around the room.) What is the voice, and what is the echo?

Perhaps the Mishnah is thus already inviting us to a broader conception of “hearing”—one that isn’t strictly limited by physical dimensions, and thus also opens up broader potential meanings. Thus the second, related, idea in the Mishnah: To truly fulfill the mitzvah of the shofar, it’s necessary to engage in kivvun halev, directing the heart. While the Talmud debates whether or not, in general, doing mitzvot requires intention, in the case of hearing the sound (literally the kol, the “voice”) of the shofar, it certainly does.

What does it take to direct our hearts? For some it might be pausing before the shofar blasts to make a mental note: “I’m experiencing these blasts in order to fulfill the mitzvah.” But I would suggest there is a more expansive opportunity for us if we choose to take it.

The language the Mishnah uses, here and elsewhere, to describe one who has fulfilled a mitzvah is yatzah yedei chovato, which literally translates to “has left the grip (yad/hand) of one’s obligation,” or, in abbreviated form, simply yatzah, “has left.” There is motion here, an act of leaving, of going somewhere. On one level, of course, it’s leaving the state of still being obligated to fulfill the commandment of hearing the shofar: once we’ve heard it, we have discharged the obligation, and thus “left.”

But on a deeper level, I think there’s an invitation here to transcend the noise-drenched world in which we live, to go deeper, to go inward. In the voice of the shofar we can, for a moment, leave the cacophonous din of this world and hear other kolot, other voices: The voice of the Divine that called to us at Sinai and, according to the Talmud, still calls to us every day; the still small voice that remains after the storm (to borrow from I Kings 19); the voices of joy and delight, of brides and grooms, in a comforted and spiritually renewed world (Jeremiah 33:11).

“The Torah is not in heaven,” Moses tells us, “nor is it across the ocean… It is on your lips and in your heart that you may do it” (Deuteronomy 30:12-14). Already in Moses’s time, it feels like the world could be a noisy place. It certainly is today. It often feels like so much work to attune to the genuine signals amidst the haze of so many siren songs. The shofar is our people’s ancient spiritual technology for cutting through the noise. This year, may we direct our hearts to hear it, to sense its vibrations deep inside. May the voice of the shofar help us attune to the compassionate, loving Divine voice within each of us.

Many years ago when I was a young rabbi working at Northwestern University Hillel, I went to meet Patti Ray at her home. Patti was the longtime director of Hillel at Loyola University, one of our neighboring campuses in the Chicago area. After this long time, I don’t really remember why I went to her house, but that visit has had a lasting impact—because the day that I came, Patti was having her windows cleaned before Rosh Hashanah.

This wasn’t something I had grown up with. While I can definitely remember using Windex and a rag to clean the windows in our house as a kid, that was only on the inside. Patti had hired professionals to clean not only the inside, but the outside. And, having never seen this, I got to experience the dramatic difference it made. With apologies to Joni Mitchell: You don’t know how much schmutz you’ve got til it’s gone. (Or, alternatively, Johnny Nash: “I can see clearly now.”)

This week the window cleaners came to our house and the result is, as ever, transformative. But, of course, it’s not only the physical aspect that makes such a difference. There’s also something about cleaning the windows, and thus being able to see clearly, that is particularly evocative during Elul. For me, it’s a kind of embodied metaphor for the self-accounting, purification, and renewal that the season invites and demands of us.

“When all of these blessings pursue you and overtake you” (Deuteronomy 28:2). This is a frankly strange verse in our Torah portion: There’s the unusual notion of blessings almost physically chasing us—how does that happen? And there’s the odd juxtaposition of this active, subtly violent language (rodef, pursue, is the word the Torah uses to describe Pharaoh’s army chasing after the Israelites, for instance) with the abundant tone of the rest of the verse. How to make sense of it?

One answer comes from Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Izbicsza: “When one becomes wealthy,” he says, “one changes—they become a different person. Thus this is a special blessing: If all of these blessings of material success come upon you, they will find you as you are—not “puffed up” (nechmetzet, like chametz) and not unmoored.”

Wealth can take many different forms—yes, financial, but in other ways too. “Who is wealthy? One who is happy with what they have,” as Ben Zoma teaches. So one invitation of this reading might be to ask ourselves: How have we grown wealthy—and what changes might that have brought about in us? How may our perception have shifted? How, if at all, might we need or want to re-attune ourselves with our deepest values?

A second reading comes from Rabbi Chayim Ephraim of Sudilkov: “When one is in a more constricted state of mind, one can wind up fleeing from the good—for they don’t realize that it is in fact good for them. Thus King David prayed, ‘May goodness and hesed pursue me’ [N.B. again, the word rodef], for there are times when I don’t realize I should pursue goodness and hesed myself—in such cases, may they chase after me and find/overtake me. Thus the Torah assures us: ‘When all of these blessings pursue you and overtake you’ — that is, they will come upon you and greet you.”

This is a related but slightly different lesson: We can’t always perceive clearly what is actually the good in a given moment. Sometimes—especially when we are harried, when our consciousness is constricted—we can miss the goodness that’s right in front of us, or we only come to appreciate the goodness that was present long after our encounter with it. So the invitation of this reading is to recognize the good that’s present when it’s present.

Elul is a time of spiritual cleaning: clearing off the schmutz both inside and out. One of our goals for that cleaning is to gain greater clarity of perception, to behold what needs change and realignment and the many blessings that are often already present but that we fail to acknowledge. May our practices support us in doing so—for ourselves and for our communities.

On Monday I had the rare opportunity to attend two funerals of women who died well into their 90s. They happened to know each other, they were both matriarchs of families with whom I’ve enjoyed long friendships, and they even shared the same first name (though spelled differently: Rheta Shapiro and Rita Mendelsohn). It’s not every day such a thing occurs.

I have always found funerals in Elul to be particularly poignant. Many of us are already engaged, to a greater or lesser degree, in spiritual reflection as we prepare for the High Holidays. As the seasons change, as children head back to school, as the sense of so many different new years arises, I find myself entering some deep grooves of memory—thinking and feeling backwards and forwards, feeling the legacies of ancestors and considering what I’m creating and bequeathing as an ancestor myself. In other words: Heshbon hanefesh, spiritual accounting. ‘Tis the season, after all.

Rita Mendelsohn’s funeral was led by her son-in-law, Rabbi Marty Lockshin. In his eulogy, he spoke of the mitzvah of sending away the mother bird when gathering eggs from a nest, which we find in this week’s parashah. Marty cited the 19th Century Italian commentator, Rabbi Shmuel David Luzzato (known by his acronym, Shadal), who observes that most of the time a bird will fly away when humans approach. (Any child who has ever playfully shooed away pigeons in the city will know that.) But a mother bird won’t fly away: She’ll stay to protect her eggs, a reflection of the deep bond to which we might all aspire in our loving relationships.

In his comments on the verse, Rashi focuses on the unusual assurance that observing this mitzvah will result in “lengthening of days.” If a “simple” or “light” mitzvah (mitzvah kalah), which involves no element of expense on your part, yields such a reward, all the more so with a mitzvah that does. Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter of Ger (1865-1948) observes that there are many other mitzvot that don’t involve expense, yet they are not referred to as “simple” or “light.” So why is this one? “Because it involves no preparation,” he says. As the Torah puts it, this mitzvah applies “If you chance upon a bird’s nest” (Deut. 22:6). Thus the definition of a “light” or “simple” mitzvah is one that requires no preparation—while weightier ones do.

Of course, the lines can become blurry. Yes, building a sukkah requires preparation and intention. So does making Shabbat dinner, or blowing the Shofar, or reading from the Torah. But one could argue that sending away the mother bird itself requires some preparation: moral preparation, to recognize the situation and not simply kill the mother bird—cruelly taking advantage of her own vulnerability which is the result of her innate desire to protect her chicks—and then take the eggs. And, in the reverse, there can be moments of illumination and epiphany, moments when we haven’t prepared, but life seemingly summons us to do something of significance.

Yet the Talmud reminds us, Ein somchin al hanes, “We don’t rely on miracles.” That’s why we plan and prepare. In Elul “the King is in the field,” the atmosphere is laden with the spirit of reflection and preparation. It’s a time to be considering the stories we hope will be told years from now as we’re remembered by loved ones, to make changes in our lives to live in alignment with those stories, and to repair the relationships with those who might tell them long into the future.

One of the most delightful parts of being a parent has been studying parts of the Mishnah with each of my children. With my older kids, who are now both in college, it has been a little while. But my youngest is still at home, and our synagogue recently began a new collective project to study two mishnayot (individual teachings) per day, with the goal of completing the entire Mishnah in five years. If we stick to it, Toby and I will finish before he graduates high school. In the meantime, the shul is incentivizing teenagers with the lure of a gift card for each tractate we finish. That was enough to whet his appetite.

I was on the road a couple of nights this week, but Toby and I Facetimed for 15 minutes each evening to study the tractate of Rosh Hashanah together. While the later chapters discuss the shofar (as one would expect), the opening chapters focus on the mitzvah of kiddush hahodesh, the sanctification of the new moon. In ancient times, the Jewish calendar—which remember, is lunar—depended on the monthly declaration of the new moon by the Sanhedrin, the rabbinic high court. In order for the court to proclaim the date of the new moon—and thereby establish the dates for the holidays and festivals, which had a significant effect on individual and communal life—the court had to receive testimony from two witnesses who saw the new moon. The opening chapters of Rosh Hashanah deal with the whole procedure.

The first teaching of the second chapter reads as follows:

Initially, the court would accept testimony from anyone. But when the Boethusians corrupted the process, the Sages instituted that they would accept testimony only from those they knew to be valid.

The Boethusians were one of the groups that opposed the Rabbis. Much of their disagreement centered on the notion of the Oral Law, the set of customs and interpretive traditions that particularly distinguished Rabbinic Judaism. In several places the Talmud (which was, of course, written by the Rabbis) relates stories of these disputes: Over the proper dating of Shavuot, for example, or over the way the High Priest was supposed to perform the rituals of Yom Kippur. This results in an emotional scene in Tractate Yoma, when the Rabbis make admonishing the High Priest part of the regular part of his preparation: the text relates that everyone cried at this, presumably because of the breakdown in trust that it represented.

Toby and I caught a whiff of that sad sensibility in this Mishnah too. The Boethusians, it seems, were not only committed to their version of ordering time, but went so far as to undermine the institution of testimony—that is, truth-telling that establishes a common reality—by sending false witnesses to the Sanhedrin. While the Rabbis would generally have been very expansive in trusting those who came to testify, they ultimately had to presume distrust, and limit testimony only to those whom they knew. We reflected together that it’s much more comfortable to live in a world where you feel like you can trust people, and it’s painful to feel otherwise. It’s kind of the bedrock of safety.

Parashat Shoftim begins with the commandment to appoint judges and magistrates, v’shaftu et ha’am mishpat tzedek, “and they shall govern the people with due justice” (Deuteronomy 16:19). Rashi, following the Sifrei, interprets: “This means, appoint judges who are expert and righteous to give just judgment.” The Torah expects a combination of both expertise and righteousness: Judges need to know the law—that is, they need to be experts—and, in the same breath, they need to understand how to apply the law with fairness and equity.

Why does the Torah feel the need to articulate this? Perhaps because a society ultimately depends on our collective trust that our judges and leaders know their stuff and will apply the law fairly, balancing the needs of individuals, society, and the law itself. Yet as the Mishnah reminds us, all of us are part of maintaining that trust. Even those of us who aren’t appointed leaders or judges have to be trustworthy to offer testimony. When any aspect of this collective trust begins to erode—whether our trust in our leaders’ expertise and ability, or our trust in one another as reliable narrators committed to the collective welfare—that is, at a minimum, an occasion for sadness and regret. At maximum, it jeopardizes our ability to live together in peace.

One of the greatest judges in the Bible is King Solomon. Famously, upon assuming the throne, he asks the Holy One to grant him a lev shomeah, a listening heart, “to judge Your people” (I Kings 3:9). In this season of spiritual attunement, and in this time of so much distrust—between communities and their leaders, between neighbors, between fellow Jews—may our spiritual practices help us to open our hearts, that we might be trustworthy to one another.

Ever since we moved into our home 12 years ago, we have faced a challenge whenever there’s a heavy rain: our backyard turns into a small pond. Thankfully the water has not posed an issue for our basement (though the presence of three sump pumps in the house tells me that it probably did for the previous owners). Mostly it has just been a wet inconvenience. Depending on the amount of rainfall, it can put our backyard out of commission for a week or more—and in the Chicago area, every day that isn’t winter is a precious chance to be outside.

We’ve looked into various solutions. The one that would most effectively solve the problem is regrading, but it’s expensive. So for years, every time there’s a big rain, I have donned my rubber boots and schlepped an electric pump that sends the water through a hose out to the drain in the street. Not pretty, not fun, but effective.

This spring we tried a new solution: We planted a rain garden. Our neighbor Ron runs a landscaping business that specializes in native plants. He came over and designed an L-shaped garden of beautiful flowering plants that are indigenous to this area of northern Illinois: Rose milkweed, white turtlehead, cardinal flower, brown-eyed susans. It didn’t take long for them to grow, and by the middle of summer there were beautiful reds, yellows, blues and pinks throughout, along with monarch butterflies and hummingbirds and even a pair of goldfinches.

Earlier this week the garden got its first real test: 2.5 inches of rain in the span of about 4 hours on Monday night. The next morning I was eager for the dawn so I could get a look. And lo and behold, while there was water in the garden, much of it had been sopped up by the plants—and it was much prettier to look at than the muddy pond that would have been there otherwise. Success!

“There shall be no needy among you” (Deut. 15:4) declares Moses as he explains the mitzvah of shemittah, which involves both cancelling debts every seven years—and continuing to lend to those in need, even with the knowledge that the loan will be cancelled. (N.B. This is what led Hillel the Elder to come up with the pruzbul, whereby debts could be sold to the Rabbinic court and carried over through the sabbatical year—thereby ensuring that those with capital would lend to those in need.)

Yet despite this categorical statement—”There shall be no needy among you”—just a few verses later Moses contradicts himself: “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” (15:11). The medieval commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra observes this seeming contradiction and suggests a resolution based on the language of verse 6: “For YHVH your God will bless you as promised: you will extend loans to many nations, but require none yourself.” Ibn Ezra says, “Moses knew that a generation will arise that will not be mostly meritorious. He therefore said, ‘For the poor shall never cease out of the land.'”

I would suggest an additional way of resolving the contradiction: Moses’s first statement is an aspirational one; his second is realistic. We should aspire to a society in which everyone has what they need. Yet we know from our own experience that our desire not to see need can lead us, through motivated reasoning, to overlook it altogether. Thus we hold the vision on the one hand while perceiving clearly and honestly on the other. Living in that tension between ideal and real enables us to make progress—however partial and incomplete it may be.

The rain garden isn’t going to stop the storms that will continue and intensify. As I found when the morning finally came, it’s not even going to soak up all the water. But it undoubtedly makes things better than they were, providing beauty for us to enjoy and a habitat for plants and creatures to live in their glorious interdependence.

In a casual line of conversation years ago, Rabbi Nancy Flam pointed out that “contemplative” means “with time.” I think about that observation nearly every day. These days I find myself thinking about how we who engage in and teach contemplative practices approach questions that seem to have great urgency: How do we end suffering right now? How do we bring about action before it’s too late? I’m still working on my answer to that. But I know that a key element is continuing the practice so that we can live in this tension between ideal and real, to plant and tend the garden as best we can.

I was at a wedding the other night when an elderly woman collapsed unconscious on the dance floor. It happened last Sunday.

The wedding was beautiful. My wife and all of our kids and I were there together. We sang and danced and celebrated at this wonderful simcha of a family who have been our collective friends for many years. As my father, may he rest in peace, said after our own wedding: “To make a wedding really festive, it helps to have great music—and a lot of young people.” This one had both.

Like so many of our people’s rituals, a Jewish wedding typically incorporates multiple and contradictory themes. There is of course the joy and hopefulness of a couple who have found each other and are coming together to build a home and a life. The language of the sheva brachot, the seven special blessings recited at a wedding, reminds us of this: “Bring great joy to these loving friends, just as You brought joy to Your creations in the ancient Garden of Eden.” A wedding is a rebirth, a renewal, the creation of something wholly new and wonderful in the world—and that’s a cause for celebration.

The counterpoint, of course, comes from our recognition that not all is or can be wholly joyful in a world so broken. The Talmud records that since the destruction of the ancient Temple, Jews have tempered the festivities at our weddings. Most famously, we do that by breaking a glass. At this wedding, as at many others, the glass-breaking was introduced by the singing of im eshkakhekh Yerushalayim, “If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem,” (Psalms 137:5), as well as a prayer for the return of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza and an end to the war.

All of which is to say that we are used to the simultaneous presence of these major and minor keys. But this experience was a deeper lesson in holding it all.

I was standing just behind the woman as she collapsed. The band stopped playing. For a moment it felt like time stood still. I found myself shocked and momentarily paralyzed. The father of the bride called out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Two people raced over. They determined she needed CPR. Someone called 911. I remembered that I had seen a defibrillator in the coat room and ran to retrieve it. By the time I came back, someone was doing chest compressions.

The rest of us moved out of the ballroom and into the foyer as we waited. Our festivity turned to worry and apprehension. Parents spoke to their young children about what was happening. And though I was one of many rabbis in the room, it occurred to me that this isn’t one of those scenarios most of us are taught to prepare for, or, thank God, encounter in our careers. I found myself praying, and accessing my own mindfulness practice to try to calm my anxiety.

After a few minutes, the police, followed by the paramedics, arrived. The woman had, thank God, regained consciousness. As she was wheeled to the ambulance, we all clapped. And then, because the mitzvah of bringing joy to the newlyweds was still the evening’s prime directive, the band struck up again, we set aside the heaviness for a moment, and danced again.

One of the big themes of Parashat Ekev is practicing anava, humility. Moses exhorts the Israelites not to be deluded into thinking that they have brought success upon themselves. “Remember that it is YHVH your God who gives you the power,” he says (Deut. 8:18). That’s the purpose of the mitzvah of birkat hamazon, reciting grace after meals; “When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to YHVH your God for the good land given to you.” (8:10) We cultivate an awareness that our food, like the rest of our lives, isn’t ultimately about “me, myself, and mine,” but part of a much larger whole.

Yet anava involves not just this act of self-limitation or even negation, but also self-affirmation. As Alan Morinis famously teaches, “No more than my space, no less than my place.” An unbalanced sense of humility can lead to a sense that “nothing is in my hands—it’s all in God’s—so therefore there’s nothing I can or should do.” And of course that’s not true. As I remarked when one of my children said, “Thank God” upon seeing the now-conscious woman wheeled out to the ambulance, “Thank God—but also thank the first responders.” (And, if you’re like me, let this be a reminder to renew your CPR certification regularly.)

One of our great challenges today is living in the gap between our feeling that we bear the weight of such large, heavy problems—on a national, international, and species-existential level—and the comparatively tiny amount of agency most of us actually have to respond to them. And while we undoubtedly have a responsibility to do everything we can to address those problems, this week reminds me not to lose sight of the ways each of us can and must be vehicles for making the divine Presence manifest in the world: in healing, in showing up in community, in dancing out our hopes at a wedding—even at a time of fear.

I think it’s safe to assume that you’ve heard of Yoda. If you’re not of a certain age, it may be a little less safe to assume that you’ve heard of another great animated spiritual master, Oogway. He’s a tortoise who appears in the Kung Fu Panda movies. But he has one of the best lines about spiritual practice in contemporary popular culture: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift: that’s why the call it ‘the present.'” As we say in the business: Gevalt.

It’s a heck of a quote because it cuts to the heart of mindfulness practice for many of us: Our attempt to stay present with what is happening now, in this moment, and then from moment to moment, while not getting caught in thoughts, judgments, or anxieties about what was or what might be. “Be Here Now,” as Ram Dass summed it up. For those of us who embrace such a practice, it indeed feels like a gift.

I think this approach, emphasizing sitting still and calm amidst the current of history, is one of the things that has attracted so many Jews to Buddhism in recent decades. Because Jewish history—especially in the last century, but stretching back considerably further than that—has been deluged by history, and we have been buffeted by it. Many of us carry, consciously and unconsciously, family histories, collective stories, and the residue of ancestral traumas. Practices like meditation and yoga offer us a way to be present in the moment, to re-ground in our actual lived experience rather than the realm of words and ideas—realms in which our people excels. That re-grounding and recentering offers healing. When framed and understood through the language of Torah and the ritual rhythms of our calendar, the result is a renewed relationship with Judaism.

This isn’t new, of course. Jewish mystical traditions, like other mystical traditions, offer something similar. And Hasidism in particular succeeded in offering an orientation of deep, present-moment spiritual significance in the words and practices of Torah. As Moses says in our Torah portion this week, ein od milvado (Deut. 4:35)—which the Hasidic tradition, based on the Zohar, understood not only as “there is no God but YHVH,” but that “there is nothing but YHVH.” Divinity is the substance of the universe, if only we can attune ourselves to that reality.

Yet, to quote the twentieth century Jewish poet Adrienne Rich, we frequently experience that, “The great dark birds of history screamed and plunged / into our personal weather.” Even as we are meditating and seeking to be present in the present, there’s a whole lot of history happening. Perhaps nothing testifies to this more acutely or painfully than the destruction of so much of Hasidic life, and so many Hasidic lives, during the Shoah.

Since I began the phase of my own spiritual journey involving Jewish meditation and a deeper lived relationship with the teachings of the Hasidic masters, two questions have nagged at me repeatedly: First, what is the place of history in this approach? Second, what is the place of tochacha (rebuke), and, more broadly, ethical and political speech and action? In reality, I think they’re two sides of the same coin, as they are both questions about what happens outside of the moments we’re in quiet contemplation. And, of course, they are both questions driven by dominant conceptions of Jewish life, conceptions that center knowledge and understanding of Jewish history on the one hand (Jewish Studies and much of liberal Judaism), and ethics and political activism on the other (other parts of liberal Judaism, along with the many political expressions of Judaism).

I will confess that I don’t have a neat synthesis to offer. I don’t think there is a single ethics or politics that flows naturally from this view. As Emory University anthropology professor Don Seeman writes in an essay entitled, “The Anxiety of Ethics and the Presence of God,” “To put it very bluntly… any religious phenomenology that is focused too closely on the immediacy of the Divine Presence will tend to undervalue the complicated human multiplicity that calls for balance and adjudication, that which might also be called ‘justice.'” That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The fact is that many folks who are committed Jewish spiritual practitioners wind up in different places politically, with different conceptions of history and different visions of the future.

Yet it bespeaks one of the most pressing and painful challenges for all of us in this particular moment: Our people is deeply, profoundly divided. We are living through a historical moment the likes of which we have scarcely, if ever, encountered in our many long centuries. It is a moment that raises what often feel like unprecedented questions about Jewish agency, sovereignty, peoplehood, and power—profound questions about our understanding of Torah itself, of ourselves as Jews, of what it means to serve the Holy One in this moment. Our responses reveal our enormous fractures, with large swaths of our people deeply feeling that other parts are not only wrong, but evil.

We have just observed Tisha b’Av, a day which marks our most profound divisions, on which we remember how our people’s baseless hatred for one another contributed to unfathomable pain and suffering and the exile of the Divine Presence from its home. The question I want to raise is not what our politics should be—many other good people are discussing that. My question is, How can we practice loving one another despite our deepest, most profound divides? And if love seems too strong, then at least goodwill. I think that’s a question to meditate on—literally.

As we turn from this low point on the calendar and begin the ascent towards our fall holidays, which ultimately culminates in the sukkah—a symbol of diversity and unity, of fragility and gentle strength—let’s not forget this foundational piece of our spiritual work. “Nachamu nachamu ami,” as Isaiah exhorts us: Extend comfort, extend gestures of goodwill, extend grace and compassion, even as we rebuke one another, even as we labor to make the Divine Presence more visible in the world.

If you’re a full-fledged grownup in a relationship with a younger member of GenZ (born mid-1990s to early 2010s) or GenAlpha (born since then), you may find yourself, like me, sometimes at a loss when it comes to language. Some of this is normal generational churn: words like “rizz” and “sus,” phrases like “no cap,” are just as foreign to me as the incessant interjection of “like,” or the casual use of “awesome” that characterized my childhood, were to my parents. (I have regular conversations with my kids about the correct linguistic deployment of “low key.” Alas, I fear I’m a hopeless case.)

But some of the intergenerational language barrier feels like it’s bigger than the normal way the generations naturally define themselves. The inundation of our society with screen technology, social media, and video reels has led to what seem like wholesale changes in not just what members of different generations say, but how they say it—and whether they (we) say anything at all.

And that’s to say nothing of the general sense that our political lives are taking place in different languages: not only do we not agree on facts, in some cases we can’t even agree on the meanings of words. It often seems that we’re living through a long cultural moment in which language itself is just breaking down.

This isn’t particularly new terrain for me. I’ve been writing about it since October 7, and probably before that. I have noted that it’s a particularly acute problem for Jews, because we believe so powerfully in the efficacy and importance of language: according to the Torah, the world itself was created through words (“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”)

But recently I’ve been wondering if part of the vexing nature of this sensation of broken language might arise because, perhaps, we’ve actually over-invested in language.

What do I mean by that?

Over dinner with friends the other night, we were trying to imagine how our immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents would respond to the way we live our lives today—in particular the emphasis on words, labels, and identities that draws so much of our collective attention. We thought about how these ancestors—who overwhelmingly were not college-educated, and who we knew had survived all kinds of traumas—would respond to the way we process trauma today, much of which verbally—through words.

We considered the need so many of us have today to feel seen, heard, and valued. We talked about the expectation that that sense of belonging is conveyed through language, and the way the absence of the right words is sometimes (often) read as a failure to value people who feel like they need to read or hear it. To me, it seemed that this dynamic applied just as much to older folks today as to younger ones.

Our dinner group surmised that our ancestors would find it hard, if not impossible, to recognize much of this. I speculated that one of the reasons might be that our relationship with language itself has changed. There are many reasons why: the disproportionately large share of American Jews who, for generations, have attended universities, where so much of life takes place in words and ideas; the rise of psychotherapy and a broader therapeutic culture; the proliferation of media that was unimaginable a century ago.

What it all leads to is not just a belief but a lived experience that life itself takes place in language, that if we can’t narrate our experience or be identified by others with just the right words, then it’s as if we don’t fully exist.

I think a lot of people are exhausted by it—folks on both the left and the right, straight people and LGBTQ+ people, people identified in the culture as privileged and people identified as marginalized. I hear from folks on every end of the spectrum who are worn out from all this languaging.

And I think that exhaustion is one of the reasons so many folks today are trying to get off their social media accounts and are flocking to meditation, niggun (wordless song), yoga, hiking, farming, the gym, crafting, and other non-verbal practices. I think we know deep down that we have to get out of our heads, that we’ve put so much pressure on language that our minds and our collective lives—which we have constructed and maintained through words—are crumbling.

“Eleh hadevarim, These are the words that Moses spoke to the Children of Israel.” From these opening words of the book of Deuteronomy we derive the name of this Torah portion, Devarim: Words. It’s a paradox, of course: Earlier in his life, at the burning bush, Moses said of himself, “I am not a man of words” (Exodus 4:10). Yet by the end, he can produce an entire book of the Torah.

In her biography of Moses, Avivah Zornberg elaborates on the paradox: “From Moses’ own idioms, we understand that he experiences an excess of ‘feelings and thoughts,’ a kind of congested intensity, as sealing his lips… The irony is that Moses who cannot speak can articulate so powerfully a fragmented state of being… desire and recoil inhabit his imagination. An inexpressible yearning can find only imprecise representation. Language is in exile and can be viscerally imagined as such. This both disqualifies him and, paradoxically, qualifies him for the role that God has assigned him.”

This notion of “language in exile” finds acute representation on Tisha b’Av. The Book of Lamentations is an exquisite paradox of poetic expressions of desolation, of silence. Here is chapter 2, verse 10: 

Silent sit on the ground
The elders of Fair Zion;
They have strewn dust on their heads
And girded themselves with sackcloth;
The maidens of Jerusalem have bowed
Their heads to the ground.

The fact that each of the book’s chapters, save the last one, are Hebrew alphabetical acrostics only serve to heighten the irony: language is broken, language itself is in exile.

The day of Tisha b’Av itself is a day of this broken language. It’s the only day of the year when we’re not supposed to greet each other. We actively avert our gazes, consciously tear at the social fabric, to allow ourselves to sit and sense, and perhaps begin to reckon with, the pain that accompanies the destruction of the home of the Divine.

From Tisha b’Av, we can begin counting an Omer of sorts: seven weeks of consolation until Rosh Hashanah, 49 days until the broken language of exile is met with the whole-broken-whole blasts of the shofar—which are both before language and after it.

In an exquisite reflection on silence published last year at Tisha b’Av, writer Cole Aronson reflects on the tortured silences and words—the excruciating efforts at language—that arose in the wake of the Shoah. He concludes, “In Genesis 8:21, God laments that the tendencies of man are evil from youth. [God] doesn’t suggest a limit to the forms that evil might take. [God] says the capacity is ordinary to us. Experience shows that it does not, like a haunting menace, exceed our powers of resistance. It also does not, like an infinite being, defeat our powers of description. So we describe and lament.”

We have so much to lament this Tisha b’Av. Our language is so broken. Our people and our world are so broken. May our silence be deep and profound. May it awaken us to the words and actions of redemption.

If you’re a regular reader of these Friday reflections, you have probably noticed that, like a Law & Order episode, they follow a pretty predictable form: I start with an engaging personal story, pivot to a lesson drawn from the week’s Torah portion, and then bring it home with a message about how Jewish spiritual practice can help us lead a more meaningful life.

This week I feel a need to write differently. Even as I reach for the right story, I can’t find it, other than to tell you that I’ve found myself waking in the middle of the night thinking a lot about Israelis, Gazans, and Jews.

Now I’m not here to offer political commentary or analysis. Much as it’s tempting, that’s neither my expertise nor, frankly, my role. Even as I wade into this water, I’m clear that my purpose is to offer a personal spiritual reflection rooted in Torah which can, I hope, be of benefit to you in your own spiritual journey. As my rebbe, Avi Weiss, used to tell us in yeshiva: “I’m talking to myself and letting you listen.”

As I said, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night. And I’ve found myself gripped with a series of questions that have been swirling in the writings and conversations of people around the world who I read and am regularly in conversation with: How is it that Hamas still hasn’t released all the hostages, and will they ever be able to come home? How is it that Israel, Egypt, and the international community, haven’t implemented a way for the people of Gaza to be fed and housed—whether in Gaza or somewhere else of their own choosing—without facing the prospect of a violent death while waiting for food? What does it mean, and what will it mean in the future, for the Israel Defense Forces and the democratically elected government of Israel to have been the instrument of so much devastation? What will it mean for Jews—in Israel, in America, and throughout the world? What will it mean for Judaism itself? The list goes on and on.

Before I go further, I want to pause and invite you to notice how you’re feeling after reading that paragraph. How’s your breathing? How’s your heart rate? Are there any thoughts coming up for you? Maybe you feel some judgment arising because of who I mentioned or didn’t mention, the order in which I mentioned them, or how I phrased something. Perhaps you’re feeling some aversion and don’t want to read further. And/or perhaps you’ve experienced some of these same questions and you’re feeling hopeful that I’ll offer some definitive, clear answer. (Don’t get your hopes up.) Just pause to notice and, I would ask, withhold any impulse to judge for the moment.

Every year I find that reading the double Torah portion of Matot-Masei brings up some very deep questions of home for me. This is, after all, the parashah that includes the story of the tribes of Reuben and Gad, who ask Moses for permission to live on the eastern side of the Jordan River—that is, outside the Promised Land proper. And so, every year at this time I find myself asking, “Why do I not live in Israel? Why am I still in America?”

My life experience conditions me to ask this question. I was raised in a Zionist home, by parents who lived in Israel with my older brothers for a year in the early 1970s (before I was born). We had books about Israel around our house, and I heard Israeli songs growing up. My oldest brother moved to Israel 35 years ago, married, raised a family, and built a life there. My own children have grown up with visits to Israel and, like so many kids who go to Jewish day schools and summer camps, have been educated with a sense that a relationship with Israel is a foundational element of contemporary Jewish life.

So I think it’s pretty natural that reading this Torah portion brings up this question: Where is home? Where should it be? And, especially given all that conditioning—not to mention the challenges we face in the United States today, as both Americans and Jews—what am I still doing on this side of the ocean?

At the same time, this Torah portion also contains one of the most challenging passages in our tradition: “And YHVH spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites; then you shall be gathered to your kin” (Num. 31:1-2). What follows is the most organized military campaign the Israelites wage in the Torah, complete with officers and regular troops. This would seem to be precisely what the previous chapters were preparing them for: to become a nation capable of conquering, holding, settling, and successfully governing the land.

And yet, moral problems abound: What does it mean to engage in a war of vengeance? What does it do to a nation to slaughter so many? Is the Torah saying that this is the price of nationhood—and, if so, is that an answer we can or want to accept, either about ancient Israel or the modern state? What is the place of values like compassion, justice, forgiveness, and diplomacy in this scheme—in a life of Torah, and in our collective life?

Again, an invitation to check in. Pause for a moment if you feel the need. My aim is not to rile you up, but to offer some acknowledgement of questions that, certainly for me and perhaps for you, are often on a regular low simmer and, more recently, have been boiling to the surface.

Amidst the sharper edges of this Torah portion, there is one moment when some softer spiritual language appears: “You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I YHVH abide among the Israelite people” (Num. 35:34). ‘Abide’ here is shokhen, as in Shekhinah, the Divine Presence. Rashi offers two comments. First: “Do not do anything defiling to the land so that you will make Me dwell amidst its uncleanness;” Second, “Even when the Israelites are impure, my Shekhinah remains amongst them.” As I read him, Rashi suggests that there is both a call to responsibility in the first comment, and, in the second, a reassurance of the abiding availability of the divine Presence, the ever-ready possibility of return, teshuva—even when we make mistakes, as we will inevitably do, individually and collectively.

This Shabbat begins the month of Av, leading us to the lowest point on the Jewish calendar, the 9th of Av, when we read Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, and are invited to experience our deepest sense of estrangement from the Divine Presence. Yet we conclude Eicha with the cry, “Return us, YHVH, to Yourself, and let us return; renew our days as of old.” At our most acute moment of feeling God’s absence, we move in the direction of return, the direction of presence.

What might that return look like? A return of the hostages to their homes and families. A return of the soldiers. A return of the hungry and homeless in Gaza to something better than the hellscape in which they live today. A return of all of us to a life, a community, a Judaism, and a world in which we can feel safe and strong enough to risk showing compassion, to turn toward one another in a peaceful, divine embrace of presence.

Earlier this week, my middle son and I woke up bright and early in order to beat Chicago rush hour traffic and make it to Champaign, Illinois in time for his orientation/registration day. While our older son is also a student at U of I, the new student process then was entirely online because of the pandemic. So this was a new experience.

Having grown up in another Big Ten college town (Ann Arbor) and spent much of my career in higher education, there was something reassuringly familiar about walking on the sleepy quad in the summer, entering the student Union building, and witnessing the beautifully diverse array of students and families on hand. At a time when universities have become sites of so much contention, this was a visceral reminder of their incredible positive possibilities.

[Related side note: Last year I published an article in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s journal, Sources, entitled, “American Jews & Our Universities: Back to Basics.” I’m pleased to share that it was recognized as the runner-up in the Excellence in North American Jewish History category of the Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism. Shout-out in particular to the journal editor, my old college friend Dr. Claire Sufrin, for her excellent guidance.]

After a morning of the expected sessions (how to pay your bill, how to use the health center, getting oriented to your department/school), my son eventually went to register for courses. I waited in the campus bookstore (always on brand). As I perused the shelves, I came across a copy of “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.” This was a delight, as Ellison is someone I’ve always wanted to read more of but for whatever reason have never gotten around to. I wasn’t disappointed.

For starters, I discovered that we shared some common interests: He too had studied music before embarking on a career as a writer and academic. Additionally—and perhaps related, or maybe not—Ellison and I share a preoccupation with questions about the nature of the American experiment, particularly the experiences of the minority groups with which we each respectively identify, while simultaneously claiming and holding fast to the label “American.” 

In 1970 Ellison published an essay in Time magazine entitled, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” He observes that one of the enormous contributions of African-American culture to American life in general has been “to remind us that the world is ever unexplored, and that while complete mastery of life is mere illusion, the real secret of the game is to make life swing.” (The musician in me thrills to that metaphor.) Imagining an American history without African-Americans—an idea he dismisses as objectionable on both ideological and pragmatic grounds—Ellison observes that such a history would yield the absence of a “tragic knowledge which we try ceaselessly to evade: that the true subject of democracy is not simply material well-being, but the extension of the democratic process in the direction of perfecting itself.” And then he adds, “The most obvious test and clue to that perfection is the inclusion, not assimilation, of the black [sic] man.” 

If you were in band class at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor in the 1980s and 90s, you probably had Robert Albritton for a teacher. And if you had Mr. Albritton for a teacher, you probably remember some of his many colorful sayings. More than 30 years later, my brothers and I still find occasion to recite them to each other. One of our favorites was what Mr. A would occasionally say to a percussionist by way of encouragement: “Young man/woman, Hit the drum! I promise it won’t hit you back.”

Naturally, this phrase came to mind the other night as I attended a moving performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem with the Chicago Symphony, led by Riccardo Muti. While the entire piece is one of the crown jewels of the classical repertoire, its most memorable section by a mile is the Dies Irae, a truly terrifying piece of music set to terrifying words about the “day of wrath” that will “break up the world into ash” and “how much trembling there will be.” The words are brought to life by the full orchestra, soloists, and double chorus, who perform music that feels like a freight train on a roller coaster at maximum volume, punctuated by the repeated thunderous booms of two bass drums and the tympani played as loud as humanly possible. Mr. Albritton would love it. (And kids, I can testify with my own eyes: the drum did not hit back.)

While the piece contains many moments of beauty that offset this fire-breathing energy, theologically speaking the Dies Irae is pretty representative of the liturgical text of this requiem mass overall. The view of the Divine that Verdi presents here is not, on the whole, a comforting one: It’s a lot of Day of Judgment, prayers for salvation from a fiery fate and the like, concluding with the words of the Libera me, “Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death on that awful day. Deliver me.” While we have some of this kind of thing in traditional Jewish liturgy (most notably, perhaps, on Rosh Hashanah), on the whole the portrait of God presented here lands as a striking contrast to the gentler, more loving, less judgmental, and less angry conception that predominates much of contemporary Jewish theology—including the approach we teach here at IJS.

Which makes sense. I mean, today we can choose what kind of service we want to go to—or even make for ourselves. And while Verdi’s music is breathtaking, it’s hard for me to imagine many folks in my world vibing with a vision of the Divine as a terrible, destructive force. To put it crassly: that view of God just isn’t good for business.

And yet, as I write these words, there is terror and violence all around. A war has just taken place between Israel and Iran involving weapons whose destructive power were unimaginable in Verdi’s time. And that war comes on top of a war between Israel and Hezbollah, which of course came on top of the ongoing war in Gaza, with its enormously devastating toll. Which of course came on top of the October 7 massacre. And this is to say nothing of the terrors of ICE raids and deportations, or attacks on vulnerable minorities (including Jews) here in the US, or the fear and trembling at the destructive power of Mother Earth in the form of tornados and hurricanes and punishing heat waves, all of which we have managed to make even worse through our own collective action and inaction.

While we may listen to Verdi’s Requiem and think, “Well that’s not a very sunny view,” all we have to do is take a look at the news and we might find ourselves saying, “Maybe he wasn’t so wrong.”

Parashat Korach is not only about the story of a rebellion against Moses. At its heart lies the latent terror that can be present in the collective human encounter with the Divine, with the source of life—which is also the source of death. In this Torah portion we read of the earth swallowing people up and sending them down to she’ol, and a plague of Divine wrath that takes the lives of 14,000 people. At its core, perhaps, is the people’s anguished cry to Moses: “‘Lo, we perish! We are lost, all of us lost! Everyone who so much as ventures near YHVH’s Tabernacle must die. Alas, we are doomed to perish!” To paraphrase, perhaps: How are we supposed to do this—to live together with the Holy One in our midst, to trust our leadership and one another? We can’t seem to pull it off.

In response, the Torah offers us a system of social-spiritual order: The kohanim will be specialists in God-service, as it were, assisted by the Levites, so to that the whole camp can function without further risk of plagues and death. (Note: Ibn Ezra comments that this whole episode comes out of order, and in fact occurred before the people left the wilderness of Sinai.) In exchange for receiving special gifts from the people, God instructs that the Aaron that “you and your sons alone shall bear any guilt connected with your priesthood.”

This is a solution, of course, but it’s far from perfect. Leaders who are granted power and privilege then face their inevitable temptations—which can just lead to a repetition of the cycle that started all of this to begin with. This leads Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman Epstein (1753-1825) to interpret this charge to the kohanim this way: “You must always mindfully tend to the concern that you are doing this sacred service for your own glory and enjoyment. You must regularly engage in deep discernment as to whether your intention is aligned with that of the Creator.” And, being a Hasid, Rabbi Epstein sees this as not only the work of the kohanim, but, in the nascent democratic spirit of the age in which he lived, the spiritual labor of us all.

It seems to me that a good deal of that regular practice of reflection and discernment involves touching in with our fears and acknowledging them: fears of violence, death, destruction, and loss, or even of their less extreme expressions—fear of rejection, humiliation, not belonging. The embers of these fires are ever-present—that comes with being human—so we can show ourselves some compassion for having them. Yet I would suggest the work that we are called to do is to acknowledge those fears and then choose life-giving responses—in our words and our actions. I think that’s what Verdi did with his music, and I bless us all that we may do it with the music we make too.

A few months ago, my dear friend and synagogue rabbi Ari Hart delivered a sermon that opened with a critique of an aspect of some (perhaps a lot?) of contemporary mindfulness practice: nonjudgmental acceptance. Now, I hasten to add that Ari is a participant in our Clergy Leadership Program cohort that launches next month, and he was not offering this critique to knock Jewish spiritual practices grounded in mindfulness. He was pointing out something on which, frankly, I agree with him: The Torah and Judaism aren’t simply about accepting what is, but about changing our lives and the world to what they can and should be. If we’re going to practice mindfulness, it should be in the service not just of acceptance of what is, but bringing about what might be.

I don’t think that should be a controversial statement, yet I imagine it might prompt at least a moment of going, “Huh” in our minds. It should come as no surprise that as mindfulness practice has become commercialized it has emphasized the self-acceptance element—”You are absolutely perfect, just as you are”—and de-emphasized the self-improvement aspect—”with room for improvement,” as Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, was known to teach. The former is good for sales; the latter, not so much.

Twenty years ago, when I was a freshly minted rabbi who just arrived in Evanston to work at Northwestern University Hillel, I came up with the idea of hanging a banner to advertise for the High Holidays. Intuitively, I decided to put a question on the banner, rather than just making an announcement: “What will you do better this year?” While the banner got a lot of positive response, one of the other staff members came to me with some concern: “I’m worried about the word ‘better.’ It’s kind of judgmental. It might push people away. What about ‘What will you do different this year?'” I responded, “It’s called the Day of Judgment. It’s okay to be judgmental.” (I was younger and brasher then.) Clearly this tension between non-judgmental acceptance of what is and gentle judgmental aspiration of what might be isn’t a new conversation.

A keyword in Parashat Shelach (Numbers 13:1-15:41) is the verb latur. “Send people to scout (latur) the land,” the Holy One tells Moses (13:1). He does so, and in his charge he elaborates on the mission of scouting: “See what kind of country it is” (13:18). The scouts are meant to take an honest look at the land and its inhabitants and bring back a report. They do so, of course, but famously they add their own commentary, full of judgmentalism and self-doubt: “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishingly great size… We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (13:32-33). We know what comes next: the imposition of a 40-year period of wandering in the wilderness, so that the entire generation of the Exodus might die off.

Yet the word latur comes back at the very end of the Torah portion, in the mitzvah of tzitzit. By looking at them, the Torah says, v’lo toturu, we should be reminded not to follow after our hearts and our eyes “in your urge to stray” (15:39, JPS translation). Rashi, following the Midrash, connects this instance of latur with that of the scouts. As Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav puts it: “They are a method of self-rebuke, reminding us to fulfill the mitzvot and not simply follow the desires of our hearts and eyes.”

We can interpret these words harshly, as though they involve discounting and denying bodily sensations altogether. But I think that misses the point. The larger message here, it seems to me, is that our spiritual practice is meant to help us see clearly—both what is present in our mind-hearts and, gently, what of that which is present is not serving us well.

Thank God, we are created with desires generated by our bodies and our hearts. We have emotions, we have thoughts, we have imaginations, and we are able to experience an incredible range of feelings and sensations. The point of mindfulness practice in a Jewish idiom is to see all of these things clearly—so that we can make choices that reduce harm and suffering and, wisely and skillfully, bring about something better than what might be right now.

Like millions of people, earlier this spring I binge-watched the second and final season of Andor, the Star Wars TV series starring Diego Luna as the titular character: a reluctant, yet willful and highly effective agent in the growing rebellion against the Empire.

For many Star Wars fans, Andor is probably the greatest thing the 48-year old franchise has ever made. The quality of the scripts, acting, and production value is exceptional. And it’s unusual in the Star Wars universe: Over two seasons, we see not a single light saber, no Jedi, no Darth Vader (even though he is alive and kicking at this point in the timeline). Rather than tell the story of leaders at the highest levels of institutional power (emperors, lords, princesses), Andor mostly focuses on life at more mundane—but, it turns out, no less important—registers: bureaucrats who execute the Empire’s policies, soldiers conscripted into military service, farmers and businesspeople and retired mothers who just want to live their lives in peace.

You can read about all of this in other places, and of course you can watch the show yourself (with a Disney+ subscription). But one thing I have found myself wondering about is the name of the show and Luna’s character. My own read is that the name Andor should, perhaps, be read with a silent slash: And/or. Because I think that’s part of what the series is getting at: The coexistence of simultaneous truths and experiences, the possibilities and limits of our choices, the promise and peril of our agency. Some things in life are “and”—they’re just true, no matter what, though they may only become “and”s to us when we’re aware of them—and some things are “or”s: options, possibilities, things that could otherwise be true or not true, things we may bring about by our choices or that may be chosen for us. Part of the point of Andor (or, “And/or”), it seems to me, is to complicate what may feel like a simple story line of rebels (=good) versus Empire (=evil) by showing how all of these big concepts are made up of individuals and their manifold contradictions.

This brings us to Parashat Beha’alotcha, which, as much as any Torah portion, moves in this space of both-and. Famously, the parasha is divided into three sections: Before Numbers 10:35, after Numbers 10:36, and the two verses in between, which are bracketed and, according to the Talmud, counted as their own “book.” In the first section, the people make their final preparations to leave Sinai, and then journey forth “by the word of YHVH.” There is, seemingly, perfect alignment and attunement between the Divine and the entire Israelite camp.

In the third section, we experience what has always felt to me like a Bizarro version of the story: “The people took to complaining bitterly before YHVH,” it begins (JPS translation). “YHVH heard and was incensed: a fire of YHVH broke out against them, ravaging the outskirts of the camp. The people cried out to Moses. Moses prayed to YHVH, and the fire died down.” If there is an opposite to perfect alignment and attunement, this seems like it. And, of course, from here it’s one story of complaining, fighting, and suffering after another. It reads like a photonegative of the previous 10 chapters.

Yet perhaps take note of that little story (but, if we pause long enough, we may realize, not so little—it could certainly be an episode in a Disney series on Numbers) of the fire breaking out. Note what happens: “The people cried out to Moses”—not the Holy One directly—and “Moses prayed to YHVH and the fire died down.” Here is Rashi, quoting the Sifrei: “A parable: This may be compared to the case of an earthly king who was angry with his son, and the son went to a friend of his father and said to him, ‘Go and ask forgiveness for me from father!'” Rashi highlights the breakdown in relationship, trust, and communication that brings about this result that nobody really wants, as if the Israelites and the Creator have become middle schoolers reduced to passing notes. How far they have all fallen together.

Eventually, Moses himself unloads on the Holy One. In response, the Divine brings about a sharing of the burden. And here we get the seeds of another potential side-series off the central canon: “Two men, one named Eldad and the other Medad, had remained in camp; yet the spirit rested upon them—they were among those recorded, but they had not gone out to the Tent—and they spoke in ecstasy in the camp” (11:26). What was meant to be an ordination only to an authorized set of 70 elders winds up touching lives beyond the boundaries. The Divine spirit, it seems, cannot be fully contained. The story as it was meant to be is not the only story that winds up happening.

While that’s always true, it feels especially so today. Between the time I write this and the time you read it, the headline stories will likely have shifted. Wherever we live, violence may have broken out. Protesters, soldiers, bureaucrats, and regular folks may have confronted choices about reading their situation as “and” or “or,” and, concomitantly, dilemmas about whether and how to speak, act, be. As Andor reminds us, the work of making, unmaking, and remaking the world (or the galaxy) doesn’t only sit with those who hold institutional power—it is work that belongs to all of us.

The middle “book” in this parasha is a two-line poem about when the Ark would begin to travel and when it would come to rest. That is, it is about the constant going out and coming in, journeying away from home and finding our way back to it, a beating heart of the Torah and of our own lives. Perhaps it comes to remind us that you and I are constantly discerning between “and” and “or,” constantly dancing with the storyline of our individual and collective lives, constantly breathing out and in. Our spiritual practices can support us in navigating that journey of discernment. May they be that for us now, and may we support one another in mindful and courageous speech and action.

One of my favorite jokes in the (heilige/holy) Big Book of Jewish Humor is the one about a man from Warsaw who is in Chelm on a business trip. As he walks down the street, he’s stopped by Yossel the chimney sweep.

“Zalman!” cries Yossel. “What happened to you? It’s so long since I’ve seen you. Just look at yourself.”

“But wait,” replies the stranger, “I’m—”

“Never mind that,” says Yossel. “I can’t get over how much you’ve changed. You used to be such a big man, built like an ox. And now you’re smaller than I am. Have you been sick?”

“But wait,” replies the stranger, “I’m—”

“Never mind that,” says Yossel. “And what happened to your hair? You used to have a fine head of black hair, and now you’re completely bald. And your mustache, so black and dapper. What happened to it? You know, I don’t see how I ever recognized you. Zalman, what has become of you?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you,” the man replies. “I’m not Zalman.”

“Oy,” replies Yossel. “You’ve gone and changed your name as well!” 

Aptly, you can find this tale on the internet as a case study of the humor trope “thoroughly mistaken identity.” Part of what makes it such a successful joke (you have to admit it’s hilarious) is that, like most really effective humor, it touches a deep vein in our human experience. In this case, that vein is perhaps the profound contingency of recognition. While “Zalman,” who is already traveling, does not seem to experience dislocation, Yossel invests everything into making this man into someone he recognizes. He’s so committed to that story that he never gives it up, even when “Zalman” tells him, “I’m not Zalman!” That is, Yossel is so invested in this stranger being Zalman that he denies both the truth (he’s not Zalman) and the most logical explanation for the man’s claim (the problem is in his own perception).

This issue of recognition came to mind earlier this week as I read the Book of Ruth over Shavuot. In the second chapter, Boaz spots a stranger gleaning in his field. This itself isn’t a problem–the produce that falls to the ground during reaping (leket in Hebrew) is specifically designated by the Torah for the poor. But when Boaz inquires of the young man supervising the harvest, “Who does that girl belong to?” he responds with more information than Boaz asked: “She’s a Moabite who returned with Naomi,” he tells Boaz. This immediately injects some tension into the scene, as leket is technically reserved only for the Israelite poor. (The Rabbis of the Talmud clarify later that the practice is to support the non-Jewish poor alongside the Jewish poor “for the sake of peace.”)

In one of the many moments of exemplary hesed in the book, Boaz tells Ruth that she is more than welcome to continue to glean in his field, that he has ordered everyone else to be good to her, and that she’s even invited to drink from the water that the workers have drawn. Ruth, seemingly overcome, falls on her face and says to Boaz, “Why are you so kind to me? You have recognized me even though I am a stranger!” (2:10) The English here doesn’t do it justice. The last three words of Ruth’s statement in Hebrew are pure poetry: l’hakireini v’anochi nochria. 

In many years of reading Ruth, I don’t remember these words jumping out at me the way they did this year. l’hakir—to recognize—and nochria—foreign woman or stranger—share the same letters: nun, kaf, and yod. And while they may not be technically related etymologically, they are undoubtedly drawn together here to point up the deep intertwining between them. Because what is that makes or unmakes someone as foreign, strange, different? Recognition or lack thereof. A stranger is a stranger until we realize, or decide, that they aren’t. With the act of recognition, we transform the unknown into the known. Boaz, holding the power of recognition in his word, brings Ruth over a hidden but no less powerful border.

Reading Ruth on Shavuot always comes at the time we read Parashat Naso, which, like the larger opening of the Book of Numbers, is concerned with establishing boundaries and distinctions: In the camp, between the tribes, down to the intimate lines that delineate trust and distrust in marriage (see: Sotah) and the ways we can make ourselves, temporarily, into a different kind of social-spiritual being (see: Nazir). Yet the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz lingers in the background, like an earlier movement in a symphony. As we consider all these ways that structure is imposed, that story might prompt us to be sensitive to the ways in which those structures–who is in and who is out, who is a stranger and who we consider known–are made and sustained, and how they are undone and refashioned.

Naso culminates in a twelve-day official parade, with each head of tribe bringing an identical offering of riches to fully inaugurate the altar of the Mishkan. We can imagine the newspapers of the day covering the pomp and pageantry. Similarly, Ruth culminates by situating its heroes in a grand genealogy that links its protagonists with their eventual descendant, King David.

Yet I think both Ruth and our Torah portion also call us to look far beyond the headlines, to the more quotidian levels on which we live our daily lives. They ask us to consider, mindfully and reflectively, some timeless and timely questions: Who do we recognize and treat with hesed, and who do we call a foreigner and treat more harshly? What does it take for us to trust, and to earn the trust of others? And what might we do to bring about a world in which we can all feel safe enough to practice the hesed of our exemplary forebears?

On erev Shavuot 1993, a Volkswagen van pulled up outside our house in Ann Arbor. I was finishing my junior year in high school, and we were preparing for the holiday. An unfamiliar older couple exited van and came to the door.

I honestly don’t remember the interaction that followed, but the long and short of it is that this was my father’s brother Arthur and his wife Kate. They had driven from their home in Montana. Art was dying and he wanted to see my father before he passed away.

My Dad was the youngest of three children. And while my brothers and I knew our Aunt Marilyn, who moved out to California early in her adult life, we didn’t hear much about our Uncle Arthur. I remember seeing a small black and white photo of a young Lou (i.e. Dad) and his much taller older brother Art, who was wearing a sweater with a big S on it—for Michigan State, but that’s about it. We never really learned the story. It had something to do with Arthur’s being 11 years older than our dad, living in Montana (even more remote than California), and (probably, given the known family dynamics) having married Kate, who wasn’t Jewish. Like many other Jewish families of immigrant parents at that time, that could be the cause of a tremendous rupture. Now, as Arthur was dying, there was an attempt at reconciliation.

All I really remember of the days that followed was awkwardness. Arthur came to shul, and I remember feeling a mix of befuddlement, dislocation, and annoyance—which, as a father, I can now see as totally predictable teenage behavior. I don’t remember having a real conversation with him or Kate, just practicing a lot of avoidance. And I don’t remember really processing any of it with my Dad after they left after a couple days. But looking back, and having experienced my Dad’s death 25 years later, I can appreciate that even the act of welcoming Art and Kate into our home was a big deal for all of them. I’d like to think some repair occurred, even if it wasn’t obvious to me how.

I’d also like to think it wasn’t quite an accident that this visit took place on Shavuot, which is imbued with such a melange of valences and impulses. There is, of course, the inclusiveness of Shavuot. It is the day we read the Book of Ruth, a paradigmatic story of chesed, the force of loving connection that sees beyond boundaries (in Ruth’s particular case, the boundary of her status as a Moabite who is prohibited by the Torah from joining the Israelite people—but who, of course, does and becomes the ancestor of King David and the messiah). And this is the day when we re-experience the revelation at Mount Sinai, when, according to the Midrash, every person heard the voice of the Divine in a way custom-tailored to them. It’s a day for celebrating the multivocality of Torah, a day whose central observance is no more and no less than delighting in the overflowing storehouse of riches of our textual tradition, our inheritance.

Yet revelation is not only a happy event. It can, perhaps even should, be an overwhelming one. “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die'” (Exodus 20:16). There is disorder here, synesthesia: “they saw that which should be heard — something which is impossible to see on any other occasion,” as Rashi explains. He adds, “Startled, they moved back twelve miles, a distance equal to the length of their camp.” Revelation is not simply a warm embrace. It is that—and, in the same breath, something that pushes us back, causes us to recoil because it is so beyond the capacity of our human senses. It is a moment of both speech and silence, when everything—everything—is expressed through the utterance of the vowelless, noiseless aleph of Anochi, “I am YHVH your God.”

It’s easy to allow maamad har sinai, the moment of revelation, to be an abstraction, an idea. We can play with it as an intellectual exercise. We can read our texts and experience the delight of our minds lighting up at the stimulation. But a fuller engagement and reckoning will move us on many more and deeper registers as we experience contradictory gestures: both chesed and gevurah (unnboundedness and limitation), netzach and hod (strength and flexibility), all the worlds through which we have journeyed these seven weeks of the Omer. That journey has served as preparation for our encounter on Shavuot.

Every year before Shavuot we start reading the Book of Numbers, which begins with an instruction to Moses to take a census, counting the Israelites b’mispar shemot, according to the “number of their names.” The medieval Italian commentator Rabbi Obadia Sforno suggests that this unusual formulation suggests that each Israelite was counted not only by number, but with a recognition of their unique individuality. Perhaps there’s a Shavuot charge there for each of us as well: To encounter anew, through this moment of Revelation, the fullness of our existence in relationship with the Divine, with life, with one another, with ourselves—and, in the process, to tend what is broken, heal what is in pain, renew and redeem our lives and the world.

Last Friday our family experienced a mini ingathering of the exiles: Our oldest came home for the summer, our middle one returned from nine months on a gap year program, our youngest didn’t have a classmate’s b-mitzvah to attend. And so, for the first time since last summer, our whole crew was around the table for Shabbat dinner. However briefly (I left on a business trip Sunday morning), we got to feel a special sense of at-homeness that can happen when all the chickens are in the coop.

Of course, having everyone at home isn’t all sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops. Everyone needs to eat, and everyone has different foods they like or don’t like, so the regular “Have you had any thoughts about dinner?” text exchange my wife and I have (we try to plan, we really do) becomes that much more complicated (and expensive). There are negotiations about who gets the car, who will do the dishes, who will mow the lawn. As others who have returned to their childhood homes as adults might have experienced, there can be a bit of reversion to senior year of high school behavior patterns—among both parents and children. And yet, as others who have welcomed home adult children may have felt, I find it’s a wonderful problem to have (for a little while—and then it’s nice when they go back out in the world and do their things).

I write and speak regularly about the basic definition of spirituality that I’ve developed: It’s our capacity to feel deeply at home in the universe. While Shabbat in the physical home where I live is always a significant spiritual moment, I experience an even richer sense of being at home when the people I care about most are there with me. And I think they do too.

Perhaps in anticipation of the journey toward the land of Canaan that the Israelites will resume soon after we begin the Book of Numbers, the closing chapters of Leviticus offer some of the most stirring reflections on what it means to be at-home—not only on an individual level, but on the level of society. This is where we are instructed about the sabbatical year, applying the practice of Shabbat not only to our individual homes, but to the larger collective home: letting the land itself rest, releasing indentured servants, cancelling debts (in the Deuteronomic version, at least).

In addition, every fifty years comes the yovel, or Jubilee year. “Count off seven sabbaths of years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbaths of years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” (Lev. 25:8-10) During this Jubilee year, not only does the land rest, and not only do the people rest, but something even larger happens: dror, liberty. Specifically, the Torah states, “It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan.” Land sales are effectively cancelled, and everyone is to return to the plot of land from which their ancestors came. It is, in effect, pressing the reset button on society.

In his commentary on this passage, Rabbi Judah Loew (the Maharal of Prague, 1520-1609) explains why yovel is proclaimed not on Rosh Hashanah, as we might expect, but on the tenth of the month of Tishrei, Yom Kippur: “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one: For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original state, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original state. As the Holy Blessed One atones for them, they return to their original state.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “M’mashma”)

The Maharal highlights the idea that just as the Jubilee is a more potent version of the sabbatical—seven times seven years, a sabbatical of sabbaticals—Yom Kippur is also described (in last week’s Torah portion) as Shabbat Shabbaton, an even more concentrated version of Shabbat, as it were. What they share in common is that they are both moments of the deepest homecoming: Yovel in a physical and political sense, Yom Kippur in spiritual and social sense.

My colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius likes to say that Jewish mindfulness practice is about “microdosing Shabbat”—creating moments of pause and return-to-center not only every seven days, but every seven moments. I think that’s true. And, as we close the Book of Leviticus, I think the Torah reminds us that this practice is not only meant to help us feel at home in our bodies, minds, and emotions so that we can weather the storm; it’s ultimately directed toward a vision of social renewal and transformation in which all of us sense that we have a place, that we’re deeply at home in the universe, held in the embrace of the Holy One.

Last Thursday and Friday were, hands down, the best days in Chicago social media history. Why? Because, in the words of the ginormous headline in the Sun-Times Friday morning, the papal conclave had elected “Da Pope.” Robert Prevost, born on Chicago’s south side, became, overnight, Pope Leo XIV–and Chicago, where I live, was here for it.

The memes were flying: The Wiener Circle, one of Chicago’s many beloved (treif) sausage vendors, posted an image of their marquee: “Canes nostros ipse comedit” (translation: “He has eaten our dogs”). “Chicago produced a pope before a quarterback who throws for 4,000 yards” (a reference to the Bears’ long and miserable history of quarterbacks). “God bless Pope Leo XIV! Since he is from Chicago, I heard that of the 133 Cardinals that voted, he received 140 votes!” I saw an AI-generated image of the Pope wearing imaginary Chicago Bears-branded papal garments with the caption, “Popes from Chicago:1. Popes from Green Bay: 0. I rest my case.” It was spectacular.

While Chicagoans, understandably, are fascinated by the new pope (and fascinated isn’t the right word for it–it’s probably closer to the Yiddish term “schepping nachas”), I’ve noticed that people from all walks of life, whether or not they’re Catholic, seem to be really taken with the pomp and ceremony surrounding a papal election in general. The success of the movie “Conclave”–even many of the cardinals watched it as preparation, apparently–testifies to that.

Perhaps part of the fascination, for Jews at any rate, is that so much of the papal office seems to be drawn from our own kohen gadol, or high priest, as described in the Torah. Most notably, of course, he wears white all the time (even a white kippah!)–a white robe, a white sash, a white mitre. The office of pope seems designed to draw on the conception of the kohen gadol: the holiest person among holy people. So while we no longer have a high priest, my guess is there is something about seeing someone who taps into that same vein that touches us as Jews.

Parashat Emor opens with a description of some key rules for the kohanim in general, and for the high priest in particular: Who they can marry, how they have to cut their hair, who they’re allowed to bury (since, according to the Torah, contact with a dead body conveys ritual impurity). While regular priests are subject to pretty strict limits in all these areas, the high priest, predictably, encounters even greater constraints. Most notably, perhaps, the Torah instructs that the high priest “shall not go in where there is any dead body; he shall not defile himself even for his father or mother” (Leviticus 21:11). 

It seems important to point out right away that, in reserving this level of stringency for the high priest, the Torah throws into high relief that this is not an expectation for the rest of the Israelites, i.e. that we are not even remotely to think of ourselves as failures in comparison. If anything, I find myself experiencing some compassion for the kohen gadol at the idea that the ceremony of his office would prevent him from properly mourning for those he loves. 

Yet later in the Torah we find that there exists a mechanism where the rest of us can voluntarily take on some of these stringencies: the institution of the nazirite. The Mishnah notes the parallel: “A High Priest and a nazirite may not become ritually impure even to bury their deceased relatives. However, they become impure to bury a corpse with no one to bury it” (Nazir 7:1). While the Rabbis generally seem to frown on the practice of taking nazirite vows, the fact that the institution of the nazirite exists, and that it holds out a way for regular folks to experience the quasi-monastic life of a priest, seems like it’s meant to teach us something. 

Perhaps that something is the intuitive need we may experience for depth and significance in our spiritual practice. On its own, the way of the Torah is meant to be a meaningful spiritual path: we eat special foods (discussed later in Emor); we mark special time through Shabbat and the Jewish calendar (also discussed later in Emor); we hold our possessions lightly and share what we have with all who need it through the practices of tzedakah (the subject of next week’s Torah portion). When these practices become routine, though, we may feel a stirring toward something more, something deeper, something renewing. In ancient times, that may have resulted in taking the vows of a nazir; today it might lead us to go on retreat.

I wonder whether the collective fascination with the pope might reflect some of this too. Though our political leaders today might be a particular case study, I think it’s safe to say that such leaders have more rarely than frequently been our spiritual role models. Nor, for that matter, have many popes, or perhaps even high priests in their day. Yet we seem to have a natural thirst, a desire to project images of leadership that reflect holiness, sacredness, spiritual depth and significance. I think we do that because, deep down, a voice within us wants that for us. And I would suggest that the Torah reminds us that the act of projection may, in fact, be a distraction. As Moses himself reminds us at the end of his life: That spiritual significance we seek isn’t in heaven or across the sea–or, perhaps, in the guy in the white robes. “It is very close to you–on your lips and in your heart, that you may do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14).

My very favorite TED talk is by the Israeli conductor Itay Talgam. It’s called “Lead Like the Great Conductors.” In 20 minutes, Talgam shows clips of some of the greats of the twentieth century: Richard Strauss, Carlos Kleiber, Riccardo Muti (who is still alive and well, conducting here in Chicago and around the world), Herbert Von Karajan, and ultimately Leonard Bernstein, who was Talgam’s teacher and who he regards as an exemplar of leadership.

The talk closes with Talgam playing a memorable clip of Bernstein conducting the final movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 using only his face. The lesson being: When you’re doing everything right as a leader, you should be able to simply get out of the way as the group does its work.

Along the way, Talgam draws a contrast with Karajan in particular, who was something of a rival to Bernstein—and something of a foil as well. Where Bernstein refused to change the last name that broadcast his Jewishness to the world, the Austrian-born Karajan joined the Nazi Party in 1934 to further his career. (Though we might also note that in 1942 he married a woman who was one-quarter Jewish.)

But the key difference Talgam highlights doesn’t have to do with their identity or politics, but with their eyes and hands. Talgam plays a clip of Karajan conducting Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 with his eyes closed and with very fluid hand motions—which are hard to read if you’re a member of the orchestra. The message, as Talgam puts it, is this: “The real music is only in Karajan’s head. And you have to guess his mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because he doesn’t give you instructions, and yet, you have to guess his mind. So it’s… a very spiritual but yet very firm control.”

Talgam contrasts this with Bernstein, who conveys with his face, his hands, his whole body, that everyone—the composer, the orchestra, and the audience—is invited to share in the story and meaning within the music-making. Bernstein becomes a kind of conduit for all of that energy, not stopping it up with him, but letting it flow through him.

Now this binary is, of course, overdone. Bernstein was not a saint (see the Bradley Cooper movie), and Karajan is not a simple villain. But I find this basic message about leadership instructive.

There’s a story told about Rabbi Shlomo Hakohen Rabinowicz (1801-1866), founder of Radomsk Hasidism. At one point the rebbe traveled through the Jewish metropolis of Krakow, where he was greeted by a throng of the city’s Jews and its elders, including Rabbi Shimon Sofer, the chief rabbi of the city. They of course asked him to share words of Torah.

Rabbi Rabinowicz (also known as the Tiferet Shlomo, the title of his most famous work), said, “Any leader (tzaddik) who does not bring to their community a flow of blessing and material well-being is not a tzaddik, and is not fit to be a leader of the Jewish people… This was the sin of Nadav and Avihu: They only ‘brought their offering before YHVH,’ (Lev. 16:1, the opening verse of Parashat Acharei-Mot) but they didn’t create a flow of blessing and material well-being to the rest of the community.”

The story continues that Rabbi Sofer spoke up and asked, “Does the good Rabbi know what purpose Heaven may have had in mind in establishing a Chief Rabbi in Krakow?”

The Tiferet Shlomo paused to consider the question, then answered: “Does the Chief Rabbi think that he was appointed simply to answer questions about whether this or that pot is kosher? There are rabbis to answer such questions in every street and alley in Krakow. I will tell you: A Chief Rabbi was appointed in a great city such as Krakow in order to bring blessings, economic prosperity and good health to the community. That is what heaven wants.”

The crowd was silent, trembling at how their Chief Rabbi might respond. And then he did: “Thank God—now I am aware of a new duty of my office, one that hasn’t been written down in the legal codes, but that I will be mindful of from now on!”

Like the orchestra conductor, the Chief Rabbi confronts multiple approaches to leadership. I remember an interview in which the great violinist Isaac Stern said that a conductor should convey that she or he knows more about the score in their pinky fingernail than the entire orchestra does put together. That’s one way to do it: to lead through authority and intimidation. But, in Rabbi Rabinowicz’s formulation, that’s not a kind of leadership that is going to cultivate blessings—spiritual blessings or those of material well-being. A more elevated kind of leadership might be one in which leaders understand themselves to be temporary custodians of the responsibility to help those they serve to “secure the blessings of liberty,” as the United States Constitution puts it—to realize, individually and collectively, our potential as images of the Divine.

I would suggest this doesn’t only apply to leaders in positions of authority, but to all of us. As the great writer on education, Parker Palmer, writes: “What does it take to qualify as a leader? Being human and being here. As long as I am here, doing whatever I am doing, I am leading, for better or for worse. And, if I may say so, so are you.” All of us can and should strive to show up, to lead, in ways that increase the flow of blessing. It isn’t only the High Priest or the orchestra conductor or the chief rabbi who exercises leadership—if each of us carries within us a spark of divinity, then all of us are leading all the time.