The other day I found myself thinking back five years, to the first Pesach we celebrated during the Covid pandemic. I remembered the strange feeling of loneliness and isolation. I remembered how families struggled to figure out whether and how they could do “Zoom seders” (and, frequently, how they would manage to get less tech-savvy relatives into the “room”). I remembered the unusual experience of cooking just for my family and no guests. Perhaps you remember that time, too.

I also remember that Pesach 2020 afforded new insight into what it might have felt like for our ancestors to seek protection inside their homes as a plague raged beyond the threshold. Home became even more of a refuge than it normally is, and in those early days many folks went to even more extraordinary lengths to keep their homes pure: Wiping down items from the grocery store before they came into the kitchen, keeping repair workers standing at a distance beyond the front door. While I had an academic sense of purity rituals before Covid, Pesach 2020 provided a deeper understanding.

Purity is, of course, a theme of Passover. In ancient times, in order to offer the Pesach sacrifice one had to be in a state of ritual purity (tahor). At the same time, offering that sacrifice was a sacred duty of every Israelite. So what happens if, through no fault of your own, you’re ritually impure at Pesach and can’t offer the sacrifice? In Numbers 9 we find the highly unusual provision of Pesach Sheni, a make-up opportunity: you offer the sacrifice a month later. No other communal observance quite compares. (If you were ritually impure for the make-up, then you’re out of luck. There’s a limit.)

While we don’t offer a Pesach sacrifice these days, the impulse toward purity remains a deep part of Pesach for many. Most prominently that shows up in the way we relate to chametz. In his very first entry on the laws of Pesach, Maimonides writes, “Anyone who intentionally eats an olive’s size of chametz on Pesach… is liable for karet, being spiritually cut off from the Jewish people, as Exodus 12:15 states: ‘Whoever eats leaven… will have his soul cut off.'” Likewise, he subsequently reminds us, it is forbidden to own or derive benefit from chametz on Pesach (though this prohibition doesn’t carry quite as high a penalty).

In many Jewish homes, including my own, all of this serves to make the atmosphere thick with a sense of purity and impurity around Pesach. Many Jews want to get the chametz out of their homes. Stories are told of Jewish mothers and grandmothers (permit me to gender essentialize for a moment—though in my own house this character would be played by me) who ruthlessly police the household for wayward children munching on a sandwich or a cookie after the kitchen has been kashered. The slightest trace of impurity is a threat.

All of which has, I think, given purity a bit of a bad rap. Certainly it can be misapplied. A focus on purity can, of course, lead to a heavy emphasis on policing the boundaries and thus to exclusion, persecution, and worse—see the Nazi racial purity laws, American laws against miscegenation, or Pharaoh’s own maniacal effort to eradicate Jewish baby boys, for textbook examples. Yet in the appropriate wariness to purity many of us have developed in response to these abuses, I think we may have left behind some good things.

In a recent talk at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, Gil Fronsdal pointed toward what we might experience in a healthy approach to purity. After he first began meditating in a monastery, Gil shared, he “started feeling this amazing sense of purity within. And I could feel that if I had certain thoughts that were not so pure, how it was a kind of violence… that shut down this place of purity that felt so healthy and good, that felt like home in a way… I felt free from a lot of the kind of inner conflict, the way that greed and hatred were a kind of a loss of freedom because they become compulsions that are difficult to put down, they drive us. And so there’s a kind of freedom from living with a deep sense of virtue.”

As I listened to Gil’s talk, it struck me this kind of purity was akin to the deeper spiritual experience of the practices of purity and impurity that surround Pesach. Chametz, of course, is not only about the food—it’s about the inner chametz too, the inner compulsions that keep us from being truly free servants of the Divine. The practice of eating matzah can be understood as an invitation to “flatten” ourselves—to let go of ego and self-centeredness. Maimonides himself reminds us that the commandment to destroy and rid ourselves of all chametz in our possession is not simply a physical or legal maneuver, but ultimately involves the work of the heart: “What is the destruction to which the Torah refers? To nullify chametz within one’s heart and to consider it as dust, and to resolve within the heart that one possesses no chametz at all: all the chametz in one’s possession being as dust and as a thing of no value whatsoever.” (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 2:2).

While I have no desire to return to Pesach 2020, nor to descend into the oppressive potentialities of a discourse of purity and impurity, the tradition invites us into this richer spiritual experience of reclaiming purity as a form of recalibrating what we hold onto and what we let go of. My sense is that, in some communities at least, while observing the Seder ritual remains a central part of Pesach, for many folks this notion of giving up ownership of our chametz—either by giving it away or by selling it to someone who isn’t Jewish or doing the true heart-work of relinquishing our claim of ownership over it and thus its claim of ownership over us—is not as front of mind.

So this year, as issues of borders and possession and purity swirl powerfully around us in current events, I suggest we step into the challenge and invitation of our tradition—that alongside the physical work of preparation, we do the heart-work as well. For Jews, Liberation Day is not a political slogan, and it is not limited to questions of economic or political freedom. It should not be about nationalism or racism or other oppressive misapplications of purity. For Jews, Liberation Day is Pesach, the time when we see ourselves as once again leaving the political and spiritual constraints of the stifling confines of Egypt. To leave behind that constriction and step into our freedom—that is an experience of genuine, wholesome purity. May we experience it this year.

A few years ago I received an email from Joe Reimer, a professor emeritus of Jewish education at Brandeis, with a request: to be part of a small working group supported by the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at Brandeis that would focus on the teaching and learning of Jewish spirituality. Certainly because of the people who would be involved, and possibly because of my own predilection to say yes to good ideas too quickly, I happily decided to join.

The lens of the study ultimately became trained on the study of Hasidic texts in adult Jewish education settings. There were six of us in the group and we met on zoom for a year (I’m writing this before securing everyone’s permission to share names, so I’m keeping them private). In each session one of us took a turn sharing a reflection on our own experiences of teaching Hasidic texts, standing both inside the experience and on the balcony looking down on it. We practiced noticing and asking questions, and we started to develop a bit of shared language.

After a few months, Joe shared that the Mandel Center was interested in hosting a convening on the topic, and we started to think about a gathering. Then October 7 came, and we, like so many others, were thrown. Our sessions, which from the beginning included one Israeli, became a time to connect and to process the shared pain and grief of the world. We pushed back our plan for a convening by a year.

This week the convening finally happened, with 23 participants from various backgrounds, institutions, and communities. I was especially delighted that so many current and former IJS faculty members were among the group. (You can read more about it here.)

By design, the convening was a space for not only some incredible teaching of Hasidic texts by some of the most talented teachers I know, but also reflection on what’s happening when we teach those texts. And, straddling the worlds of academe and spiritual practice, it also included meditation, singing niggunim, and teaching modes like movement improvisation that helped us play with what we might think of as boundaries between disciplines or realms.

At one point, pulling me back into the real world for a moment, a participant asked me, “How do you justify this kind of thing to your board and your funders?” I honestly hadn’t considered the question that much, perhaps because the Mandel Center was able to foot the lion’s share of the bill. Still, we were making a significant investment in the time of our faculty, which is precious. So the question has been sitting with me.

“And the Holy One called to Moses, and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying:” (Leviticus 1:1). Rashi’s first comment on this verse—his first comment on the Book of Leviticus—reads as follows: “Before every Divine speech act, before every utterance of the Holy One, before every instruction-invitation (tzivui, as in mitzvah—JF), there is a call, the language of affection, the language used by the Ministering Angels: ‘They call one to the other’ (Isaiah 6:3).”

I sometimes hear from Jews that it can feel weird to invoke the language of “calling” or “vocation” (which also means calling) to describe our relationship with the Holy One or the way we came to the professions or relationships to which we’ve dedicated ourselves. Particularly in English, it can feel Christian. And yet—with affection for, but not apology to, my Christian colleagues and friends—this is one of those things we Jews had first. The experience of calling is a central aspect of Jewish life, as suggested in the very name of the central book of the Torah: Vayikra, “And God called.”

Teachers, whether they work in public schools or at universities or in synagogues or at IJS, confront a unique set of challenges when it comes to calling. Those of us who teach texts, yours truly included, often start teaching because we love studying these texts and want to share our love of them with others. If we have some skill, and if we’re blessed to be in the right environment, we come to experience that innate desire as a calling, and we learn to help those we teach discern the voice of the Divine calling to them (you) in the course of Torah study.

Yet like so many other passions in a world that demands economic productivity, teaching can become more labor than love, and that flame of an initial calling can die to an ember if it isn’t tended. Which is why teachers, like all of us, need regular opportunities to renew their sense of vocation, to get quiet enough to hear the roar of the still small voice, to blow air on the embers and add fuel to the fire. In quotidian terms, we call that professional development. In the more majestic register of Torah, we might call it hitchadshut, an act of making new again. That’s my answer.

On one level, particularly as we approach the Passover seder, I’m tempted to say that we’re all teachers and we’re all learners—which is true, we are. But I also think it’s important to lift up the unique skills and talents and experience it takes to do particular types of teaching. Not anyone can teach a high school chemistry class, and not anyone can teach the Sefat Emet. It takes work and preparation, and most significantly it takes a sense of deep love and affection—a sense of calling.

Your call is different than mine. Each of us is on a particular path, which is part of what makes life rich and wonderful. Yet all of us can experience a calling—to forms of work, to types of service, to particular relationships, to Torah and mitzvot. Like many of my colleagues at the convening this week, a large part of the work I have found myself called to do is to help you and one another and as many people as we can to sense and renew their experience of calling through the extraordinary teachings of our tradition.

I’ll begin with a confession: I am a shoplifter.

Well, I was a shoplifter. As a little kid. My Mom and I were shopping at the grocery store. I saw a greeting card I really liked (I remember it being blue) and I wanted to buy it. For whatever reason, my Mom said no. I surreptitiously took it anyway and hid it inside my shirt. My Mom discovered it when we got home. After a serious talking-to about trust, we got in the station wagon and returned to the store, where I gave it back and apologized. Lesson learned.

Now, I’m proud to say that I have never shoplifted since, though I feel like that’s kind of a low bar. But perhaps the bigger imprint this event made on me had to do with trust—its importance and its fragility.

I have written about trust and trustworthiness here many times before. It’s one of my regular themes. In both my personal and professional relationships, maintaining trust and being recognized as personally trustworthy are a major focus for me—more than a focus, more like a preoccupation or a north star. (Plug: It’s why I’m proud that IJS has a 4-star rating on Charity Navigator and a Platinum rating on Candid.) That could come from being in the Boy Scouts or from the example of teachers and role models. But if I were on a therapist’s couch looking for my earliest memory dealing with trust, this incident with the greeting card would inevitably come up.

What’s clear is that the core animating issue, for me at any rate, was less the fact that the greeting card was someone else’s property (for fans of Les Mis: I’m not going to go all Javert on Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread) as the effect of the action on the way my mother and others thought of me—and the way I thought of myself (i.e., this is more Jean Valjean singing, “Who am I?”). I feel deeply driven to be, and to be known as, a trustworthy person. I credit my parents in particular with helping to make me that way.

Yet I think this is a pretty core issue for all of us. As a parent I have witnessed that some of the most difficult emotional moments for my children when they were young were just like mine—when they were caught in a lie, when they knew they had violated someone’s (our) trust. And I would speculate that that’s because, at root, our entire world depends on our ability to trust: to trust ourselves, to trust other people. Betrayal is one of the very deepest and hardest things to heal from—and so most of us neither want to be betrayed nor to betray others. We want to be able to trust and for others to be able to trust us.

Taking the phrase pekudei hamishkan in its most literal sense, the Midrash imagines that the opening passage of our Torah portion finds Moses sitting and making a public accounting of the Israelites’ donations in front of the entire people. “All of Israel came and Moses sat and counted,” the midrash relates. But as he counted, he forgot about the 1,775 shekels of silver that were used for the vavei ha-amudim, the little hooks that enabled the posts to be held together. Moses became nervous. He said to himself, “Now the people of Israel will think that I stole from them!” Like young Josh, like any of us—well, any of us who have a sense of honor and shame—Moses began to fear that his integrity would be impugned.

At that moment, the Holy Blessed One opened Moses’s eyes so he could see the hooks. Thus Moses told the people, in what reads like a just-in-time afterthought, “And with the 1,775 shekels he made the hooks for the posts” (Ex.38:22). “In that moment,” says the midrash, “the Israelites were reassured about the integrity of the process of creating the tabernacle.” (Yalkut Shimoni 415:3; my thanks to Rabbi David Schuck for reminding me of this midrash)

The process of building the tabernacle is the work of our collective human creation. It is a mirror to God’s creation of the world. That is why Shabbat is mentioned so frequently in these Torah portions, and it’s why the language of Exodus 39 sounds an awful lot like Genesis 1. And just as we depend on the trustworthiness and reliability of the world that has been created for us, our capacity to work and live together—to build a home in which the Divine can dwell among us—depends on the trustworthiness and reliability of our shared public life.

I would be pulling my punches if I didn’t make the implicit at least a bit more explicit: The behavior of many of our public leaders today, in the United States and Israel and in too many other places, does not reflect these values. As Jews who seek to live lives of integrity, whose mission is to build a mishkan and make the world a place in which the Divine may dwell, we should practice so that our lives may be models of integrity. And we should expect that and more from our own leaders.

I’ve written here previously about my mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease, which officially began seven years ago but which has likely been going on longer than that. For me, the first visible sign was when she had a hard time reading a children’s book to our youngest son, who was then 3 or 4 years old. Since then, the path has taken her through, among other things, a gradual reduction in her ability to read, tell time, and call up words.

A couple months ago Mom reached the point where the care she was receiving in assisted living was no longer enough, and she needed to move to a memory unit. The progress of the disease since then has been quite visible: Her vocabulary is shrinking, her world is getting smaller. And that’s okay—which is to say, I’m at peace with it. It’s the path she’s on, and our aim is for her journey to be as free of unnecessary suffering as possible.

Through all of it, Mom continues to be one of the more remarkable Alzheimer’s patients I’ve known—and even that my wife’s uncle, a world-renowned neurologist, has seen. Her name is Happy, and as we say in Hebrew, k’shma ken hi—she is true to her name. If the disease can bring out a latent essence in a person, then hers really is grounded in positive energy. Even now, what most lights her up is meeting people she can greet.

At this point, the distinction between physical presence and talking on the phone seems to be getting a little blurry for Mom. And while she cannot perform most tasks that most of us would take for granted, she still has the muscle memory to use the speed dial on her cell phone. Add this to the point of the previous paragraph and the result is that I get about 15 calls a day from her—and so do my brothers. Her little red cell phone is a vital lifeline to the rest of the world, and she is not afraid to use it.

The content of these conversations is more or less the same, lasting usually no more than a minute: a little how are you, a few patches of words that don’t make a tremendous amount of sense, and then, “Ok, we’ll talk again later. I love you so much.” Which is really the point: to paraphrase the great rabbi, Stevie Wonder, She just called to say she loves me.

“Everyone whose heart was moved, and all whose hearts were moved, came and brought to YHVH an offering” (Ex. 35:21). Commenting on this verse, Rabbi Chaim Joseph David Azulai (18th c., land of Israel; known as Chida) observes, “We all know there is a great distance between thought and action, between our good intentions and making them happen. Many good impulses evaporate before they come out into the world. Many people carry within them the burden of thoughts generated by the goodness of their hearts, but which have never been made manifest. Thus the Torah relates that, in the case of the construction of the Mishkan, no one suffered in this way—’everyone whose heart was moved,’ ‘whose spirit was moved,’ made an offering. That is, everyone had an impulse to give—but even those who might normally have found that that impulse remained just an impulse were able to bring their thought into action.”

Accompanying my Mom on her journey has afforded me some new insight into the Chida’s beautiful teaching. Unsurprisingly, the rabbi’s words align with one of my Mom’s own maxims that I remember from childhood. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” was a phrase Mom remembered growing up with. But as a parent, she also added her own inversion as a corollary: “And when you have something nice to say—say it!”

Taken together, I experience both these teachers as reminding me that part of my avodah now, my spiritual and human calling, is to help my Mom express her loving impulses into action—and to do the same for myself. I find that isn’t so much a technical issue as much as it’s about an orientation, a way of approaching her and her journey: Attuning myself to the opportunities and gifts, challenging as they may be at times, present in each moment, each interaction, each one of those many phone calls during the day.

While there may be a particularly localized and intensive dimension to this form of avodah in my relationship with my Mom, I would suggest that it can be a way to understand our general spiritual mission in the world. As much as anything else, this work of enabling the expression of loving impulses through words and deeds, is what building the Mishkan was all about—and it remains our work today.

Our family dog, Phoebe, is a 50ish pound Plott Hound (the official state dog of North Carolina, it turns out). Plotts are hunting dogs, and Phoebe certainly likes to be active. She requires at least two long walks a day, and often more. And she will frankly take as much stimulation as we can offer.

Sometimes I play a game with Phoebe: I dangle a rope in front of her, just out of her reach. She jumps at it and I tug up just in time, so that she can’t reach it. We do this a few times (this may well be related to years of my older brothers playing monkey in the middle—where I was said monkey) until eventually I let Phoebe get the rope and we do a little tug of war.

Now, I could just let Phoebe get the rope on the first try. But I’m not so interested in that (since I want to help her get some energy out) and I don’t think she’s terribly interested either (she likes the play of it). But I often feel a little bit of guilt around it, like I’m taunting her. At the same time, I recognize that as soon as Phoebe gets hold of the rope, we’re at the beginning of the end of our game. The adventure here is in the chase, the Quixotic quest for the rope. Once she has the rope, it gets a lot less exciting for both of us.

This is, of course, a conundrum as old as literature, perhaps best summed up by Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya at the end of The Princess Bride after he has finally fulfilled his life’s mission to avenge his father’s death: “It’s very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.” It also goes to a much deeper set of questions about attaining, possessing, and having.

Writing about the study of Torah, the contemporary French rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin observes a similar dynamic in our ability to make meaning, to understand. “The Text can never be attained,” he writes. “One could say that it is caressed. In spite of the analysis undertaken, in spite of the research, the bursting open, the laying bare, the text slips out of our grasp, remains inaccessible, always yet to come. It reveals itself only to withdraw immediately. The text is both visible and invisible at the same time; ambiguous, its meaning twinkles, it remains an enigma” (The Burnt Book, 63).

Making meaning of a text—in this case, Torah—is like my game of rope with Phoebe: As soon as we think we’ve grasped it, the game is over, and the dynamism in our relationship with it fades away. What makes the study of Torah—or our relationships with people, or our experience of the world—interesting, generative, and life-giving is when there is play, a healthy amount of openness and possibility, a caress rather than a grip.

Parashat Ki Tissa provides the Torah’s most forceful lesson in this teaching, as the Israelites, unable to bear the indeterminacy of an ineffable divinity, create a golden calf. Ouaknin quotes Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion: “What the idol tries to reduce is the gap and the withdrawal of the divine. Filling in for the absence of divinity, the idol brings the divine within reach, ensures its presence, and, eventually, distorts it… The worshipper lays his hand on the divine in the form of a god; but this taking in hand loses what it grasps… The idol lacks the distance that identifies and authenticates the divine as such—as that which does not belong to us, but which happens to us.”

If this kind of French philosophy isn’t your thing (I’m a fan, but I get it if you’re not), here’s my summary: Like the ancient Israelites, we too are frequently tempted by the spiritual seductiveness of idolatry. It springs from our natural human desire for certainty, for control, amidst the profound challenge of living in a world of indeterminacy. The challenge the Torah sets before us is to mindfully respond to that uncertainty and our resulting drive for control: to pursue meaning, to seek truth, and yet to hold it lightly, to caress it. In our ability to caress rather than hold tightly, perhaps, lies our capacity to live peacefully with ourselves and one another.

Purim offers us a particularly rich opportunity to live into this challenge, as it is our holiday most explicitly infused with the world’s indeterminacy (even in its very name, Purim, from the lots cast by Haman). When confronted with the potential for annihilation, Esther’s first reaction seems to be despair—which is, perhaps, its own form of idolatry in the way it holds tight to the notion that the story as intended is the story that must inevitably unfold. With Mordechai’s help, Esther musters her courage to loosen her grip on that narrative—or perhaps, the narrative’s grip on her. In that psycho-spiritual gap, she finds the space to take action and change the story.

Twice a day—even on Purim—our liturgy calls us to remember the Exodus from Egypt. The Hasidic masters understood that our enslavement in Egypt was not merely a historical or political fact, but an ongoing spiritual reality. The constriction, the tightness, the idolatry of Egypt is something that haunts and calls to us all the time. Just like our ancestors, from Moses to Esther, we have the capacity to leave that spiritual Egypt in every moment. One might even say—lightly, with a caress—that that’s what our entire tradition is about.

While social media is, generally speaking, a wasteland of toxic drek, there are still some moments when its original hopeful potential glimmers beneath the surface. One such moment occurred for me in recent weeks, as I began to engage with an old acquaintance from my youth whose politics are pretty different from mine. He had posted something about the hypocrisy of political leaders. I couldn’t understand what he was getting at with his post, and, genuinely trying to practice curiosity rather than conviction, I reached out to him privately to ask him to explain it to me.

We had a couple of rounds of exchange, all of which were friendly. (A good lesson here is to do this kind of work in private messages, rather than in public comments.) What I came to understand through our conversation was this issue of hypocrisy was really important to him. He recognized a tendency of conventional political leaders to engage in what he viewed as hypocritical speech, and that really seemed to touch a nerve in him. Like many other Americans, he sees the current president as someone who does not engage in the hypocrisies of conventional political leaders—someone who speaks plainly and says what he means. In my friend’s view, the rest of the political class are phonies, while Trump is authentic.

While I imagine some readers identifying with that view, I suspect the vast majority probably don’t. And if you find yourself gasping for a moment—”But what about… ?!”—I would ask you, in my best meditation teacher voice, to set down your judgment and conviction for a moment, and try to practice open curiosity. (If you’re anything like me, you can, and almost certainly will, come back to the judgment later.)

I found this new learning to be tremendously helpful, because it gave me insight into how someone I know to be a good and decent person could hold political positions I frequently find to be anathema. It caused me to reflect on how I relate to authenticity and hypocrisy, and to consider what my own deepest motivations are in supporting leaders, parties, or policies.

Because of course authenticity is something we think about a lot in Jewish mindfulness practice. So many people find this Torah in a search for healing and wholeness, often brought about by a feeling that their insides and outsides are not in alignment, that they weren’t being true to who they really were meant to be. They (perhaps you) are trying to live a life that looks like the Holy Ark described in last week’s Torah portion: our golden insides match our golden outsides.

Yet I don’t get as worked up about hypocrisy from political leaders. Maybe that’s because I’ve long internalized the leadership theorist Ron Heifetz’s observation that “leadership is letting people down at a rate they can absorb.” Or it’s because I’ve come to believe that no two human beings can ever fully understand each other; only God can fully understand us. Or it’s because I’ve been married for a long time, and somewhere along the way I realized that if I told my spouse everything I was thinking in the moment I was thinking it, I probably wouldn’t stay married for very long. Is that hypocrisy? If so, I’m happy to be called a hypocrite.

Or perhaps I want to be called a peace-maker. “Hillel taught: Be like the students of Aaron: Love peace and pursue peace; bring peace between one person and another, and between a married couple; love all people and bring them closer to Torah” (Avot d’Rebbe Natan 12:1). Aaron, who is the central character of Parashat Tetzaveh—the only Torah portion from Exodus onwards that does not mention the name of his brother Moses—is our tradition’s paradigm for peace-making.

Whereas Moses’s watchword is emet (truth), Aaron’s is shalom (peace). In associating the brothers with these two virtues, the tradition seems to acknowledge a tension that exists between them. If we’re really serious about it, it can be profoundly difficult to arrive at a shared understanding of truth. And yet our ability to live peacefully with one another—whether within the walls of a home or the borders of a nation—depends on both the degree to which we share a version of truth, and on the degree to which we are willing and able to tolerate the reality that the truth we know might be slightly different than the truth of our spouse, our neighbor, or our political opponent.

I hope this isn’t misunderstood as a call for moral relativism. That’s not what I’m trying to suggest. Rather, I’m seeking to invite you and me and my friend on social media to do some serious inner reflection on what we understand to be true and how we hold it: tightly, lightly, something else?

Because that question of how we hold it—that, I believe, is a key to navigating this built-in human tension between truth and peace. I’ll have more to say about that next week. In the meantime, I hope all of us can lean into our practices to help us to both discern what is true and, without sacrificing truth, be disciples of Aaron: lovers and seekers of peace.

Regular readers will know that the Boy Scouts were a big part of life in my family growing up. My grandfather became an Eagle Scout in 1924. My father, two older brothers and I were all Eagle Scouts too. It was through Scouting that I learned formative lessons about life and leadership, camping and hiking, citizenship and first aid.

But more than anything, I think Scouting helped instill in me a deep sense of duty and responsibility. “On my honor:” these are the opening words of the Scout Oath. Speaking them, an eleven-year old Tenderfoot is immediately confronted with a word that signifies an inner-directed sense of virtue. While honor can be related to shame, which has a significant public dimension, in Scouting as in life I learned that honor is ultimately much more a sense that springs from within, and that honorable people are those who don’t need others watching them in order to do the right thing.

That sensibility of honor animates the first of the twelve points of the Scout Law: “A Scout is trustworthy.” We might be able to trust someone because we know they are being held in check by other forces—the threat of consequences if they violate our trust, for instance. But genuine trust is the kind that emerges because we know someone to be honorable: We can have faith that they won’t abuse our trust, simply because to do so would be wrong.

Society cannot exist without trust, and law cannot really function without honor and virtue. Yes, the threat of punishment can keep bad actors in check. But, just as the Talmud recognizes the category of a naval b’reshut hatorah, one who acts within the law but is nonetheless a scoundrel, all legal systems ultimately require that those enforcing the laws, much less those obeying them, be honorable people.

Parashat Terumah opens with the stirring words of the Holy One to Moses: “Speak to the children of Israel and take for Me an offering—from every person whose heart is moved shall you take the offering to Me” (Ex. 25:2). Reflecting on why this Torah portion comes just after Parashat Mishpatim, which was focused so heavily on civil and criminal laws, Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein (1860-1941) suggests that the placement is intentional. “It is to teach you that only an offering of things acquired justly and legally are desirable by the Holy Blessed One. Not so for an offering acquired through robbery and extortion—these are unacceptable.”

We often look to these words about the stirring of the heart as the touchstone for our Torah of spiritual practice, and with good reason. We don’t want to perform rituals, or live our lives more generally, as automatons. Much of our teaching of Jewish spiritual practice reflects that: we often focus less on concepts like duty and obligation (some might even blanch a bit at them), and much more on voluntary action. From that perspective, Rabbi Esptein’s words might even strike us as superfluous: Do we really need to be reminded of the importance of living ethically and honorably?

And yet. Today, as much as ever, we live in a moment when all of us, individually and collectively, should expect honorable behavior of ourselves, of others, and of those we entrust to lead us. Yes, it should be a prerequisite for our practice—but it should also be its goal. If our spiritual practices aren’t leading us to greater ethical behavior, to a deeper sense of our own honor and dignity and that of every image of God, to higher levels of trustworthiness—then what are we doing? Put another way: If observance of the law without manifesting its spirit is rote performance, then isn’t observing the spirit without manifesting justice rote performance too?

Nine centuries ago, Rabbi Bachya ibn Pekuda titled his great work of Jewish ethics and spirituality Hovot Halevavot: Duties of the Heart. Then as now, our heartwork is a responsibility of our personhood—and it must be deeply interwoven with our efforts to live honorably, to be trustworthy, and to maintain a just society under the rule of law.

It was cold on Presidents Day, and many of our friends had gone to warmer places for the long weekend. So my son Toby and I wound up at the movies. We saw “Mufasa,” which tells the backstory to “The Lion King:” how the orphaned Mufasa (this is a Disney movie after all—gotta have your orphan story) is adopted by a new family and emerges into a great leader. Love, betrayal, all the the usual ingredients, including some new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda (far from his best work, but fine). I’d give it a solid B.

Despite the familiarity of the storyline, nevertheless I couldn’t help but be moved when the stronger moral moments emerged: when characters showed great bravery, when homecoming finally occurred, when all the animals recognized Mufasa’s integrity and instinctively started kneeling to him and calling him “Your Majesty,” crowning him their brave, wise, and benevolent king. While the Disney tropes may be tired, they’re still quite effective.

I’ve written in this space before about social psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research into awe. As a tear came to my eye towards the end of “Mufasa,” I heard Keltner in my head reminding me that one of the ways we can experience awe is by witnessing moral beauty: seeing people do selfless, courageous things; witnessing people offer comfort and solidarity (like many others, I expect, I teared up again Thursday morning watching Israelis lining overpasses and interchanges as the vehicles carrying the bodies of Oded Lifschitz and Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas traveled on the highway from Gaza to Tel Aviv). These touch deep chords in our hearts. They activate something deep inside, a sense, perhaps, that we’re observing the Divine Presence at that moment.

Another familiar trope founded on moral beauty is the person willing to do what’s right even when it comes with great risk. Think of “Twelve Angry Men,” or “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Such stories inspire us. We see courage, virtue, integrity: all the things that the animals—and we—see in Mufasa. If you’re like me, you might experience a swelling of the heart at such stories.

Yet those stories invite us to certain questions: How do we discern what’s right? How much is acceptable to risk, and under what circumstances? And, perhaps most of all for people who live in a democracy (or a polity that aspires to be one), when do we accede to the will of the majority—even if we think they’re wrong?

Political theorist Danielle Allen reminds us that “of all the ritual relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent. No democratic citizen, adult or child, escapes the necessity of losing out at some point in a public decision.” (Talking to Strangers, 28) Democracies function on the twin practices of a) losing minorities to sacrifice by recognizing the will of the majority; b) the system’s ability to distribute sacrifice equitably, such that everyone is losing out at a roughly equal rate and no one constituency is always winning.

But sometimes the majority is actually wrong. Parashat Mishpatim invites us into such a case: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.” (Exodus 23:2) This is the verse that undergirds the whole story in “Twelve Angry Men:” Even when—no, especially when—the majority is about to do something wrong, we are commanded to speak up.

In an unusually long gloss, the normally laconic Rashi takes issue with an interpretive tradition that emerged around this verse which understood its application to be limited to rather particular cases within the rabbinic court system. In an unusually animated voice, Rashi counters: “There are regarding this verse Midrashic interpretations by the Sages of Israel; but the language of the verse is not explained by them in its proper way… ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil’ means, if you see wicked men perverting justice, do not say, ‘Since they are the majority I shall follow them;’ ‘Neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment’ means, if the defendant asks you concerning that judgment, do not answer him regarding the dispute anything which inclines after that majority to pervert justice from its truth, but tell him the judgment as it should be, and let the collar be hung around the neck of the majority.”

The picture Rashi paints is one of a judge—or, in a democratic society, I would suggest, a juror, government official, or citizen—who is fearless in the face of the majority’s pressure to conform. Not only is such fearless righteousness morally inspiring, it is also Biblically commanded.

Easier said than done, of course. If it were easy to do, Disney wouldn’t make movies about it.

Which brings us to the question of practice. I have observed many times before that I see a relationship between Tocqueville’s notion of “habits of the heart” that lie at the core of democratic life and the Talmudic phrase avodah shebalev, “service of the heart,” which the Rabbis used to describe prayer. So many of the capacities required of citizens in a democracy are spiritual ones: the capacity to sacrifice, as Danielle Allen describes; the capacity to understand clearly our own motivations and those of others; the capacity to speak and act courageously, even when powerful forces are arrayed against us. These are not dry legal ideas confined to treatises by Hobbes and Locke. They are the heart and soul of the sacred task of sustaining a society in which every human being can live and be recognized as an image of God.

The beginning of this month marked five years since I began working at IJS. Half a decade later, I am grateful that I continue to wake up every day and get to do this amazing work with these amazing colleagues—including our professionals, our volunteer leaders, and the thousands of people who participate in our community in one way or another. That includes you, as a reader of these reflections. So I begin with gratitude: Thank you for the opportunity to be part of your life, and to hopefully do some good.

While by this point I feel genuinely comfortable in my role, when I first started it wasn’t necessarily obvious that that would be the case. Among other things, I am the first man to lead IJS. And (not unrelated) I’m also the first of our leaders who doesn’t hail from the liberal Jewish community. My ordination is from YCT Rabbinical School, a modern orthodox institution—with a feminist and often liberal bent, no doubt, but still.

So I’ve observed moments over these five years when the part of the world I’m working in and the part of the world I come from operate with different sensibilities. For instance, most of the people I work with and serve don’t observe Shabbat or practice keeping kosher in the same way as I do. Our communities have different orientations around the liturgy of the prayer book. They have different cultures of text study and language. The encounter of these worlds inevitably produces tension for me—tension which Jewish mindfulness practice has helped me to manage. And most of the time, I find that tension is a productive one, like a passing storm that yields a gentle rain—for me, at any rate, and hopefully for others too.

Yet sometimes the storms can be, well, stormier. Such a case happened this past week, as I watched how these two worlds responded to the president’s announcement that he intends for the United States to redevelop the Gaza Strip and, in the process, aid in or force the relocation of the area’s millions of residents. Much of the liberal world responded immediately that this was wrong: It amounted to ethnic cleansing. Much of the orthodox world responded that not only was Trump’s idea not wrong, it was right: To oppose the opportunity for Gazans to relocate was immoral, as was the status quo, which would consign Israel to perpetual warfare with Hamas.

My own first instinct was closer to my liberal friends: Of course I’m against ethnic cleansing. I likewise believe the people of Gaza should have freedom to leave if they wish, and I also believe Israelis and Gazans alike should be able to live free of Hamas’s rule.

But my point here is not so much to espouse a political position (there are plenty of columns that do that) as to take note of this phenomenon I experienced in straddling the worlds that I do, and the way my own practice has aided as I’ve done so (there are far fewer columns that do so).

One of the benefits of my job is that I don’t have to make excuses to meditate—I, like, literally get paid to do that. So I found myself deepening my own practice this week, and really trying to stand on the balcony and observe this Bizarro phenomenon: Two views of right which appear to be diametrically opposed—and with enormous practical, political, historical, strategic, and moral stakes. I tried to resist the urge to react, and just sit with this profound, quite jarring phenomenon.

As I did so, what arose for me was a midrash about the miraculous nature of the revelation at Sinai, which we read in this week’s Torah portion: Each person heard according to their own voice—women heard the Divine voice in the voice of a woman, men in the voice of a man, etc. Or, as the Talmud puts it, “Moses would speak and God would answer in a voice”—in what voice? In Moses’s own voice (Brachot 45a). I understand this interpretive tradition as an attempt to answer a bedrock conundrum, or series of them: How is it that we each can relate to the Divine Presence uniquely, and yet we can agree that all of us encountered the Divine Presence? How is it that I can have my own experience of reality, which is inherently different from yours, and yet we can both acknowledge that we share a reality?

The philosophical, social, and legal questions proceed from there: How do we communicate, since my experience of language and your experience of it are always going to be different on the most intimate levels? (One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s quip: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”) How do we agree on the meaning of a promise, or a law, and that we are each bound by it? How do we come to a shared understanding, and what happens when we don’t? How do we know that others are operating in good faith—or even that we are doing so ourselves?

As I observed these questions coming up for me, I found myself arriving at the other end of the Torah’s socio-political spectrum, which is summed up in the sentence: “Each person did what was right in their own eyes.” This is a catchphrase of the Book of Judges, repeated over and over again to illustrate what can happen when a society is not bound by a shared commitment to authority, and setting the stage for the establishment of centralized government in the Book of Samuel. Yet what I realized as this verse arose in my mind alongside the midrashim about revelation that I shared above is that the line between these two experiences is, perhaps, vanishingly thin: When Ploni (Hebrew for John Doe) was standing at the foot of Sinai and heard God speaking in the voice of Ploni, was he hearing God’s voice or his own? How did he know? How would he know? And how would others trust that judgment—or their own? It doesn’t take long before the philosophical knots proliferate.

Revelation, recognizing the Divine voice and discerning the truth of the moment, is not easy business. It can be messy and contradictory and really hard—not only to discern what is right and true, but to live in community with others with a shared language of what is right and true. We are living through a period when, in my lifetime at any rate, as both Jews and Americans, we are being challenged on these most fundamental levels in ways we’ve never been challenged before. As individuals and as a collective, now is a time to lean into our practices even more, to resist the impulse to react with words and, instead, take the time to be quiet, to listen, and only then to speak—with more compassion, with greater wisdom, with deeper trust.

I don’t have much occasion to go in the backyard during the winter. For starters, January is pretty cold in Chicago, and the dog is perfectly fine if we just let her out the door to do her business and then run back in.

But the other day it was a little warmer, and Phoebe seemed like she would enjoy playing fetch. So I bundled up and took her out.

After a few rounds of catch and release with a stick, my eye noticed a large ice formation on the side of the house—under an outdoor faucet. Channeling my inner Moses, I thought, “How wondrous is this sight.” So I went to look.

Turns out we had a leak that, drip by drip, had built up into quite a large piece of work over the weeks.

Like a lot of homeowners, we have a membership to a service that supposedly vets and rates professionals to come to your house and fix stuff. While we had someone there, I figured they could also repair another outdoor faucet in our side yard that wasn’t working properly. I knew that the expensive plumbing service we’ve used for major repairs in the past would take a week or more to come (they’re popular), and there was an offer from this online outfit to send someone the next day for a good price. So I took it.

Lesson learned (again): You get what you pay for. The guy was nice enough, but he didn’t have the right parts, so he went and found some cheap PVC plastic spout that would take care of the leak and would also fix the other faucet.

Which it did—until the next day, when I arrived home from a walk with the dog to notice a giant puddle forming on our driveway. I went to investigate, and the workman’s cheap fix had exploded. The side yard faucet was now gushing water, and the backyard faucet had sprung a leak too—worse than the original!

I turned off the faucets from the basement to stop the gushing (something the repairman had neglected to do), and then I called the expensive plumber. They’re coming next Thursday. The online outfit gave me a refund when I told them I’d cancel my membership.

As I reflected on this story, I found the words of Gil Fronsdal ringing in my ears. Gil, who I’ve mentioned in this space before, teaches a wonderful short maxim of mindfulness: Don’t make it worse. We may not always be able to make things better, at least not right away. But generally we can try to avoid taking action, in word or deed, that makes it worse. As my case illustrates, good words to live by. Oops.

Now you might say, “Don’t make it worse” seems like a low bar. It’s not exactly the prophet exhorting us to “break every yoke and let the oppressed go free” (Isaiah 58:6). But, shifting into some other registers, I find that it’s often a very high bar indeed. As a partner or a parent, it’s not unusual to find myself trying to discern whether and how best to communicate a thought or feeling: Say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and I can definitely make things worse. The same goes with relationships at work, in friendships, with my neighbors, or as a citizen. And as a (very minor) public figure, it’s a question I think about all the time: Are the words or actions that I’m contemplating going to improve things, or make them worse?

And on a deeper level, this is a two-step I think we do all the time. It’s reflected in the rhythms of Shabbat: Engage in the world for six days, withdraw from the world for one. Or, as my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius teaches, engage for six minutes or six seconds, withdraw for one. (This is microdosing Shabbat, as Marc says.) This reflects a feature, not a bug, of the human condition: a little higher than my dog, who is constantly engaged with the world; a little lower than the angels, who exist on another plane.

“A person must consider himself as nothing, forgetting himself completely and praying only for the good of the Divine Presence,” teaches the Ba’al Shem Tov. “Then he can attain a level that transcends time – the world of thought, where everything is equal: life and death, ocean and land. This is the meaning of the Zohar: ‘Why do they cry to Me?’ (Exodus 14:15) – ‘to Me’ specifically, for the matter depends upon Atik, that part of the Divine that is beyond all duality and difference.’ The Israelites had to abandon themselves completely and forget their own danger in order to enter the World of Thought, where everything is equal.”

This is a lofty teaching from the Besh”t: If we can withdraw from, or transcend, the physical world, then we might behold the infinitely deeper reality that lies beyond its appearance. That’s what happened when our ancestors crossed the sea.

Yet consider this teaching of Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira on the very same words, from two centuries later: “The Blessed Creator cares more about the dignity of the people of Israel than God’s own dignity… And since Moses prayed before the Holy One for God’s honor, God responded, ‘Why do you cry out to me?!’ Which is to say, ‘Why do you cry out to me for my sake? Rather, speak to the children of Israel and tell them to move!’ More than I care about my own dignity, I care about the dignity of my people.”

Rabbi Shapira would seem to push against the Ba’al Shem Tov: In a moment of such dire worldly concerns, God doesn’t want our self-abnegation and transcendence—God wants our action, our very physical engagement with the world.

Both readings are true, of course, and one may be more true than the other depending on the circumstances. Both can be, and probably are, even true simultaneously.

An essential part of our practice is discerning the circumstances in which we find ourselves, determining whether this is a moment for engagement or withdrawal, action or rest, speech or silence. We do this all the time—in our relationships, our work, our citizenship. We aim to hold, simultaneously, in our minds, hearts, and hands, the goal not to do harm and actively repair the world.

This a difficult practice. But it is one we are invited to engage in every cycle of Shabbat and the workweek, in the unceasing flow of moments of engagement and withdrawal, Shabbat and chol. May we be blessed to practice it and manifest it in our lives today.

“Insurance is one of finance’s great gifts to mankind. Through the statistical magic of risk pooling, an individual can obtain peace of mind and protection against devastating loss.”

A perhaps unexpected opening sentence to a Shabbat reflection from yours truly. But the article it comes from, by Wall Street Journal writer Greg Ip, really grabbed my attention. I had always kind of assumed that, if legislators couldn’t figure out how to address climate change, then ultimately the insurance market would do it for us, as the rising risk of disaster got priced into our insurance premiums. Ip shows why that assumption doesn’t actually work out, and I found it illuminating.

Now, of course, I am neither a climate scientist nor an economist. My interest here is more in the social, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of risk. Note Ip’s description of what insurance does: It can help us “obtain peace of mind.” Now he’s speaking my language. (And, incidentally, he’s casually invoking the name of a book by Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman that spent 58 weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 1946-47.)

Where does peace of mind come from? For most of us, safety is pretty crucial for that. We want our borders to be safe, our homes to be safe, our schools and vehicles and children to be safe. When something is safe, it means there’s minimal risk associated with it. And when risk is minimized, we generally feel less anxious and more peaceful in our minds. That reality is reflected in the very word insurance, which provides a level of surety. We can feel more sure, more secure, more safe.

Today, though, I feel like we’re living in an age of unsurance: We’re not sure what the next day, or even the next hour, may bring. The weather has changed and will continue to do so. Disasters are striking in places like Asheville, NC, where no one thought a hurricane could wreak the kind of destruction they experienced last fall. The Federal government, under the new administration, is rapidly changing many large sectors of policy–and doing so in a disorderly, chaotic fashion. For me, and perhaps for you, peace of mind feels harder and harder to come by.

With Parashat Bo, we reach the highpoint of the Exodus: the end of the plagues and the moment of liberation after centuries of enslavement. We remember the instructions Moses gives the Israelites: Before the final plague passes through Egypt, the Israelites are to paint lamb’s blood on their doorposts, which will keep out the Angel of Death, and to hold the very first Passover Seder–while they are still slaves in Egypt.

But it’s unclear: Which side of the door is the blood supposed to be painted on? Does God really need a visual reminder to know not to enter a particular home? Commenting on Exodus 13:13, “And the blood shall be a sign for you,” Rashi explains: “It shall be a sign for you, and not for others. From this we may learn that they put the blood only inside their houses.”

This is a significant detail. The blood on the doorpost is not some kind of lock that keeps out the forces of destruction and ensures safety. Rather, as the 13th century French commentator Hizkuni ben Manoah observes, “It is a symbol that you have observed the divine instruction,” that you have been able to live with trust and faith even as the swirl of destruction and uncertainty rages outside. (Gratitude to my brother Aaron for reminding me of this gloss this week.)

We are living in the age of unsurance. And that is certainly something to mourn, because pooling risk through insurance and mitigating risk through wise policies and governance contribute so much to physical, psychological, and spiritual safety. But that doesn’t mean we are out of tools–indeed, we have an enormous array of them. They can be found in our Torah, in our spiritual practices, in our mitzvot–the opportunities to connect with and be supported by the Divine Presence and one another. We’ve been doing that for 3,000 years, and we can do it today.

When I was a kid, in order to become an Eagle Scout you needed to earn 21 merit badges. Of those, some were required and some were elective. I remember my electives included things like ice skating and music (which were, conveniently, things I did anyway outside of Scouting). The required merit badges were things like First Aid (no surprise), Citizenship in the Community, Swimming and Lifesaving.

At Scout camp one summer, somewhere in the study for these last two, I vividly remember fulfilling a requirement that involved jumping into the water with my clothes on. The task was to remove a pair of blue jeans while in the water, tie the legs together, blow air inside, and then tie the waist and wear it around the neck — that is, to create a makeshift life vest. Real-life MacGyver stuff. Of all the activities associated with these merit badges, I found it to be the hardest — and the most memorable.

Looking back, one of the things I most appreciate about that episode was that, like many other activities in Scouting, the lesson was this: You already have what you need, at least a lot of the time. It’s right here, if you can muster the imagination to sense it. Don’t have exactly the piece of rope you need? Take two smaller pieces and put them together with a square knot (if they’re the same thickness) or a sheet bend (if they’re different thicknesses). Down a tentpole? You can make a lean-to. Don’t have bread for French toast? You can make scrambled eggs. And, in the case of swimming with my jeans on: Don’t have a life preserver? Make your pants into one.

This doesn’t work in every situation, of course. There are times when we simply don’t have the necessities, emergencies of the highest order. But what Scouting taught me through these lessons at a young age was an orientation toward resilience, ingenuity, improvisation, faith and trust — that we have more than we might think at first, that there are more possibilities here than meet the eye, that at times of crisis we can access the means of our salvation more readily than we might assume at first blush.

“These are the names of the children of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each one coming with his household.” Commenting on this first verse of the Book of Exodus in his Degel Machane Ephraim, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov (1748-1800) offers a powerful teaching about this kind of orientation, which he links to God’s promise to Jacob a few chapters earlier: “I will go down with you to Egypt and I Myself will bring you up” (Gen. 46:4). In both cases, the Degel says, the divine Presence (Shekhinah) is the very means of ascent. “It is like one who wants to go down into a deep pit but is worried what will happen when he wants to come back up. So he takes a ladder with him into the pit. The Shekhinah is the ladder.” Like the jeans life preserver, the means of our salvation — on a spiritual level, at least — are more accessible than we might realize. (Thanks to my colleague Rabbi Sam Feinsmith, who translated and wrote about this teaching in our IJS text study series several years ago.) 

I hesitate to share this teaching in light of the devastation in Southern California this week. So many have lost so much, and, if offered without care, it could land in a way that sounds dismissive. So I want to be clear that my intention in offering this Torah is not at all to minimize the pain and suffering, or to simply preach self-reliance. That is not, I believe, what the Degel is saying, and it’s certainly not what I’m trying to say. 

Rather, I think this Torah might serve as an invitation to those who are suffering, and to all of us who are witnesses and who carry the burdens that are uniquely ours during these dark winter months: to find some quiet amidst the chaos and, in that quiet, sense if we can perceive the presence of a ladder up. The ladder may not reach all the way out, we might perceive just a rung or two — in our own minds and hearts, in the care of friends and loved ones, in the support of caregivers and strangers. But we can give ourselves permission to try to sense the ladder, and in doing so can be agents of our own liberation.

As we say so often, this is why we practice: for moments when life is hardest, when the spiritual struggle is most challenging. As the Degel and the Torah itself remind us, our people drinks from deep, inexhaustible, wells of spiritual strength. Those wells can be available to us — even when we’re treading water with our jeans on. May they provide nourishment and comfort to all those who need them today.