Even though I went to bed early on Tuesday, before the election outcome was clear, I didn’t get much sleep. Try as I might — sleep meditations, visualizations, every trick I know—I couldn’t get my mind to stop spinning: so much uncertainty, so much at stake for so many of us. I just couldn’t settle down, and I tossed and turned all night.

I know many of you felt that way too.

When I finally got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and made some coffee, I checked the news. While I grappled with the results, shaken, my first instinct was to study Torah. I started reading the weekly Torah portion. Sitting there reading Parashat Lekh-Lekha in the early morning darkness, I felt as if the Torah was enveloping me in an embrace, like a warm blanket.

Not because it was comforting to read these stories — they are profoundly difficult stories that touch on the many issues that challenge and divide us: migration, being strangers and welcoming strangers, gender and sexuality, treatment of women, bodily autonomy, war, conflicts over land, the taking of captives and their rescue — but because I found comfort and support in remembering that the Torah is a home, a sanctuary for me. And that’s when my tears started to flow, thinking about the sometimes brutally painful ways many of us have struggled and continue to struggle to feel secure, to feel at home. For many of us, the election results have only sharpened that profound feeling of insecurity.

In this time when many of us are deeply shaken, I want you to know that IJS is here to be a place where you can feel secure, and where you can find comfort and belonging.

Whatever happens in the days and years to come, we are here for you to be a sanctuary of calm, welcome, acceptance, and love that you can turn to when you need to breathe deeply and connect with others in our divisive and in many ways broken world.

On Monday night, during one of our special IJS meditation sits for election week, I led a practice that included a selection of a favorite teaching from Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl’s Meor Einayim. It’s a text in which the rebbe says that every Jew has a root-soul that corresponds to a letter in the Torah. I take that to mean that each of us (and here I would extend his teaching to all human beings, not just Jews) has a spiritual home in the universe. I think that means that our avodah, our spiritual work, is ultimately about building a world in which every human being can experience that sense of belonging.

This is our commitment to you, now and always: Like Abraham and Sarah, who welcomed everyone under their tent and made them feel at home, we will be here for you as a sanctuary and spiritual haven in a turbulent world. It’s what we have sought to do for 25 years, and it is what we are committed to doing this week, next week, and into a redemptive future.

Here’s a historical tidbit I love to recite: Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706. Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism better known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, was born eight years earlier, in 1698. Which is to say, Franklin and the Besht were contemporaries.

I often mention this factoid when I teach Hasidic texts because I think that, while they emerged in different political and cultural landscapes, at root, Hasidism responded to some similar questions as the Enlightenment and the nascent American democratic project. Most significantly, perhaps, was this: What could spiritual experience look like in a world in which power does not reside exclusively in a king or emperor, but is rather shared among all citizens? Put differently, how does our conception of and relationship to the divine, one another, and ourselves, change when we take seriously the idea that all people are created equal?

Hasidism didn’t have a monopoly on these questions, of course. All modern expressions of Judaism—and religion in general—have responded to them in one way or another. And, eventually, some strains of Hasidism took an anti-democratic turn, investing spiritual authority in a tzaddik or rebbe who was treated as something like a king.

But I think one of the reasons that so many American Jews have been drawn to Hasidic teachings over the last two generations is because we experience a profound resonance between this approach to Torah and our deeply held values of liberty and equality. When the Hasidic masters teach that every Jew is the bearer of a divine spark, and that each and every one of us can create a home for the divine Presence with this breath or this word or this action, we hear an evocation of Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal.” We experience a Torah that invites and demands of us a set of democratic impulses—so much so that, intuitively, we extend the sentiment of the Declaration to all people, not only men, and such Torah to all human beings, not only Jews.

It’s not a simple thing, to live life this way. Being aware of our thoughts and emotions, mindful and skillful in how we speak and act, present in every moment, requires practice–as does sacrificing and sharing power the way we have to in a democracy. We constantly have to tread a line–of exercising our agency and making choices, and, when that becomes infeasible or exhausting, trusting institutions and leaders we authorize to make choices for us. Sometimes it can feel easier to outsource our agency—to a rebbe or a Tzaddik, to someone we view as powerful or a savior. And sometimes our need for belonging can lead us down an emotional road in which it feels better, at least for a moment, to be self-righteously angry and resentful at “them,” those “others” who we allow ourselves to perceive as making our lives worse.

But that is not our way. That’s a form of aversion, a way of turning away from deep and difficult truths—most fundamentally, the truth that our seeming separation is an illusion, that we are indeed all interconnected, all created in the divine image, all mutually responsible for one another, as Jews, as Americans, as beings who are human.

Of course, the Torah begins with this teaching: Human beings are created in the Divine image. And, of course, it doesn’t take long for us to lose our way, as we read in this week’s Torah portion: “The earth became corrupt before the Holy One; the earth was filled with lawlessness” (Gen. 6:11). While the commentators offer various interpretations, a consistent theme is that we human beings managed to lose our capacity for self-awareness and self-regulation. We forgot that we are not the centers of our own universes, and instead took people and property simply because we wanted to. We lost our internal sense of honor, and thus we could not honor the inherent dignity of God’s creations. In short, human beings became mindless.

What to do? The answer, after unleashing the forces of chaos upon the world, was to start over with the most basic awareness: Don’t shed blood. Stop killing each other. And then: learn to trust. “I now establish my brit, my covenant with you,” God tells Noah (Gen. 9:9). Rashi observes, “God said this because Noah feared to fulfill the duty of propagating the species until the Holy Blessed One promised to not destroy the world again.” How could Noah bring children into the world again? He had to learn to trust on the other side of intense, unprecedented trauma.

There are lessons here that apply to individuals as much as nations: What does it take to trust after destruction and devastation? What does it take to live mindfully, lovingly, as a home for the Divine presence, when the storm feels like it’s approaching, when the earth beneath our feet feels like it’s turning to mud on the way to being covered in water altogether? These are some dark questions–terrifying questions we may not want to ask. And yet the story of Noah demands that we confront them.

A classic Hasidic teaching on Noah finds meaning in the fact that the word for ark in Hebrew, teivah, also means word. Thus when Noah’s family and the animals enter the ark, they enter into language in its most reduced and elemental form. As the earth unravels, so too does language. And, as the earth is renewed, language too is renewed. But during the storm, I imagine there may have been long periods of silence, or wordless niggunim, inside the ark.

In a letter to John Adams in December 1818, following the death of Abigail, Adams’s wife and partner (Adams’s word) of 50 years, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines.” Around the same time, Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav taught that “Silence is a hedge for wisdom… Like Shabbat, it is above speech, the root of speech, and the remedy for speech” (Likkutei Halachot Shabbat 7:43:6).

As we head into these final days of the election and enter what is likely to be a difficult post-election season, I find that my practice is more important than ever–and I imagine that may be true for you. Our language feels like it’s being tested to its limits, and nourishing silence or wordless song feels like a refuge. And perhaps that’s precisely what we need to heal and renew ourselves, as individuals and as a society–fewer and better words, deeper and richer shared silences, longer and more beautiful shared songs. May it be so; may we make it so.

Years ago, when he was 7 years old, my son Micah couldn’t sleep. (He’s now 19.) After a fitful hour of tossing and turning, he finally came downstairs and lay down on the sofa. And of course he was asleep within seconds. Half an hour later I picked him up to carry him back upstairs to his bed. At age 7, Micah was reaching the point where I could no longer comfortably carry him. But, perhaps sensing precisely that this was likely one of my last opportunities to carry the sleeping child who for the last seven years has been my youngest (his younger brother was about to be born), I made an extra effort to carry him instead of asking him to walk up on his own. We made it to the top of the stairs, and I put him in his bed.

There is something about sleeping children: we look at them and see innocence, we pick them up and feel protective and intimate. I remember moments when my children were babies and toddlers, holding them in a rocking chair, willing myself to remember the feeling of the moment, sensing just how ephemeral it was. To hold a child, to carry a sleeping toddler to bed, is one of the great tender moments of life, overflowing with a feeling of generosity. We sense the holy in such moments.

I find myself thinking about children, and about carrying, on this Yom Kippur.

Being Carried on Yom Kippur

When we think of children and holidays, we usually think of Passover. Of course, Passover is a child-centered holiday, with its games and questions, its special foods and many meals. The youngest child asks the Four Questions; the cleverest child negotiates the best deal for returning the afikomen. Many a Jewish parent has carried a sleeping child from the couch to the bedroom at the end of the seder.

Not so Yom Kippur. Unlike Passover, Yom Kippur is a quintessentially non-child-centered holiday. Parents of young children are challenged to figure out what to do with their kids on Yom Kippur, because Yom Kippur is made for adults: there is no meal, there are no stories, no games, no question-and-answer. Even when the grownups aren’t in shul, fasting makes them low-energy and not particularly available to children. Likewise the substance of Yom Kippur is for grownups. The concept of teshuva can be a hard one for children to connect with. To think about teshuva requires a long view, an ability to be self-reflective, to take in the scope of one’s actions in the past year, and to judge oneself. While children can grasp the idea of being sorry and granting forgiveness, the fullness of the idea of teshuva isn’t something to expect of a 7-year old.

Yet on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our metaphors are frequently parental: k’rachem av al banim, ken terachem aleinu: As a parent has mercy on their children, so may You have mercy on us. Or the many times we say avinu malkeinu, our parent, our sovereign. Or consider Rabbi Akiva’s famous words at the end of the Mishnah in Yoma: “Who purifies you? Your parent in heaven!” This is language unique to the High Holidays. At Pesach we refer to the Divine as God, and ourselves as God’s servants. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, alongside the image of God as sovereign and ruler, the liturgy evokes a different relationship, that of parent and child.

The language of carrying is also central on these days. In our selichot prayers we repeatedly refer to God the way God describes Godself: nosei avon, the one who carries sin. We draw this language from two accounts in the Torah: the Holy One’s forgiveness after the sin of the Golden Calf, and the Divine’s second act of forgiveness after the sin of the spies. In both instances, God refers to Godself as the one who carries sin.

The language of carrying is also evoked in the verse from Micah that we read in our Haftarah Yom Kippur afternoon (appended to the story of Jonah), and in the central sacrificial act of Yom Kippur, the confession of Israel’s sins on the head of the se’ir l’azazel, the scapegoat: “The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place.”

A Lesson From Cain

The midrash reminds us of the earliest episode when this language is used. It comes in the story of Cain. Just after Cain has killed his brother Abel, God famously asks him, “Where is Abel your brother?” Cain responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God tells Cain that his brother’s blood is crying out from the earth, and condemns Cain to be a wander, na v’nad, in the midst of the earth.

But, says the midrash, Cain prays.

Rabbi Eliezer said: See how great is the power of prayer. If it cannot transform everything, it at least transforms half. Cain stood over Abel his brother and killed him. The decree went out against him: “Na v’nad, a wanderer you will be in the earth.” Immediately Cain stood and confessed before the Holy Blessed One, saying, “My sin is too great to carry.” He said, Master of the Universe, you carry the entire world, but my sin you will not carry? Did you not write, ‘[I] bear sin and pass over wrongdoing?’ Forgive my sin, for it is great!” Immediately Cain found mercy before the Holy Blessed One, who took away the Na part of the decree, for it is written, “And he lived in the land of Nod.” From here you learn how great is prayer before the Holy Blessed One. (Deuteronomy Rabbah 8:1)

Cain’s plaintive words in this midrash are striking. Helpless, overcome, he cries out to God: My sin is too great to bear. The burden is too heavy. I can’t carry it. And then he reminds God that the Holy One is the ultimate carrier: the one who is sovel, who bears the burdens of the world; the one who is nosei avon, who carries sin away. Cain does not ask God to carry him: just the opposite, Cain will have to carry himself. But God agrees to carry his sin, to lessen the severity of the decree. Cain will not have to carry the burden of both his own life and the sin he has committed. God grants forgiveness, God carries away Cain’s sin, and his burden is eased.

This is an adult moment. Cain’s forgiveness does not mean he recovers his childlike innocence. The very next verse of the story tells us as much: “And Cain knew his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Hanoch.” Immediately after his forgiveness, Cain finds a place to live, the land of Nod, and engages in the most basic definition of biological maturity, reproduction. He then has a son whose name signifies education. Cain does not become a child again. He becomes an adult, doing adult things, taking adult responsibilities. He finds a place to live. He has a child. He teaches his child. In just a few verses, Cain transforms from the teenager who kills his brother and shirks responsibility into a responsible adult who has children and educates them.

Yet the touchstone for this assumption of adulthood is an ironic twist. In order to become a fully responsible adult, Cain first has to surrender himself to God. He has to let go of the power he thinks he has–the power he has just proven, the power to kill–and acknowledge that in the presence of God, in the presence of ultimate consciousness, he is powerless. In surrendering his power, Cain in effect becomes a small child again: the small child who is powerless, who is utterly dependent. The small child who cannot fight off sleep. The small child who needs us to carry him. This powerless small child is precisely the being that evokes our sympathy, our rachmanus, our tender love.

Cain is not a child, and his moment of returning to a child’s state is not permanent, but temporary. Through this moment of throwing himself on God’s mercy, of acknowledging his powerlessness, Cain is transformed. He is forgiven. He is redeemed. He grows up. By allowing God to carry his sin, and by begging God to carry it, Cain becomes capable of carrying himself.

Yom Kippur: Allowing Ourselves to Be Carried

There’s a famous Christian poem about a person having a dream of walking on the beach, looking back on the footprints of the journey. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, those of God and the person walking. Sometimes there was only one. As the poem famously puts it, “During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

I think sometimes we have too easily resisted this kind of language in Judaism. We’ve been more  fond of intellectual arguments and text-heavy formulations of symbolism and signification. We often tend to over-intellectualize the experience of the High Holidays. In doing so, we can miss the core experience, the basic move that this time is about. It is about allowing ourselves to be carried.

Yom Kippur is about enabling God to forgive us of our sins, those accretions that build up in our adult lives of power and separate us from our Divine essence. The halakhah defines an adult as  a bar da’at, one who has the capacity to know. The old maxim goes that knowledge is power, but it is not simply an aphorism. To know is to be powerful. That’s what it means to be an adult, to have agency and to exercise it. But as the story of Cain poignantly illustrates, our knowledge, our power, the very thing that makes us tzelem elohim, images of the Divine, can be used to dominate, to control, even to kill. That is the inherent dilemma of power. The corruptions that knowledge and power engender, those are our sins.

The great possibility of teshuva on Yom Kippur is to acknowledge those corruptions, and then to allow the Creator to carry them away. It is about returning, for a moment, to being a child–not with a child’s innocence, but with a child’s capacity for surrendering. It is about giving up our illusions of certainty, liberating ourselves from the false trappings of our knowledge and power, and allowing ourselves to be ultimately powerless–on this day, this Shabbat shabbaton.

A few weeks after that night he couldn’t sleep, I took Micah and Jonah to their first night baseball game. Jonah caught a foul ball. Our beloved team (go Tigers!) held off the White Sox. We stayed until the end. When we got home after 11 p.m., Micah threw himself on the couch and began to fall asleep. This time I looked at him and knew that I couldn’t carry him. He was too big now, and I was no weightlifter. I had to rouse him and help him walk up the stairs on his own two feet.

As we experience this Yom Kippur, I pray that we can all find the emotional and spiritual place where we can let ourselves be carried. Where we can stop being adults so fearful of losing power, and remember what it is to be a child who trusts in their parents to carry them.

My father, may he rest in peace, used to say that there were two vistas, two views on the road, which made him feel like he was coming home. One was driving south on US-23 towards Ann Arbor, where he lived most of his adult life, as the road slopes down towards the Huron River yielding a view of downtown and the University of Michigan. The other was heading east on Highway 1 in Israel, coming up the hill towards Jerusalem.

Though my parents and my older brothers lived for a year in Israel before I was born, and though my Dad visited many other times, that year was the only time he spent extended time living in the country. Yet there was something about driving up that hill that made him feel like he was coming home.

My guess is you likely have some views that evoke similar feelings in you: a landscape on a highway, a smell as you cross a threshold. If my social media feed is any indicator, my Dad was not alone in feeling like arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, much less making that ascent up Highway 1, aroused deep feelings of homecoming–despite the fact that he didn’t actually live there.

Earlier this week, the Israeli religious singer Ishay Ribo played a concert at Madison Square Garden. Tens of thousands attended, with many expressing a feeling of solidarity and strength in being together in the midst of this profoundly difficult year. On the day after the concert, a friend of mine, who is a rabbi living in Israel, shared on Facebook that, as much as he was glad that people went to the concert, if they really cared about Israel they should be going not to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, but making aliyah: “Bring Them Home isn’t just a slogan for the hostages,” he wrote. A lot of Israelis commented on his post, saying that they were grateful he had said what they were thinking. A few pointed out that not everyone has the means to be able to make the move.

To me, what the post most illuminated was the very deep animating tension of the idea of home in Jewish life. “Ki tavo el ha’aretz,” “When you come into the Land,” are the opening words of the Torah portion of Ki Tavo (Deut. 26:1-29:8). The land, of course, is Canaan–the land of Israel. It’s home. And yet, even just those words–“When you come into the land,” and the fact that the name of the land changes from Canaan to Israel, reflect tensions built into the very narrative of Jewish history we tell ourselves: Abraham came from a different land into this one; this people came out of Egypt into this land. It is as though the Torah wants us to be simultaneously at home and not fully at home. Perhaps that’s why it constantly reminds us to be mindful of our experience as strangers in a foreign land.

One of the great and necessary innovations of the ancient Rabbis, which was deepened and amplified by the Hasidic masters, was articulating a way of simultaneously longing for our ancestral homeland and being spiritually at home wherever we are. Ashrei yoshvei veitecha, Happy are those who dwell in Your house (Ps. 145:1), which we say three times a day in the traditional liturgy, can refer both to the beit hamikdash, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, and, simultaneously, to the spot where you are right now as you read this. It is, I believe, not either/or but both/and.

This tension has been the incredible–and incredibly difficult–challenge and invitation of Jewish life and spiritual practice for virtually our entire existence as a people: to sense the Divine presence and long for it; to accept the moment as it is while also seeking to mend and improve it; to be at home and not-at-home, all at the same time. It is the challenge and invitation embodied in the sukkah, the ultimate destination of our spiritual journey of this season. May our practices help us to enter and live within it with strength, wisdom, and compassion.

There’s a neighborhood grocery store two blocks from my house. It’s called Village Marketplace and, to many of us who reside in Skokie, it’s one of the best things about living here. It’s not a big chain, it’s independently owned, and best of all, I can walk there and back in 5 minutes when we need a dozen eggs.

Occasionally there are folks standing outside Village Market (locals drop the “place” in the name; in our family we refer to it as VMart in an homage to the great Detroit Tigers switch-hitting DH from the early 2010s, Victor Martinez): young women selling Girl Scout cookies or people selling “StreetWise,” the magazine written and produced by homeless people around Chicago.

But in recent years the folks standing outside have more often been migrant families holding cardboard signs asking for donations, a local reminder of a national and global challenge. We can see these migrants, refugees, in what feels like virtually every shopping center parking lot, at major street intersections, outside sporting events.

Like most people, when I’m in my car I drive right past them. But when they’re standing in front of me as I pass the entrance to the grocery store, that’s harder to ignore. Which doesn’t mean I don’t ignore them–it just means that doing so weighs more heavily on my conscience. While I often give them money, just as frequently I don’t have cash, and their cardboard sign doesn’t have a QR code to Venmo them. So I go into the store and exit it with a little aversion of my gaze, my modest attempt to diminish the pain of both internalizing their situation and my own moral self-judgment. (If my Spanish were better, I might ask them what they need from inside and buy it for them.)

Part of the mental story I tell myself during such moments is precisely that these people in front of me are manifestations of much larger systemic problems: our immigration and asylum systems, failed governments in far away places, foreign policy choices, climate change. My inaction toward them thus becomes justifiable: What good does helping one person do in the face of challenges that are many orders of magnitude larger than me or them? It’s like trying to boil the ocean–so I can just go on with my day. Perhaps this resonates with you, too.

There’s an article that’s been circulating on my social media feed this week by a writer named Rachel Cohen. She explores her own attitudes towards volunteering, and thoughtfully places them in the context of larger social trends and ideas of the last 25 years–Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Occupy Wall Street, climate activism. What she concludes is that many of us have been told, and now tell ourselves, that we should focus on systemic solutions, and that emphasizing individual actions is actually a distraction from doing so, i.e. we’re not going to recycle our way out of climate change. Yet Cohen thoughtfully interrogates this set of assumptions, and ultimately suggests that our individual actions–she starts donating blood regularly–are important not only for the actions themselves, but for the well-being and sense of connection they foster within and between us.

Among the commandments that are restated or elaborated in Parashat Re’eh are the laws of the sabbatical year. The Torah here addresses us as both individuals and as a collective, envisioning a society that sees and cares for those on the margins. “If there is a needy person among you, one of your kindred in any of your settlements in the land that YHVH your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kindred. Rather, you must open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the need” (Deut. 15:7-8). Rashi, quoting the midrash, observes: “There are people who painfully deliberate whether they should give or not, therefore Scripture states, ‘you shall not harden your heart’; and there are people who stretch their hand forth but then close it, therefore it is written, ‘you shall not close your hand.'”

I certainly have been that person the Torah is talking about. Perhaps, like me, you’ve had a momentary deliberation about whether to give to the person in need standing in front of you. Perhaps, like me, you can recognize yourself in those brief moments of hesitation Rashi describes. So, first and foremost, I would just say: Let’s listen to the Torah, which plainly understands how our minds and motivations work, and seeks to help us respond to our own inclinations through mindful attention.

Beyond that, I would add that I think it’s helpful to think of the systemic as related to–not necessarily defined by, but related to–a sum of individual actions. “Don’t harden your heart” is clearly connected to the “listening heart” King Solomon asks for at the beginning of his reign, the same listening heart I frequently suggest is what we seek to cultivate as members of democratic societies. The king’s actions are rooted in his heart, and in a democracy all of us are kings–we all hold responsibility for the state of society, whether through our votes or through our actions in front of the neighborhood grocery store.

Like many of you reading this, I expect, the most powerful moment of this week’s Democratic National Convention for me was the speech of Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the 109 remaining hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Jon, and especially Rachel, have tragically become the most recognizable spokespeople for the hostage families. Seeing the tears in their eyes and the warmth of the reception for them from the 50,000 people at the United Center in Chicago, just a few miles from my home, was a profoundly moving moment.

“This is a political convention,” Jon said, “but needing our only son and the cherished hostages home is not a political issue. It is a humanitarian issue.” I have been thinking about that line a lot. Because while the cause of the hostages is certainly a humanitarian issue, I find that the question of whether or not it’s a political issue highlights a different question: What do we mean when we call something “political”?

I think what Jon meant by “political” here is that this isn’t an issue that can or should be politicized, i.e. used as a tool to score points or advantages, to accrue political capital, for a party or an individual. The hostages are civilians, and they should never have been taken in the first place–so they should be released immediately, on humanitarian grounds.

Yet the very fact that Jon and Rachel spoke at the convention, like Ronen and Orna Neutra, the parents of Omer, who spoke at the Republican National Convention earlier this summer, reflects that there is a political dimension to the issue–in a different sense of the word. This sense is more along the lines of another dictionary definition: “Relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.”

In that sense, securing the release of the hostages is certainly a political issue: absent a miraculous unilateral decision by their Hamas captors or a similarly  miraculous rescue operation by the IDF, the way the hostages will come home is through governmental decision-making and negotiation; i.e. political action. That is why both these families spoke at these conventions; it is why so many in Israel have been organizing to apply political pressure on the government for months.

This week on my podcast, Soulful Jewish Living, we began a five-part series exploring some of the spiritual “habits of the heart” about which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote 200 years ago, and that I think Oprah Winfrey had in mind when she talked about the “heart work of democracy” during her speech at the DNC. The five we’re looking at come by way of Parker Palmer’s book, The Heart of Democracy. They include: Remembering that we’re all in this together; valuing and embracing otherness; holding tension in life-giving ways; finding our personal voice and agency; and nurturing a capacity to create community. I hope you’ll listen and let me know what you think.

For this week, however, I feel a need to highlight the ways in which so many of these habits find expression in the Torah–and in Parashat Ekev (Deut. 7:12–11:25), that we read this week. Ekev is when Moses seems to hit his rhetorical stride in his valedictory address to the people before they enter the land and begin their exercise in self-government. It is full of grand, sweeping evocations to love God and do God’s ways. But it is also all about the work of the heart, perhaps no more centrally than in this series of verses:

Cut away, therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more. For YHVH your God is God supreme and Sovereign supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deut. 10:16-19)

One of the inside jokes my wife Natalie and I have shared over 23 years of marriage is what we lovingly call the “Really, you needed research to tell you that?” phenomenon. You might be familiar with it yourself. In our experience, it most regularly occurs reading articles in The New York Times in which scientific research demonstrates something that it seems like someone with common sense could have figured out on their own. “Having friends contributes to lower levels of loneliness” “More sleep helps you feel more rested.” “People who have more birthdays live longer.” That kind of thing.

That’s not to knock the scientists who do this work (okay, the last one was genuinely tongue in cheek). Studies into phenomena we intuitively know to be true are, in my experience, very valuable. They usually uncover dimensions we didn’t previously understand. They give us ways to quantify and talk about aspects of our lives that have previously been a little mushy. And they often offer ways in which science and religion can speak to one another.

One truly excellent contribution to this genre is Berkeley social psychologist Dacher Keltner’s recent work on awe and wonder. Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” He and his team show that awe is a very deep emotion that serves a number of psychological, physiological, and social functions. I learned a tremendous amount reading his book.

It turns out that awe, like meditation, stimulates the vagus nerve, which helps to reduce inflammation in the body and in the processes that regulate our emotions. And so experiencing even a few minutes of awe regularly can help us be more humble and altruistic, feel more connected to community and the natural world, and see the world as less polarized. That, in turn, can help us alleviate multiple crises we’re experiencing: in mental and physical health, the epidemic of loneliness (about which the U.S. Surgeon General has issued a warning), political polarization, even climate change.

If you’re the kind of person who’s reading a Shabbat reflection from a rabbi who leads the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, you may well be hearing that little voice in your head I described at the top: Really, I needed a study to tell me that awe is a good thing? I know that from my own experience. True. And I’ll still highly encourage you to read the book and watch Keltner’s Ted talk, because you’ll probably learn things you didn’t know (I certainly did), including ways to experience awe you might not have thought of. And of course, it may be particularly useful for having a conversation with people in your life who don’t intuitively buy the argument.

Tuesday was the Ninth of Av, the lowest point on the Jewish calendar. Beginning this Shabbat and continuing for the next seven weeks, the haftarah, or portion of the Prophets we read liturgically, is drawn from the Book of Isaiah. Collectively these seven haftarot are known as the shiva d’nechemta, the seven haftarot of consolation.

This week’s haftarah is marked by an abundance of nature imagery: deserts, mountains, hills and valleys. “Who measured the waters with a hand’s hollow, and gauged the skies with a span, and meted earth’s dust with a measure, and weighed the mountains with a scale, and the hills with a balance?” (40:12-13). All of this, it would seem, is in service of reawakening within us a sensation of awe, helping us sense that we are part of something much larger than ourselves.

The haftarah concludes with the memorable verse, “Lift high your eyes and see: Who (in Hebrew: Mi) created these (eleh)? The One who sends out their host by count, who calls them each by name. Given such great might and vast power, not a single one fails to appear” (40:26). The Hasidic master Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl comments that the act “lifting up our eyes” is a spiritual act, whereby we connect the mi (who) with the eleh (these), thus producing the letters that spell out elohim, the Creator.

The lesson would seem to be that a trailhead on the path of healing is re-grounding in awe. Our brokenness can lead us to places of constriction and isolation. But contemplating the vastness and majesty of creation–of which we are an amazing and yet infinitesimally small part–helps awaken with our bodies, hearts, and minds the sources of our own renewal.

In this, Isaiah would seem to be a precursor to Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” which memorably concludes,

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I was blessed to spend this week at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, during its 150th anniversary season. When I’ve had to explain what Chautauqua is to friends and loved ones, I’ve described it as some combination of Brigadoon, Mackinac Island, and adult summer camp for people who listen to National Public Radio. There are lectures and classes and cultural events galore, families that have been coming for generations, and an aspirationally utopian spirit about the place.

With thanks to IJS board member Bill Klingensmith (a fourth-generation Chautauquan), I was invited to give a talk as part of the summer-long interfaith lecture series, which is held at 2 pm every afternoon in the Hall of Philosophy, an outdoor amphitheater with doric columns (that also gives you some idea of the flavor–picture is of me speaking there). I took the opportunity to talk about some new work we’re developing at IJS around responding mindfully to antisemitism, particularly through an approach grounded in the intergenerational nature of Jewish trauma. I encourage you to watch the lecture and the Q&A and let us know what you think. (There’s a paywall, but I can tell you the $2.99 subscription is more than worth it.)

A particularly special element of this visit was that I was housed in a small B&B with the other Religion Department speakers for the week. And thus, by design, every day I had breakfast and spent time with an amazing group: Rev. Michael Curry, the head of the Episcopal Church (you may remember his famous sermon at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry); Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician who draws on her Hindu background to write powerfully about death, dying, and living; Rev. Amy Butler, a pioneering Baptist minister who is leading a revolution in how Christians think about the work of the church. And we spent time with friends of theirs, with the staff at Chautauqua, and with regular folks who would just walk up, introduce themselves, and ask questions–all of which expanded the circle of conversation.

I found these conversations and these new friendships to be truly nourishing, and I think the same was true for the rest of the group. There was a lot of laughter as we identified the many realities and challenges we share across lines of faith and religion. And there was plenty of learning–about those realities and challenges, about the particular contours of each of our work. I had the advantage of speaking midweek, so I had more time to refine my talk–and those conversations caused me to make some adjustments (which were, hopefully, improvements).

Parashat Devarim (Deut. 1:1-3:22) is always read immediately before the Ninth of Av, our day of deepest sadness and shattering. On that day, we read the Book of Lamentations, Eicha in Hebrew, the opening line of which is, “Eicha – Alas, lonely sits the city once great with people!” In a linguistic preview, Moses utters similar words at the beginning of Deuteronomy: “Eicha – How can I bear alone the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering” (Deut. 1:12).

While our attention is drawn to the opening word of both verses–Eicha: “alas,” or “how”–the third word of both verses is also shared: Badad (alone) and l’vadi (by myself). I would suggest that parallelism invites us to some reflection. For me, it immediately evokes God’s words upon creating Adam: “It is not good for Adam to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). While solitude, the capacity to be happy in our own company, is essential for our well-being, it is ultimately a precondition for being in relationship with others–as intimate partners, yes, but also as friends, neighbors, and fellow images of the Divine in creation.

What we allow ourselves to experience on Tisha b’Av, then, is a profound loneliness, disconnection, isolation. This is a gift of the Jewish calendar, to concentrate that feeling in one day. We do need to feel it, to experience it. But then we emerge from it as we begin a seven-week journey of repair and renewal, en route to Rosh Hashanah–not alone, but together with friends and community.

One of the stories we justifiably tell ourselves about Jewish suffering is that we are alone. “None came to help her,” cries the prophet (Lamentations 1:7). Yet by making that the primary or only narrative we tell ourselves, we risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: no one has ever been our friend and no one ever will, so we have to go it alone. And I would suggest that, ultimately, that is not a healthy narrative to tell ourselves and it is not a healthy way to live. Moses himself shows us as much. Immediately after he wonders how he could possibly lead the people on his own, he and God agree on a plan to recruit more leaders (Deut. 1:13-14). He is no longer on his own; he has partners to share the burden. He is not, in fact, alone.

On reflection, I have found that my time at Chautauqua, and especially my many conversations with friends new and old, have helped me to recalibrate my settings in this zone between solitude and loneliness. It seems to me that’s what Jewish history and Jewish life have long demanded of us. And while I believe we need to remain clear-eyed about the real threats to Jews and Jewish life today–they are very real, and they are very dangerous–I also hope we can nurture our capacity to trust good people from beyond our community, to imagine a shared future together, to sense that we all can be at home. To me, that is a required stop on the road to redemption.