I recently heard a podcast interview with Benjamin Wittes, the editor of a blog called Lawfare that I read every now and then. Wittes was talking about the role of context in determining the meaning of speech acts according to the law. He cited the following example: If an insurance salesman says to me, “You have a beautiful house, it would be a shame if something happened to it,” we can understand that as a perfectly normal thing to say. But if a mob boss says the same thing to me, we would understand that as a threat. That is to say, words often don’t have absolute meaning. Rather, we have to understand the context in which they are uttered in order to discern the meaning they convey.

I’ve been thinking about this issue of words and context a lot lately, in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war. There has been, of course, a great deal of public discussion of the meaning and context of the words, “From the river to the sea.” Likewise, we encounter questions about the context in which references to Amalek are invoked, or  the meaning of words like “humanitarian pause” or “ceasefire.” At the rally on the National Mall that I attended on Tuesday, I found myself thinking about how messages that are directed internally to the Jewish community are understood by people in other communities—or how words directed internally within other communities are heard and experienced by our own, given our particular stories and experience. Words like “Never Again” can evoke different emotional responses depending on our own history, who is saying them, where and when.

There is perhaps nothing Jewish tradition does better than consider the possible meanings of words. Torah, in its broadest meaning, is understood not only as the Five Books of Moses, but the thousands of years of interpretation of those books—and of the further interpretation and discussion of those interpretations. For Jews, the work of making and interpreting and understanding language is the holiest thing there is. It is what we mean—or, perhaps more accurately, one of the things I think we mean—when we say, as the Mishnah does, “The study of Torah is equivalent to all the other mitzvot put together.”

Parashat Toldot contains one of the murkiest, most mysterious passages in the Torah: Jacob’s deception of his elderly, blind father, Isaac, in order to steal his brother Esau’s blessing. One of the ways we can understand this story is as a reflection on the complexities of language and interpretation. We can read the story as the struggle of Isaac to understand clearly what is happening—and of Jacob to discern how to behave. As readers, we sense Isaac’s profound challenge: He seems to know something is off in this situation, as reflected in his repeated attempts to verify the identity of Jacob (who he thinks, and wants to believe, is Esau). We can sense Jacob’s struggle to carry out the task. And we can even sense the struggle we, as readers and interpreters, have in discerning the meaning of the story—this last perhaps most clearly when Isaac asks, “Who are you, my son,” and Jacob replies, “I am Esau, your firstborn.” Rashi, unable to live with the idea that Jacob lied so directly, strains credulity by parsing the verse, “I am, [and] Esau is your firstborn.” In the context of the story, such an interpretation is incredible. In the context of Rashi’s larger project, and his theological and ideological commitments, it’s understandable. Context is key.

One of the values I find in mindfulness practice is that it invites, even demands of me to pause and consider the context of words—both words I speak or write and words I hear or read. As I shared recently, I’ve been referring a lot lately to the Buddha’s five principles of right speech (and right listening): Are these words true? Are they timely? Are they gentle? Are they beneficial? Are they spoken with goodwill? Wartime is, almost by definition, one in which our capacity to create space between stimulus and response is reduced. Our world of social media, which is designed to feed and feed on our reactive impulses, intensifies that reality even more.

All of which suggests to me that we need to double down on our practice, to insist on more space and time in evaluating the words we see and hear, and the contexts in which we see and hear them, and crafting the words we put out into the world and the contexts in which we do so (and, it should go without saying, to reduce our time on social media).

So much depends on our words. A few words uttered by Jacob in this week’s Torah portion have an enormous effect on his own life and that of his descendants—right down to today. May our practice help us communicate wisely and listen with clarity and resilience.

Twenty-five years ago, right out of college, I lived in Jerusalem for a year. While I grew up with a very strong Jewish identity, I didn’t receive the kind of Jewish education that would allow me to study Talmud in the original Hebrew/Aramaic or to walk into a beit midrash and know what all the books on the shelf were, much less how to open them up and study from them. In college I met people who did have that kind of education, so I decided to spend my first year after graduation acquiring it. That took me to Jerusalem.

My mom had a friend from Ann Arbor whose son was my age–he went to the high school across town, so we didn’t know each other–and who was also spending the year in Jerusalem. His name was Chris, and his family was of Palestinian Arab ancestry. Chris had studied to be a journalist and had an internship that year at the Jerusalem Times, an English-language Arab newspaper. Our mothers suggested we meet. We did, and we became friends.

Chris spent a couple afternoons a week tutoring students at Bethlehem University in English. He invited me to join him and I was excited to go. These were the heady days between the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, the days of od yavo shalom aleinu. Transportation wasn’t difficult, though it did require bringing my passport along for a ride on a bus line serving the Arab community that left from just outside Damascus Gate. An Israeli soldier boarded the bus to check everyone’s papers on the return trip. I made the journey several times.

These were still the nascent days of email and well before social media, so I confess that I’ve fallen out of touch with the people I met then, including Chris. But a few memories stand out a quarter-century later, memories I find stirring in me these days.

The first is that, while I felt safe enough to go, I did not feel safe enough to identify as a Jew. The rest of the time I lived in Jerusalem I walked around wearing a kippah and flowing tzitzit. But as I approached Damascus gate, I took off the kippah and tucked the tzitzit into my pants. As soon as I got off the bus on Derekh Hevron, on the edge of the Jewish neighborhoods of south Jerusalem, the kippah went back on and the tzitzit came back out.

Related to this, I remember an encounter with a young woman at the university. At one point she asked me, “Are you Arab?” I told her I wasn’t, but I didn’t tell her I was Jewish, either. “Amazing. You look like an Arab.”

I remember disembarking from the bus and walking down the hill toward my apartment, the sun beginning to set over Jerusalem. And I remember feeling, even in those more hopeful days, this indescribably melancholy feeling: My bus ride had been less than ten miles; genetically, it seemed, I could pass for an Arab (and of course she could pass for a Jew); and yet these two societies felt worlds apart.

The story of Abraham prompts me to reflect on some elements of my own story here: the passing (in the form of Abraham trying to pass off Sarah as his sister); the so-close-yet-so-far nature of the relationship between Ishmael and Isaac and their descendants; questions of speech and silence, of honesty and something less than it; questions of fear and courage.

While Parashat Vayera contains the Greatest Hits of the story of Abraham–welcoming the angels, standing up for the people of Sodom, the Akedah–there’s a little story nestled within it that often gets overlooked. It comes just after Hagar and Ishmael are rescued in the wilderness and before the Binding of Isaac. It’s the story of Avimelech and Abraham resolving a land dispute. Set against the backdrop of their previous history, which involved deception and the threat of sexual violence, it’s all the more remarkable: Abraham and Avimelech are able establish a kind of working trust of each other. “The two of them made a covenant,” the Torah says (Gen. 21:27) and “Abraham resided in the land of the Philistines for many days” (v. 34).

Our work at IJS is not that of policy, so it seems far out of my lane to comment on military or political strategy. And in the fog of war and the age of quick takes and misinformation, I find myself doubling down on the importance of listening, discernment, and what I’ve come to call the silence of presence. Yet one clear thing I’ve found arising for me over the last few weeks is an increasingly urgent reminder of the foundational nature of mindfulness practice for peacemaking–both within ourselves and between each other.

Peace is made possible by, among other things, our capacity to be aware of, honest about, and yet not necessarily governed by our emotions. This is the bedrock of resilient listening. When we can practice mindful awareness grounded in compassion; when we can practice setting wise boundaries while grounding ourselves in love and interconnection; when we can practice tikkun hanefesh, repair of our own hearts and spirits, then and only then can we possibly begin to create the conditions for honesty, coexistence, and peace–the conditions for genuine tikkun haolam. 
 

When I was little, I remember I would usually wake up and come out to the kitchen to find my mother sitting there with her coffee, reading a book or the newspaper. She would often have a notebook beside her, and whatever she was reading was marked up with sticky notes. In later years, the books and sticky notes weren’t there as much, and I would find her with just the coffee. I asked her about it once, and she told me that she loved the quiet time in the morning, before everyone else was up. It was her time to be alone, to listen, to think.

Like mother, like son: My best writing time (the time I’m writing this, in fact) is invariably early in the morning before anyone else in the house is around (and with coffee, of course). Most mornings I come downstairs, feed the dog and the cat, put in my earbuds and do a meditation sit. It’s my time to be quiet, to be alone, to listen, to think, before the rest of my household, the rest of the world, wakes up.

I’ve grown to cherish this time, especially these days, because of the quiet, the silence. Perhaps that’s because, like many others, I’ve been preoccupied with questions of silence and speech of late: Who is speaking up, and who is being silent? The phrase, “their silence is deafening” is all over the place. I see accusations of sinful speech or silence a lot right now: This university president or that corporate executive was silent–they didn’t say anything, or they said something but were silent about something else, and that makes them a moral failure. This is the stage we’ve reached in the current crisis.

Particularly in the age of social media, I think a lot of us feel like we have to speak. Since I was a child, I’ve been taught Elie Wiesel’s words about silence always aiding the oppressor, and so I feel a moral duty to speak. I feel Professor Wiesel’s quiet, intense moral gaze looking over me and asking, in his powerful whisper of a voice, “Josh, are you remaining silent?”

Yet Elie Wiesel was also a Hasid, and he knew the value of silence. Sama d’ukla mashtuka, silence is a balm for everything, says the Talmud (Megillah 18a). I imagine, if I were having a conversation with him, that he would have reminded me that there are multiple kinds of silence: Silence of absence, yes, but also silence of presence. There is a silence of fear, and there is a silence of courage. There is a silence that communicates disconnection, and there are silences that embody deep relatedness. And there is the silence of gestation, of creation, of possibility: The silence of the early morning, the silence that comes before the Creator says, “Let there be light.”

One of the things that makes the story of Abraham so intriguing is the seeming inconsistency between when Abraham speaks and when he is silent. Most famously we have his speech in protest at God’s planned destruction of Sodom (“Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” Gen. 18:25) and his silence when commanded to sacrifice his son (22:2-3). These both come in next week’s Torah portion. But we find intriguing moments of speech and silence this week, too: his plea on behalf of Ishmael (“O, that Ishmael might live by your favor!” in 17:18) versus his silence at God’s very first command, to leave everything he knows behind and go to an unknown land–and versus his deceitful speech, which is a kind of absence-through-speech, with Pharaoh (repeated with Avimelech next week) to say that Sarah is his sister and not his wife.

I’m of the last generation to come of age before the internet and social media. (We still learned how to use a card catalog in school.) Perhaps that conditions me to try to recall what life can be like when we don’t feel the constant need to make statements, to speak, when we can create room for silences of presence, silences of possibility. I don’t presume to have a full answer to the problem of speech and silence right now, and it seems to me Abraham, too, was unclear. In some moments, speech is appropriate; others call for silence. And, as Abraham shows us, sometimes, perhaps much of the time, we may not get it right. Perhaps that can help us be a little more gentle with ourselves.

By way of conclusion, I want to share that I’ve found myself going to a core Buddhist teaching in the last few weeks as I’ve been reflecting on these questions of speech and silence, the practice of shemirat hadibbur or mindful speech, namely the Buddha’s five principles for right speech. These are often formulated as questions, and I find they can be useful both as I’m contemplating my words and as I’m listening to the words of others:

1. 1. 1. Are these words timely?
      2. Are they true?
      3. Are they gentle?
      4. Are they beneficial?
      5. Are they spoken with goodwill?

Jews are a people who love language. We love words. We believe the world was created through an act of speech, and our tradition conceives of every subsequent act of speech as an act of profound power–to create and nurture, to hurt or destroy. In this time of so much pain and difficulty, and in this age of so much speech, I think we could all benefit from more mindful silence for the sake of more mindful, creative, and life-sustaining speech.

On Monday morning a headline crossed my newsfeed: A six-year old boy in suburban Chicago had been brutally stabbed to death by his family’s landlord. His mother was severely injured while trying to protect him. 

The story was tragic. What made it even more significant was that the boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, was, like his mother, from the Palestinian community. While the landlord was–I hate to say it, thank God–not Jewish, the authorities are treating the murder as a hate crime because it seems the landlord was activated, in part, by the Hamas pogrom in Israel on October 7.

I live in the Chicago area, and I knew right away that, if possible, I wanted to attend the boy’s funeral. I felt called to go for a few reasons: As an American, I’m heartbroken and outraged that this would happen to any family, or that anyone would feel unsafe because of who they are; as a parent, I’m shattered at the family’s loss; as a Jew and a Jewish leader, particularly in the present moment, I wanted the family and the larger Palestinian community in Chicago and the United States to know that I bear witness to their pain. If there is anything we should be able to come together on, it is that the death of children is unspeakable sorrow. We should be able to show up for one another for that. And at a time when I feel so powerless to help my own people in Israel, this act of humanity and bridge-building felt like a small concrete action I could take.

I went with a few colleagues. As we approached the neighborhood where the mosque was located, it was evident this was a huge event. Traffic was backed up. We had to park on a side street and walk ten minutes, along with hundreds of others streaming toward the mosque. The mosque filled up, and the crowd spilled outside into the parking lot. It felt like thousands of people were there.

Since I went, some have asked me whether I felt unsafe. The answer is no. In fact, I was warmly welcomed as an honored guest. Dozens of people came up to me to shake my hand and thank me for coming. A few of us hugged. Everyone I spoke with seemed to share the sentiment that what the vast majority of people want is simply to be able to raise their families and live in their communities in peace. That felt like a small glimmer of hope.

Parashat Noach is, among other things, a story of violence, terror, survival, and rebuilding. As I referred to in my post last week, it is part of the Torah’s larger meditation on the fraught nature of siblinghood, the profound difficulty humans seem to have in living together in peace. And, in the concluding story of the Tower Babel, it offers ground for reflecting on the values and complexities of languages and cultural identities–dynamics that were all present in the moment, that are all present now. There is a reason we read this book again and again: “hafoch bah v’hafoch bah, ki hakol bah–turn it and turn it, for all is within it.” 

After the flood, God promises Noah not to destroy the world again and establishes that the rainbow will serve as a sign of that commitment. Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (Likkutei Halakhot Shabbat 7:70) comments that the rainbow (KESHET) evokes the shofar blasts of Rosh Hashanah (teKiah, SHevarim, Truah). There are many ways we might interpret this connection: A call to repentance, a call to duty. What stands out to me is that both the shofar blasts and the rainbow contain within them a full spectrum: of emotion, experience, language, culture, people. They ask of us: Can we make room for all of that within our own hearts? Can we find a way to live with ourselves–and with one another? For that, at the end of the day, is the basic question of the covenant, whether it is the Covenant of Sinai or the Covenant of Noah. The stakes of these questions, as we are being so painfully reminded right now, are life and death.

I’ll conclude with a note about the kippah I wore (pictured): I generally only wear this kippah on Yom Kippur. On most other days I wear a black one. But at the funeral I wanted to make sure people saw I was there, that a rabbi showed up. I hope in doing so I was able to effect some modicum calling us all, inviting us all,  back to the demands, expectations, and possibilities of the Covenant of Noah. I hope I was able to perform a small act of kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of the divine name, in a time when that name has been so horribly desecrated.

May all our children know no more suffering, may our families and communities know no more sorrow.

If there’s one constant to my life, it’s siblinghood. From the moment I was born, I have been the youngest of three brothers. Since my second child was born, I have been the father of siblings (pictured above on a family picnic when they were little). When my brothers and I got married, I learned what it meant to have sisters.

But my experience of siblinghood didn’t come about exclusively through biology or marriage or family life. In my rabbinic school class, we often addressed each other–half-jokingly, but also kind of seriously–as “Holy Brother!” (and often still do). In the Boy Scouts we referred to each other as brothers–the way fraternity or sorority members do, the way monks and nuns do, the way soldiers do.

And perhaps all of that has led to a lifelong preoccupation with this notion of siblinghood. What does it mean to be a brother or a sister or a sibling? Some of it has to do with sharing a language: the intimate language of family, the shared people and places and jokes. Some of it has to do with sharing experiences: shared purpose or effort or struggles. And some of it has to do with the sense of responsibility that’s present: My brothers and I know, without even asking, that we and our families can show up and stay at each other’s houses and take food from the fridge. We know, without even asking, that we can list each other as emergency contacts for our children.

The Book of Genesis is, as much as anything, an extended reflection on the meaning of siblinghood: The children of Noah, the children of Terach, Isaac and Ishmael, Rebecca and Laban, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and Dinah and their brothers. Every Torah portion in Genesis is animated, often centrally, by questions about siblinghood–about what it means to be a brother or sister, what it means to share a common ancestor.

Of course, at root the Torah teaches us that we all–all human beings–ultimately share the same common ancestors, Adam and Eve, and beyond that, the same divine source. And thus the primordial story of siblings, that of Cain and Abel, serves as something of a touchstone for this whole exploration. This is the story that essentializes siblinghood into questions of violence and responsibility:

When they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.

God said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ And he said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’

‘What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!’

(Gen. 4:8-10)

While Cain’s rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” rings in our ears as a fundamental question about human life, the words that immediately precede them are equally important. Those words are: lo yadati, I do not know. Rashi, quoting Bereshit Rabbah, captures the importance of these two words: “He became a gonev da’at elyonah” — a deceiver of the Most High, or, perhaps more literally, he stole ultimate awareness. In his moment of rage, Cain was overcome; and in the moment following, when confronted with his action, he would not or could not allow his awareness to recognize it, so he lied to himself and to the source of genuine awareness. That led him to ask a question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” which, it would seem, he meant rhetorically–“I bear no responsibility for him!” And we can understand why Cain spins this story in his mind, because when he is ultimately forced to confront the reality of his actions, he is overcome once again: “My sin is too great to bear” (4:13), he cries. In the immortal words of Jack Nicholson: He can’t handle the truth.

The question of siblinghood–who, if anyone, we call a brother or sister or sibling; who, if anyone, we label as a friend, a neutral, an enemy; who, if anyone, we call a tragic but necessary casualty; and what, on the basis of that labeling, our posture is towards them–this is one of the deepest, most difficult, and most important questions we confront. We are living through a time suffused with these questions right now. It’s why so many of us are shedding tears.

It should go without saying that the violence and brutality suffered by so many Israelis at the hands of Hamas last Shabbat were heinous desecrations of the image of God. Failing to acknowledge this is, itself, an act of “stealing ultimate awareness.” Likewise, failing to acknowledge that those who were murdered and kidnapped seem to have been targeted for no other reason than that they were Jews (or people who were with Jews at the time) is an act of seemingly unconscionable disbelief. We Jews, who have endured so much trauma through the centuries, are understandably activated by it.

And: The question of da’at, awareness, is ultimately the question that keeps coming back–day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Where are we directing our awareness? Toward whom? With what kind of quality or valence–curious, compassionate, angry, something else? What do we notice, and what do we–willingly or unwillingly, wisely or unwisely–overlook?

Just last week, our people read the Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). My own wonderful rabbi, Ari Hart, like many others I expect, went to that book for guidance as the violence unfolded in shul in real time. Ari invoked Kohelet’s most famous passage: “A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven.” Speaking for myself, the time isn’t right yet–I still feel too raw to create the necessary space to reflect dispassionately on where and how to train my awareness. Hostages are in harm’s way. My own loved ones are on the front lines. My practice helps, but there are still many many moments when tears cloud my vision and my thinking. And I’m not living under threat of rocket fire.

And, in the same breath, the gifts and demands of da’at, of awareness, this most basic element of our humanity and thus our status as images of the Creator–those gifts are ever-accessible, those demands are ever-present. And so I practice, and I invite you to practice, in the aspiration that, through all the fog and haze, in the midst of all the chaos and tumult in the world and in our mind-hearts, our da’at might be whole and our bodies, our spirits, and our worlds–and the bodies, spirits and worlds of our brothers and sisters and siblings, and of all beings–might be at peace.

Dear friends,

Like so many others, I awoke this past Shabbat morning to the heart-rending news from Israel. And like so many others, as the hours and days have unfolded, I have struggled to contain all the emotions: fear, grief, anger, confusion, gratitude for those who are keeping others safe and bringing healing to those in need. As I danced with my community on Simchat Torah–somberly, with tears in my eyes–I felt a new appreciation for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous words about praying with his feet.

Like so many others, I am praying for the well-being of my own family, friends, and loved ones, including nieces and nephews who have been called back to active duty, a brother and sister-in-law and many good friends who, like millions of others–Israelis and Palestinians–must now seek shelter from bombs and missiles. These prayers come alongside our collective prayers for the safe return of those taken captive, healing for the injured, safety for innocents, and a peaceful resolution to the war as soon as possible.

And, perhaps like you, I find that in these times, I lean on my spiritual practice as much as ever. I find comfort and insight arising from meditation. I find healing in prayer, chant, and song. I find wisdom and depth in the words of Torah.

But most important, I find that now is when community matters most to me. It is in that spirit that I write today to say: the IJS community is here for you. Now, as ever, we are here for you with all of our resources: Our daily Jewish meditation sit at 12:30 pm ET or on demand; our weekly Jewish yoga studio at 11:00 am ET on Mondays; our podcasts and courses; our teachings and our teachers. We are here for you, we are here for one another, day in and day out.

These are hard days, and hard days are why we practice–together. As the Jewish people and the world make our way through this profoundly difficult time, I invite you both to lean on this community and to join in so that others may lean on you.

With blessings for well-being and prayers for peace,

Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD
President & CEO

Like many people, I grew up with a beautiful Yom Kippur break-fast. Immediately after the end of services, my family would drive over to our family friends, the Rubinfelds. Rivka, the matriarch, always had out a delicious spread of bagels and lox and whitefish and rugelach. I remember the acidic sting of orange juice in my parched mouth, and the sensation of it landing at the bottom of my empty stomach. (I also remember that the radio was always on during the day at the Rubinfeld house, ever since 1973. Rivka is Israeli.)

My own children haven’t grown up with this ritual, which I regret. A big reason why is that in the early years of our family life, I was a rabbi with institutional responsibilities. I oversaw three simultaneous services on campus at Northwestern University. And, being a younger man than I am now, not only did I give sermons at all of them and co-lead the Reform service, I also timed things such that I could lead Musaf and Ne’ilah myself at the Orthodox service, my home base. By the end of it all, I was so exhausted that I could barely move. The kids were little, and it became easiest for them to just go home and for me to make my way there eventually. Break-fast became a bowl of cereal.

But like most things, there was a silver lining. After everyone had hurried out to go to their break-fasts, I remember lingering in the room that served as our little shul. It was just me and the room. I still had on my kittel, the white robe I had worn for most of the last 25 hours. And in that empty room, I could still sense the energy and life force we had generated and shared, the songs we had sung, the heartfelt prayers we had offered. The room was empty, and yet it was full—not in a nostalgic way, but in some way that was both present and absent at the same time. 

My podcast this week, devoted to the holiday of Shemini Atzeret that we observe this Shabbat, is about lingering. The Talmud imagines the Holy One saying to the people of Israel something to the effect of, “We’ve had such a wonderful time together these last weeks. Stay one more day.” Hence Shemini Atzeret has no particular mitzvot: no sukkah or lulav, no matzah, no shofar. Just being. Or, perhaps, lingering—just as I was somehow moved to do at the end of Yom Kippur years ago.

The way the calendar works out this year, Shemini Atzeret is the day on which we read the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes, also sometimes spelled Qohelet). One of the reasons we read this book at this time of year, I believe, is that it reflects this mood—a combination of spiritual groundedness, wistfulness at the passage of time, the sensibility of taking it all in after “the long season of tending and growth” in the words of Marge Piercy, aware that it will fade and pass and arise again. In this, Kohelet’s mood is not unlike a kind of posture we cultivate in mindfulness meditation as we bring awareness to the life-giving sensation of breath entering our nostrils and lungs, and then fading as we breathe back out into the world.

Breath, one way to translate the word hevel in Hebrew, is a—perhaps the—central metaphor in Qohelet. As Rabbi Audbrey Glazer writes in the introduction to the stunning new translation and commentary of Qohelet he developed with Rabbi Martin Cohen, “Hevel… manifests a ‘qualified optimism’ such that awareness of the evanescent feeling of life as vapor enables a deeper cultivation of joy! ‘Enjoy life, for not only injustice, but everything, is contingent.’ By enjoying the passing pleasures from moment to moment, we can deepen our appreciation of the nature of being amidst its evanescence. Such awareness then further reveals its own glimmers of deeper light that wash over the present.”

We have traveled a long journey these last months—in fact, this entire last year: A journey through Torah (we start all over this week!), through the holiday cycle, through the seasons, through natural rhythms of birth, growth, and life, dying, death, and decay. Shemini Atzeret, this final moment on the journey, invites us to breathe, to delight in our awareness, and to start the cycle anew with, hopefully, a deeper sense of loving interconnection (hesed), a greater capacity for compassion (rachamim), a refined attunement to true joy (simcha), and an expanded quality of wholeness and peace (shalom) within, between, and all around us. May it be so.

One of the many emotional moments of my year of mourning for my father came when I was building our sukkah. Sukkah-building is often a family affair, because it’s so hard to do alone and it’s something kids generally love to do. That was true for me growing up, and it has been true with my own children. While so many other Jewish rituals involve putting away and cleaning up, sukkah-building is creating something where nothing existed before. Unlike cooking, a sukkah doesn’t get consumed but lasts. It lives in space. And you can decorate it. What’s not to love?

But what also usually happens in our family is that the kids get tired after the initial phase. So after my children had helped put together the poles and put up the canvas tarp (the skhach—a bamboo mat in our case—would go on top much closer to the holiday), I was left alone to do some of the last touches. That year, I decided to secure the sukkah to a railing so that it wouldn’t blow around too much, as it had the year before. I took out some rope and began tying knots and hitches I had learned in the Boy Scouts.

And that’s when I thought of my Dad, who had been our Scoutmaster growing up and who taught me not only how to do the actions I was performing with my hands, but the context in which I was doing them. As I wrote in a letter to him that I posted on Facebook, “I would have loved to call you to tell you about it, because I know you would have schepped a lot of nachas. I’m sure you’re enjoying a wonderful sukkah up there. We have a picture of you in ours, and we miss you.” (Picture of our family sukkah is above.)

There’s something in this story that gets at the heart of what Sukkot can be: a time of visceral, embodied, felt openness and flow—between the natural world and the world of civilization we construct that, in our minds at least, separates us from it; between people past and future who are with us here in the present, guiding our hands and visiting us as ushpizin; between our own hearts, minds, and bodies, which, in this uniquely physical, spatial ritual, flow through one another.

Yet for all that, the act of sukkah-building and sukkah-dwelling depends on letting go (something I explored last week). The sukkah is meant to be a temporary dwelling, and this particularly comes through in the requirements for the roof. As the Mishnah teaches, the skhach or roof of the sukkah must be made of formerly living material. If one had a grape vine and wove it on top of the sukkah in order to serve as skhach, the sukkah would not be a sukkah until the vine was cut. As long as it’s still attached to the earth, still holding on and still able to grow later, it can’t serve as skhach. The message would seem to be: We can’t hold on. We have to let go.

In that letting go, of course, we find possibilities for different forms of embrace—with neighbors, loved ones, ourselves, the world, the Holy One. By opening the walls and doors of our homes, by venturing outside, we bring down the baffles of our regular homes and can enter the embrace of a less secure yet more expansive sense of home.

Earlier this year, my youngest son, Toby, and I watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy together. He is a fantasy genre lover, and, true to form, fell in love with the story of Frodo Baggins’s long journey to Mount Doom, his struggle to carry the Ring of Power along the way, and his mission to throw the ring into the lava inside the mountain and destroy the ring once and for all.

Of course, Frodo doesn’t do this alone. He has the help and support of a whole fellowship (the titular “Fellowship of the Ring” of the first of the three books/films). And in particular, he has the help of his closest friend, Sam, who is always looking out for him. In the climactic scene of the film, Frodo stands inside the volcano, holding the ring out over the lava. All he has to do is drop it. But the Ring of Power, as it has done throughout his journey, beckons him with a seductive call, and he can’t manage to do this one simple final act—the act that will stop a war and save the world. Sam calls out, “Just let it go!” But Frodo can’t.

In case you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil what happens next. Suffice it to say the ring does ultimately wind up in the lava—but Frodo is left hanging from a rock above the molten lava, clinging on for dear life. He has no strength left. His mission is accomplished. He contemplates letting his life end. But Sam reaches out to him and, in the first words spoken since his last exhortation, he now says, “Don’t you let go!”

I had never noticed this parallelism before, the “Just let it go” and “Don’t you let go” of Sam in this scene. But it struck a deep chord in me on this viewing and I’ve been coming back to it frequently in the months since. Because it encapsulates so simply one of the fundamental discernments we constantly have to make: When do we hold on? And when do we let go?

On deep level, human development can be summarized as living these two questions: From the holding on/clinging that characterizes the relationship between a parent and an infant, to the letting go that happens at the moment of death, grief, and mourning. Like a heartbeat, the stages in between are full of grasping and relaxing, closing and opening our grip, in real and metaphorical ways: in relation to people, things, places, ideas, identities. What do we hold on to? What do we let go? The question pulsates, returning again and again.

One of my favorite prayers in the Yom Kippur liturgy comes in the evening service: Ki Hinei kaChomer, “Like Simple Clay.” The poem, from 12th century France, compares the Jews gathered to pray to raw material in the hands of various tradespeople: clay in the hands of the potter, uncut stone in the hands of the mason, silver in the hands of the smith, etc. The craftsperson chooses what to do: to shape gently, to stretch and mold, to smash, to melt, to crush. “So too are we in Your hand,” the poem says of the Holy One, with a plea to “look to Your Covenant,” remember our relationship, and not give in to baser inclinations.

Many folks, including, most likely, the author of the poem, understand the theology here as something roughly like, “We deserve to be destroyed, but please forgive us and let us live.” If that works for you, abi gezunt as we might say in Yiddish—great! I’ll confess that it doesn’t work so well for me and, if you’re reading this, I expect it might not work so well for you either. So let me offer another way to read it, influenced by the example of Sam and Frodo.

It is not only the Holy One who is the potter holding clay or the ship captain steering the rudder. We are also those people. In every moment, we hold in our hands the raw material of life: our breath, our awareness, our presence. When we “look to the Covenant” and remember the virtues of lovingkindness and compassion—the essence of the 13 Attributes of Mercy which form the core of Yom Kippur—we have the opportunity to adjust our grip: To loosen it where we are holding too tightly, to strengthen it where it has become slack. That invitation/demand is available in every moment, with every breath. It is even more available on Shabbat. And it is especially available on Yom Kippur, Shabbat Shabbaton—an ultimate Shabbat in which we set aside the cares of the world for a day and so that we may abide in our individual and collective presence, and the Divine Presence.

My blessing and prayer for you and all of us, then, is that Yom Kippur be a moment–or, really, a long series of moments–of letting go of what needs to be let go, and holding on to what needs holding. May we emerge from this day rebalanced and renewed in our embrace of life, the world, one another, and the Divine Presence.

Dear friends,

My Elul practices for the last decade or so have included listening to an album recorded by the poet David Whyte called Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question (also available here on iTunes). I generally listen to 10 or 15 minutes at a time as I walk the dog in the morning after I drop off my youngest son at the bus. Listening to Whyte’s beautiful and penetrating language, recited in his unique English-Irish brogue, has become one of my favorite parts of Elul.

Over the years I’ve become familiar with the album and the poems and stories Whyte recites and tells. Yet, like a good work of Torah that one revisits year after year, I find that on each listening a different part emerges to speak to me. Without fail, each year there’s a point at which I have to stop because I’m struck by a passage and by the need to note the time on the recording so I can come back to it.

This year, that happened when I listened to this little bit:

One of the great tenets of a beautiful question is that it brings you to ground in your life as it is now. And in some ways, along with the amnesia of what we’ve forgotten, we step into a sense of having forgotten something which needs to be remembered and which is foundational to our future. And one of the remarkable things, I think, about being human, one of the incredible things about being human is, you only have to articulate exactly the measure of your exile, exactly the way you feel far from yourself, exactly the way you feel as if you don’t belong—and as soon as you’ve said it, exactly as it feels, you’re on your way home. You’ve started the journey back, just by describing the way you feel imprisoned, or the way you feel far from yourself, or far from life.

The closing Torah portions of Deuteronomy—which is to say, the closing Torah portions of the Torah—are suffused with the language of exile and homecoming. Here is one characteristic passage from last week’s Torah portion:

When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have set before you—and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which YHVH your God has banished you, and you return to YHVH your God, and you and your children heed God’s command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then YHVH your God will return with you and take you back in love. [God] will bring you together again from all the peoples where YHVH your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there YHVH your God will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you. And YHVH your God will bring you to the land that your ancestors possessed, and you shall possess it; and [God] will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your ancestors. Then YHVH your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring—to love YHVH your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live. (Deut. 30:1-6)

One of the remarkable things about this passage is the way it fuses teshuva, spiritual returning and renewal, with the end of bodily and political exile. In this passage, to be far from the Divine is to be far from not only our spiritual sense of at-homeness, but also from the more literal sense of at-homeness in the land where our ancestors lived. Yet the vast majority of Jewish history has been lived in a state of political and geographic exile. Thus Rashi, quoting the Rabbis of the Talmud, parses verse 3: “Our Rabbis learned from this that, if one can say so of the Holy One, the Divine presence dwells with Israel in all the misery of their exile, so that when they are redeemed, the Ineffable makes Scripture write ‘Redemption’ of Godself that the Divine will return with them.”

There is a paradox here: The Divine is with us in exile and estrangement, even as our returning to home—in all its senses, physical and spiritual—is also a returning to the Holy One. All, it seems, we have to do is make an internal move—in David Whyte’s language, articulate exactly the measure of our exile—and we’re on our way home. Yet that “all we have to do” is, of course, no simple thing. Again, Rashi: “The day of the gathering of the exiles is so important and is attended with such difficulty that it is as though the Holy One must actually seize hold of each individual’s hands dragging them from their place.”

There is a reason we read these Torah portions in the weeks before Rosh Hashanah. Confronting the reality of our various exiles—whether they take the form of estrangement from our own bodies, our identities, our families, communities, societies, geographies—is the work of this season. Wherever we are this New Year, in any of these dimensions, the sound of the shofar beckons us to wake up and see, courageously and clearly, who we are and where we stand right now, in the totality of our wholeness and our brokenness. It invites us to gaze, with genuine honesty, within ourselves and discover that access to the Creator is not in heaven or across the sea, but on our lips and in our hearts. And in that recognition, we might experience that we are already on the way home.

Shanah tovah, Blessings for a sweet and joyous New Year,
Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD
President & CEO

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a minute to watch the finish from this year’s Kentucky Derby. It’s a sight to behold.

The two leading horses are racing neck-and-neck (literally), jockeying for position (again, literally), as they make the final turn of the one-and-a-quarter-mile track at Churchill Downs. Slowly and then suddenly, Rich Strike, a horse no one even expected to be in the race, comes out of nowhere to win. It’s shocking on every level: Rich Strike had 80-1 odds of winning, the second-highest odds in the history of the 148-year old race. He only became eligible for the Derby a day earlier due to another horse being scratched from the race with 30 seconds to spare before the registration deadline. And then, to top it off, he comes out of nowhere to win the biggest event in horse racing. Someone in Hollywood is surely working on a script already.

The day after the Derby, the writer and climate activist Rebecca Solnit posted a link to the race video on Facebook, calling attention to Rich Strike’s win as a “black swan event.” The term, popularized two decades ago by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, refers to an event that most people assumed simply couldn’t happen—and that, therefore, whole ways of thinking became devoted to assuming it couldn’t happen either. That is, it wasn’t simply an objective question of whether or not something was possible; it was also a psychological question: If my/our worldview depends on the impossibility of this idea, how could I entertain the notion that it might occur? My/our whole world would unravel! So we tend to treat black swan events as not just logical impossibilities; rather, we become emotionally invested in verifying the narrative of their impossibility.

As a climate activist, Solnit encounters this phenomenon a lot. If we read the news, we have good reason to feel like solving the problem of climate change is a black swan. The odds seem increasingly remote that we will keep global temperatures from rising past 2 degrees Celsius. The polar ice sheets are already melting. The invasion of Ukraine isn’t helping. It is totally understandable that a lot of us feel pretty grim about the future. And when we start telling ourselves that narrative, our human tendency toward confirmation bias leads us to reject news that might counter it and embrace news that reinforces it.

But, as Solnit has been doggedly pointing out on her Facebook page for months, there’s a lot of good climate news! Most significantly, advances in battery storage, solar, and wind technology are causing the price of renewables to drop quickly and, correspondingly, their use to increase rapidly. And, while the odds remain quite long, Solnit seems committed to helping the rest of us see the possibility of a black swan. Epicenter and Zandon, the two favorite horses at the Derby this year, had odds of 7-2 and 3-1, respectively. They were the horses racing neck-and-neck to win. The race was playing out precisely the way the math told us it would. Until it didn’t. The lesson for climate? While it’s still a major league longshot, we might, just might, be able to get it together for greener forms of energy to come out of the back of the pack and win the climate derby. (Likewise, Donald Trump was projected as having a 7 percent chance of being elected president in 2016. Black swans don’t take sides; they just describe longshots.)

On the Jewish calendar, we are deep into a Sabbatical year, a year of shemitah. The Torah’s expectations for this year, and for the larger Jubilee cycle in which it occurs, might strike us as fanciful, preposterous even. We are commanded not to farm the land, but only to live off whatever naturally grows. We are expected to forgive debts and release indentured servants. Every 49 years, we are expected to return the land to its ancestral owners. In short, we are, it seems, expected to overthrow the economic table and start anew. It is nothing short of a radical resetting, a recalibration of society.

If this might have seemed difficult to imagine two or three thousand years ago, it feels even more so now. Yet the Torah is not alone in deploying sacred ritual to reconfigure the social order. As David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate in their book The Dawn of Everything, societies the world over have done similar things throughout human history. From Native American communities to Neolithic Europe and Mesopotamia and beyond, human beings have shown a remarkable propensity to order our societies in many different ways—and to consciously reorder them when necessary and desirable.

Contra Rousseau, there is no “state of nature,” according to Graeber and Wengrow. Rather, there are innumerable different ways humans have configured social and political life. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.”

That, perhaps, is the greatest challenge we face: that we accept that this is the way things are and will be—whatever that way is. We are so invested in the current scheme of things that we discount the possibility that anything could be otherwise. We lose imagination, we lose freedom, we become fatalists.

The Torah, like other wisdom traditions, invites us to practice a different way of being, the touchstone of which is yetziat mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt. What was is not what must be. What seems inevitable is not destiny. Just because life seems good right now doesn’t mean it’s going to remain that way; just because life looks horrible right now doesn’t mean it will always be so. When we cut ourselves off from the unfolding nature of the world, when we become so invested in a particular way of encountering it, we practice a kind of idolatry, we drive the Divine presence from the world.

Our calling and mission is to do the opposite: to live with mindful presence, aware of the contingency and ongoing becoming of a world which is constantly recreated anew, aware of our interconnection with all other beings, with the earth, with life itself. That is the practice of Shemitah, the practice of Shabbat. It is the practice that enables us to resist our confirmation bias, our fatalism about climate, and to remain open to the possibility—however long a shot it is—that the unexpected might just come about.

This piece was published in the Times of Israel on May 12, 2022.