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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps, like me, you shed tears this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s hard to argue with.

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

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

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

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

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