This week I remembered an event from many years ago when I was a young Hillel rabbi. I was in a session at the annual Hillel staff conference led by Rabbi Jim Diamond z”l, the sagely longtime Hillel director at Princeton. Jim was sharing some of his war stories, one of which went like this:

One year, the president of the student body turned out to be Jewish. Jim didn’t know this student, but he managed to get word to him that he would love to meet him. The student got word back to Jim that he had no interest in meeting. (It happens.) The student, unsurprisingly, went on to an illustrious career in state politics. But ultimately, he resigned in scandal. “And so,” Jim said, “I’ve been wondering whether history might have been different had Elliot Spitzer said yes to my offer to meet.”

I’ve been thinking about that story this week as more and more of the Epstein files are revealed to us. Not so much because I think meeting with the Hillel rabbi at Cooper Union or NYU would have changed history (Epstein attended both but didn’t graduate from either), but because I find it hard to ignore the Jews involved in the story, from Epstein himself and Ghislaine Maxwell to Howard Lutnick, Leslie Wexner, Ehud Barak, Noam Chomsky, and countless others. While Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes are horrific on their own, the presence of so many prominent Jews in the story compounds my sense of revulsion.

In the case of Wexner, I experience a deep personal sense of implication. Like over a thousand other Jewish professional leaders, it was the Wexner Graduate Fellowship that put food on my family’s table while I was in rabbinical school. The fellowship community has been an enormously important source of wisdom, companionship, and professional support throughout my career—as it has been for two generations of Jewish professional and volunteer leaders. The idea that all of that was, in significant measure, built on a core of moral rot is nauseating.

But for the moment, what most preoccupies me is this deep feeling of offense, anger, sadness, and even shame at the reality that so many Jews were, knowingly or unknowingly, part of this horrific web of rape, abuse, and dehumanization. Last fall I wrote about the culture of detachment and rootlessness described in the Epstein files. But this week I’m really feeling a sense of disgust at the idea that so many landsmen, fellow Jews, were not only part of that jet-setting culture, but seemingly turned a blind eye to profound injustice in their midst.

Because I feel like we all know we’re supposed to be better than this. “These are the laws which you shall place before them,” begins Parashat Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1). “Just as the preceding words [i.e. the Ten Commandments] were given at Sinai, so too were all of these laws given at Sinai.” So says Rashi, quoting the Mechilta. Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa adds, emphatically: “before them—the Torah teaches here that the civil laws, the commandments about how we treat fellow human beings, come before everything else, including the commandments about our relationship with God. Derekh eretz kadma latorah: Common decency comes before religious law.”

In another comment, Simcha Bunim goes further: “Mishpat tzedek, our basic sense of fairness and justice, must precede everything: every thought, every discernment.” And, he adds, this is foundational to what it means to be Jewish: “The rest of the world may teach that all law is established by human beings and thus may be changed, depending on the time and place, in response to various pressures. But we are taught, ‘Justice is the Lord’s’ (Deut. 1:17)… Just as we don’t change the Ten Commandments in response to the contingencies of our time, we also don’t change the fundamental laws of how to treat human beings.”

I hear this voice in my kishkes crying out: Even if one doesn’t know Reb Simcha Bunim or Rashi or the name of this Torah portion; even if one hasn’t been to shul in decades; even if you’ve eaten a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur every year, how is it possible that you don’t know the most fundamental elements of goodness and decency?! “You shall not oppress the stranger, as you know the heart of the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9), or “Stay far from falsehood” (23:7), or “Do not pervert justice” (23:6), and “Don’t take bribes (23:8).” Beyond the horror of the crimes themselves, the seeming absence of these most basic elements of ethics from the hearts and minds of so many Jews in this story leaves me speechless.

Of course, these are not the first nor the last Jews to seemingly suffer from this moral malady. The violent abuse of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank by Jewish Israelis, too often with a similar lack of disapproval or enforcement by the authorities as in the Epstein case, is yet another moral stain on our people. And again, my heart is a jumble of anger, sadness, and shame.

We can, of course add to that list. While Reb Simcha Bunim’s teachings may reflect a centrality of ethics that we like to think of as a distinguishing feature of Torah and Jewish life, our tradition is replete with counterexamples: Abraham allowing Sarah to be taken into Pharaoh’s harem; Shimon and Levi murdering the defenseless men of Shechem; King David abusing his office to bring about the death of Batsheva’s husband so he could marry her. When we recite the confessional at Yom Kippur (whether we ate that ham sandwich or not), we join a long list of Jews who have come up short—some of whom have been held to account in court, many of whom have not.

That is not an excuse, it’s an essential reminder. The emotions surrounding the Epstein case are powerful. To me, that makes it all the more important to rely on our spiritual practices grounded in mindfulness: so we can be aware of how those emotions may be activated within us; so we can look clearly at the wrongs and injustices; so we can have the clarity and courage to offer healing to the victims and rectify the harm; and so we can try to avoid falling into the same morally and spiritually vacuous pits ourselves.

For Reflection & Conversation

• In your own life, who is a model of a person with a strong ethical core? What lessons of theirs have you tried to embody?
• How, if at all, does your Jewish spiritual practice support your ethical life?

It has always been easy for me to know how old the United States is. I was a “Bicentennial Baby,” born in 1976. Add 200 to my age, and you get the age of the country. With God’s help, I’ll turn 50 in May, and my country, in turn, will be 250 in July.

I don’t know about you, but to me it doesn’t feel like a very happy birthday year for the nation.

Two and a half centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson and his comrades, however imperfectly, planted into the Western world’s collective political consciousness the ideas of human equality and government by the consent of the governed. (As David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate in their wonderful The Dawn of Everything, Jefferson and his European antecedents very likely learned some of these ideas from Native Americans. Add it to the many things on the list of what the rest of us owe the original inhabitants of this land.)

They grounded that claim in a conception of the Divine that we recognize from our own Torah: that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Or, as my mentor, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, so persuasively taught generations of Jews, human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. This, according to Ben Azzai, is klal gadol batorah, the Torah’s foundational principle.

That basic idea was and remains revolutionary. From the very founding of the republic, it challenged the practice of slavery—eventually leading to the country’s most catastrophic moment of rupture and, in the same breath, bringing about a profound moment of its redemption. Planted there in the Declaration of Independence, the idea of equality continued to challenge those with and without authority, leading eventually to women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and legal equality for LGBTQ folks. And it undergirded the value that all human beings, regardless of their national origin or legal status, are entitled to equal protection under the law. Despite moments—sometimes long moments—of backsliding and repeated failures, increasingly large majorities of people came to trust that the United States and its institutions generally strived to live out the true meaning of its creed.

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the great poskim (halakhic authorities) of the twentieth century in America, identified the United States as a malchut shel hesed, a government that—unusually, and happily—was imbued with kindness. Rabbi Chaim Strauchler summarizes Rav Moshe’s view: “America, uniquely in Jewish history, embedded kindness into its legal and civic structures. Hesed was not dependent on the goodwill of a ruler or the mood of a mob. It was routinized, bureaucratized, and protected by law. For Jews, this was unprecedented: not perfection, but reliability.” Which is to say, the bank of trust that authorizes the government—the consent of the governed—rests on a foundation of Hesed. There have always been groups for whom this description wasn’t true, of course. But the seed of equality, planted at the root of the American project, summoned the country to rise to its challenge.

Thus one of the things that makes this such an unhappy birthday year for me, and perhaps for you, is that this description increasingly seems not to fit reality overall. Arms of the Federal government are flagrantly, even gleefully, violating these values and squandering this trust: ripping people from their homes in the dead of winter, imprisoning children, housing human beings in inhumane conditions, and even destroying images of the Holy One—i.e., killing people (who also happen to be citizens, but I’m not sure that should matter)—who get in their way. They are supported and justified by Administration officials who seem to delight in spreading hate and falsehoods, and have claimed absolute immunity for their actions. And all of them are ultimately authorized by a President who, at the most charitable, I might describe as suffering from incontinence in his speech. “What is worse than doing harm?” the Buddha taught. “To prompt others to do harm.” Or, in our own tradition: “Whoever causes the multitudes to be righteous, sin will not occur on this person’s account; And whoever causes the multitudes to sin, such a person is not afforded the ability to repent” (Pirkei Avot 5:18).

All of that causes me, and perhaps you, a lot of pain. It can lead to fear, to a sense of constriction, to moments of paralysis interwoven with moments of reactivity. And, perhaps most significantly for we who practice Judaism as a mindfulness practice, it can lead to “spiritual bypass,” when we use the tools of mindfulness to acknowledge our fears, but not to take responsibility for doing anything about the state of the world.

To me, this is one of the hardest parts of our practice—and, even more so, of leading a Jewish organization devoted to this approach to Torah in this moment. At IJS, we begin all of our retreats and courses by creating a trust bank, a container in which participants feel safe enough to be vulnerable. We gather deposits into that bank by reading a set of shared norms that we call Making Safer Spaces. The third item in this document reads, “Know that there is genuine freedom in this program. Every invitation to speak and participate is just that: an invitation. Passing or staying quiet is perfectly acceptable. You know best what you need.”

Which is to say, at IJS we mostly avoid using the word “should.” We don’t tell you what to do. We invite you to determine what is right and good for you right now.

That ethic has largely guided how we respond to public events. In 2022 I told our Board of Directors that I was worried about something big happening in the world and us feeling a lot of pressure to sign on to or make a political statement. We hadn’t really prepared for that, and I was concerned we could suffer as a result. So we spent the next year working together as a Board and staff, the result of which was our policy on making and signing statements. Consistent with our approach to “shoulds,” the upshot of our policy is that we generally don’t make or sign onto such statements. Rather, we see our role as holding the container within which all of us can “strengthen our innate sacred capacity to work towards a more just, equitable, and inclusive society and world, and to fulfill our sacred role as stewards of Creation.”

The Board adopted that policy in September 2023, less than a month before October 7. Generally speaking, it has served us well in the years since.

Yet the question of spiritual bypass is always lurking, and as the leader of this organization, I find myself thinking about it frequently every week. It is so important that we help folks to manage their stress and anxiety and to do so through the language and practices of Torah. And it’s so important that we help folks connect with their deep sense of purpose, experience a rich sense of community, and recognize the presence of the Holy One in their lives. I am incredibly proud of us for that. But are we also helping people (me, you) to get off the cushion and act?

One of the ways spiritual bypass can show up is when we tell ourselves, “There’s nothing I can do. Someone else will have to solve this problem.” Part of the clear perception that is a goal of our practice is to discern what the problem is and whether it is ours to solve. Some Jews, it seems, have adopted the position that, in a world where trusted institutions are breaking down, the first and overwhelming priority needs to be Jewish survival: “Let others worry about America, we need to focus on our own protection.” And honestly, I am sympathetic to this argument. As a student of Jewish history, I think that’s a completely reasonable position. Indeed, in many ways it informs the dedication of my life to Torah and the Jewish People. There is no one else to keep the Jewish people alive—it’s up to us.

And yet I cannot give up on America. I can’t seem to shake the belief that there is something profoundly special and important about this experiment that is two centuries older than me. In a remarkable series of essays, my colleague Rabbi Zachary Truboff suggests that it’s the radical notion that, in America, just as in the Torah, we have been born into a covenantal relationship with one another:

We must not forget what America offered Jews. For the first time in their history, Jews could live covenantally within a non-Jewish political community, not as tolerated guests, but as participants in sustaining a shared political world. America’s Constitution, like the Torah, rested on the fundamental principle that power must be restrained by law, for without this, those in charge soon act as if they were gods. But there is a second dimension to covenantal politics that is just as essential: responsibility. A covenant does not perpetuate itself automatically but only endures if those bound by it take responsibility for it again and again. At Sinai, all Jews were made responsible for the covenant with God, and in America, all citizens are responsible for the republic. Neither system functions if its members treat it as someone else’s problem.

Parashat Yitro tells us two stories. There is the story of the Revelation at Sinai, and, before that, the story of Jethro, Moses’s non-Jewish father-in-law, who helps him establish a system of law, judging, and governance. The very juxtaposition of these two stories teaches us about what it takes for a society of humans to live together: a sense of shared experience and purpose, institutions that can maintain the trust of the people, and wise and compassionate leadership, among others.

Jethro tells Moses that the leaders he appoints “will judge the people at all times,” in all moments, as it were. Commenting on this verse, the Seer of Lublin suggests a slightly different reading: “According to the time and the moment will they make judgments and decide the halakha,” the righteous path to take.

In a democracy, every one of us shares an equal piece of the sovereign. That is what makes the Declaration such a radical document, even 250 years later. Power does not reside in a king or an emperor far away, but rather within each and all of us together. And not only political power, but spiritual power: God is not off in some far away place, but within, between, and amidst us.

If we take the Seer of Lublin’s teaching seriously, then the responsibility devolves on each and all of us, individually and collectively: to know what the time and the moment are, to judge, and to act.

We practice so that we can perceive clearly, so that we can know what the time and the moment are. We practice so that we can acknowledge our fears and mindfully, courageously act in spite of them. We practice so that we can live a life of loving and compassionate purpose and devotion, and bring about a world in which every image of God can be safe, free, loved and loving in the deepest sense.

So when I say that IJS is here for you right now, that’s what I mean. If you need comfort, calm, and clarity we are here for you. If you need community, we’re here for you. If you or those you know and care about are afraid for your safety, we are here for you. And, if you’re ready to act, we’re here for you—and I’m glad you’re here for all of us.

For Reflection & Conversation

• What do you notice arising in you as you take in this reflection? If you sit with it, does anything become clearer for you? If so, what and why? If not, why not?

• What supports or inhibits you from engaging in civic life in this moment? How, if at all, does your practice help? How do you try to manage the dangers of spiritual bypass?

This week I’m thinking about three walks. I’ll talk about them in reverse chronological order.

The First Walk
On Tuesday I was walking the dog and listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdal, which he had given two days earlier. Gil prefaced it by saying that it would be a challenging talk, and it was clear he was going to address questions of citizenship and activism in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

I was struck by a Buddhist poem Gil started with:

Others will be cruel. We will not be cruel.
Others will be violent. We will not be violent.
Others will kill. We will not kill.
Others will steal. We will not steal.
Others will engage in sexual misconduct. We will not engage in sexual misconduct.
Others will lie. We will not lie.
Others will speak divisively. We will not speak divisively.
Others will speak harshly. We will not speak harshly.
Others will speak pointlessly. We will not speak pointlessly.
Others will be avaricious. We will not be avaricious.
Others will have hatred. We will not have hatred

This “poem” is actually a section of a chant drawn from the Sallekha Sutta of the Pali canon. There are 44 total lines, and in the ritual Gil discussed (but didn’t actually do on this recording), it is recited four times successively.

As I listened to this litany, my mind went to a (much shorter) parallel from our own tradition, the prayer of Rabbi Nehunia ben HaKanah, which is traditionally recited today upon completing the study of a tractate of Talmud:

I rise early, and they rise early. I rise early to pursue matters of Torah, and they rise early to pursue frivolous matters. I toil and they toil. I toil and receive a reward, and they toil and do not receive a reward. I run and they run. I run to the life of the World-to-Come and they run to the pit of destruction.

There are obvious differences, of course. But in both cases, what I sense is a kind of affirmation in the face of struggle: We can’t control what other people will do, but we can take responsibility for our own actions—even if great forces stand against us. We have faith in our teachings, our practice, our way of living.

The Second Walk
On Sunday I went with my cousin to a march in downtown Chicago. This was the day after Alex Pretti was killed, and I felt a need and desire to join others and make my own voice heard.

The rally was organized by several groups, not all of whom I necessarily identify with. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld perhaps, sometimes you go to the protest with the coalition you have. In the crowd of several thousand people, I could see a wide range of signs and sentiments. Some were mournful (pictures/names of Pretti, Renee Good, and others who have died or been abused by federal agents in the last year). Some invoked the American revolution (“no kings,” “don’t tread on me”). Some expressed anger and even rage (there was a lot of f*ck ICE). (I also feel a need to share here that the only foreign affairs issue I heard mentioned at the rally came in a chant: “From Minneapolis to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”)

I wore an American flag—literally. I tied it with some rope and donned it like a cape. Normally this is the flag I put up in front of our house on national holidays, and it’s a special flag for me: I received it when I became an Eagle Scout nearly 40 years ago and it had been flown over the U.S. Capitol before that. As I looked around, I observed that virtually the only other American flags I saw were upside-down ones held on flagpoles.

This reflected my experience of a lot of the tone of this particular rally. Unlike the ‘No Kings’ protests last fall, where organizers made a point to encourage people to bring and wear the Stars and Stripes, this one seemed to be more about expressing anger than inspiring a shared vision of the future. I say that without judgment—people are going to feel what they’re going to feel, and undoubtedly a lot of people were understandably experiencing a great deal of fear. I certainly had my own fears, and others were undoubtedly, and understandably, more afraid than me. I believe that for some, that manifested in anger. But my choice to wear a flag was quite deliberate, and I found myself wishing that there had been some more flag-wearers there too.

The Third Walk
The earliest of the three walks on my mind happened not this week, but over 3,000 years ago. It is, of course, our ancestors’ walk through the Sea—which I suspect I am not alone in thinking about in light of this week’s events.

Commenting on both their journey through the parted waters and on the Torah’s description of the Israelites’ constant accompaniment by “a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night,” Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner offers the following in his Mei Hashiloach:

The pillar of cloud signifies Awe (Yirah), and the pillar of fire signifies Confidence/Trust (Bitachon). Sometimes a person feels great security and inner strength—this is the aspect of “Day.” In such a state, one must introduce the attribute of Awe. At other times, a person feels excessive fear—the aspect of “Night.” Then, one must strengthen their spirit with trust in the Holy One. This is the meaning of: “With a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night….” This is why it is written that the Israelites went “on dry land in the midst of the sea,” (Exodus 14:29) and elsewhere “in the midst of the sea on dry land” (Exodus 14:22). The Sea signifies Awe, while the Dry Land signifies Strength and Security. The essence of this strength is the Torah, which is the stronghold of Israel.

I hear in these words a deep and challenging teaching—for me, and I think for all of us. Part of our human condition is that we experience strong emotions: Joy, delight, ecstasy; sadness and melancholy; self-righteousness and anger, among many others. Fear is, perhaps, unique among these in the ways it can overtake us and short-circuit the connections between our heart-minds and our limbs. It can lead us to feel disempowered and immobilized. It can also lead us to rage and violence—whether we are government officials (who, as authorized agents of state violence, must, according to our tradition, be held to a higher standard than regular folks) or ‘merely’ human beings created in the Divine image.

Unlike Buddhism, Judaism is not a pacifist tradition. I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m conflating the two. But I know that for me, and I hope for you and all of us, this is a moment to call upon our spiritual practices to help us stay grounded, to mindfully touch our fears rather than try to force them away, and to choose responses grounded in trust, faith, and love. That is what our ancestors did when they crossed through the sea. May we walk together in their footsteps.

For Reflection & Conversation

• What, if anything, is making you fearful these days? What, if anything, is grounding you in trust?
• What represents the sea for you these days? How, if at all, have you found Jewish spiritual practice to be a source of strength as you walk through it?