I was particularly intrigued by two items here. The first was the attitude the protesters were trained to adopt: “Serious. Committed. Believe. Passion (for the issue, not against other people). Calm confidence.” As much as anything, that reflects a profound and mature spirituality, what Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz referred to as the yishuv hada’at, or calm, settled mind, of the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh’s decree.

The second thing that grabbed me was the emphasis on song: “Creating unity, easing fear, establishing moral superiority, forcing attackers to deal with demonstrators as a group rather than focus on an individual… Everyone sings, no exceptions. If you can’t sing, sing louder.” This reminded me of Moses’s words in Parashat Vayelekh: “And when many evils and troubles have come upon them, this song shall confront them as a witness, for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring” (Deuteronomy 31:21). Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav comments, “By means of this song one can awaken goodness from wherever one finds oneself, even at the end of these many generations, such that one can remember their inherent virtue and return to their deep spiritual roots.”

Another exhibit about Martin Luther King’s antipoverty work featured a quote from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture: “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.” That brought to mind another powerful teaching, from the early Hasidic master Rabbi Shmelke Halevi Horowitz of Nikolsburg (1726-1778). It comes on the verse, “Then YHVH your God will return your captivity and have compassion upon you…” (Deuteronomy 30:3). The rebbe comments, “A sign of a person’s teshuva (repentance/return) is whether they conduct themselves with the attribute of compassion (midat harachamim). For transgressions generate cruelty in a person’s heart, whereas it is written: “Then YHVH your God will return your captivity—and compassion will come upon you.”

I love that this teaching brings the question of teshuva out of the theological realm and into the profoundly personal. How do we know if we’ve done genuine teshuva, if we’ve really returned to the paths of peace that are the paths of Torah? One good indication is whether our hearts are soft, open, and compassionate, or hard, closed, and angry. If we’ve really done the work of teshuva, then we should be able to feel it in our hearts. If we can’t, then there is probably still more work to do.

In that spirit, one final item at the museum spoke to me on this visit. It was a video of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 speech to Congress advocating for passage of the Voting Rights Act. One of the most moving parts of that speech was when Johnson said this: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” As the exhibit at the museum reminds viewers, Martin Luther King was said to have been moved to tears when he heard the President say these words.

“You stand this day, all of you, before YHVH your God,” says Moses, “your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials—the entire body of Israel—your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to waterdrawer” (Deuteronomy 29:9-10). In other words, it takes all of us. No group of people—not African-Americans, not Jews, not Muslims, not anyone—should be made to sacrifice themselves for another. Rather, as the phrase goes, none of us is free until all of us is free.

It can sometimes feel like we’re a long way from that: When politicians call for Jews to sacrifice our own safety for the greater good, when our fellow Jews wantonly assault Palestinians in a warped and dangerous perversion of Torah, when we’re reminded of how long and how much the struggle for human dignity and equality can take.

Yet, as Rebbe Nachman teaches, it is precisely in such moments that we can turn to “this song”—the song of Torah, the song of our tradition, the song of our spiritual practice, to help us reconnect with our spiritual roots. That is the essence of teshuva, the essence of this season.

For Reflection & Conversation

• • • What do you make of Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg’s teaching that a sign of teshuva is behaving with more compassion? Is that a helpful approach to the idea of spiritual returning and repentance? How, if at all, does it differ from other conceptions you’ve encountered?

Two decades ago, after leaving the Wall Street Journal, one of my wife Natalie’s first jobs in the Jewish world was working for a nascent project at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to send Jewish children’s books to families every month.

The idea was brilliantly simple: Children want their parents to read to them at bedtime. If they get a book in the mail with their name on it, they’ll run to their parent and beg/demand for them to read it. Fertile soil. Now plant the seed of a story about Shabbat, Jewish holidays, or the like, and you’ve created a moment of Jewish education that may not have existed before.

For its first five years, Natalie led the book selection committee. She worked with authors and illustrators and publishers. It wasn’t a simple process (and still isn’t), and she certainly learned that you can’t satisfy everyone.

Natalie eventually went on to other work. But over the last 21 years, the PJ Library has reached 670,000 Jewish families and shipped over 50 million books. And evaluation research has shown that many of them are significantly more engaged in Jewish life and Jewish education as a result. Pretty amazing.

Harold Grinspoon has long shared that the idea for PJ came from Dolly Parton, who passed away this week. In case you missed it, one of Dolly’s most significant legacies is her Imagination Library, a program that sends over 3 million children’s books every month to kids who might not have them otherwise. And that’s just part of her philanthropic legacy, which has included education, direct aid to people in poverty, medical research, and disaster recovery. I kind of wish that one of the many headlines about her this week had read, “Major philanthropist and humanitarian, who was also a great songwriter, entertainer, and feminist, dies at age 80.”

“And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you” (Deuteronomy 28:2). So says Moses as he sums up his second major address in the final book of the torah. Rabbi Shaul Yedidya Elazar Taub, the second Modzitzer Rebbe (1886-1947), observes that the word v’hisigucha, “overtake you,” seems redundant: if the blessings come upon you, isn’t it obvious that they will reach you?

“Rather,” he says, “there are those whom the Ineffable has blessed with fortune, wealth, and abundant blessings, but who lack the proper understanding (hasaga) of how to use their wealth and goodness. In that case, their wealth it is not a blessing to them. Therefore, the Torah says v’hisigucha from the language of hasaga: that you should also possess the understanding of how to conduct yourself properly with your wealth. This understanding itself is one of the blessings.”

Wealth, and knowing what to do with it, has long been a challenge of human life, and it remains so today. The Wall Street Journal, my wife’s old employer, recently ran an article about “landmaxxing,” with the opening line: “It is no longer enough for the superrich to own one mansion on a street. Now, they want two or three—and sometimes the entire block.” From Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane to the billionaires of today, it seems that in every generation we humans have to re-learn Hillel’s maxim, “The greater your possessions, the greater your worry.” Or, in the words of Notorious B.I.G., “Mo Money, Mo Problems.”

Why, despite all the blessings that wealth might bring, does it take an extra blessing of insight to live well with it? Perhaps because wealth is just like everything else in life: You can’t take it with you. “Every moment of our lives, our suffering, our clinging to our lives, drives us out of our lives—away from home,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew. Wealth, the desire for it and the fear of losing it once we have it, is one of those things a lot of human beings cling to. More than the wealth itself, it’s that clinging that’s the real problem.

It takes spiritual effort to recognize that the clinging is even going on. As Alan Lew continues, “Every moment, our awareness brings us back—returns us to ourselves, because we need to return, need to come back.” Perhaps that’s why we read this verse just before Rosh Hashanah, to help us discern what we’re clinging to and the ways we’re clinging to it.

My friend David Geller, a retired wealth advisor and alum of our Kivvun program, asks wealthy people to imagine their funeral. One version of the funeral is that people give the usual eulogies about what an accomplished person the departed was. Some family members speak. It’s lovely and touching.

The other version of the funeral includes not only the family, but the director of the local food pantry, who talks about the thousands of people the deceased helped to feed, or the principal of the school who shares how many children their wealth helped to teach, or the rabbi (or head of a Jewish mindfulness organization?) who lovingly remembers how their financial gifts helped so many people connect with their roots and live meaningful lives. (David has a terrific blog on this stuff that you should subscribe to.)

My grandfather Hymie used to say, “Rich or poor, it’s good to have money.” That’s true. It’s also true that money can’t buy happiness (or love, per the Beatles). For that, spiritual practice is required, no matter how much or how little we might imagine we possess.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How do you feel about your relationship with money? Do you feel a sense of clinging when money comes up? Or perhaps security, openness, or generosity? As we move towards Rosh Hashanah, how might you want to improve your relationship with wealth and money in the coming year? How might your spiritual practice help you do so?

Before anything else, I want to say thank you to the many readers who wrote last week to offer their condolences on the loss of my cousin Julian. My family and I have been surrounded in love and support. It means the world to all of us. Thank you.

Among the reasons I wish my father was still alive is that I know how much he would delight in observing me coming to appreciate lessons he offered—and that I resisted in my youth, when, like plenty of others, I was convinced I knew everything better than he did. There are small things, like waiting to run the dishwasher until you have a full load. There are bigger things, like the chart he once drew for me plotting left- and right-wing political views on the horizontal axis, and democracy and autocracy on the vertical—a reminder of the limitations and imperfections of political parties, political systems, and human beings.

While my dad wasn’t one to say, “I told you so,” he did like quoting a line from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s “The Two Thousand- and Thirteen-Year-Old Man” (sequel to the original and a favorite in our home): “We mock the thing we are to be.” Yep.

In my teaching these days, I find the phrase “hold it lightly” coming up a lot. A classic image in Buddhist teaching is holding a quail: if you hold the bird too tightly in your hands, you’ll crush it. If you open your hands too much, it will fly away. So, be like Goldilocks: Hold it just right. That is, hold it, but hold it lightly. Don’t cling—but also, don’t necessarily fully let go either.

I find that image applicable in so many realms. It’s helpful in my meditation practice, where my aim is to be gentle with my mind, body, feelings, and sensations. It’s helpful in relationships of all kinds, from family to customer service reps. It’s helpful in text study (which is, after all, another kind of relationship) where I find it reflects another image I’ve long taught, that of a game of tetherball: If the text is the pole and the reader is the ball, then you want to stay tethered, but you also want some dynamic tension in the rope—otherwise there’s no game.

Two Hasidic teachings on one of Parashat Shoftim’s most famous lines, “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” (Deuteronomy 16:18) reflect this sensibility of holding lightly. First, the Sefat Emet:

“The Torah writes ‘pursue’ (tirdof). This is because it is impossible to arrive fully at the ultimate reality of truth within this world of falsehood (Alma D’Shikra). Therefore, one must always pursue justice—to know that one has not yet reached perfect truth. Rather, when one pursues justice in this world, one attains it in its complete perfection in the World to Come. And this is what is written: ‘…so that you may live and inherit [the land]’—which gestures at the World to Come, a world that is entirely life.”

The Sefat Emet reminds us, first of all, that while truth is indeed the ground of reality, it’s also impossible to arrive at fully in this world. Thus, the Torah tells us to pursue justice—which is founded on truth—so as to help us remember that truth is ever-elusive. So, hold it, but hold it lightly. Keep some healthy humility even as you pursue what is true and right.

Which brings us to Rabbi Zev Wolf of Zbarazh (d. 1822), a student of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who offers a related teaching on this verse:

“The Evil Inclination (Yetzer Hara) has many ways to trap a person in its net. Just as it uses schemes to entice the human heart toward wickedness, so too does it sometimes entice a person toward excessive righteousness—so that one will try to be an absolute tzaddik. Against this, the Torah warns us: ‘Justice, justice’—justice in moderation— ‘shall you pursue.’ Do not practice excessive piety, for sometimes this too is among the tactics of the Evil Inclination. ‘Do not be overly righteous’ (Ecclesiastes 7:16).”

Both of these teachings emphasize the point of holding, but holding lightly: pursuing truth, but recognizing that we can never fully grasp it; judging but not becoming judgmental. In this season of Elul, we might extend it: Holding ourselves and others accountable, while also making room for grace and forgiveness. And in this increasingly violent world of political and cultural polarization, we might also apply it to our bigger conflicts.

All of that work begins in our own hearts and minds. May our preparation for the coming New Year help us do it together.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How easy or hard do you find it to hold things lightly? Are there certain things that are easier or harder for you to hold lightly? If so, why? What might it feel like to soften your grip? What might it feel like to hold on a little tighter?