On my podcast this week, I shared a bit about my recent struggle to walk our dog, Phoebe, in the midst of all the cicadas that now line the sidewalks of our neighborhood. (Folks, the cicada invasion is real, and it’s here, at least in Illinois.) While it’s okay for her to eat a number of them, too many could cause her to have stomach issues.

We’ve tried a muzzle (she hated it and got it off). We’ve tried the cone of shame (she outsmarted it). So where we’re at now is that I just have to hold the leash pretty tight when we’re walking, and I kind of yank her every time we approach a cicada. It seems to be working alright, but it makes for an unpleasant walk for her and a tired arm for me. But so far, so good: No major digestive issues to speak of, just a dog who is very eager to go in the backyard as much as possible (where there are many more cicadas).

I’m finding that, in its own way, the whole episode reflects a lot about the relationship my family and I have with Torah and Jewish mindfulness. First and foremost, we take the health of this creature of ours seriously. “V’chai bahem–v’lo yamutu,” as the Talmud comments on Leviticus 18:5: The Torah is meant to be lived by and not died by. (The interpretation is offered as a proof that we violate almost every prohibition in the Torah to save a human life.) So we approach the question of what to do about Phoebe and the cicadas with the value that her life matters. (The cicadas’ lives matter too, but… priorities. And common sense.)

Further, we’ve approached this question in a way that also asks about what is doable and practical. Can we completely shield Phoebe from the cicadas, just leaving her inside? No, that would harm other parts of her health and wellbeing–and ours! Could we create or buy some kind of robotic device that would walk ahead of us and vacuum up the sidewalk in advance? (Note to the Roomba people: This idea has potential. You heard it here first.) Again: impractical, cost prohibitive. As my teacher Rabbi Yitz Greenberg observes, God’s covenants with the world and the Jewish people are intended to operate on a human scale and pace–in ways that are achievable. So we’re looking for solutions that have some chance of implementation.

The basic motivating impulse here is to find a solution, to literally walk our talk. We espouse and hold dear some extraordinary values–honoring and sanctifying life, enabling the divine presence to be made manifest in the world in every action, every step. So, like our tradition, we take the ethical and practical questions seriously. That, in a nutshell, is halakha–often translated as “Jewish law,” but perhaps more fully and even literally rendered as “the way Jews walk in the world” (halakha which comes from the same root as the verb lalekhet, to walk).

A couple weeks ago I read a poem in The New Yorker by Ocean Vuong called “Theology.” It contained this line:

I thought gravity was a law, which meant it could be broken.
But it’s more like a language. Once you’re in it
you never get out.

Vuong’s words have been ringing in my ears since because I think they capture this challenge of understanding halakha so well: While at one point in my life I related to it as law–imposed by some external force, operating under the threat of punishment–as I’ve gotten older it has become much more like a language, operating in a more fluid zone of culture, explicitly and implicitly negotiated meanings, intertextualities and connections. It still has to make sense–languages have to make sense–but as language, halakha has a great deal more expressiveness and suppleness than when it’s understood only as law.

Concluding the halakha-rich book of Leviticus, Parashat Bechukotai begins with the words “If you walk in my ways.” Commenting a little later on the verse, “I will walk in your midst: I will be your God, and you shall be My people” (Lev. 26:12), Rashi picks up on the linguistic connection to the primordial image of the Divine walking in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8) and interprets: “I will, as it were, walk with you in the Garden of Eden as though I were one of you, and you will not be frightened of Me.”

That’s the goal and the promise of our halakha: If we can act in the world in ways that are mindful, aligned with the covenantal values of the Torah, compassionate, present, loving, and attentive, then we reveal the Divine presence that is here walking with us. We discover that this world can indeed–even now–be a redeemed Eden. That’s what it’s really all about, even and perhaps especially when the obstacles to sensing that possibility are greatest.

Josh’s Friday Reflections
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The last couple of weeks have been one of those moments when I pinch myself and ask, “Really, I get paid to do this?!” Because over the last two weeks, I have spent a total of eight days on IJS retreats–first for our Sustainers Circle and, this week, for our staff, both of which are extraordinary groups of people. My days have been filled with reflection, thoughtful conversation, study, and a lot of laughter–all things that I dreamed 25 years ago would describe the work I would do as a rabbi. It’s an extraordinary blessing and privilege.

We held both of these retreats at Trinity Retreat Center, a beautiful place on the Housatonic River in northwest Connecticut. IJS has a long history with Trinity–it’s among the retreat centers we regularly go to. The staff is extraordinarily welcoming. They eagerly accommodate our requests about kashrut and Shabbat. On a retreat last October for our Kol Dodi program, the Episcopal priest at the center, Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, welcomed our group and spoke movingly about how important it was for him to welcome us because of the pain he knew our people were in after the massacre of October 7. There were tears.

During our staff retreat this week, my colleague Rabbi Myriam Klotz led a session on sacred listening, an area we’re really developing at IJS. The essence of sacred listening is practicing a form of mindfulness that’s relational: sitting with another person with presence and intention, giving them your full attention, being aware of what arises within you as you listen and making the mindful choice to continue listening non-judgmentally. In the session Myriam led, we each sat with a partner for three minutes and listened to them speak. At the end of those three minutes, we summarized–without editorializing–what they said. For the listener, it’s hard work to listen in that way without forming judgments or thinking about what to say. For the speaker, it’s usually a gift to feel heard and acknowledged. (Important side note: I’ll actually be teaching an online course on sacred listening with Myriam and Rebecca Schisler beginning June 23. You can register here.)

The speaking prompt in this exercise was Ayeka, Where are you?, in a spiritual sense. When it was my turn, what I found arising for me were questions about at-homeness. I noticed the feeling I experienced of being at Trinity: an exceptionally welcome guest–but also not at home in quite the same way I do on retreats at Jewish retreat centers. I perceived sensations having to do with translating our language and practices–acts which I find both exciting and also, in some cases, a little tiring. I observed how subtle these sensations could be: not categorical statements, but little movements in my mind, heart, and body. And I found those sensations pinging deeper registers of at-homeness and guestness in my life, most significantly in relation to Israel and America, the tonic and dominant chords of this key in my life.

“When you enter the land,” God tells the Israelites at the beginning of parashat Behar, “the land shall observe a Shabbat to YHVH.” From there the Torah elaborates the practice of the Sabbatical year, the paradigmatic case of a mitzvah that is observed only in the land of Israel. While the agricultural and economic practices associated with the Sabbatical year have deep spiritual meaning, and have even been adopted voluntarily by some Diaspora Jewish farmers in recent years, in halakhic or Jewish legal terms, they do not apply outside the Holy Land.

It’s one of the phenomenal features of Jewish life: We have significant practices that, for the centuries and millennia of our Diaspora experience, a majority of Jews experienced only in their imaginations, not their bodies. And it’s one of the amazing features of the Jewish people’s mass return to the land of Israel in recent centuries: the widespread reclamation and renewal of these ancient practices, not only in our imaginations, but in our bodies and on the earth.

Teaching in the eastern Europe of the 18th century, the Ba’al Shem Tov interpreted this opening line of Behar as referring not (only) to the Land of Israel, but to the body: “‘The land shall keep a Sabbath to YHVH:’ This means to bring rest and relaxation to the land, which is the body, and to rejoice over physical pleasures. Through this, the soul can rejoice spiritually. This is ‘a Sabbath to YHVH,’ for you need both these aspects on the Shabbat.” (Toldot Yaakov Yosef Behar) As happens frequently in Hasidut, the Besh”t here excavates the spiritual dimensions of the mitzvah alongside its physical ones. The Shabbat of the land becomes not only a legal or physical requirement for the land, but an invitation to a spiritual consciousness we can cultivate all the time.

Which brings us back to the question of at-homeness and guestness. Our spirituality is our capacity to experience being deeply, profoundly at home in the world. That is tied up with large, tectonic questions of place and culture: the ability not to have to translate; the sense that we are really in our place and with our people. But/and, that at-homeness takes place on a very intimate level at the same time, in the space of our minds, hearts, and bodies. Shabbat and the Sabbatical Year–our built-in Jewish retreats–are our regular invitations to sense that we and the Holy One are not guests in the world, but are, together, deeply and profoundly at home with one another.

Josh’s Friday Reflections
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Every Friday morning, IJS President & CEO Rabbi Josh Feigelson shares a short reflection on the week in preparation for Shabbat. Josh weaves together personal experience, mindfulness practice, and teachings from the weekly Torah portion in a uniquely accessible and powerful way. Sign up to receive Josh’s weekly reflections here.

I want to tell you about my amazing Shabbat last week.

It came on the third day of a five-day retreat we held for about 25 members of our IJS Sustainers Circle, a group composed of former board members, alumni of our Kivvun program, and major donors. The retreat was full of meditation sessions, rich and musical prayer tefilah (prayer), mindful movement, mindful eating, and a lot of love.

But Shabbos took it to a whole different level.

And there was one moment that stood out in particular. It came as we were starting Shabbat dinner on Friday night. My dear friend and colleague, Rabbi Miriam Margles, reminded us all that this time is traditionally one of bracha, blessing. In my own home, as in many others, it’s a moment when parents offer blessings to their children. So Miriam invited us into this opportunity for blessing, but–this was an IJS retreat, so, of course–to do it perhaps a little differently than we usually do. We were to turn to a neighbor and look into their face. Each of us would share, honestly and from the heart, the blessing we needed just then. Our partner would listen attentively and then offer that blessing to us.

My partner was another member of the retreat faculty, the wonderful Rabbi Jonathan Kligler. And in this moment, I was able to look at Jonathan, be held by the embrace of his face, and share with him very openly the bracha I felt like I needed in that moment. Jonathan took my hand and offered exactly that blessing. And then I did the same for him. I know we weren’t the only pair in which tears were shed. It was a deeply moving experience.

It is always a profound thing to be seen and heard deeply like this. Being fully present with someone else, offering and receiving blessing–it felt as if, for that moment, we were like the two keruvim, the two cherubs that faced one another atop the holy ark. The Divine presence was revealed within us and between us. And that was happening all around the room.

But what also enabled that moment to be so meaningful was its ritual element: It took place at Shabbos dinner. It drew power from our mutual submission to and upholding of the rhythms of Jewish time. While in theory this showing up for one another, this “presencing,” could have taken place anywhere and anytime, in practice our ritual made it both more accessible and richer than it would have been otherwise.

Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21-24) details the holiday calendar: “These are My fixed times, the fixed times of YHVH, that you shall proclaim as sacred occasions” (Lev. 23:2). Beginning with Shabbat, the parasha goes on to enumerate the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, the counting of the Omer, and the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Opening his commentary on this passage, the 13th century Spanish commentator Ramban (Nachmanides) observes that, while much of Leviticus is directed specifically to the priests, this passage is meant to be shared with the entire people. Why? “The priests have no greater duties with regard to the festivals than the Israelites, therefore the Holy One did not admonish Aaron and his sons in this section, but the children of Israel, a term which includes all of them together.” All of us, Ramban suggests, regardless of background or station, have a share in these times; all of us can access them; all of us uphold them. These are not special rites of professional ritualists; they are the inheritance and responsibility of the entire Jewish people.

There’s no rocket science in that, of course, just a rearticulation of a basic truth. The challenge–for me, anyway, and perhaps for you too–is that they can become ritualized and, in the process, lose some of what the ritual is supposed to help us do. Our moadim, our sacred times, are invitations to deeper awareness, a richer encounter with the Divine within ourselves and one another. Every week on Shabbat, and then throughout the other special moments of our holiday calendar, we can step into an opportunity for blessing, pause and rest through which we recognize the presence of the Shechina within, between, and among us. What an incredible gift, what an astonishing inheritance.

Josh’s Friday Reflections
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Every Friday morning, IJS President & CEO Rabbi Josh Feigelson shares a short reflection on the week in preparation for Shabbat. Josh weaves together personal experience, mindfulness practice, and teachings from the weekly Torah portion in a uniquely accessible and powerful way. Sign up to receive Josh’s weekly reflections here.

My sons never knew their maternal grandfather. I never knew him either. He died of a brain tumor while my wife Natalie was in college, which was before we met.

By all accounts Peter was a wonderful person. He loved chess and theater and active life outdoors. He loved his daughters and, no doubt, would have doted on his grandchildren. He was beloved by his extended family.

While all of that is good in and of itself, what makes it more remarkable is that my father-in-law was born in the Ukrainian forest in 1942 while his parents fought the Nazis in a brigade of Partisans. At one point, as an infant, he was hidden, found by the Germans, and left to die—only to survive miraculously when the soldiers either had compassion or didn’t want to waste a bullet on him. His father took the baby to a non-Jewish farmer and, at gunpoint, made him pledge to care for the child until after the war, which he did.

The family eventually made its way to Canada, where Peter grew up and made a life and met Natalie’s mother, whose parents found refuge in Israel following their own stories of imprisonment by the Russians during the war before eventually moving to Canada as well. Today Natalie, among other things, helps run a graduate degree program in Israel education. (Not to be outdone, her younger sister is currently the Canadian ambassador to Croatia, which during World War II was a puppet state of Nazi Germany and a collaborator in the Holocaust. Take that, Hitler.)

My own ancestors immigrated to the United States before the Shoah, and thus it was not the presence in my life growing up that it was for Natalie (and for many Canadian Jews of her generation). Israel, however, was and has remained a major part of my family’s story: my parents lived for a year in Israel with my older brothers before I was born; my eldest brother made aliyah after college and has been blessed with five children and two grandchildren; and I lived there for two years as a student, the latter of which was with Natalie when our eldest son was an infant.

This week, which began with Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and concludes with Yom HaZikaron (Israeli Memorial Day) and Yom HaAtzmaut (Israel Independence Day), is thus an important and meaningful one in my own life and that of my family, if for no other reason than that our own personal stories are so wrapped up in their larger narratives. A hair’s breadth, a single bullet, separates the existence of my wife and my three children from non-existence. For us, that miracle is on a level of the action of Pharaoh’s daughter to save the baby Moses from the Nile. One who saves one life saves, creates, sustains an entire world, entire worlds: a miracle.

I thus frequently wonder about that moment, when the Nazi soldiers stood over my father-in-law’s infant body: What was going through their minds? Was there an argument? Did some tiny modicum of compassion swim its way from their hearts to their heads to their hands? Did a still, small voice of the Divine speak into their ears and lead them to lower their weapons? I want to believe that some element of rachamim, some kind of mercy, was present in that instant—rachamim which is rechem, the womb in which life in all its manifold possibilities gestates and grows, even in a speck of an instant in the Ukrainian forest.

I do not have a political point with this message. If this story needs a point (does it?), perhaps it’s no more and no less than a call to compassion. As my wonderful French-Israeli colleague Rabba Mira Weil shared on our Daily Sit on Yom HaShoah this week (see especially her comments after the sit), compassion has been hard for many to feel in the wake of October 7 and the painful, devastating months that have followed. And it feels like so many hearts are only getting harder, the polarities growing stronger, the shouting getting louder, the space for rachamim—between Jews and other Jews, between Jews and Palestinians, between Jews and the rest of the world—shrinking and shrinking.

Parashat Kedoshim (Leviticus 19:1-20:27) that we read this week is the Torah’s clarion call to holiness, and so much of it is centered on awareness of and compassion for those who lack power and agency: not putting a stumbling block before the blind; not oppressing the stranger; leaving the gleanings of the harvest on the ground for the poor to take. These are all, in their way, expressions of rachamim, gestures of compassion that are the wellspring of holiness. In the words of a contemporary commentary on the Torah portion’s most famous line: “Love your neighbor as yourself—even when your neighbor isn’t like yourself” (which of course invites the question: who is really like or unlike any of us, and how do we make that judgment?).

This is the essence of a life of holiness, a life of Torah, and I would suggest it applies even when it’s hard—even, that is, when we need to have compassion on ourselves for not mustering as much compassion as we feel like we should. That’s where the Torah asks us to dig deeper, to try a little more, to yes treat ourselves with compassion—but also to not let ourselves off the hook from seeking to be compassionate. As Moses’s story illustrates, as my own family’s story illustrates, the entire world depends on it.

Josh’s Friday Reflections
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Every Friday morning, IJS President & CEO Rabbi Josh Feigelson shares a short reflection on the week in preparation for Shabbat. Josh weaves together personal experience, mindfulness practice, and teachings from the weekly Torah portion in a uniquely accessible and powerful way. Sign up to receive Josh’s weekly reflections here.

In recent days I feel like I’ve been living in a world suffused with the word camp. The encampments on college campuses, which are themselves reflective of ideological and political camps, have occupied our collective attention. As the parent of one student in college and another about to graduate high school, I have been following events with concern. As a scholar of the history of Jews and universities, I have been following them with keen interest. As an American Jew, I have been following them with a not inconsiderable dose of anxiety and worry.

Yet, in what I’m choosing to believe is a not coincidental twist, the drama on so many campuses played out while my family and I were at a different kind of camp, namely the annual Passover experience at Camp Ramah in Ojai, California. For ten days, from the day before the holiday to the morning after it concluded, we ate and talked, prayed and sang, celebrated and studied with a wonderful group of nearly 200 Jews young and old in the sunny, warm, and breathtakingly beautiful setting of the mountains north of Ventura. In the spirit of Passover, I felt like I was liberating myself from email, social media, and news feeds as I reconnected with family, friends, the Jewish people, the natural world, and the Creator. It was an incredible blessing. (Picture is of my two younger sons overlooking Lake Casitas.)

Still, many of the sessions that I and other faculty members taught inevitably focused on the questions of the day: In Israel and Gaza, of course, but also the college campuses which have become so central to American Jewish life, and the more familiar terrain of our communities and our own minds and hearts. In particular, a question that seemed to pervade the whole week was some version of, How can we stay sane in this world that is enduring so much suffering? And how can we be mindful in the face of this constant firehose of information–some of which is true, much of which is false, and the totality of which is overwhelming?

Those questions offered me an opportunity to talk about the Jewish mindfulness practices I use in my own life to try to help, which include meditation, intentional consumption of media, Tikkun Middot practice when it comes to social media posting, setting app limits, and meeting sensations of judgment with curiosity rather than conviction (“Be curious, not furious,” as one participant put it). Our practices are designed for moments like these. They can help us sustain the habits of the heart we need to live and participate wisely and mindfully as members of a diverse democracy.

Because this year is a leap year on the Jewish calendar, we encounter the somewhat unusual situation in which the Torah portion for this week that immediately follows Passover is Acharei Mot, which is about Yom Kippur. We have barely put away the matzah and our attention is turned toward the opposite end of the year and our people’s other most important holiday.

The Torah describes Yom Kippur as a “Shabbat Shabbaton,” a day of complete rest (Lev. 16:31). Commenting on this verse, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner observes that the aim of the restrictions of Yom Kippur is to help us cultivate a profound sense of yishuv hada’at, a settled and clear mind, which is the essence of Shabbat. When we can do so, he writes, the flow (shefa) of the Holy One can fill us completely, without any limitation. We can be fully present–and can be vessels for the Divine Presence.

Of course, Yom Kippur represents this dynamic at its peak–a day on which we can be particularly and especially suffused with the presence of the Holy One. Yet the kind of presence and awareness–the yishuv hada’at, the settled and clear mind at its core–is available to us every week on Shabbat, and in every moment in the form of “Shabbat Mind.” It is reflected and embodied in speech and action that is full and mindful, not empty and reactive.

These qualities, of mindful presence and expansiveness, are also related to the central theme of Passover, the exodus from Egypt–the place of narrowness and constriction. Which suggests that, though these holidays are on opposite ends of our calendar, they are profoundly connected. Political freedom is not complete without spiritual freedom, and spiritual freedom is not whole without political freedom. As we continue to witness and engage in discussion, debate, and activism centered on political camps and encampments, my humble observation is that such work, wherever we stand in relation to it, will only benefit from greater yishuv hada’at–the spiritual practices of mind and heart that weave together our larger camp that exists within, between, and among us.

Josh’s Friday Reflections
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Every Friday morning, IJS President & CEO Rabbi Josh Feigelson shares a short reflection on the week in preparation for Shabbat. Josh weaves together personal experience, mindfulness practice, and teachings from the weekly Torah portion in a uniquely accessible and powerful way. Sign up to receive Josh’s weekly reflections here.