All the World’s a Stage: Sukkot 5785

All the World’s a Stage: Sukkot 5785

Oct 15, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Last week I wrote about Yom Kippur as a quintessentially adult holiday. This week we arrive at Sukkot, a holiday very much made for children.
 
Aside from the assembly and decoration of the sukkah itself, which many kids love to do, there’s the basic notion of the sukkah that I find engages children. “You mean we build a hut and eat our meals in it? I have so many questions!” How many walls does it need, and what can they be made out of? How high can it be? How short? What if you can’t fit your whole body inside the sukkah–does it still count? What if you used an elephant for a wall? What counts as a “meal”–can I snack outside the sukkah? What if it rains? What if we built a sukkah on a wagon? Or what if–crazy idea, I know–but what if we built one sukkah on top of another sukkah?!
 
All of these and many more are questions we could imagine children asking–and all of them happen to be actual questions the Talmud takes up. They point up the playfulness of Sukkot: the way we create rules to delineate walls and boundaries and then poke and prod within, around, and perhaps just beyond that perimeter. Without those rules, the sukkah cannot exist. But once we state the basic rules–minimum 3 walls, between 10 handbreadths and 20 cubits high, roof made of organic material that’s no longer attached to the earth, and make it your dwelling place for 7 days–then we’re going to invite all sorts of questions. That’s what children do, and that’s where the adults of the Talmud go too.
 
To the point, one of the joys of my own parenting has been studying tractate Sukkah of the Mishnah with each of my children at around age 7 or 8. In my experience, there is something deliciously approachable for a child of that age in this subject matter. And we went a little further and extended the play by creating little home movies with legos to illustrate the teachings. For your viewing pleasure, here’s my favorite:
The 20th century German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “In being presented as play, what is emerges. It produces and brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn.” He applies this observation to art: “What we experience in a work of art and what invites our attention is how true it is–i.e. to what extent one knows and recognizes something in oneself.” But, as Gadamer shows, the observation applies to any world created through shared acquiescence to the rules of play: a game, a poem, a song, a comedy sketch, a conversation, a Mishnah movie made on an iPhone.
 
And in that sense, of course, building and dwelling in the sukkah invite us to experience something much deeper about what is than we can experience through our regular everyday activity. Most fundamentally, perhaps, there are invitations in the sukkah to reveal for ourselves truths about permanence and impermanence: “All seven days one must make the sukkah their permanent residence and their house their temporary residence” (Sukkah 2:9). What do we experience as permanent, and what as temporary? It doesn’t get more real than that.
 
In this past year, I certainly have been profoundly challenged on that score: to really sense what seemingly permanent dwelling places I have created for myself, and to allow them to dissolve into a new reality–one in which things like borders and social contracts, the language and norms of public life, the weather and the coastline, can’t be taken for  granted. Rather, these things are always being renewed–like our breath, like our lives. Which is no simple matter. It is affirmatively not child’s play.
 
And yet, on the heels of the confrontation with mortality and renewal that is Yom Kippur, here is Sukkot, with its rules and its games, to invite us deeper still. Hevel havalim–hakol havel–Everything is the merest breath, says Kohelet (1:2). After all the play of Sukkot, that perhaps is the essence at which we can arrive. In arriving there, with all the difficulty and loss that arrival entails, we might experience renewal and possibility. May it be so this year.
To Be Carried as a Child: Yom Kippur 5785

To Be Carried as a Child: Yom Kippur 5785

Oct 10, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Years ago, when he was 7 years old, my son Micah couldn’t sleep. (He’s now 19.) After a fitful hour of tossing and turning, he finally came downstairs and lay down on the sofa. And of course he was asleep within seconds. Half an hour later I picked him up to carry him back upstairs to his bed. At age 7, Micah was reaching the point where I could no longer comfortably carry him. But, perhaps sensing precisely that this was likely one of my last opportunities to carry the sleeping child who for the last seven years has been my youngest (his younger brother was about to be born), I made an extra effort to carry him instead of asking him to walk up on his own. We made it to the top of the stairs, and I put him in his bed.

There is something about sleeping children: we look at them and see innocence, we pick them up and feel protective and intimate. I remember moments when my children were babies and toddlers, holding them in a rocking chair, willing myself to remember the feeling of the moment, sensing just how ephemeral it was. To hold a child, to carry a sleeping toddler to bed, is one of the great tender moments of life, overflowing with a feeling of generosity. We sense the holy in such moments.

I find myself thinking about children, and about carrying, on this Yom Kippur.

Being Carried on Yom Kippur

When we think of children and holidays, we usually think of Passover. Of course, Passover is a child-centered holiday, with its games and questions, its special foods and many meals. The youngest child asks the Four Questions; the cleverest child negotiates the best deal for returning the afikomen. Many a Jewish parent has carried a sleeping child from the couch to the bedroom at the end of the seder.

Not so Yom Kippur. Unlike Passover, Yom Kippur is a quintessentially non-child-centered holiday. Parents of young children are challenged to figure out what to do with their kids on Yom Kippur, because Yom Kippur is made for adults: there is no meal, there are no stories, no games, no question-and-answer. Even when the grownups aren’t in shul, fasting makes them low-energy and not particularly available to children. Likewise the substance of Yom Kippur is for grownups. The concept of teshuva can be a hard one for children to connect with. To think about teshuva requires a long view, an ability to be self-reflective, to take in the scope of one’s actions in the past year, and to judge oneself. While children can grasp the idea of being sorry and granting forgiveness, the fullness of the idea of teshuva isn’t something to expect of a 7-year old.

Yet on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our metaphors are frequently parental: k’rachem av al banim, ken terachem aleinu: As a parent has mercy on their children, so may You have mercy on us. Or the many times we say avinu malkeinu, our parent, our sovereign. Or consider Rabbi Akiva’s famous words at the end of the Mishnah in Yoma: “Who purifies you? Your parent in heaven!” This is language unique to the High Holidays. At Pesach we refer to the Divine as God, and ourselves as God’s servants. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, alongside the image of God as sovereign and ruler, the liturgy evokes a different relationship, that of parent and child.

The language of carrying is also central on these days. In our selichot prayers we repeatedly refer to God the way God describes Godself: nosei avon, the one who carries sin. We draw this language from two accounts in the Torah: the Holy One’s forgiveness after the sin of the Golden Calf, and the Divine’s second act of forgiveness after the sin of the spies. In both instances, God refers to Godself as the one who carries sin.

The language of carrying is also evoked in the verse from Micah that we read in our Haftarah Yom Kippur afternoon (appended to the story of Jonah), and in the central sacrificial act of Yom Kippur, the confession of Israel’s sins on the head of the se’ir l’azazel, the scapegoat: “The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place.”

A Lesson From Cain

The midrash reminds us of the earliest episode when this language is used. It comes in the story of Cain. Just after Cain has killed his brother Abel, God famously asks him, “Where is Abel your brother?” Cain responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God tells Cain that his brother’s blood is crying out from the earth, and condemns Cain to be a wander, na v’nad, in the midst of the earth.

But, says the midrash, Cain prays.

Rabbi Eliezer said: See how great is the power of prayer. If it cannot transform everything, it at least transforms half. Cain stood over Abel his brother and killed him. The decree went out against him: “Na v’nad, a wanderer you will be in the earth.” Immediately Cain stood and confessed before the Holy Blessed One, saying, “My sin is too great to carry.” He said, Master of the Universe, you carry the entire world, but my sin you will not carry? Did you not write, ‘[I] bear sin and pass over wrongdoing?’ Forgive my sin, for it is great!” Immediately Cain found mercy before the Holy Blessed One, who took away the Na part of the decree, for it is written, “And he lived in the land of Nod.” From here you learn how great is prayer before the Holy Blessed One. (Deuteronomy Rabbah 8:1)

Cain’s plaintive words in this midrash are striking. Helpless, overcome, he cries out to God: My sin is too great to bear. The burden is too heavy. I can’t carry it. And then he reminds God that the Holy One is the ultimate carrier: the one who is sovel, who bears the burdens of the world; the one who is nosei avon, who carries sin away. Cain does not ask God to carry him: just the opposite, Cain will have to carry himself. But God agrees to carry his sin, to lessen the severity of the decree. Cain will not have to carry the burden of both his own life and the sin he has committed. God grants forgiveness, God carries away Cain’s sin, and his burden is eased.

This is an adult moment. Cain’s forgiveness does not mean he recovers his childlike innocence. The very next verse of the story tells us as much: “And Cain knew his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Hanoch.” Immediately after his forgiveness, Cain finds a place to live, the land of Nod, and engages in the most basic definition of biological maturity, reproduction. He then has a son whose name signifies education. Cain does not become a child again. He becomes an adult, doing adult things, taking adult responsibilities. He finds a place to live. He has a child. He teaches his child. In just a few verses, Cain transforms from the teenager who kills his brother and shirks responsibility into a responsible adult who has children and educates them.

Yet the touchstone for this assumption of adulthood is an ironic twist. In order to become a fully responsible adult, Cain first has to surrender himself to God. He has to let go of the power he thinks he has–the power he has just proven, the power to kill–and acknowledge that in the presence of God, in the presence of ultimate consciousness, he is powerless. In surrendering his power, Cain in effect becomes a small child again: the small child who is powerless, who is utterly dependent. The small child who cannot fight off sleep. The small child who needs us to carry him. This powerless small child is precisely the being that evokes our sympathy, our rachmanus, our tender love.

Cain is not a child, and his moment of returning to a child’s state is not permanent, but temporary. Through this moment of throwing himself on God’s mercy, of acknowledging his powerlessness, Cain is transformed. He is forgiven. He is redeemed. He grows up. By allowing God to carry his sin, and by begging God to carry it, Cain becomes capable of carrying himself.

Yom Kippur: Allowing Ourselves to Be Carried

There’s a famous Christian poem about a person having a dream of walking on the beach, looking back on the footprints of the journey. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, those of God and the person walking. Sometimes there was only one. As the poem famously puts it, “During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

I think sometimes we have too easily resisted this kind of language in Judaism. We’ve been more  fond of intellectual arguments and text-heavy formulations of symbolism and signification. We often tend to over-intellectualize the experience of the High Holidays. In doing so, we can miss the core experience, the basic move that this time is about. It is about allowing ourselves to be carried.

Yom Kippur is about enabling God to forgive us of our sins, those accretions that build up in our adult lives of power and separate us from our Divine essence. The halakhah defines an adult as  a bar da’at, one who has the capacity to know. The old maxim goes that knowledge is power, but it is not simply an aphorism. To know is to be powerful. That’s what it means to be an adult, to have agency and to exercise it. But as the story of Cain poignantly illustrates, our knowledge, our power, the very thing that makes us tzelem elohim, images of the Divine, can be used to dominate, to control, even to kill. That is the inherent dilemma of power. The corruptions that knowledge and power engender, those are our sins.

The great possibility of teshuva on Yom Kippur is to acknowledge those corruptions, and then to allow the Creator to carry them away. It is about returning, for a moment, to being a child–not with a child’s innocence, but with a child’s capacity for surrendering. It is about giving up our illusions of certainty, liberating ourselves from the false trappings of our knowledge and power, and allowing ourselves to be ultimately powerless–on this day, this Shabbat shabbaton.

A few weeks after that night he couldn’t sleep, I took Micah and Jonah to their first night baseball game. Jonah caught a foul ball. Our beloved team (go Tigers!) held off the White Sox. We stayed until the end. When we got home after 11 p.m., Micah threw himself on the couch and began to fall asleep. This time I looked at him and knew that I couldn’t carry him. He was too big now, and I was no weightlifter. I had to rouse him and help him walk up the stairs on his own two feet.

As we experience this Yom Kippur, I pray that we can all find the emotional and spiritual place where we can let ourselves be carried. Where we can stop being adults so fearful of losing power, and remember what it is to be a child who trusts in their parents to carry them.

On Grief and Solace: Rosh Hashanah 5785

On Grief and Solace: Rosh Hashanah 5785

Sep 25, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

About ten years ago, I discovered an album of the poet David Whyte called “Solace: The Art of the Beautiful Question.” At the time I was leading Ask Big Questions, an initiative of Hillel International I had helped to found, and so the title intrigued me. Yet even as I’ve transitioned to new work and new stages of life, listening to this album has become an annual ritual, part of my practice of preparing for the High Holidays. (I wrote about it last Rosh Hashanah too. Like any good work, it repays regular visits.)
 
Whyte explores a lot of terrain over the course of two hours. He reflects on loss and renewal and becoming. He offers beautiful ruminations on pilgrimage. He talks about exile and homecoming. And because Rosh Hashanah encompasses all of these themes (seriously, Rosh Hashanah is a rabbi’s favorite holiday, because you can write a meaningful sermon on just about anything–its lens is so vastly wide), I find listening to this album prompts fresh and deeper reflection year after year.
 
The second part of the recording begins with a series of reflections on grief and solace.  Understandably (I hope), it was this section that really spoke to me as I listened this year. Because we have all done a lot of grieving this year–of lives lost, of realities shattered, of ideas we thought were solid that, perhaps, turned out to be less durable than we assumed. And, perhaps even more challenging, so many of us have not been able to grieve properly, as our worlds and realities are fundamentally unmoored, the possibility of feeling at home strained to the breaking point, as if we’re climbing a staircase without any landings–no rest and no respite. 
 
“Solace,” Whyte writes elsewhere, “is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.” And the most basic gesture of that solace comes not through our minds, but through our bodies. Here is how he describes it at the end of a poem he wrote after losing a close family friend:

 
For this loss I could not speak,
the tongue lay idle in a great darkness,
the heart was strangely open,
the moon had gone,
and it was then
when I said, “He is no longer here”
that the night put its arms around me
and all the white stars turned bitter with grief.
 
To me, the image of the night embracing us in our pain, the stars crying along with us, is beautiful and powerful–and evocative of the sound of the shofar. Or, perhaps more accurately, what I think the shofar can and is meant to help us do. 
 
The Rabbis of the Talmud understood that the middle sounds of the shofar blast–the shevarim or teruah–-are meant to evoke crying. Or, as Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav explains, a broken heart. According to Rebbe Nachman, the word shofar itself is related to hitpa’arut: the confidence and pride of fully living in our humanity as images of the Divine. “On the other side of our self-estrangement, which continually changes its form and voice, we can inhabit a healthy self-confidence that includes all these tones.” This is symbolized, even experienced, in our surrounding the broken blasts with whole ones. When we truly sense the fullness of our grief and open our hearts to the solace the world offers at the same time, “we become whole. This,” he says, “is the essence of Rosh Hashanah.” (Likutei Halakhot, Laws of the New Year 4:5:2–my poetic translation). 
 
Frequently at this time of year I get questions about the theology of Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer that asks, “Who will live and who will die?” and, inevitably, the Holocaust: Where was God? Why didn’t God save the Jews? This year I’m hearing from friends and relatives similar questions about October 7 and the year since. 
 
Here’s my answer, in two parts: a) I don’t know; and/but b) I also have found that looking for that kind of intervening-in-history version of God isn’t all that helpful for me, as I find it leads me to a theological and experiential cul-de-sac. At this point in my life, I have found  other conceptions of divinity that are more helpful. Here is one of them.
 
The Rabbis of the Talmud taught that the Divine presence travels with us into exile and will be with us in redemption (Megillah 29a). The sixteenth-century mystical master, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, elaborates: “Shechinah is the one who is expelled with us, ascending with us and descending with us. She is redeemed with us and exiled with us. She is the one connected to us always, never separated from us under any circumstance. She dwells with us. Our deeds cause her union or separation or mercy. It all comes from us, for she depends on souls” (Ein Yaakov 1:3).
 
Speaking for myself, I experience a strong desire to hear the tekiah of the shofar as a stirring blast to pride and courage–the kind of sound I often associate with national glory and military honor. But/and: that kind of orientation can also lead me towards understandings of the Divine as acting–or not acting–in history, and away from the much more personal, intimate, often painful and challenging kind of heart work that the broken middle notes call us to do. 
 
Each of us relates to that heart work in our own way, at our own pace, in a language that is, at its deepest level, only decipherable to ourselves as the Infinite One. This, too, is an invitation of the shofar: to be in a way that is both before and after the language we can share with others; to live, if only for a long moment, in the expansive silence of a wordless cry. 
 
As the new year enters, I want to bless you, as I hope you will bless me, that through our shared experiences of grief and loss, through our silent witness to one another, we might come to also sense the love and support of the Creator and creation, the divine presence that is always available, the night that puts its arms around us, the whole notes that embrace the broken in the cry of the shofar.
Coming Home (Ki Tavo 5784)

Coming Home (Ki Tavo 5784)

Sep 18, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

My father, may he rest in peace, used to say that there were two vistas, two views on the road, which made him feel like he was coming home. One was driving south on US-23 towards Ann Arbor, where he lived most of his adult life, as the road slopes down towards the Huron River yielding a view of downtown and the University of Michigan. The other was heading east on Highway 1 in Israel, coming up the hill towards Jerusalem.

Though my parents and my older brothers lived for a year in Israel before I was born, and though my Dad visited many other times, that year was the only time he spent extended time living in the country. Yet there was something about driving up that hill that made him feel like he was coming home.

My guess is you likely have some views that evoke similar feelings in you: a landscape on a highway, a smell as you cross a threshold. If my social media feed is any indicator, my Dad was not alone in feeling like arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, much less making that ascent up Highway 1, aroused deep feelings of homecoming–despite the fact that he didn’t actually live there.

Earlier this week, the Israeli religious singer Ishay Ribo played a concert at Madison Square Garden. Tens of thousands attended, with many expressing a feeling of solidarity and strength in being together in the midst of this profoundly difficult year. On the day after the concert, a friend of mine, who is a rabbi living in Israel, shared on Facebook that, as much as he was glad that people went to the concert, if they really cared about Israel they should be going not to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, but making aliyah: “Bring Them Home isn’t just a slogan for the hostages,” he wrote. A lot of Israelis commented on his post, saying that they were grateful he had said what they were thinking. A few pointed out that not everyone has the means to be able to make the move.

To me, what the post most illuminated was the very deep animating tension of the idea of home in Jewish life. “Ki tavo el ha’aretz,” “When you come into the Land,” are the opening words of the Torah portion of Ki Tavo (Deut. 26:1-29:8). The land, of course, is Canaan–the land of Israel. It’s home. And yet, even just those words–“When you come into the land,” and the fact that the name of the land changes from Canaan to Israel, reflect tensions built into the very narrative of Jewish history we tell ourselves: Abraham came from a different land into this one; this people came out of Egypt into this land. It is as though the Torah wants us to be simultaneously at home and not fully at home. Perhaps that’s why it constantly reminds us to be mindful of our experience as strangers in a foreign land.

One of the great and necessary innovations of the ancient Rabbis, which was deepened and amplified by the Hasidic masters, was articulating a way of simultaneously longing for our ancestral homeland and being spiritually at home wherever we are. Ashrei yoshvei veitecha, Happy are those who dwell in Your house (Ps. 145:1), which we say three times a day in the traditional liturgy, can refer both to the beit hamikdash, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, and, simultaneously, to the spot where you are right now as you read this. It is, I believe, not either/or but both/and.

This tension has been the incredible–and incredibly difficult–challenge and invitation of Jewish life and spiritual practice for virtually our entire existence as a people: to sense the Divine presence and long for it; to accept the moment as it is while also seeking to mend and improve it; to be at home and not-at-home, all at the same time. It is the challenge and invitation embodied in the sukkah, the ultimate destination of our spiritual journey of this season. May our practices help us to enter and live within it with strength, wisdom, and compassion.

In God We Trust (Shoftim 5784)

In God We Trust (Shoftim 5784)

Sep 5, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

One of the leadership teacher Stephen Covey’s most famous observations is that “relationships operate at the speed of trust.” It’s a line that has resonated with me for a long time. To me, trust is everything–at work, at home, in life. When I keep my promises, I feel like I’m upholding trust, depositing it in my account; when I fail to do so, I feel like I’m reducing the balance. When I have trust in the account, I can draw on it to ask other people to trust me as we head into uncertain situations; when my balance is low or overdrawn, that’s pretty hard to do.
 
That’s a rather transactional way of putting it, of course. Interpersonal trust isn’t just a mortgage application–it’s much more. Trust and trustworthiness are ultimately things most of us experience in much deeper registers. They touch chords within us that go back to our earliest moments of life: when we learned to trust that a cry would produce someone to hold and feed us, when a parent who left us in the care of someone else kept their promise that they would come back. Violations of trust are perhaps the deepest violations we can experience. 
 
For me, as for many others, the past week was an especially hard one. On Monday morning, our synagogue held services at 7 am–unusually early for a national holiday–so that folks could gather to watch the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. While Hersh is of course just one of the thousands of precious souls violently snuffed out over the past eleven months, for many of us he had become one we felt especially close with. And in my community’s case, that was even truer: Hersh’s aunt, uncle, and grandmother are members of our shul. 
 
Sitting and crying along with hundreds of others in the sanctuary, what became so palpable to me was this sense of the degradation of trust. During his remarks at the funeral, Israeli President Isaac Herzog repeatedly said, “Selicha,” we’re sorry, to Hersh–for failing to protect you, for allowing you to be kidnapped, for not bringing you home safely.  That reflected what has been so devastating for so many Jewish Israelis and so many Jews the world over: the sense since October 7 that the State of Israel, the ultimate Jewish institution, the Jews’ safe haven, profoundly betrayed their trust, our trust. Other arguments about Israel–about its military tactics, about the occupation, about its politics–also test our trust in our conception of the exercise of Jewish power. But for me and many others, this most basic element–the implicit duty of a state to protect and rescue its people–strikes to the most elemental levels of our self-conception. That is one of the things that has made this week, and these last eleven months, so especially hard.
 
Parashat Shoftim (Deut. 16:18-21:9) is all about law, authority, and power. In many ways it is a reflection on the social contract between judges and officials and the people who appoint them, and on the implicit trust upon which that social compact sits. In a midrash on the Torah portion (Devarim Rabbah 5:1), Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel warns that, since the Sages teach that the world stands on judgment, truth, and peace, then “if you distort judgment you destabilize the world, as it is one of its legs.” I believe he is not only speaking in formal terms about corruption or the perversion of justice, but is pointing to something even deeper: the need for officials to maintain the trust of those who authorize them to begin with. When the people sense they can’t trust the judgment of the authorities they have empowered, then the world becomes destabilized. (An issue as true in America or any other country as it is in Israel.)
 
This, it would seem, is part of the motivation behind the ritual described in the closing section of the Torah portion, when a dead body is found on the outskirts of a city and the perpetrator cannot be found. “The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall wash their hands… and they shall make this declaration: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done.'” Why do the authorities need to seek absolution for something that presumably wasn’t their fault? Perhaps because the trust placed in these authorities is so fragile and so sacred–the public needs to know, and the authorities need to reaffirm, that they take seriously their obligations to safety, protection, wellbeing, and peace.
 
None of this is new, of course. The Pew Research Center keeps regular tabs on public trust in government here in the U.S., and the results for most of the last 50 years have been pretty steadily declining. We are divided along political and cultural lines, and we have a hard time believing that those in another camp are operating in good faith (or even agreeing on what constitutes operating in bad faith). All of this is both symptomatic of and contributes to the erosion of trust.
 
As we’ve been exploring on my Soulful Jewish Living podcast in recent weeks, the habits of the heart for living in a democracy are fundamentally spiritual in nature. That heartwork informs both the trust we, the people, invest in our authorities–and the sense of “sacred honor” that must inform those who hold authority as they draw on the people’s trust. There is spiritual work, heart work, to be done by both citizens and officials. All of us, together, are the custodians of that trust, and all of us, together, need to strengthen those spiritual muscles of the heart. 
 
So, as we conclude this awful week and begin the month of Elul, a prayer: May the life and death of Hersh, of the other hostages, of the far too many soldiers and civilians who have died and been injured and orphaned and displaced–may all this suffering serve as a shofar blast to rouse us to awakened hearts, and to a path of healing and renewed trust in one another. 
 
Open Your Hand (Re’eh 5784)

Open Your Hand (Re’eh 5784)

Aug 29, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

There’s a neighborhood grocery store two blocks from my house. It’s called Village Marketplace and, to many of us who reside in Skokie, it’s one of the best things about living here. It’s not a big chain, it’s independently owned, and best of all, I can walk there and back in 5 minutes when we need a dozen eggs.

Occasionally there are folks standing outside Village Market (locals drop the “place” in the name; in our family we refer to it as VMart in an homage to the great Detroit Tigers switch-hitting DH from the early 2010s, Victor Martinez): young women selling Girl Scout cookies or people selling “StreetWise,” the magazine written and produced by homeless people around Chicago.

But in recent years the folks standing outside have more often been migrant families holding cardboard signs asking for donations, a local reminder of a national and global challenge. We can see these migrants, refugees, in what feels like virtually every shopping center parking lot, at major street intersections, outside sporting events.

Like most people, when I’m in my car I drive right past them. But when they’re standing in front of me as I pass the entrance to the grocery store, that’s harder to ignore. Which doesn’t mean I don’t ignore them–it just means that doing so weighs more heavily on my conscience. While I often give them money, just as frequently I don’t have cash, and their cardboard sign doesn’t have a QR code to Venmo them. So I go into the store and exit it with a little aversion of my gaze, my modest attempt to diminish the pain of both internalizing their situation and my own moral self-judgment. (If my Spanish were better, I might ask them what they need from inside and buy it for them.)

Part of the mental story I tell myself during such moments is precisely that these people in front of me are manifestations of much larger systemic problems: our immigration and asylum systems, failed governments in far away places, foreign policy choices, climate change. My inaction toward them thus becomes justifiable: What good does helping one person do in the face of challenges that are many orders of magnitude larger than me or them? It’s like trying to boil the ocean–so I can just go on with my day. Perhaps this resonates with you, too.

There’s an article that’s been circulating on my social media feed this week by a writer named Rachel Cohen. She explores her own attitudes towards volunteering, and thoughtfully places them in the context of larger social trends and ideas of the last 25 years–Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Occupy Wall Street, climate activism. What she concludes is that many of us have been told, and now tell ourselves, that we should focus on systemic solutions, and that emphasizing individual actions is actually a distraction from doing so, i.e. we’re not going to recycle our way out of climate change. Yet Cohen thoughtfully interrogates this set of assumptions, and ultimately suggests that our individual actions–she starts donating blood regularly–are important not only for the actions themselves, but for the well-being and sense of connection they foster within and between us.

Among the commandments that are restated or elaborated in Parashat Re’eh are the laws of the sabbatical year. The Torah here addresses us as both individuals and as a collective, envisioning a society that sees and cares for those on the margins. “If there is a needy person among you, one of your kindred in any of your settlements in the land that YHVH your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kindred. Rather, you must open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the need” (Deut. 15:7-8). Rashi, quoting the midrash, observes: “There are people who painfully deliberate whether they should give or not, therefore Scripture states, ‘you shall not harden your heart’; and there are people who stretch their hand forth but then close it, therefore it is written, ‘you shall not close your hand.'”

I certainly have been that person the Torah is talking about. Perhaps, like me, you’ve had a momentary deliberation about whether to give to the person in need standing in front of you. Perhaps, like me, you can recognize yourself in those brief moments of hesitation Rashi describes. So, first and foremost, I would just say: Let’s listen to the Torah, which plainly understands how our minds and motivations work, and seeks to help us respond to our own inclinations through mindful attention.

Beyond that, I would add that I think it’s helpful to think of the systemic as related to–not necessarily defined by, but related to–a sum of individual actions. “Don’t harden your heart” is clearly connected to the “listening heart” King Solomon asks for at the beginning of his reign, the same listening heart I frequently suggest is what we seek to cultivate as members of democratic societies. The king’s actions are rooted in his heart, and in a democracy all of us are kings–we all hold responsibility for the state of society, whether through our votes or through our actions in front of the neighborhood grocery store.