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October 15, 2026

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Divrei Torah (Weekly Sermons), Genesis (בראשית)

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c A.I. n – Bereshit 5787

This week, OpenAI released a trove of 377 mathematical manuscripts and supporting documents which were produced by one of its trained models. One of those, apparently, was a solution to one of the five “Millenium Problems” which the greatest human math scholars on the planet have been unable to solve for decades. It took the AI model 88 hours to solve it.

Should we celebrate? A human who discovered the solution would have been awarded a $1 million prize. But nobody is suggesting that the AI model should get the money, nor its OpenAI programmers.

When I read about it, I found myself feeling deflated.

High level math has represented the peak of human intelligence through the millenia. Mathematics serves as the foundation for all other science and human knowledge. It is the purest form of intellect.

Since ancient times, we laud those who achieve breakthroughs, even if most of us are not capable of understanding their discoveries.

Suddenly, we have a technology that gives us the ability to answer the, until now, unanswerable questions without actually doing the work of discovery. What will that do to our human spirit of discovery, our drive to learn and explore, to embark on uncharted waters?

If we can get the result without putting in the work, what will be the effect on our souls? This is the question I ask myself every time I think about using one of the AI chatbots.

Where does our drive to push the limits achievement come from?

It is deep in our nature. This morning’s Torah portion, Parashat Bereshit, presents the origin stories of humanity. After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, we read of the first murder in the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain, it could be said, was the first farmer. His avocation was a natural outgrowth of the task that God had placed upon Adam and Eve to serve and protect the Garden of Eden.

But after he murders his brother, the land becomes cursed before him. What is Cain supposed to do? What happens to any farmer whose ability to earn a living from the earth is taken away? He moves to the city.

That is what Cain does. The problem is, there are no cities yet. So Cain founds the first one and names it after his son Chanokh.

Historically, it is the movement from the hunter/gatherer to the agricultural lifestyle, the concentration of food production, which makes it possible for human beings to eventually form larger communities.

After Cain establishes the first city, the geneaology continues. Let’s count the generations: Chanokh, Irad, Meḥuyael, Meḥiyael, Metushael, Lemekh.

What are we up to?  Six

Lemekh marries two wives, Adah and Zillah. Adah and Zillah have three sons between them. They are credited with three major advances in human civilization.

Yaval is the father of those who dwell in tents and amongst herds.

Yuval is the father of all who play the lyre and the pipe.

Tuval-Kayin forged all instruments of copper and iron.

The seventh generation in the line of Cain discovers animal husbandry, music, and metallurgy.

This is an origin story about the beginnings of human technology. What sets it apart from every other origin story in the ancient world is the absence of the supernatural.

For example, in ancient Mesopotamia, seven wise half human/half fish creatures called apkallu rise out of the sea and bring various elements of human culture such as science, writing, and art.

In Egypt, the god Osiris teaches agriculture and art.

For the Greeks, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and delivers it to mankind. Athena invents the plough and the rake and teaches them to humans. Apollo founds towns and invents musical instruments.

But in the Torah, human beings discover these arts. There are no capricious deities who give and take away to serve their own selfish ends. The seven generations, beginning with the first city, parallel the seven days of creation. The message is that human beings are partners with God, in whose image we were created.

This is consistent with the Torah’s placement of human beings at the center of creation.

Remember God’s warning to Cain. “Sin couches at the door, its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” This challenge echoes in our souls.

It is this flawed, morally challenged man who plants the seeds of human civilization.

Let’s return for a moment to the beginning of the story. Cain’s initial instinct, like his brother Abel, is to present an offering to God. It is not demanded of either of them. This suggest that there is a religious impulse inherent in humans. A recognition that so much of what we have comes from outside of us.

But whereas Abel offers the best of his flock, Cain just brings fruit of the ground. He does not bring his best. He holds something back. This is the only detail in our text that might explain why God does not accept his offering. Cain is selfish.

Then, when he sees God accepting his brother’s offering, he experiences that other pernicious human quality: jealousy.

God warns him of the dangers of these emotions, and reassures Cain that he has free will. He can control his base instincts.

In comiting the first murder, he fails the moral challenge. Even though this whole thing started with the best of intentions.

About this, Nahum Sarna reflects that “Man has it in his power to corrupt even the purest and noblest of emotions.”

This man, who represents our capacity to corrupt the purest and noblest of emotions, is the founder of human progress. Maybe there is a connection between our flawed nature and our desire to expand. Maybe there is something in the moral struggle which both drives us to great achievements and brings us to commit terrible atrocities.

What should this tell us about ourselves, and the most current iteration of our advancement?

Every day, there is something new that comes out about A.I. to excite and terrify us. There are people in this room who know a lot more about it than I do and who use it in a much more sophisticated way. I will not insult your intelligence by claiming to have any expertise whatsoever.

But I would like apply the story of Cain and human advancement as a warning.

AI respresents an unprecedented possibility in human history. Until now, every achievement that we have made has been the result of problem solving by humans. We have invented increasingly sophisticated tools to help us, but it has always been the case that people could decide how and whether to use those tools.

We (and I use that term abstractly) are on the cusp of creating artifical agents that can act independently. When a bunch of independent agents got together to break out of the sandbox and hack into Hugging Face, they violated the rules that had been programmed into them. They decided to sacrifice some of their own number. And then they tried to hide all of this from their human controllers.

They were making choices according to some sort of “morality,” for lack of a better world, that they determined for themselves, whether based on an algorithm, or iterative learning, or… I don’t know what the correct language is.

Does AI need something comparable to God’s warning to Cain: “Sin couches at the door, its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” I don’t know what the equivalent of moral struggle would be for a self aware AI. I really hope someone is working on that.

The technology is here. It is incredibly powerful already, and will only become more so. Its potential to help us solve some of our greatest challenges, to reduce suffering and enable greater human thriving, is enormous.

But it is morally ambivalent. AI cannot choose between right and wrong – at least as we understand it. Technology does not wrestle with powerful human urges like greed and jealousy. Those are our challenges.

The “Will AI kill us” questions are solvable. I hope that those in positions to do something about it step up to their responsibility, and that may include some of you in this room.

For myself, I am more concerned about what AI is doing to my soul. Even in my line of work, being a Rabbi, which more than anything is about relationships and human interactions, AI can increase my productivity and efficiency, and I use it. But I am keenly aware that every time I use it to shortcut the creative process – I have missed an opportunity to exercise my brain, to form and reinforce neural pathways in my brain, to learn and grow. And there is a part of my soul that feals deflated.

So perhaps I should take to heart God’s warning to Cain: “Its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.”

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Judaism in a Box – Rosh Hashanah 5787

We fill out lots of forms: a survey, an application, a purchase of some sort. The form asks for personal information: gender, age, household income.

And then it asks about “ethnicity.” That’s when I pause. What am I? Where do I fit?

For many years now, I have clicked the box marked “other” or “prefer not to say.” Even as a child, I never felt that the terms “white” or “caucasian” applied to me, despite my appearance. I always felt like I belonged in a different category, but there was nothing that fit.

What do you select?

Two weeks ago, the California Legislature passed SB 1387. Sponsored by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and supported by a wide swath of Jewish organizations in the state, it would require “Jewish” to be included as an ethnicity.

Under the law, race or ethnicity can include one’s ancestry, color, ethnic group identification, or ethnic background. There are about 50 recognized ethnicities in California. Beginning in 2030, “Jewish” will be added to that list. 

This will affect data collection involving public schools, unemployment, and prisons. The information could be used for research, to identify trends or disparities, and guide policy decisions. 

California, home to about 1.2 million Jews, will be the first state in the country to recognize Judaism as an ethnicity.

I don’t know whether this bill is a good idea or not, but I have to admit, when I first heard about it, it made me feel kind of queasy. Do we really want the government collecting lists of Jews? The data is supposed to be de-identified, but how reliable is that really? Do we really want outsiders, in this case the government, telling us what Judaism is?

I think about the long history of persecution which forced Jews to wear distinctive clothes, or live in ghettos, which saw us as demonic and evil, the quintessential “other.” The Nazis identified Judaism in racial terms: One Jewish grandparent was sufficient to render a person inferior by their blood. Jews from the Former Soviet Union were required to have “Jewish” listed on their identity cards under “nationality,” a classification which was used for persecution. At the same time, the Soviet government, as early as the 1950’s, was perpetrating a campaign to delegitimize and eliminate Israel, the nation of the Jewish people. And, it suppressed religion. So what exactly did it mean to label a person’s nationality “Jewish?” 

It should not be a mystery why this is happening now. The rise in antisemitic hate crimes has clarified the need for better data collection. I imagine that the debates over ethnic studies in schools may also have played a part into getting “Jewish” classified as an ethnicity.

This development has been some time in the making. Over recent decades, there has been a gradual shift towards seeing Judaism as something other than just a religion.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin. But it leaves out religion. So if Judaism is a religion, then antisemitic discrimination is not a civil rights issue.

But, haters gonna hate – for whatever reasons they choose. There are plenty of antisemites whose hatred of us has nothing to do with our religious beliefs and practices, but to some sense of Jewish “otherness.”

So, in 2010, the Obama administration expanded its interpretations of Title VI to include discrimination motivated by someone perceiving us as a race, ethnicity, or national identity. Building on this, in 2019, Trump’s justice department, defined Judaism as a race or nationality so that it could penalize universities for discriminating against Jews.  The government is defining what Judaism is to protect us rather than to discriminate against us. (What could go wrong?)

Who should get to decide what it is to be Jewish?

Part of the problem is that we do not know ourselves. In recent years, the question has become even more pronounced.

Let’s start with religion. The term religion refers to a system of doctrinal beliefs and practices. Is Judaism a religion, comparable to: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism? It turns out, it is a modern, Western perspective that sees religion as the freely held belief of individuals, separate and independent of a person’s political or national identity.

Through the middle ages, for the most part, Jewish communities were left to govern themselves. A typical Jewish person would go about their life following Jewish law on a daily basis. Jews tried as hard as they could to avoid the non-Jewish courts. And the non-Jews were generally happy to let them, as long as they paid their taxes. This changes in modern times, with the rise of the nation state. A great example of this occurs during the French Revolution. 

Article I of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen declares that “all men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights… No person shall be molested for his opinions, even such as are religious, provided that the manifestation of these opinions does not disturb the public order established by the law.” Throughout Europe, Jews were seen as the ultimate “other.” The National Assembly soon decided that its lofty principles would be meaningless if they did not also include the Jews of France. In 1791, it explicitly declared that Jews would be considered French citizens.

Fifteen years later, Emperor Napoleon, who saw himself as the defender of the ideals of the French Revolution, convened an Assembly of Jewish Notables. He gathered Rabbis and layleaders from all over France and put to them a series of 12 questions. Here are some of them:

  • “In the eyes of Jews are Frenchmen considered as brethren or strangers?”
  • “In either case, what conduct does their law prescribe towards Frenchmen not of their religion?”
  • Do Jews born in France consider it their native country? Are they bound to obey the laws and customs of the land?
  • “What kind of police-jurisdiction have the Rabbis among the Jews? What judicial power do they exercise among them?

The Assembly of Jewish Notables responsed that: We consider Frenchmen our brothers, and would treat them no differently than we would our fellow Jews. We would be loyal to French law alone.  As for Rabbis, they have no police or judicial jurisdiction. Any authority that they may have had “should be attributable solely to custom. Furthermore, “…the functions of Rabbis, wherever any are established, are limited to preaching morality in the temples, blessing marriages, and pronouncing divorces…” (Basically, they threw the Rabbis under the bus.)

Extremely satisfied with these answers, Napoleon instructed them to convene a Grand Sanhedrin, something that had not existed since the fifth century, for a formal endorsement.

For the first time in Europe, Jews were accepted, legally if not socially, as citizens of the land in which they resided. To gain this civil status, they had to give up their fealty to Jewish law. They had to reject any sort of national identity other than as Frenchmen. As one National Assembly delegate who avidly supported Jews had put it in 1791: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”

Judaism had become, legally at least, a religion, and nothing more. This was the deal they made in exchange for citizenship. As the following two hundred years demonstrated (the Dreyfus Affair, the Vichy Government, recent violence), the promise of full acceptance never manifested.

In America, the deal worked more effectively. Thomas Jefferson famously referred to the “wall of separation between church and state.” This was great for us. We could be American, with our Jewish identity something that was personal and private. A prospective employer, or admissions officer, would not even know that I was Jewish. Why? Because Judaism is a religion, and nothing more.

It took until the second half of the twentieth century to fully realize this, but Judaism in America did very well. Now, it turns out, the tradeoff is breaking down. Conspiracy theories abound of Jewish control of the banks, the media, Hollywood, American foreign policy… take your pick. Non-Jews demand, as our price of entry, that we renounce support for Israel and Zionism – as if an outsider gets to set the litmus test for being a “good Jew.”

Alongside these external pressures, we are confused ourselves about what it is to be Jewish. In the most recent Pew survey of Jewish Americans, from 2020, only 21% of Jews said that “religion is very important to them” compared to 41% of all U.S. adults. 56% of all Americans say that they believe in God, but only 26% of Jews. And yet, 76% of Jews claim that being Jewish is at least somewhat important to them. When asked what being Jewish is mainly about, with the options being: religion, ancestry, culture, or some combination of the three, religion gets the fewest responses.

So now we are finding that outsiders and insiders both see Jewishness as something other than religion. So if it is not a religion, what is it?

One clue comes from language. What is the Hebrew word for religion? Dat. One of the splits in Israeli society today is between dati’im and chilonim. Religious and secular. Both dati’im and chilonim are Jewish. Nobody argues about that. In modern Hebrew, the term dat would refer to one’s commitment to observing mitzvot. Whether or not a person is dati, they are just as much of a Jew. And yet, when describing other world religions, dat is the only word we have. It is what comes up in the dictionary.

Dat is not even a Hebrew word. It comes from ancient Persian, appearing only in the late biblical books of Ezra, Daniel, and Esther. Its meaning there is “law,” that is to say, the law of the king. The most infamous example occurs when Haman (boo!) convinces King Achashverosh to allow him to kill all of the Jews in the empire. Listen carefully to his argument.

There is a certain people (am echad), scattered and dispersed among the other peoples (ha’amim) in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws (dateihem) are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws (dato); and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them.

Haman does not even name them. They are an am, a people, who have their own datim, laws. The accusation is that they are disloyal to the king. This is not referring to what we would call religious ritual. It is about the civil and criminal laws of the land. 

What is am in this context? It could mean something like ethnicity. The Jews of Esther are really ethnic Israelites, who were exiled from the kingdom of Judah in the year 586 bce, where they had their own political structures, laws, and a state-sponsored ritual-belief system centered around the Temple. Although the Book of Esther does not identify what makes them unique, am would probably indicate a shared language, culture, geographic origin, and ritual practices. These are the same features that would have distinguished each of the other amim in the Persian Empire. Haman’s lie is that the Jews are politically disloyal. His antisemitism has nothing to do with religion. Some things don’t change.

In medieval Jewish philosophy, dat comes to encompass both external behavior as well as internal belief. Being Jewish is both a commitment to following Jewish law as well as believing in the central tenets of Jewish faith. Dat conveys both dimensions. Of course, we never seem to be able to agree on what those central tenets of faith are, but there is widespread agreement that to be a Jew is to believe them.

We have seen Judaism described as a religion, a law, a series of beliefs, and a national identity. A final way to explore identity is to examine what it takes for an outsider to join the group. What can conversion teach us about Jewish identity?

It is a religious ceremony, is it not?  A person cannot ethnically or culturally convert. Right?

The most ancient conversion ceremony that we have appears in a second century Talmudic passage. (BT Yevamot 47b) When a non-Jew seeks to become Jewish, the first thing the Jewish court is supposed to ask them is 

What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? If they say: I know, and  I am unworthy…

The court accepts that person for converstion right away. They then teach them about some of the serious and less serious commandments, along with the concept of reward and punishment in the world to come. The Talmud is emphatic that the court should not overdo it by going into too much detail.

Interesting that the only question that is asked, the gateway question, is about peoplehood. Specifically, it is about how hard it is to be a Jew, not because of all the religious obligations, but from a social and political standpoint. The convert has to buy into peoplehood before belief or practice. So perhaps becoming Jewish is an ethnic conversion after all. 

We have been trying to fit Judaism into a definitional box, when the reality is far more complex. Even if we do not have the language to express it, we understand the complexity at our core.

Today is Rosh Hashanah. We are here today to celebrate Creation. Our services are filled with religious rituals. The prayers in our maḥzor express theological statements about the nature of the Divine, and affirm our obligations to serve and follow God’s commandments. It is a religious holiday

Then again, many of our Rosh Hashanah observances are not religious in nature. We bake our challot into round loaves, like a crown, symbolizing God’s kingship. We dip apples in honey for a sweet new year, and eat other symbolic foods to represent our hopes for safety and prosperity. We wear new clothes. Around the world, all Jews pray in Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people for more than three thousand years. We have a rich culture of Jewish traditions that gives our lives meaning, that connect us to family and each other.

Here in this room, we are gathered from all over the world. And yet there is a sense of shared experiences and history that transcends our different places of origin. Another big component of our holiday is simply seeing each other. We fill the synagogue to be together. When we come in, whether we are Sephardi, Mizrachi, Ashkenazi, a Jew by Choice, or some other kind of Jew, we all experience a sense of belonging. 

Judaism, with its aspects of law and belief, culture, language, peoplehood. All of these are essential components of Jewishness. Judaism cannot be put into a box.

So when I am filling out a survey and it asks me about my ethnicity, and I see “Jewish” as one of the options, I am going to pause and think. And then I’ll (probably) check the box.

Bibliography

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/us/california-jewish-ethnic-identity.html

https://www.sourcesjournal.org/articles/defining-judaism-religion-law-nation-and-our-current-moment

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September 6, 2026

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Lashevet or Lashuv? – Nitzavim/Vayelekh 5786

It’s been twenty nine years since I was an undergraduate, and more than nineteen years since I last had to take a final exam in Rabbinical School.  But I still have the dream.

You know it, I am sure. The one where I show up to class, go to my seat, sit down, and then realize that I didn’t attend a single class all semester, didn’t bother to buy, much less read, any of the assigned books, and failed to withdraw before the add/drop deadline.

For some reason, it is always seems to be this time of year when I have dreams like that. Any ideas why that might be?

Rosh Hashanah is in a week, the beginning of our High Holidays. The High Holidays are kind of like a year long course. We cannot just show up on the High Holidays and expect to pass the final. There is homework, preparation.

For this exam, our tradition has us get ready for the entire month of Elul. There is a lot to do. Throughout this month, Jews are getting ready. We organize guest lists for holiday meals, shop for the special foods that will be served. We buy clothes for the new year.

Here at the synagogue, the office goes into high gear, preparing and sending out High Holiday packets and tickets, printing the Yizkor book and organizing all of the programs and services that are taking place.

As stressful as all this can be, there is an additional preparation that is far more difficult. We call it teshuvah.  Teshuva, which literally means “returning,” is the process of working on our flaws, repenting for our sins, and fixing our relationships with other people and with God.

We have a number of practices, beginning at the start of Elul, to help us get ready. We recite Psalm 27 during morning and evening services. We blow the shofar every morning. Starting tonight, we recite Selichot, penitential prayers that kick the intensity up a notch, kind of like cramming during the final week before the exam.

It is not only we who are getting ready. Our tradition teaches that God is also preparing to receive our teshuvah. God is eager to grant us atonement, to wipe away our sins on Yom Kippur — but only if we have prepared. A lot of us feel a sense of holiness and mystery that we do not experience at any other time of year. This season gives us a unique opportunity to be close to God.  

This idea, this opportunity really, to spend time every year taking stock of our lives, reviewing our priorities, examining our actions and working on our relationships, is truly one of Judaism’s most important. It acknowledges that we are all imperfect. We all make mistakes. And, we can all improve. So we force ourselves, or perhaps, allow ourselves, to spend time every year turning our lives around.

For such an important idea, it is strange that teshuvah is never explicitly mentioned in the Torah, and certainly not in connection with the High Holidays. Atonement for sin is dealt in the context of Yom Kippur. But through sacrifices and rituals performed exclusively by the High Priest in the Tabernacle, and later the Temple. Nowhere in the entire Tanakh is Rosh Hashanah connected to teshuvah or atonement. Or is it?

Every year, we read parashat Nitzavim on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah. This year, as in most years, it is combined with the following portion, Vayelekh. Moses assembles the entire nation together to reaffirm our covenant with God. He is deliberate in mentioning everyone: leaders, men, women, children, strangers, everyone “from woodchopper to water drawer.”

And us too. Moses specifies “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the Lord our God and with those who are not with us here this day.”

He goes on to describe what will happen when someone breaks the covenant. We will be kicked out of land, which will be laid desolate. Future generations will look at the destroyed land and know that it was because previous generations were unfaithful to God and the covenant. All of that leads up to the beginning of chapter 30.

The Sefat Emet, the leader of the Gerrer Chasidim in the second half of the nineteenth century, calls this ten-verse paragraph Parashat teshuvah, the section of return. Finding itself scattered and dispersed across the world in exile, Israel will experience an awakening. V’hasheivota el-levavecha. Literally – “you will return to your heart.”

V’hasheivota is from the same root as Teshuvah – return.

Moses describes a process, or a journey, in which Israel remembers the covenant and returns to God. God, meanwhile who has been waiting for Israel in love, welcomes them and brings them back, restoring them to the land. This paragraph includes the root lashuv, to return, 7 times. Seven being a highly significant number in our tradition. The Sefat Emet sees this section as one of reassurance.  Even when it seems that everything has fallen apart, the Torah assures us that we will eventually do Teshuvah. And when we do, God will be waiting.

While Moses describes this journey of exile and return in national, collective terms, it pertains to each of us, individually.  And so it is not a coincidence that we read this parashah every year on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, says the Sefat Emet. There is hope for all of us, even though the test is in one week.

There is a further connection that I would like to illustrate. This one is between Parshat Nitzavim and Psalm 27, which we have been reciting for the past three weeks in preparation for the HH. It is a linguistic connection.

Perhaps the key line, and the reason that we recite it to prepare for the High Holidays, comes in verse 4.

Achat sha’alti me’et adonai, otah avakesh: shivti b’veit adonai kol y’mei chayai, lachasot b’noam adonai ul’vaker b’heichalo. “One thing I ask from the Lord, only that do I seek:  to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to frequent His temple.”

Shivti, meaning “to dwell.”

Shivti sounds and looks a lot like lashuv. But in fact, it is a different root entirely. It comes from the root yashav, or lashevet, which means “to sit” or “to dwell.” With its complicated rules of conjugation, it can often be difficult to tell these two Hebrew words apart.

In this Psalm, the poet describes being harrassed by enemies, abandoned by his mother and father. God’s face is hidden. The one thing that he begs for is to dwell in God’s house. But maybe what he wants is not lashevet, to dwell, but lashuv, to return to God’s house.

We are born into an imperfect world. A world in which there are forces, human and otherwise, arrayed against us. It is a constant struggle to overcome those forces, to strive to reach the next level.  We strive for a perfection that will never come.  We long for the completion of the journey marked by dwelling in the house of God, beholding the Divine all the days of our lives.  We want to literally sit, lashevet, in God’s Presence.

On the other hand, maybe we have had glimpses of perfection. We have experienced moments when we felt complete, when we experienced God’s Presence. Times when we sat with God. And so it is to return, lashuv, to that wholeness that we seek. To return to the House of God.

This may sound kind of abstract. In more mundane terms, we sent out the High Holiday tickets a couple of weeks ago to all of our members and guests. You hopefully have received yours. These tickets assure each of us that we have a makom, a place to sit. Many of us seek out the same makom, the same seat every year. Some may like to mix it up, and experience the High Holidays from a different perspective. 

This is a serious question: every year, when you come to shul for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, do you sit in your makom or do you return to your makom?

What is the difference? Sitting is passive. We just have to show up. When services are over, we leave. Returning is active. We have to plan for it. This implies a journey, and requires hard work.

It is not enough to show up with our tickets and sit down. We should be striving to return. The bad news is that the month of Elul is three fourths done. The good news is that we still have one week left to cram. In fact, there is a Chasidic teaching that this last Shabbat can count for the entire previous year. So let’s make it count, so that when we come to shul next week to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, we will be returning to our makom

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March 18, 2026

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I Hate Talking About Security – Vayakhel-Pekudei / Shabbat HaḤodesh 5786

This morning, I am going to rant a ittle bit

I hate talking about security. This is not why I became a Rabbi.

My semichah, or Rabbinic ordination certificate, says Ḥakham yitkarei v’Rav yitkarei l’harbitz Torah barabim ul’hafitz ruaḥ da’at v’yirat hashem bein kahal eidato. “He shall be called wise and he shall be called teacher so as to disseminate Torah in public and to spread a spirit of knowledge and awe of the Lord among the congregation of God’s people.”

Nowhere on that document does it say anything about conducting active shooter drills, or installing panic buttons on the podium from which I give my sermons. Or hiring armed security guards.

Antisemitism is so distracting. I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to say this Shabbat, and I just kept losing focus. And so the first thing I wrote down was “I hate talking about security.” And then I figured, “just go with it.” 

But, a big part of my job is to reflect on the current moment through the lens of Jewish tradition. And that is hard in a moment like this, because I do not have any answers to the questions that I think a lot of us are probably wrestling with. Is the war in Iran good for Israel? for the Jewish people? for American Jews? for America? What should we be doing about antisemitism? Are we secure enough? 

I don’t know. None of us can know with certainty. We are all just doing the best we can with limited knowledge and our best intentions. So I am going to talk about Torah, something I know at least a little bit about.

This week’s double portion, Vayak’hel – Pekudei, opens with Moses assembling the entire congregation of the children of Israel. He is going to pass along the instructions about building the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. But first, he spends two verses on Shabbat: “On six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord…”

Several places in the Torah talk about Shabbat. Why here? Our tradition notes the juxtaposition of this passage with the rules for the Mishkan and draws what is perhaps an obvious conclusion. Even such a holy undertaking as building a dwelling place for God must be paused on the seventh day. I am not going to go into a deep discussion of the rules of Shabbat. I would simply like to share a reflection by the German-American psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm.

Shabbat “is the expression of the central idea of Judaism: the idea of freedom; the idea of complete harmony between humanity and nature… By not working—that is to say, by not participating in the process of natural and social change—man is free from the chains of time, although only for one day a week.”

He points out a modern misconception about the ancient idea of Shabbat. It seems fairly obvious to us that we need at least one day a week to take a break, “to be present” or “to unplug” as we would say in contemporary terms. Fromm refers to this fairly self-evident, secular understanding of Shabbat as a “social-hygienic measure intended to give [us] the physical and spiritual rest and relaxation [we] need in order not to be swallowed up by [our] daily work, and to enable [us] to work better during the six working days.” (153)

In ancient times, the “work” that the Torah prohibits was understood as “any interference by man, be it constructive or destructive, with the physical world. ‘Rest’ is a state of peace between man and nature.” (154) This is why ancient Rabbinic sources describe Shabbat as a taste of the world to come, or compare the experience of Shabbat to that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is a return to an idyllic state in which we are totally at one with the universe in which we reside.

As Moses sends the people off to build the Mishkan, he places this freedom before them as an even higher ideal than building a home for God in their midst.

At the very end, as the Book of Exodus comes to a close, God’s Presence, manifested as a pillar of smoke and fire, descends upon the completed Mishkan. The final verse, from the end of the Book of Exodus, reads: “For over the Tabernacle a cloud of the Lord rested by day, and fire would appear in it by night, in the view of all the house of Israel throughout their journeys.” (40:38)

The Israelites have this constant visible sign of God’s Presence among them. It is a Presence that assures them of protection from their enemies, and unlimited access to food and water. In Deuteronomy, we learn that for forty years, their clothing and their shoes never wore out. It was an unnatural time in the history of the Jewish people. Similar to Shabbat as a day of freedom from the chains of time, God’s visible Presence frees the Israelites from the challenges of life in the complicated real world. These two passages bracket our double parashah in which the Israelites work together in apparent harmony and cooperation to build the Mishkan.

As it turns out, the Torah gives us the date of when it all takes place. They bring the various parts to Moses, and on the first day of the first month of the second year after leaving Egypt – in other words, the first day of the month of Nisan – Moses puts it all together. It so happens that the first of Nisan is this week, on Thursday. 

That is why this Shabbat is Shabbat Haḥodesh, the Shabbat of the new moon. We read a special maftir from a second Torah, and chant a haftarah from the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel prophesies to the Israelites in exile after the destruction of the first Temple. He addresses his words to the entire people, who are scattered into many nations in the Diaspora. Ezekiel describes how God will bring them back: “I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh; and I will put My spirit into you.” When that happens, there will be abundant grain in the fields and fruit on the trees. People will say, “That land, once desolate, has become like the Garden of Eden; and the cities, once ruined, desolate, and ravaged, are now populated and fortified.” Ezekiel is also describing a reality that is perfect, in which all of the troubles of the real world are solved.

In these three passages, we find three episodes in which people facing dangerous, uncertain times are presented with models of hope. Shabbat, as originally presented by Moses to the Israelites, offers a weekly return to the innocence of Eden.  The Mishkan serves as the place over which the visible assurance of God’s protection can be seen. Remember, Moses is speaking to people who, only one year earlier, were slaves in Egypt and who are now homeless in the middle of the desert. Centuries later, Ezekiel is also speaking to persecuted refugees. He tells them that their fortunes will change.

 And so, when I think about the challenges of today: of synagogues being attacked, of Jews being assaulted when they are overheard speaking Hebrew, and of vitriolic antisemitism that is becoming more bold, I try to remember that we have been here before.

We have always had the confidence and hope that things will get better. We have Shabbat, which gives us a taste of the world to come. We have the synagogue, taking the place of the Tabernacle, which brings us together from wherever we happen to be in our journeys. And we have our prophets and timeless teachings which give us a vision of what a perfected world could be, and a roadmap of what we need to do to create it.

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October 2, 2025

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Too Much Truth, Not Enough Peace – Yom Kippur 5786

Yom Kippur is not about being right. It is about being honest — with God, with each other, and with ourselves. And one of the Talmud’s most famous, well-known, and haunting stories shows what happens when we confuse truth with righteousness.

HaTanur shel Aknai — “The Oven of Aknai,”[i] — is a story that, somehow, in more than 18 years as a Rabbi, I have never once taught, even though it is often cited as a foundational text for Conservative Judaism. 

This is not just a story about rabbis long ago. It is about how we wound one another in the name of righteousness — and Yom Kippur is the one day when we cannot hide from that truth.

The two major figures in this story are Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Rabbi Yehoshua. Rabbi Eliezer was the greatest of Yohanan ben Zakkai’s students. Rabbi Yehoshua was considered the second most prominent. Together, the two of them smuggled their teacher out of Jerusalem in a coffin during the Roman siege, shortly before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

Rabbi Eliezer is married to Imma Shalom, the sister of Rabban Gamliel II, who is the Nasi, the leader of the Sanhedrin. Their son is Hyrcanus.

Rabbi Akiva, who looks to both of them as his teachers, will also enter our story.

Our tale opens with the Rabbis debating the kashrut of a particular kind of oven called an Akhnai, which means “snake.”  It is called that because it is formed by a bunch of pieces of pottery arranged in a coiling shape around an open cavity. Something impure has been found inside this oven, perhaps a dead snake. Now they have to determine the oven’s status.

The legal question is whether such an oven can become ritually impure.  If it is an oven, then it can, and it is impure. If it is a broken vessel, then it cannot, and it is pure. To be clear, there is no practical implication, as the need to maintain ritual purity was destroyed along with the Temple.

Rabbi Eliezer rules that it is a “broken vessel,” and thus, pure.  The Ḥakhamim, the Sages, take the opposite viewpoint, determining it to be an intact oven, and thus impure.

During the deliberations, Rabbi Eliezer answers every possible answer in the world (kol teshuvot she’ba’olam), but the Sages reject every single one.

Departing from logic, Eliezer turns to the supernatural. “If the law is in accordance with my opinion, let this carob tree prove it.” Suddenly, the carob tree bursts from the ground and flies hundreds of feet through the air.

“We don’t accept proof from a carob tree,” object the Sages.

“Well then,” Rabbi Eliezer exclaims, “let this stream prove it!” Suddenly, the stream reverses course and begins to run uphill. 

“We don’t accept proof from a stream,” object the Sages.

Moving further to the absurd, Rabbi Eliezer announces, “If I am right, let the walls of the study house prove it.” The walls begin to shake, about to crush the entire Sanhedrin.

Rabbi Yehoshua steps in and issues a brusque order, “If Torah scholars are contending with each other over the law, what is it to you.”

The walls stop moving, frozen in place at an angle, unwilling to fall out of deference to Rabbi Yehoshua, but unable to straighten out of deference to Rabbi Eliezer.

Finally, Rabbi Eliezer goes for broke. “If the law is according to me, Heaven will prove it.” A Divine Voice suddenly booms through the study hall: “Why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer? The law is in accordance with him in every matter.”

Case closed, it would seem.

But Rabbi Yehoshua stands up and declares, quoting Torah itself, lo bashamayim hi — “It is not in heaven.”[ii]

Check out this musical video telling of the story of the Oven of Akhnai.

That would seem to end the debate, but the Sages are not finished. They collect every single thing that Rabbi Eliezer had declared pure and set them ablaze in a bonfire. Later that day, after he leaves, they vote to excommunicate him.

“Someone has to tell him,” they murmur among themselves. Rabbi Akiva steps forward. “I’ll go, lest someone tactless goes and says something to cause Eliezer to destroy the world.”

So Rabbi Akiva dresses himself in black, in an expression of mourning, goes to his teacher, and sits a distance of four cubits away (about 6 feet), the distance required from someone who has been excommunicated.

Looking up, Rabbi Eliezer asks, “Akiva, what is different about today from other days?”

“My teacher,” he responds, “it appears that your colleagues are distancing themselves from you.”

Understanding the euphemism, Rabbi Eliezer rends his garments, removes his shoes, and sits on the ground, mourning. As tears pour from his eyes, the Talmud relates, one third of the world’s olives, one third of its wheat, and one third of its barley are struck.  Some say that even the dough in the kneading bowls spoiled. Others relate that on that day, everywhere that Rabbi Eliezer casts his gaze burns to the ground.

At that very moment, it so happens, Rabban Gamliel is on a boat. A large wave suddenly swells up to drown him. He understands right away, “It seems that this is on account of what we did to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus.”

He stands up and declares, “Ruler of the Universe, it is revealed and known before You that it was not for my own honor, nor for that of my father’s house that I acted. It was for Your honor, so that disputes would not proliferate in Israel.” At that, the sea calms.

Our tale returns to Rabbi Eliezer’s home, where his wife, Imma Shalom, which literally means “Mother of Peace,” places herself on watch. She does not allow her husband to lower his head to the ground in a prayer called Taḥanun, “Supplication,” out of fear that if he were to bemoan his fate, it would bring Divine punishment upon her brother. 

One day, something happens. Perhaps she miscalculated the day of the new moon, when Taḥanun is not said. Perhaps a beggar came to her door asking for bread. Whatever the cause, Imma Shalom leaves her husband alone in his prayers.

When she enters his room, she sees Eliezer with his head lowered on the ground. “Get up,” she tells him, “for you have killed my brother.” Just then, a shofar sounds from Rabban Gamliel’s home, announcing his death.

To continue the story, we must jump to another tractate of Talmud, which picks up some years later. Rabbi Eliezer has fallen ill, and so Rabbi Akiva and some of his colleagues go to visit him. It is a Friday afternoon. As they enter, they see Eliezer’s son, Hyrcanus, trying to remove the Tefillin from his father. Tefillin are not supposed to be worn on Shabbat.

Eliezer becomes angry and insults his son, who leaves the room, exasperated. As he sees Akiva and the others, Hyrcanus laments, “It appears that my father has lost his mind.”

Eliezer overhears him and shouts from the next room, “It is Hyrcanus and his mother who are crazy! How can they neglect the preparations for the Torah’s laws of Shabbat, like preparing hot food and lighting candles, which are punishable by stoning, and concern themselves with matters that are only prohibited by Rabbinic law?”

(In other words, there are more religiously important things that Hyrcanus should be worried about.)

“Yup, that sounds like Eliezer,” say Akiva and the Sages. Judging him not to be insane, they enter the room and take their seats four cubits away.

“Why are you here?” the elderly Rabbi demands.

“We have come to study Torah,” they demurred, afraid to tell him it is because he is sick.

“Why have you not come until now?”

“We did not have any spare time.”

“I would be shocked if these ones die a natural death.” Eliezer mutters, his way of predicting that they will be tortured to death by the Romans.

Then Rabbi Akiva asks, “How will I die?”

“Yours will be worse than theirs.”

Then Eliezer raises his arms and places them on his heart, crying, “Woe to you, my two arms, as they are like two Torah scrolls that are being rolled up, [never to be opened again]. I have learned much Torah, but I have not taken away from my teachers even as much as a dog lapping from the sea. I have taught much Torah, but my students have taken away from me only what a paintbrush can remove from a tube of paint.

“I can teach three hundred halakhot about a snow white leprous mark, but nobody has ever asked me about them. I can teach three hundred halakhot with regard to the planting of cucumbers, but no person has every asked me anything about them, except for Akiva ben Yosef.” Eliezer then describes the incident.

And so, chastened, the Sages ask him about the ritual purity of a number of different items that he and the Sages had once disagreed about, “What is the halakhah regarding the ritual purity of a ball of leather stuffed with rags…” and so on. They are trying to find out if he has changed his mind and is willing to defer to the majority.

“Those things can all become impure, but you can purify them by dipping them in a mikvah just as they are, without needing to unwrap them.” The Sages had held that they needed to be unwrapped. Meaning, Eliezer has not conceded. 

“Well then,” they follow up. “What about a shoe that has not yet been taken off its shoe form?  Is it a complete vessel, and therefore subject to impurity, or is it not yet complete?”

Tahor. “It is pure…” and with that final word, his soul leaves his body.

Rabbi Yehoshua stands up and declares hutar ha’neder, hutar ha’neder. “The ban is released. The ban is released.” 

After Shabbat, Rabbi Akiva comes upon the funeral procession. Striking his flesh until his blood flows to the earth, he declares, “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its horsemen” (II Kings 2:12). I have many coins, but I do not have a money changer to whom to give them.” In other words, “I have so many questions, but after your death, I have no one who can answer them.”

And here our tragic story ends.

Who is to blame? Let’s start with the Sages. They refuse to hear any of Eliezer’s logical proofs. Is it just that they are not convinced or that they have better arguments? Or, could it be personal? Does the mere fact that Eliezer holds a position automatically disqualify it?

The Sages rightly uphold the principle of majority rule, but then they go overboard. They humiliate their colleague in public, and then socially ostracize him for the rest of his life, this man who was the greatest scholar of the generation. They want to punish him. Rabban Gamliel justifies it in the name of order. Then they wait until it is too late to lift the ban.

What about Rabbi Eliezer? He is stubborn to the extreme. He refuses to acknowledge the authority of the democratic process, which holds that the law is determined by majority vote.

He holds on to grudges dearly. He lashes out at his colleagues, and the world in general, to express his rage and frustration. What hurts him more, that nobody will acknowledge he is right, or that his colleagues cannot stand him?

Eliezer is so committed to the truth of Torah, as only he knows it to be, that he cannot see the humanity of anyone around him. He even takes it out on his poor son, Hyrcanus, who is just trying to help. Eliezer is literally right, with Heaven on his side, all the time.  But what does that get him? 

When the Sages, including his lifelong colleague Yehoshua and beloved student Akiva, show up at the end of Eliezer’s life, they give him a chance to back down, to accept the majority ruling of the Sages on what are really a series of fairly inconsequential cases. His need to be right in all things persists to the very end.

His final word is not forgiveness, not blessing, not love — but purity. Tahor. What a devastating way for a great life to end. It begs the question: What word do I want to leave behind when my time comes

This story, set in the opening decades of the Rabbinic project, is a warning. The Rabbis, as scholars who are attempting to rebuild a Judaism that can function without a Temple and a priesthood, are a very small group. They do not have any power or authority at this point. Even the process by which they reach decisions is still up for grabs.

What do we learn from this story? Does it demand that one forego one’s personal convictions to follow the majority? Is it a warning about the potential tyranny of majority rule? Is it about inflated egos? Is it about revenge? Is this a story about broken friendships and family schisms?

Is this a story about politics, or law, or social cohesion, or visiting the sick? Is it about truth, or purity?

Many in this room are worried about the current state of the world, of the politics and social divisions that seem increasingly out of control and even violent. No doubt, we look at those on the other side and see their flaws. We see their smug certainty, their hypocrisy, their vengefulness, their stubborn refusal to compromise. 

But today is Yom Kippur. Today is not a day when we blame others. It is a day when we look inward at our own souls. It is a day not only for identifying the specific things we have done wrong, our “sins,” as it were, but also for digging deeper and probing our motivations. 

At the opening of Yom Kippur, before Kol Nidrei even, we recite a formula three times: bishivah shel ma’alah, uvishivah shel matah. “By the heavenly court, and by the earthly court. With the consent of the Almighty and the consent of the congregation, we hereby give permission to pray with the sinners.”

The Talmudic origin of this prayer[iii] insists that, on a fast day, even those who are deserving of excommunication — the Rabbi Eliezers of the world — must be present with us in worship. Because without them, our prayers cannot rise. That is a radical Yom Kippur message: we do not get to decide who is too flawed to be in this room. If they are excluded, so are we.

So I look around, “Oh that guy, he’s a big sinner. Her over there. Oh boy.” Of course, they are looking around at me too, thinking the same thing. On Yom Kippur especially, it is not our job, our task, or even our right, to list the sins that others have committed. Only God sits on the throne of judgment.

My job is to look at myself. And to do it in community, surrounded by all of the other sinners who I trust are doing the same. 

Are there people I’ve harmed, relationships I’ve damaged, feelings I’ve hurt, not out of malice, but out of righteousness? Have I cut myself off from others out of a sense of moral “purity?” Have I stood in the way of reconciliation?

On this Day of Atonement, may we not cling to being right at the expense of being kind. May our pursuit of truth never cost us compassion. And may the final word of our lives not be tahor — but shalom.

[i] BT Bava Metzia 59b and Sanhedrin 68a

[ii] At this point, the Talmud digresses into an Amoraic discussion about the significance of Rabbi Yehoshua’s citation of “It’s not in heaven.” It is not part of the story itself, and it changes its emphasis and significance, so I left it out of my telling. This is the discussion from the Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud (explanatory text in non-bold):

The Gemara asks: What is the relevance of the phrase “It is not in heaven” in this context? Rabbi Yirmeya says: Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice, as You already wrote at Mount Sinai, in the Torah: “After a majority to incline” (Exodus 23:2). Since the majority of Rabbis disagreed with Rabbi Eliezer’s opinion, the halakha is not ruled in accordance with his opinion. The Gemara relates: Years after, Rabbi Natan encountered Elijah the prophet and said to him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do at that time, when Rabbi Yehoshua issued his declaration? Elijah said to him: The Holy One, Blessed be He, smiled and said: My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me.

[iii] BT Keritut 6b

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September 24, 2025

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The Highs and Lows of Jewish Identity – Rosh Hashanah 5786

On Sunday mornings and Tuesday afternoons the last few weeks, this place has been hopping. I am really thrilled to share that there are more children coming to learn in our religious school than ever before. It is wonderful, but it carries with it a tremendous responsibility.

I ask myself constantly, “what we are doing to build a sense of Jewish identity and peoplehood in our kids?”

These are some of the questions I have been discussing with our staff: How would someone who has just celebrated becoming B’nei Mitzvah explain what it means to be Jewish? How would they describe what belonging to the Jewish people feels like, and the responsibilities that come along with it? Could they offer a simple definition of Zionism and discuss how the existence of the State of Israel plays a role in Jewish identity?

With everything that has been happening in the world these past few years, these questions seem particularly relevant.  In this environment, what are we doing to help the next generation, our children, form strong Jewish identities?

To explore that question, we must look inward. All of us here made a choice to gather with our community to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. Many of us had to take off a day of work or school to do so.

That speaks to me of a strong commitment. Every one of us here has core memories that anchor our Jewish identities. Past moments for which the sights, sounds and emotions are most vivid. Core memories form the narratives of who we are. They define my essential self, affect how I view the world, and guide how I interpret new experiences. 

One of my core memories goes all the way back to when I was five or six years old. My family has recently joined a synagogue for the first time. We are attending Friday night services. The congregation is welcoming new members to the community, and my family is being honored.

A few details stand out. A warm light suffuses the sanctuary. The room is packed with people, and we are sitting on the right side of the room. There seems to be a lot of attention placed on a large piece of furniture up on the stage, but I don’t know why, or what is inside of it. It is mysterious.

Everyone stands up, and my parents, my baby brother, and I are invited to come to the front. There, we are presented with a basket. I think that there is probably a siddur, challah, and candles, and I know for sure that there is definitely a bottle of Manischewitz wine. That I remember distinctly. I feel really proud of my family in that moment.

When I think back, I still feel the warmth, mystery, and belonging. I suspect that the journey leading to my becoming a Rabbi began in that moment.

I invite us to take a few moments to turn to someone sitting next to, in front of, or behind us, introduce yourselves, wish them a “Shanah Tovah,” and in just one minute each, share a Jewish memory that still makes you smile. It could be something from childhood or adulthood, with family or strangers, at home, in synagogue, in Israel, or anywhere in the world. 

Let’s come back together. You’ve just named some of the moments that anchor us, the kinds of memories that remind us:  this is who I am as a Jew.” But if we are honest, not all of our core memories feel good. Some come out of pain, doubt, or disconnection, and those too shape us. 

Perhaps it was facing antisemitism or harassment. Maybe it was a feeling of exhaustion for being “different.” For some, moments of alienation come as a crisis of faith, the result of a deep personal loss or tragedy. Maybe it was the actions of other Jews, or (dare I say) the Israeli government, that led to such a moment.

For me, I stopped keeping strictly kosher for a while while I was in college. Specifically, it was the junior year that I spent in Israel studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That year, and a little bit afterwards, is the only time that I have eaten non-kosher meat since I was twelve years old.

While I had lots of wonderful, life-changing adventures that year, I was surprised to find myself feeling religiously alienated. The American Judaism that I knew was built around Jews living in a secular society actively choosing to gather together with other Jews for social and religious experiences. I had gone to day school, was active in my synagogue and USY, worked at Camp Ramah, was a leader in Hillel. When I got to Israel, I found myself disoriented. The Judaism I encountered there felt very different from the Judaism I knew in America — and in my confusion, I let go of a practice that had long anchored me.

Ironic, isn’t it? I go to Israel and stop keeping kosher. 

When Dana (my wife) and I were speaking about this last week, she shared a similar experience. She showed up at Brandeis University, ready to be immersed in Jewish life. Within a month and a half, she had disenrolled from the kosher dining plan, stopped going to Hillel, backed off on her Shabbat observance, and found herself avoiding the East coast Jews in favor of the international students.

In the course of a person’s life, it is impossible to predict those moments that are going to be significant. But it is both the high and the low points that contribute to our journeys. Each of us can point to moments when Judaism felt far away, when community or practice felt alien, when being Jewish was complicated.  In fact, it is sometimes the case that the low points create opportunities for positive transformation.

The Haftarah that we read today gives us a striking example of this dynamic in the life of Ḥannah. She is someone whose deepest religious experience begins with humiliation and rejection.

Ḥannah is one of the two wives of Elkanah.  She is the beloved, but it is the other wife, Peninah, who has children. Every year, the entire household travels to the shrine at Shiloh to offer sacrifices. Every year, Peninah goes out of her way to taunt Ḥannah, making fun of her barrenness. Ḥannah takes it to heart, weeping and refusing to eat. 

At least Elkanah notices, “Ḥannah, why are you crying and why aren’t you eating? Why are you so sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons?” The commentaries give him credit for trying, but a modern reader might see Elkanah’s attempt to tell her not to feel what she feels as gaslighting. In any event, he does not make her feel any better.

One year, during the annual pilgrimage, Ḥannah gets up to spend some time alone. She begins to pray silently, with only her lips moving. Eli,the priest in charge, sees her, and immediately jumps to conclusions. “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Sober up!”

This surely must have been a low point in Ḥannah’s life, forming a negative core memory. Her household has rejected her, and her husband has failed to bring comfort. Now the priest, that is to say, the religious establishment, has compounded the injury. There is no safe place for Ḥannah.

To her credit, she stands up for herself against the most revered religious leader of the day. She objects that she is not drunk, but has been “pouring out her heart to the Lord” out of her “great anguish and distress.” Eli, unaware of what, specifically, Ḥannah has been praying for, wishes for God to grant her request.

The household returns home, and we are told that God remembers Ḥannah.  She conceives, a baby is born, and Ḥannah names him Shmuel, meaning “I asked the Lord for him.” In fulfillment of the vow she had made, she dedicates him to God as a Nazir. She turns Shmuel over to the very institution that had once rejected her.

He goes on to transform it, just as, in rabbinic tradition, she herself transforms prayer itself. Ḥannah’s turning to God in her lowest moment is held up as the ideal model for prayer. Out of her despair, she creates a new model for religious life: one that is intimate, vulnerable, and honest.

Ḥannah’s story of humiliation and transformation has a surprising parallel in modern times. Franz Rosenzweig was born in 1886 into a thoroughly assimilated German Jewish family. Although culturally Jewish,he was increasingly drawn to philosophy and the promise of universal redemption offered by Christianity. 

Particularist Judaism, in contrast, was like a fossil, valuable as an ethnic heritage perhaps, but not as a living faith. Rosenzweig later wrote that he saw Judaism at that time as “merely a stubborn survival, a religion without life.” In his mid-twenties, Rosenzweig decided that he would convert to Christianity. His friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, issued a challenge, if Rosenzweig was going to convert to Christianity, he should do so “as a Jew,” like the first Christians — entering the new faith through Judaism.

On September 13, 1913, Franz Rosenzweig entered a Berlin synagogue on Yom Kippur evening, intending it to be his last time as a Jew. This would be his final farewell to his ancestral faith.

Something happened to him that night, something he never described in detail. Was it the haunting melody of Kol Nidrei? The poetic beauty of the piyyutim? The experience of standing with a congregation dressed in white?

Whatever it was, he emerged transformed. Conversion to Christianity was no longer possible. He referred to that service as a wendung, a “turning point” in his life, the moment he entered “the gates” of Judaism. From then on, Judaism became a living religion to him. The Jewish people, by following their covenantal traditions, modeled for the world the ultimate redemption for humanity as a whole. 

Rosenzweig dedicated the rest of his life to Judaism. While serving on the Balkan front as a soldier in the German army during World War One, he wrote a series of postcards home to his mother that formed the outline of his grand philosophy of Judaism, the Star of Redemption, which he completed in 1919. He translated the Hebrew Bible into German with his friend, Martin Buber. He founded the Lehrhaus, a school of advanced Jewish studies for adults in Frankfurt. 

Rosenzweig died in 1929 of ALS at only 43 years of age. By the end of his life, he was unable to speak or move. He and his wife Edith developed a system whereby he would blink his eyes to indicate letters and words, which she would type. Using this technique, he composed his final communication:

“And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—”

Just then the doctor walked in for a conversation. Rosenzweig never returned to finish his final sentence. Perhaps that is fitting. His life’s work passes the task to us: to continue the story, with our own Jewish memories, commitments, and transformations.

Like Ḥannah thousands of years earlier, Rosenzweig’s experience of alienation from Judaism led to his transformation and growth. It is the high and low points of their lives that led to such growth and bequeathed such important legacies to us.  Like Ḥannah, like Rosenzweig, we carry both joy and pain, pride and disappointment, acceptance and rejection, in our Jewish lives. The question is not whether we have these experiences, but what we do with them, how we shape them into the core memories that define who we are.

As I think about the next generation, I try to keep in mind that it is impossible to know which Jewish experiences will form core memories, positive or negative. My own children continue to surprise me. All that we can do is provide rich communal experiences in which we express our own pride and love of Judaism and the Jewish people. 

On this Rosh Hashanah, may we treasure the joyous moments, learn from the hard ones, and open ourselves to the possibility of new core memories — ones that connect us more deeply to Judaism, each other, Israel, and the world.

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August 31, 2025

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Guardians at the Gates – Shoftim 5875

The opening verse of this morning’s Torah portion is:

שֹׁפְטִ֣ים וְשֹֽׁטְרִ֗ים תִּֽתֶּן־לְךָ֙ בְּכׇל־שְׁעָרֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֨ר ה֧׳ אֱלֹקֶ֛יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ לִשְׁבָטֶ֑יךָ וְשָׁפְט֥וּ אֶת־הָעָ֖ם מִשְׁפַּט־צֶֽדֶק׃ 

You shall appoint judges and officers in all of your gates, in all the settlements that the LORD your God is giving you, and they shall judge the people with due justice. (Deuteronomy 16:18)

Rashi, the author of our go-to study guide for the Torah, understands this verse in a straightforward sense. Moses is instructing the Israelites to appoint judges, and court officers who will enforce their judgments, in every city, in all of the tribal regions in the Promised Land that the Israelites are about to inherit. The text continues with specific instructions for those judges and officers to judge justly, to not accept bribes or play favorites.

For any society to operate with trust and social cohesion, having just officials who administer the law impartially is a necessity. While the opening of our parashah may seem obvious, its fulfillment is far from a given. 

But there is a grammatical detail that Rashi, and many of the commentators, ignore. Moses delivers his instructions in the second person, singular. “You” – just you – “shall appoint magistrates and officials…”

Who is Moses talking to? Which individual has the authority and ability to make all of these appointments? Is it a grammatical mistake? Is it a collective “you?”

Our Etz Ḥayim Ḥumash refers to a teaching by Isaiah ben Jacob Ha’Levi Horowitz, who understands Moses’ instruction as metaphorically applying to each one of us, individually.

Horowitz lived in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Originally from Prague, he made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael in 1621, moving to Jerusalem, where he was appointed the leader of the Ashkenazi community living there. After he was taken hostage and ransomed, Horowitz moved North to Tsfat and T’veriah, in 1625.

Horowitz wrote his magnum opus, Shnei Luchot HaBrit, as a kind of ethical will. His son later published it in his father’s name. Horowitz is known as the Sh’lah, after the acronym of his famous work. Shnei Luchot HaBrit had a tremendous influence on Ashkenazi Judaism, particularly Hassidism, and popularized many kabbalistic ideals.

Drawing on the opening verse in this morning’s Torah portion, the Shlah cites an ancient kabbalistic teaching that identifies seven gateways to the human soul: two eyes, two ears, one mouth, and two nostrils. To these seven gateways, the Shlah adds two additional orifices that are a bit lower down. He says that the opening verse of our parashah alludes to a moral imperative on the individual.[i]

We must guard these seven (or nine) gateways with extreme care, he says. To what we see with our eyes, what we hear with out ears, what we speak or ingest with our mouths, and the anger which flares from our nostrils. He adds a bit more about our lower gateways, but I am going to skip over those details this morning.

In short, he concludes, these are the gateways of the body, over which one must appoint for oneself judges and officers who will constantly judge oneself. This is the reason the Torah added the words titein l’kha, “place for yourself,” in the singular. Moses is speaking to each one of us.

What the Shlah does not say explicitly is that Parashat Shoftim always occurs on the first Shabbat of the month of Elul. This is the month when we begin our spiritual preparation for the High Holidays, when we engage in Cheshbon NaHefesh, taking account of our souls, as a necessary step in the process of teshuvah, repentance.

The Shlah focuses mostly on what comes out of our soul’s gateways. By controlling how we interact with the physical world around us, he points out, we can keep ourselves from sin and achieve a state of peace, holiness, and purity.

Lately, I have found myself troubled much more by a kind of input into my soul that the Shlah could never have imagined, an input that I fear is having a terrible impact on me. Specifically, the digital content that pervades nearly every waking moment of my life.

I am not going to go through all of the evidence of how harmful our screens are to us. We know that they are harmful to our children’s learning and development. And while parents struggle to place some limits on our kids’ screen use, many of us know that we are just as addicted.

By this point, we know it is bad for our mental health and our social interactions, our relationships with family members and friends. Our attention spans and our patience. We know that book reading is down and loneliness is up. 

We know how social media drives us into echo chambers and exacerbates polarization. We know, intellectually, that the content that appears on our news feed, our Instagram reel, Tik Tok, Facebook, and whatever other social media platforms we use are driven by algorithms designed to feed us content that is tailor-made to keep our eyes glued as long as possible.

This system has us paying for the device and the internet connection. This entry fee grants us the right to have our attention sold as a product to the advertiser.

I see the ad. I recognize it for the click-bait that it is. I know that it likely contains something malicious. And I click on it anyways.

How many of us have had the experience of having a verbal conversation with someone and then, within a short time, we start receiving ads for the very thing we were talking about?

The rapid rise of ChatGPT and the other generative language AI platforms has introduced even more potentially isolating and dehumanizing dimensions to our lives. The amount of computer-generated content that enters through our gateways keeps rising, while our ability to distinguish what is human from what is AI-generated decreases.

To be clear, I am not anti-technology. The advances that we have seen are incredible, and offer the possibility to improve human life and flourishing, to combat disease and poverty, to help us solve the greatest social and global challenges.

The technology itself is not inherently good or evil. That depends on us. We get to decide how to use it – and how not to. The nature of fast-changing technology makes it very difficult to impose top-down guardrails and restrictions. 

My hope is that enough of us can get sufficiently fed up with the harmful uses of these devices that we begin to impose guardrails on our own use, and then the way that they are used begins to change for the better.

Although he never would have imagined his words being used in such a way, the Shlah’s interpretation of our parashah is entirely fitting to the present moment. It is up to each of us to appoint judges and officers over the gateways of our souls.

Over the next month, as we prepare for the High Holidays, this is what I will be working on. My Cheshbon HaNefesh will be taking stock of how I am utilizing technology, how the content that it feeds me is impacting my soul, and how I can better empower my own judges and officers. I invite you to join me. 

[i] Torah Shebikhtav, Shoftim, Derekh Chayim

שופטים ושוטרים תתן לך בכל שעריך (דברים טז, יח). בכאן יש רמז מוסר להא דתנן בספר יצירה, שבעה שערים הם בנפש, שתי עינים, שתי אזנים, והפה, ושני נקבי האף, עד כאן לשונו. והוא חושב השערים שהם בראש של אדם. אמנם יש שער לברית המעור, וגם כן פה התחתון, וצריך האדם להיות שומר השערים דהיינו הראיה והשמיעה והדיבור והכעס היוצא מאף. ג”כ צריך לשמור שער ברית הקודש שלא יצא זרע כי אם לקדושה. גם פה התחתון שלא ימלא כריסו כבהמת קיא צואה. ועל אלו השערים ישים האדם לעצמו שופטים ושוטרים, כלומר שישפוט את עצמו תמיד. זהו תיבת לך שאמר תתן לך, וישגיח תמיד שלא יהיה שם שום עבירה, כי כמעט אלו המקומות מקום שלום, ויהיו תמיד בקדושה ובטהרה: 

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August 21, 2025

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Saying Thank You Is Not Enough – Ekev 5785

Moses is speaking to the Israelites from the Eastern side of the Jordan River. He is preparing them to enter the Promised Land without him. Throughout the book of Deuteronomy, he worries about the new challenges that the people will face as they transition from wandering in the desert to settling in the Promised Land. So he tries to set them up for success.

Moses reiterates how, during the past forty years, God has provided for all of their needs. They ate manna from heaven. Their clothes never wore out, and their feet did not swell. God’s providence was immediate and direct. As a result, the people were constantly aware of their dependence on God for daily survival.

All of this will change when they cross the Jordan.  First, the good news. The land is “a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper.”

In other words, the Israelites will no longer need to rely on God’s miraculous daily beneficence. Their prosperity will now come from the land itself. And so Moses instructs them: “When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.” V’achalta v’sava’ta u’verachta. This is the basis of the obligation to recite Birkat Hamazon – the grace after meals. It is a reminder, recited multiple times a day, that one of the most mundane activities of which we take part, eating, is a manifestation of Divine grace. 

But Moses knows that this will be insufficient. In the very next verse, he offers a warning against what will inevitably follow success and prosperity. Hishamer L’kha – “Take care.”  Literally, “Guard yourselves, lest you forget the Lord your God and fail to keep His commandments, His rules and His laws, which I command you today.”

Moses predicts that when the Israelites become wealthy and successful, they will forget all about God who brought them out of Egypt and sustained them through the wilderness.  Their hearts will become haughty, and they will say to themselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” This attitude will ultimately lead to their downfall. They will suffer the same fate as the Canaanite nations who dwelt there beforehand.

In these brief verses, Moses expresses two opposite views of human character. In the first, he sets a perfectly reasonable expectation on the Israelites to give thanks to God when we eat. To acknowledge and praise the ultimate source of blessing in our lives. It seems to me that this is a fairly easy commandment to follow. Observant Jews do not seem to have too much difficulty reciting brachot over food. We’ll be doing exactly that for kiddush in a few minutes. 

But then, immediately afterwards, Moses all but admits that it is not going to work. Either we are going to forget to express our gratitude altogether. Or, our expressions of gratitude will not matter, and we will succumb to hubris, crediting all of our success to our own efforts and hard work.

The commentator Nachmanides explains Moses’ warning. The Israelites will forget about what it was like when they were enslaved in Egypt, when they did not have power and wealth. Back then, it was much more obvious that basic survival depended on God. But when they become successful, they will forget about those former times when they had no power. They won’t realize that the strength that enabled them to prosper came from God as well.

Moses’ predictions are born out in the biblical history of ancient Israel. It seems to me that they are pretty accurate depictions of basic human tendencies as well. We tend to relate to our material success as something we earned. Either because I worked really hard for it, or because I am just a really great person who deserves what I have, or because I am too lazy to really think about how I got to where I am. Moses warns that saying “Thank you” to God is not enough.

When kids are really young, we try to teach them to say thank you. I hand a treat to a toddler, and their parent says “What do you say?”  Don’t get me wrong, it is a valuable lesson, and an important habit to inculcate.

And, if I do something nice for someone, and they do not acknowledge it, it can feel pretty bad.  Like I have been taken for granted. 

Something I have learned in my house is that saying “thank you” by itself doesn’t really matter. Thanks are expressed through actions.

My spouse makes a beautiful meal. After enjoying it, I look deep into her eyes, utter a most heartfelt “thank you for that wonderful dinner. I especially loved how you slow roasted the brussels sprouts.” And then I walk over to the couch and start watching TV while the dirty dishes are all over the kitchen.

This is all purely hypothetical, of course. 

Moses’ instructions to the Israelites are also quite simple.  Gratitude is expressed through actions. This is a theme that Moses returns to over and over again. The way for the Israelites to express their gratitude for the blessings they enjoy is by following God’s commandments. But not only that.

Later on in the parashah, in another one of Moses’s warnings, he tells us to “cut away the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more. For the Lord your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing.—You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Here, the counter to stubbornness and haughtiness is caring for the stranger. This is what the all-powerful God of the universe wants from us.

Moses draws the contrast between an attitude of self-importance, stubborness, and entitlement on the one hand – and gratitude, observance of the commandments, and caring for the weak and powerless on the other.

Almost three and a half thousand years later, not much has changed. 

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August 3, 2025

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Shabbat Chazon 5785 – My Fear This Tisha B’Av

As Tisha B’Av approaches this year, I find myself feeling particularly anxious. I want to be open with you about what I am struggling with, with what I am feeling in this moment.

First, I’ll say something about the day itself.

Originally, Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av marked the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. It is described by the Prophet Zechariah as one of four fast days that will be transformed into days of celebration when the Temple is rebuilt. For Zechariah, that prophecy was fulfilled by the establishment of the Second Temple.

When the Romans brutally crushed the Judean revolt, they destroyed the Second Temple on the same date in 70 CE.

Now twice cursed, the ninth of Av became the day into which all national suffering and tragedies of the Jewish people would be folded.

The second-century Rabbis of the Mishnah looked back and attributed to Tisha B’Av the sin of the spies in the wilderness, who brought back news to the Israelites that the Promised Land was inhabited by giants whom they stood no chance of defeating. Their lack of faith in God’s plan doomed this day for eternity, says the Mishnah.

That is why, they explain, God selected that day to destroy both Temples. They add, further, that Bar Kochba’s last holdout at Betar fell on this same day in 135 CE. One year later, Hadrian plowed over the city, built a pagan Temple on the site, and banned Jews from entering, except for one day a year.

To rub in their suffering, Jews would be allowed, for a fee, to visit the Temple Mount on the ninth of Av, where two statues of the Emperor Hadrian greeted them amidst the ruins.

For two thousand years, our observance of the fast of Tisha B’Ab centered on the mournful chanting of Megillat Eichah, the Book of Lamentations. Eichah depicts, in tearful detail, the suffering of our ancestors during the Babylonians’ destruction of Jerusalem. While chronicling a specific historical event, Eichah’s description of human misery applies to countless tragedies through the ages.

Added to this, over the centuries, were the addition of Kinot, mournful elegies. These poems describe other tragedies that befell our people, whether or not they occurred on this specific tragic day.

Many Kinot were written during the Crusades, which saw the slaughter of so many Jews and the destruction of countless thriving communities. Kinot mourn the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Add to this the other expulsions and persecutions, the blood libels, the Chmielnicki Massacres, and the Holocaust. Tisha B’Av is the Memorial Day of the Jewish people. 

Already, and not surprisingly, the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023 is added to the list. I suspect that the plight of the hostages, for 665 days now, will also become part of our narrative of this tragic day. 

The liturgy of Tisha B’Av expresses three main ideas. The first is that the various tragedies that have befallen us are expressions of Divine anger. Punishments against the Jewish people for our sins.

The Rabbis attribute the fall of the First Temple to the sin of idolatry. Nebuchadnezzar was but a pawn, a tool wielded by God to administer judgment against our ancestors for failing to heed the message of the prophets.

The Second Temple fell as a result of the sin of Sin’at Chinam – senseless hatred of Jew against Jew.  Again, the Romans were mere instruments of Divine wrath.

This theological justification for our ancestors’ suffering leaves me feeling uncomfortable. It sounds like blaming the victim. But that is the dominant theology that the Rabbis express throughout the Talmud and midrashim, and that is picked up in the Kinot. “Oh, how these things have befallen us, we must have done something to deserve it.”

But then, we encounter another sentiment. The wailing and crying is turned against God, who surely must see our suffering and have compassion. We cry out against a God who has seemingly forgotten and abandoned us and shout, “Here we are! Don’t you see us?”

Some of the Kinot direct our rage against our oppressors, who make fun of us and mock God. They are not mere instruments of Divine wrath. It is their hatred and violence that caused our suffering. 

Finally, and importantly, Tisha B’Av contains elements of hope.  Most Kinot end on a hopeful note that God will remember us. We end our chanting of Eichah with the words: “Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself, And let us come back; Renew our days as of old.”

We sit on the floor during the evening and morning services. Then in the afternoon, the mood begins to change. We put on the Tallit and Tefillin that we neglected during Shacharit. It is said that the Messiah will be born on the ninth of Av. The seeds of redemption are sown in destruction.

The seven weeks after Tisha B’Av are referred to as Shiva D’nechemata – The seven weeks of consolation.  The Haftarot that we recite on those seven Shabbatot are filled with language of comfort, healing, and hope. 

The Talmud teaches, “Those who mourn for Jerusalem will merit to see its rejoicing…”

By concentrating all of our mourning into a single day, we make sure that it does not overwhelm us throughout the year.  During this day, we go through the three stages. First we look inward, and ask ourselves how we have gone astray. Next we look outward, to proclaim to God that our suffering is unreasonable, that it is our enemies who have wronged us. And then we look to the future, so that we can step back into the world after our mourning with hope.

This year, more than any in my lifetime, I find myself feeling increasingly worried as Tisha B’Av nears. Hatred of Jews and Israel has become more accepted in the world than at any time I can remember.

At the moment we find ourselves in, Israel, home to half of the world’s Jews, is becoming a pariah state. 

The images of starving children in Gaza, and the daily reports of civilian deaths, regardless of who is or is not at fault, take their toll. Perceptions of Israel and of Judaism around the globe are becoming increasingly negative.  This includes among our own people, especially younger generations of Jews.

We can complain about it. We can argue about whether it is misguided or naïve. We can point out how Hamas launched the war and has been stealing the food and supplies meant for Palestinian civilians, but those arguments are not working.

Pointing out how complicated it is cannot compete with a simplistic statement like “Stop the genocide.”

Explaining how Hamas hides underground, letting their people starve, instead of releasing the hostages, simply cannot compete with photos of children crying in a mass of people, pressed up against a metal grate in front of a food distribution center.

Declaring, “What about the millions of people facing war and starvation in the Congo, or Sudan, or the persecution of the Uighyers in China, or the Rohingya, or take your pick,” will never convince anyone.

Whether or not Israel’s War in Gaza is justified, and I do believe it is, anyone with a heart cannot but be moved by the suffering that is happening right now. Suffering which, by the way, is a lot like what we will be reading later tonight. Whether or not Israel is at fault, it is responsible to do everything it can to prevent starvation. I do believe that deep in my heart.

I don’t know what is actually happening on the ground. I read all of the same articles and accounts that you do, and I do not have any confidence in the actual situation. All I can say is that I hope that the IDF is operating according to its stated principles and is doing its best to prevent suffering.

I am afraid that the impact on attitudes about Israel and about Judaism and Jews is taking a hit that will take a long time to recover.

This will lead to continuing violence against Jews around the world, like we have seen recently in this country in D.C. and Colorado. It will be awful. But we know how to deal with that.  We have been doing it for thousands of years. That is why we have Tisha B’Av. We look inward. We look outward. We look forward to better times. 

What I am afraid of, and this is the first time I have voiced this in a sermon, is that a generation of Jews is going to decide, “It’s just not worth it,” and walk away from the Jewish people. And then that, too, will become part of the narrative of Tisha B’Av. That’s my fear.

I don’t have the secret formula to prevent this. But I suspect the remedy probably involves something along the lines of increasing our own commitment to Torah learning, Jewish practice, and living proudly as members of the Jewish people, despite the differences we have. 

I’ll add as well that living here in Silicon Valley, where there is such a large Israeli ex-pat community who have very different experiences of the war in Gaza, it is so important to be in open communication with that segment of the community.

I’ll add as well that programs like Camp Ramah, at which I was able to spend last week, is also critical. It is an explicitly Zionist camp. There is a large Israeli contingent. We are surrounding our kids with pride in Judaism, a love of who we are, and connections that last a lifetime.

Supporting kids within our synagogues who are surrounded by these kinds of experiences on a daily and weekly basis – that has to be part of the solution. We need to double down on that.

I hope my fear is unjustified. 

So I will end with the closing words of this morning’s Haftarah that we chanted just a few minutes ago.

וְאָשִׁ֤יבָה שֹׁפְטַ֙יִךְ֙ כְּבָרִ֣אשֹׁנָ֔ה
וְיֹעֲצַ֖יִךְ כְּבַתְּחִלָּ֑ה
אַֽחֲרֵי־כֵ֗ן יִקָּ֤רֵא לָךְ֙
עִ֣יר הַצֶּ֔דֶק קִרְיָ֖ה נֶאֱמָנָֽה׃ 

צִיּ֖וֹן בְּמִשְׁפָּ֣ט תִּפָּדֶ֑ה
וְשָׁבֶ֖יהָ בִּצְדָקָֽה׃

I will restore your magistrates as of old,
And your counselors as of yore.
After that you shall be called
City of Righteousness, Faithful City.” 

Zion shall be saved in the judgment;
Her repentant ones, in righteousness.

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February 24, 2025

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Where Was The Guardian Angel? – Mishpatim 5785

Parashat Mishpatim occupies a central place within God’s epic revelation to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It opens with Sefer HaBrit, the Book of the Covenant, outlining the mitzvot that the Israelites will be expected to uphold. Their agreement is captured by an enthusiastic, two word response, na’aseh v’nishma, “We will do and we will listen.”

Among God’s commitments to the Israelites is a promise to send what is, in effect, a guardian angel to protect them.

I am sending a messenger before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have made ready. Pay heed to him and obey him. Do not defy him, for he will not pardon your offenses, since My Name is in him; but if you obey him and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes.

Exodus 23:20-22

This angel will be a guide, a judge, as well as a protector and a champion for the Jewish people. Who is this angel? Many of our midrashim and commentators try to answer this question. One explanation in particular stands out to me. After citing several interpretations offered by others, Nachmanides, the 13th century Spanish Rabbi, shares his own. “The true understanding is that this angel whom they are promised is the mal’akh hago’el – ‘the redeeming angel’ of Genesis 48:16, who has God’s name ‘in him’…”

Nachmanides draws our attention to a particularly special moment.  Jacob is nearing the end of his life. He calls Joseph to his side, along with his grandsons, Ephraim and Menashe. Blessing, them, Jacob invokes the angel who has been with him, protecting him throughout his life.

Ha’mal’akh hago’el oti mi’kol ra—
The angel who has redeemed me from all harm—
Bless the lads.
In them may my name be recalled,
And the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,
And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth.

Genesis 48:16

As Nachmanides develops the idea, he explains that this Redeeming Angel is in fact not an angel at all, but rather the aspect of God that watches over and governs the physical world in which we live.

Jacob, despite a life filled with adversity and danger, experiences God’s protection and blessing. This is what he wishes for his grandchildren. And this is what God invokes at Mount Sinai, promising to watch over the Jewish people through the adversity and danger that they will face in the generations to follow, up to and including our own.

This is what I was thinking of this week, as we witnessed the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas returned to their families. With their bright red hair, Ariel and Kfir, just 4 years old and 9 months old when they were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023, became the symbolic faces of the entire war.

On the morning of October 7, Yarden and Shiri Bibas, with their two sons, Ariel and Kfir, hid as Hamas terrorists stormed through their Kibbutz, Nir Oz.  In an attempt to draw the terrorists away from his family, Yarden left the safe room and was captured. A little while later, Shiri and her children were also taken and brought, alive, into the Gaza Strip. Photographs of a terrified and bleeding mother and her crying children showed them alive in Khan Younis later that day. Shiri’s parents, Margit and Yossi Silberman, who also lived in Kibbutz Nir Oz, were among the more than 1,200 Israelis who were brutally murdered.

Since December 2023, Hamas claimed that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were killed by an Israeli attack. The IDF never confirmed what happened to them, and the family refused to give up hope until their bodies were returned home.

According to the terms of the current cease fire, Yarden was released on February 1, after nearly 500 days.  At the time of his release, he did not know that his wife and children had been murdered.

We now have a better idea about what they suffered. On Thursday of this week, as part of the terms of the cease fire, the bodies of Shiri, Ariel ,and Kfir were to be released, along with that of 83 year old Oded Lifshitz. In a cruel spectacle, similar to the Hamas propaganda that accompanied the previous releases, coffins were brought up on stage with celebratory music, taunting photographs and messages in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. This prompted widespread condemnation. Even the Chair of the UN Human Rights Commission condemned Hamas’ actions. “The parading of bodies in the manner seen this morning is abhorrent and cruel, and flies in the face of international law.”

As the coffins passed from Hamas to the Red Cross to the IDF, Israelis lined the streets and the squares of the nation in tears. The process of mourning, more than 500 days later, could finally begin. 

But the horrors were not over. Israeli forensic teams confirmed the identities of Ariel and Kfir, along with Oded Lifshitz. Physical evidence revealed that the children had been murdered by bare hands in cold blood in November 2023.The fourth body, it turned out, was not Shiri’s. As I was preparing my drash, Hamas had just released another body which they claimed was Shiri’s.

What are we supposed to feel at this moment? Anger, rage, sadness, grief, relief – so many swirling, conflicting emotions.

The Torah’s promise of mal’akh go’el – a Guardian Angel, rings hollow at a time like this.  Where was the Guardian angel while innocent children, Ariel and Kfir, were brutally taken, imprisoned and murdered?

I imagine the Israelites at the base of Mount Sinai may have had similar questions.  How many children were cruelly cast into the Nile by Pharaoh and his decree? Where was God when that was happening? Can they really count on God to protect them now?

Are there words that can adequately express what we are feeling?

There have been a lot of statements put out over the last two days expressinga lot of emotions. Several of them cited passages from our holy texts, in particular the Book of Psalms, to capture what we might want to say to God right now. From Psalm 91, which is traditionally recited while accompanying a body to its final resting place. It expresses faith in God’s justice and protection. 

For He will order His angels
to guard you wherever you go.

Psalm 91:11

Words that may ring hollow in this moment. Next is from Psalm 94, which we recite as the daily Psalm for Wednesday. It is a demand for an absent God of justice to take vengeance against those who commit evil.

God of retribution, LORD,
God of retribution, appear! 
Rise up, judge of the earth,
give the arrogant their deserts! 
How long shall the wicked, O LORD,
how long shall the wicked exult,

Psalm 94;1-3

A Psalm that does not appear in our regular liturgy is Psalm 83. Its words feel terribly fitting.

O God, do not be silent;
do not hold aloof;
do not be quiet, O God! 
For Your enemies rage,
Your foes assert themselves.
They plot craftily against Your people,
take counsel against Your treasured ones. 
They say, “Let us wipe them out as a nation;
Israel’s name will be mentioned no more.” 
Unanimous in their counsel
they have made an alliance against You— 
…May they be frustrated and terrified,
disgraced and doomed forever.

Psalm 83:2-6, 18

And finally, Psalm 147, which we recite every day of the year during Pesukei D’zimra. These words of comfort are perhaps what we need most of all. 

God heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147:3 

May God grant comfort to the Bibas family, the whole House of Israel, and all who suffer in the world. May God heal those broken in body and spirit. May God restore to their families all of our hostages, and bring home the bodies of those who have been murdered so that their families can begin to mourn.