In the book, D.E.A.R. is an acronym for “drop everything and read.” The book tells the story of young readers who quite literally drop everything and read, each immersing themselves in the celebratory world of books. The book suggests that reading can and should be a celebratory event. You can’t just read when you have time. A real celebration requires ritual and commitment, a time where you are ready to drop everything and read. And that time for me is Shabbat.

That is why I have recently reframed Shabbat as my D.E.A.R. time. A lot has been said of late about unplugging on Shabbat, but that almost feels insufficient. Unplug, sure. But what are we supposed to plug into? I submit that we ought to use Shabbat to plug into books. Books offer an accessible entry point for Jews of all backgrounds to sanctify the Shabbat experience with the world of ideas.

As Jews do, I made this into a bit of a shtick. Every Saturday night, I post to Twitter what I read that Shabbat along with a brief review. Since I began doing this in 2020, I’ve posted books about Shabbtai Sevi, addiction, and Isaac Meyer Wise. There are no specific rules, just a new way to engage with Shabbat.

But I also believe there is a deeper connection between Shabbat and reading. If you pay close attention, the Shabbat liturgy is quite strange. Shabbat is supposed to be a redemptive experience, but over and over again in the Shabbat prayers, we find the theme of destruction. 

In Lecha Dodi, the mystical poem we recite on Friday night likening Shabbat to a bride, we lament the destruction of the Temple. During the special Shabbat additions to the Grace After Meals, we ask for comfort from exile and pray for the rebuilding of the Temple. When we recite Kedushah on Shabbat morning, we cry out, “when will God once again reign in Zion?” This seems out of character with the redemptive nature of Shabbat. Why are we talking about the destruction of the Temple on our day of peak joy?

Shabbat, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel eloquently notes, is our Temple in time. It is the palace we build not with bricks but with minutes. And it is specifically when we occupy this palace in time that we recognize that our palace in space is still absent. 

But aside from noting the absence of the Temple, there is another way to connect to the fullness of the redemptive experience on Shabbat. In Guy Maclean Roger’s phenomenal book, For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews Against Romans, 66-74 CE, a riveting retelling of the story of the destruction of the Temple, the author concludes with a counterintuitive note. After retelling the story of the destruction of the Second Temple, Rogers concludes that the Romans had it all wrong. He writes:

Vespasian and the Romans destroyed God’s sacrificial cult and thought they had defeated the God of Israel. But the emperors were wrong. They had ensured God’s victory … it was rather the sign that God’s bond with his people did not require a Temple.

The destruction of the Temple, however tragic, was a new beginning. It did not destroy the Jewish people as the Romans intended, but changed them from a people whose religious life centered around the sacrificial propitiations of the Temple to one anchored to sacred texts. Our homeland was transformed from a Temple to the Torah. Our homeland became the book itself. 

And it is precisely on Shabbat, when we enjoy our redemptive palace in time and reflect on the absence of our palace in space, that we can still catch a glimpse of that full redemptive experience through the simple act of reading. We can’t enter a physical Temple, but we can carry its essence within our homeland of the book. So each Shabbat I immerse myself in a new book, a new Jewish idea, and somehow try to find a way to embody the full experience of redemption. I drop everything and read over Shabbat and experience a taste of redemption — one page at a time.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on August 6, 2022. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.

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At this moment of intensifying hostility within our communities and devastating levels of violence in our world, this week’s Torah portion offers us glimmers of insight into how we might heal society’s fractures and open a way towards peace: We must stop projecting our shadow on to others, and instead grapple with it for ourselves.  

As the portion opens, Esau is on the march toward his brother Jacob, whom he has not seen since Jacob stole his birthright and ran away, evading responsibility. Jacob gets word that Esau is approaching with 400 men and becomes afraid and distressed. Rashi says the fear is that Esau will kill him, while the distress is that he will have to kill Esau. Either way, this already hostile situation seems likely to end in violence. 

It is easy to imagine Jacob preparing to meet his brother by doubling down on a path of self-interest and plotting a preemptive attack. What’s more difficult to imagine is what he does instead. 

Before meeting his brother, Jacob creates the conditions to first meet himself. Jacob separates himself from all that he has amassed and places it on one side of the Jabbok river where his family is camped. He then crosses back to the other side empty-handed and unescorted. That night, vulnerable and alone, shorn of all that has come to define him, a mysterious figure appears and wrestles with Jacob until dawn. As day breaks, Jacob demands from the figure a blessing. It is then that he is renamed Yisrael — one who has struggled with beings Divine and human and endured. 

According to Jung, this kind of transformative experience of the Divine is “a force … that will only function and express itself where there is a true dialogue between ego-consciousness and the unconscious.” In this light, we can understand the mysterious figure with whom Jacob wrestles as representing the disowned, unacknowledged elements within that he finally brings to consciousness. Jacob emerges from his dark night of the soul humbled, hobbling and blessedly transformed. When dawn breaks and he and Esau finally meet, there is no hostility or violence. Instead, in an act of tender intimacy and relief, the brothers embrace and together they weep. 

We aren’t told how Esau prepares for this encounter, or why he was able to meet Jacob with open arms. We could imagine that he prepared for multiple possibilities, including a hostile encounter. But with its focus on Jacob, the text seems to suggest that the changed contours of the conflict have much to do with the wrestling Jacob did within his own soul. We can infer that without this internal work, this story could have been the beginning of ongoing war, rather than a tender reconciliation. It was only after Jacob engaged in the wrenching, humbling work of grappling with his own shadow that the conflict could resolve.  

The Torah is not meant to be a straightforward guidebook for how to navigate the world. But perhaps Jacob’s wrestling with his shadow can offer us clues towards actualizing the new realities we seek. 

Each one of us has the capacity to do the inner work that changes how conflict unfolds. In this difficult and divisive time, what if we, like Jacob, acknowledged the fear and distress that we feel? What if we risked being “alone,” separated from the beliefs, narratives and identities that have come to define us, allowing for the vulnerability and disorientation that necessarily will arise? What if we wrestle with the difficult questions and challenging truths that come to meet us? Perhaps if we are tenacious enough to stay with the struggle long enough, we, like Jacob, will discover the blessing it contains.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on Dec. 2, 2023. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.

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The first set of three verses of Psalm 126 celebrates the return of the exiles from Babylon to Zion: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.” The second set of three verses prays for the return which has not yet occurred: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord…”

What does the psalm mean when it declares that the returnees were “like those who dream [k’holmim]”? The Bible scholar John Goldingay explains that it may “refer to the experience of a wonderful dream; we were like people waking up after what we took to be a great dream and finding that the dream is reality.” Even if at least some of the exiles had been confident that a return to Zion would one day come, the experience nevertheless overwhelmed them. They, or their parents, had lost everything, and now they were being granted a new beginning.

Some traditional commentators hear the simile somewhat differently. The redemption is so powerful, so sweet and so liberating that it reduces all the woes suffered in exile to a mere fleeting dream. The glory of return makes the tribulations of exile seem as naught. 

But the word holmim, which is usually translated as “those who dream,” can have another meaning as well. It can also mean “those who are returned to health.” Robbing the people of their life force, stripping them of their vitality, the exile — not unlike the slavery in Egypt whose end we celebrate on Passover — was experienced as illness. And now God was returning them to the land, serving as their doctor and healer. As God states in Exodus 15:26, if the people observe God’s laws, God “will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I am your healer.” To return from exile, whether literal or metaphorical, can feel like coming to life again.

We need not choose between the two meanings. Brought home after a crushing exile, the people were as dreamers and as those restored to health and vitality.  But if this is so, then why the second set of three verses?  Why the hope for the future, as if redemption had not yet come?

The return from exile started slowly. Although some exiles returned, many chose not to. And although the return was a source of tremendous inspiration, it still fell far short of the glorious redemption that the prophets had promised. “Seeing some exiles returning, the [psalmist] rejoices and prays for the return of all,” the Bible scholar Richard Clifford has observed. “It is clear from the literature of Second Temple Judaism that many in Israel did not regard the restoration from exile as finished.” In other words, the first half of the psalm expresses exuberant joy over what God has already done; the second half, in turn, prays that God will finish what God has started.

There is a potent spiritual lesson in the fact that the psalmist sings for joy. The redemption is not yet complete. Only some of what he longs for has come to be. And yet he is filled with gratitude. This means that we can have only some of what we want, only part of what we need, only a portion of what we’ve been promised, and still make space for full-hearted and full-throated gratitude. This is arguably also the message of the Dayenu prayer we recited at the seder. Even if God had not done all that God had promised, it would still have been sufficient. 

But there is another lesson too. Biblical faith often lies between memories of what has happened in the past and hopes for what will yet happen in the future. The past is a foretaste and an anticipation of the future. The psalmist looks back on a mini-redemption that God has wrought (bringing some of the exiles back) and looks forward to a more total redemption that God will one day bring (bringing all of the exiles back, restoring the people to a life of full dignity in their land).

As Jews, we live in the space between the first half of the psalm and the second.  As Passover reminds us, the memory of Exodus accompanies and guides us everywhere. But the redemption is not yet complete. As we are reminded each day, we live in a broken world, one suffused with suffering and overrun by cruelty and callousness. So even as we celebrate one redemption, we pray for another.  

Time and again over the course of Passover — and every time we recite Psalm 126 — we express both deep gratitude for the redemption we already have and fervent hope for the one still to come.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on April 16, 2022. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.

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When I started rabbinical school, I got a side job teaching at a local synagogue. While the job was meant to provide experience and extra cash to help with tuition, what it really offered was a break from complex theological discourse and a chance to run around with 9 and 10 year olds. The synagogue was called Kol Ami (“Voice of My People”) and each year of religious school had a curricular theme connected to the notion of peoplehood. Fourth grade’s theme was am sefer — “people of the book.” Somehow, over the course of a year, I needed to teach my students the Torah. 

For each Torah portion, I tried to plan a lesson that fit the text. The kids debated what should have happened when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Story time worked well for the Garden of Eden. Students acted out the ten plagues (frogs were a particular hit) and drew pictures of what they thought the Tabernacle looked like according to the instructions in Exodus.

One of my favorite days was when we read this week’s Torah portion, Yitro, where the Israelites received the Ten Commandments. 

These are ten of the most important rules that Jews are supposed to follow. Some are easy — “don’t murder,” I would assume, is a manageable ask for most — and some are challenging. There are definitely moments when I covet my neighbor’s house, because, well, he has a whole brownstone to himself, and this is Brooklyn. 

As Jews, we have carried these rules with us for thousands of years, and their meaning has shifted as our context has shifted. We are no longer a people wandering on a 40-year journey to a promised land. Nor are we a strictly agricultural people. We don’t have kings and we don’t have a Temple, and many of us live on continents that were unknown to our forebears. And yet, we still have these Ten Commandments. 

So how did I approach The Ten Commandments with my fourth graders? Before cracking open Exodus, I asked each kid to write their 10 most important rules for life. Inevitably, some kids took the task more seriously than others. There was more than one regulation regarding a minimum amount of sugar to be consumed on a daily basis. But the magical thing about fourth graders is that even as they’re young enough to mandate ice cream for breakfast, they’re old enough to think in deep ways about the world beyond themselves. 

After each child wrote a list, we decided upon a shared class list. Then we looked at The Ten Commandments and tried to reconcile the two lists. We ended up with a mix of rules — some taken directly from Torah (“don’t steal” made the cut) and some of their own design (in the face of climate change, “taking care of the earth” edged out “don’t covet”). In engaging the text this way, my students reconstructed it, integrating the values of contemporary society with those of ancient (and modern) Judaism. 

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist Movement, conceived of Jews as existing in two civilizations, religious and secular. Last Monday was Martin Luther King day and the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat. Today is Shabbat and it’s Saturday. Kaplan also saw Judaism, like secular society, as capable of evolution. Professor Mel Scult, a scholar of Kaplan, recently found an entry in one of Kaplan’s diaries in which he described religion this way: “Faith in society as capable of evolving a method of social interaction based on truth, reason, freedom, justice and peace, which method is essential if society is to enable those who belong to it to achieve salvation.”

It isn’t always easy to have faith in society these days, but in reading Rabbi Kaplan’s words I found myself moved to read the Ten Commandments and reconstruct them myself, even without my fourth graders.

1. I am the Lord your God (Give your heart to what matters)
2. Don’t worship idols (Don’t devote your time and energy to harmful distractions)
3. Don’t take God’s name in vain (Choose your words with care)
4. Remember Shabbat (Make time for rest)
5. Honor your parents (Honor those whose shoulders you stand on)
6. Don’t murder (Don’t push others down)
7. Don’t commit adultery (Cherish your relationships)
8. Don’t steal (Don’t take, or take credit for, what’s not yours)
9. Don’t bear false witness (Don’t lie— no matter the reward)
10. Don’t covet (Don’t wish so much for what others have that you lose sight of your own blessings)

If I’m counting correctly, my fourth graders turned 18 this year. I don’t know how they relate to the Ten Commandments nearly a decade after we read them together. But I do hope that whatever they go on to do as adults, they use their religious education to encourage the creation of a society built on truth, reason, freedom, justice, and peace. And I hope that, like my fourth graders before me, I was able to bring a little new perspective to our sacred, ancient words.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on Jan. 22, 2022. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.

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Living in a French-speaking place, the etymology of curfew becomes clear: couvre-feu – literally, cover the fire. In medieval times, a bell was rung every evening to tell people to cover the fires in their hearths to prevent conflagrations that could spread from home to home. A person who puts their neighbors at risk by leaving their fire burning is like the person in the midrashic tale who drills a hole under his seat in the boat and asks why others are bothered. Because, his shipmates reply (I imagine with some urgency), “the water will rise and flood us all!”

Hundreds of years ago, people understood what we have been slow to learn: Our actions affect one another, within the confines of a neighborhood and around the world.

Whether by plague or flood or fire, it is easy to worry that the world is ending. In moments like these, I take comfort in my study of history, remembering that we have feared the end many times before and somehow still remain. For me, the question is not, Is this the end? Rather, my question is: Assuming we find our way through this, how do we preserve what is precious?

It is here that the couvre-feu is instructive. Covering the fire did not mean extinguishing it. Instead, a metal cover would be placed over the flames, enclosing the embers for the night. In the morning, a puff of the bellows would revive them.

Like many others, I have been trying for almost two years now to help our community thrive in new ways, to keep people connected, share spiritual nourishment, and find meaning in challenging times. We have insisted, rightly so, that online services, learning and lifecycle events are not virtual but real. And yet, this insistence comes with a risk, that in covering the embers to keep each other safe, we forget the warmth and beauty of a full and open flame. Comfortable on our couches, we risk forgetting the joy that comes with sitting beside someone in services, sharing food, finding sacred space in a sanctuary, making a stranger a friend. When all this is over, will we remember to lift the cover off the fire of our community life?

In this week’s Torah portion, fire is deeply significant. We first see its absence, in the description of the plague of darkness. The darkness of the penultimate plague is no ordinary darkness. It is a thick darkness, so much so that within it, Nahmanides says, no fires could burn. It is the darkness of despair.

Then, on the eve of the tenth and final plague, the Israelites are told what to do before leaving Egypt. Each household is to slaughter a lamb and place its blood on the doorpost, marking the threshold of their homes. The lamb itself is to be roasted over fire. After darkness, there is light.

One midrash suggests the fire that cooked the paschal lamb is reminiscent of Nimrod’s fire, which Abraham survived in one of his trials. Alternately, it could be a reminder of the burning bush that Moses encountered. Either way, fire is a symbol of persistence and faith. The odds were against Abraham, the first monotheist, holding fast to a new idea. The odds were against Moses, an unlikely leader saved only by the courage and compassion of the women around him. But I am most inspired by the everyday people on the edge of the exodus. People who did not have the reassurance of direct contact with God that Abraham and Moses enjoyed. People who knew the odds were against them but kept their home fires burning all the same. With only distant memories of freedom and no knowledge of what lay ahead, they stood ready to fan the flames.

Soon they will leave their homes into a world that has been transformed — and when they do, they will bring their fire with them. For as the Israelites leave Egypt, God goes before them in the form of a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. With a puff of the bellows, the embers that the Israelites sustained burst into brilliant flame.

Many New Yorker cartoons feature a robed and bearded old man holding a sign that says, “The End is Near.” My favorite one depicts a young woman coming around the corner with a sign reading, “Actually, this is Just the Beginning.” May we cover the fires as long as we need, but let’s keep those embers burning, bellows at the ready.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on Jan. 8, 2022. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.

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So I walked through the store decked out in red and green as Christmas music piped overhead looking for a blue and white end cap. Eventually I asked someone, who looked a little confused but pointed me downstairs. For some reason, at this particular Target, the tiny selection of Hanukkah goods were right next to the Christmas sweaters in the clothing section. Go figure. 

I grabbed a box of candles, made my way through the checkout flanked by Reeses-filled candy canes, and left with relief. Did I mention I live in Brooklyn? Finding candles should not be that hard. 

This time of year can be exhausting for Jews. While we celebrate Hanukkah, the frenzied commercialism of Christmas is inescapable. Is it any wonder that every year Jews gripe about the relentless deluge of (Christian) holiday cheer? Sometimes with all that’s going on it feels nearly impossible to ground in our own traditions. 

And yet. In this week’s Torah portion, we are reminded that we have always been a people tied to other peoples. 

This week we experience the last days of our patriarch Jacob, now happily reunited with his beloved son Joseph in Egypt. On his deathbed, Jacob addresses each of his 12 sons with blessings, although in some cases a backhanded compliment might be a more accurate descriptor. Despite being the grandfather of many, Jacob takes a particular interest in his son Joseph’s two sons, Menashe and Ephraim, even going so far as to claim them as his own children. 

The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm—

Bless the boys [Menashe and Ephraim].

Through them may my name be called,

And the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,

And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth. (Genesis 48:16)

A few verses later he adds: “By you shall Israel invoke blessings, saying: God make you like Ephraim and Menasheh.” (Genesis 48:20)

While Jacob offers praise to many of his sons, he only suggests that these two grandchildren are worthy of emulation. That blessing has been carried forward though the generations, and even today parents continue to bless their children on Shabbat with that same invocation. 

But there’s something interesting about these two boys. Unlike the rest of Jacob’s children and grandchildren, born and raised in the ways of Abraham and Isaac, Menasheh and Ephraim are the children of Joseph — the grand vizier of Egypt, second in importance only to pharaoh — and his wife Asnat, the daughter of the Egyptian priest Potiphora. They were raised in Egypt by a Hebrew father and an Egyptian mother. Menasheh and Ephraim may have been bilingual and were certainly bicultural, and Jacob chose them above all his other descendants as role models for future Jewish generations. In saying that he hoped we be like them, Jacob spoke to the place of the majority of American Jews who are part of interfaith families today. 

Next Shabbat, on December 25th, I will be opening presents and having Christmas lunch with my Catholic grandmother, Quaker mother, and Jewish dad and sisters. There might even be a Christmas tree present. I’m a Jew and was raised as such. I trace my ancestry to shtetls in Poland and bustling towns in Prussia. But I also trace my ancestry to the exiled Portuguese Jews-turned-Catholic of the Azores and to the first waves of Pilgrims in New England. While I have always been clear about my religious identity, I have also been equipped to translate between Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. Like my ancestors Menasheh and Ephraim, I understand what it means to walk in multiple worlds and to love and be loved by people who don’t share all my beliefs.

Which brings me back to the red and green overwhelm at Target. We Jews are the inheritors of incredible history, text, and theology. We are also a people that has always lived amongst other peoples with whom we have shared these things and more. In that way, many of us are also the inheritors of multiple ways of understanding what matters and how to access it. 

Perhaps that was the blessing Jacob was trying to pass on. May we be like Ephraim and Menasheh, Jews growing up with Egyptian heritage surrounded by Egyptian ways. May we cherish our Jewish celebrations even as we remain a tiny minority — even in Brooklyn. May we understand things from different perspectives even as we retain full knowledge of who we are. And may we always be able to track down that blue and white end cap. 

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on Dec. 18, 2021. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.

The post Emulating Our Multicultural Ancestors appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

Eighteen years ago, we faced a classic parental dilemma: the name game. We wanted a name beginning with A to honor my husband’s mother Andi who died when he was a teenager. It had to carry the weight of our hopes and dreams for this new little person and help us turn grief into joy. Two names stood out: Avi (“my father”) and Ami (“my people”).  

We sat at our kitchen table, the weight of the world and the promise of new life hanging in the air. “Avi makes me think of the embrace of a parent we always want him to feel,” Jason said. I nodded, thinking of the strength and comfort we seek when we cry out to God as avinu, our parent, during the High Holidays.

“But what about Ami?” I asked. We loved the idea of our child being cradled not just by us, but by our entire people. We were grappling with two sources of Jewish comfort and strength — the divine and the communal — as we took our first steps in helping him navigate the joys and sorrows of life.

That decision feels especially poignant this year. The month of Av begins with deep mourning, particularly during the first nine days when we put joyous occasions on hold. The grief peaks on Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month, a day that gathers all our collective sorrows into one heavy moment. We remember the destruction of both ancient Temples, the expulsion from Spain, and many other heartaches. The weight of our history presses down on us, demanding that we face our pain head-on.

Then, six days later, we dive into Tu B’Av, a matchmaking festival that the Talmud teaches is one of our most joyous days. In between, we mark Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Consolation. In the Haftarah we read that day, God calls us ami, “my people,” wrapping us in words of comfort and hope. This is why the month is also called Menachem Av (“comforting parent”).

Contemplating the name Avi brings me to a hospice bedside moment. As Betty and I prayed together for her comfort and renewed spirit, her smile lines deepened. “Rabbi, I am ready,” she said. Her fear evaporating, she said she felt like a small child held by a loving God. The grief of life ending wasn’t absent, but joy was in the room too.

“Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew. He teaches that true joy comes from fully inhabiting our experiences, no matter how tough. The month of Av doesn’t deny grief or force celebration. It accompanies us through both.

Reflecting on our tragedies also enhances our gratitude for present blessings. Dr. Erica Brown suggests that “we don’t diminish our happiness when we spend a day or a few weeks meditating on the tragedies of history from which we emerged. We become more grateful, holding on tightly to our blessed lives because we can.” This thread weaves through Av.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offers another layer of understanding. Joy, he says, is not merely the absence of sorrow, but the presence of a deeper connection that transcends our immediate circumstances. And in Jewish tradition, our joy is inherently collective. “The festivals as described in Deuteronomy are days of joy, precisely because they are occasions of collective celebration,” he writes. In our shared connection with God and each other, we discover a communal joy that carries us through even the toughest times.

Navigating the end of childhood isn’t easy, especially for parents. But the lessons of Av are there for our kids and for us. We live in a world scarred by memories and ongoing experiences of destruction, yet it still bursts with moments of deep joy. That joy is richer because we share it as a people, together seeking God. Opening ourselves to awe and wonder, we touch Divine compassion. We find strength in our shared history and the gritty, beautiful reality of our current lives.

As Av begins, we mourn the destruction happening in real time along with the sorrows of our past. But if we allow ourselves to sit with the pain, we can also feel the loving presence of Menachem Av. By coming together, we gain the strength of community. We join a dance, a song, an act of learning or helping, and tap into the enduring joy and hope of the Jewish people.

And as for our son Amichai, he has already met the Hillel rabbi and is ready to go.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on August 3, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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Some love is just a lie of the soul

A constant battle for the ultimate state of control

After you’ve heard lie upon lie

There can hardly be a question of why

Some love is just a lie of the heart

The cold remains of what began with a passionate start

But that can’t happen to us

‘Cause it’s always been a matter of trust

Whether in a romantic relationship, a friendship, or a society, our sense of security is based on trust. Without it, you don’t know who or what you can rely upon. We grow paranoid, agitated and isolated from the world and people around us. It becomes hard to find peace or achieve the kind of stability needed to settle, to build, and to connect. 

In Micah, we learn that the ultimate curse for Israel’s sins is a society that loses the ability to trust: “Trust no friend, rely on no intimate; Be guarded in speech with her who lies in your bosom. For son spurns father, daughter rises up against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law — a man’s own household are his enemies.” (Micah 7:5-6)

When Israel faces the consequences of its own corruption, its greatest punishment does not come from external enemies, but from within. People cannot trust those closest to them. Even their own homes cease to provide refuge since they cannot trust the good intentions of those who live under the same roof. 

How does a society reach this point? It all starts at the top. This is why, according to Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, Micah addresses his admonishments to the leaders of society. In Micah’s time, leaders did not care for the most vulnerable among them. They abused their power and acted narcissistically. The consequent breakdown of ethical norms led to a world defined by paranoia and pain. The commentator Malbim says that in that epoch “children rose up against their parents, which illustrated how debased and corrupt their society had become. It went so far that every connection of love and brotherhood ceased, and peaceful societal relations could no longer be found.” 

The cursed state of affairs that Micah describes is in many ways reminiscent of surveillance states in which parents no longer trust their children and neighbors report on one another. The German newspaper Der Spiegel, describing the East German system that ultimately led to societal collapse, observed: “Mutual evaluation, judgment, criticism and self-critique were omnipresent. Across the country, people were on the lookout for divergent viewpoints, which were then branded as dangerous to the state. Often to one’s own advantage. The losers of this system often didn’t know why their lives suddenly became derailed.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, the former citizens of East Germany realized that much of the mutual surveillance and denunciation wasn’t even commanded directly by the government. Neighbors and family members chose to ruin one another’s lives for the sake of power, retribution and status. Many victims of this system never recovered and were unable to regain the ability to trust any individual or social system.

How does a society recover from this? Like other prophets, Micah believed we can always step back from the abyss, but to do so we need to recognize our sins, do the work of repair and change our ways. The core sin in the Book of Micah is failing to see the poor as kin, as God’s special wards who deserve dignity and care. Consumed by greed and ego, the leaders of Israelite society at the time could not see the humanity of those in need, nor fully grasp their own responsibility to lead with integrity. They would need to fundamentally change how they led and how they modeled a praiseworthy Jewish life to those around them. 

The path home to God and one another is not easy, but it is clear: “Do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8) Only when we succeed in fulfilling God’s charge can we begin to chart our course to a redeemed future, unencumbered by the pain of our previous punishments. 

Billy Joel was right: It is all just a matter of trust, but trust doesn’t come automatically. It has to be earned. Whether with God, family or fellow citizens, the first step is building a record of accountability and integrity. Walk every day with a commitment to affirming the humanity of others, love the work of tending to their needs, and put the spotlight on others as you do this sacred and life-affirming work. Those steps will lead us back to a home we can cherish and love, one that always makes room for the Divine and those who need us most.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on July 27, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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What is so baffling about this story is that Balaam is not a false prophet. God actually speaks to Balaam, which raises an obvious problem: Why? Why does God talk to our enemy? Why does he have the power of prophecy too? If God has our backs, then why would God speak to Balaam at all? 

One way to resolve this problem is by claiming that Balaam isn’t actually so bad. Maybe there are decent people on both sides. But the rabbis reject this outright, bringing several teachings in the Talmud to illustrate that Balaam is truly evil. He is said to have been so bad that he was one of just four people who have no place in the World to Come. We are told that it was Balaam who advised Pharaoh to kill all the baby boys in Egypt and that he is guilty of bestiality. Balaam is not just bad, he’s the worst. 

We tend to like this kind of clarity. We are good and our enemies are bad. We are nothing like them. But amidst these stories of Balaam’s evil ways, we find an unexpected passage in Tractate Sanhedrin in which Balaam is compared to none other than the patriarch Abraham. The comparison is rooted in the fact that the Torah uses almost identical language to describe the actions of both men. 

It was taught in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar: Love negates stature we learn from Abraham, as it is written: “And Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey” (Genesis 22:3). Hatred negates stature we learn from Balaam, as it is written: “And Balaam rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey” (Numbers 22:21).

Both men rose early and saddled a donkey, and yet the Talmud learns from them opposite lessons. Abraham was so overcome with love for God and the holy task he was given that he saddled his donkey by himself rather than wait for his servants to do the manual labor. His love for God overcame his need for honor. Balaam exhibits the same behavior, but we learn from him the exact opposite: His hatred was so deep that it overcame his need for honor.   

This text is way too close for comfort. How can we be sure that Abraham is love and Balaam is hate? How can we read the same verse in both stories and feel certain that their motives are opposites? That sinking feeling only deepens when we realize that the verse about Abraham is from the story of the binding of Isaac. Abraham is following God’s word to kill his own son. The action he plans to take is so deeply problematic that it’s impossible to look at it with pride. 

The Talmud seeks to create a clear distinction between the men, but that’s not how the real world looks, and the rabbis know that too. Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar asserts the difference by citing verses that look most similar, as if to say: You might get confused. Without this teaching, you might mistake Balaam and Abraham for parallel prophets. Don’t make that mistake. 

This reading helps us better understand all the talmudic texts that disparage Balaam. Perhaps the rabbis go out of their way to vilify Balaam not because he is so obviously bad, but because his sins might not otherwise be obvious. Right and wrong do sometimes look similar, but that doesn’t mean they are. There is a difference between good and bad, and that difference matters. In this case, the difference is motivation. We can wake up in the morning motivated by hate, like Balaam. Or we can wake up in the morning motivated by love, like Abraham. 

This particular moment in history is a confusing time. Some days we think we see good and bad as polar opposites, where we and our enemies have nothing at all in common, when we cannot imagine that God might be speaking to a prophet on their side. In other moments, the picture blurs and it can start to look like all the sides are the same — going through the same motions, saddling their donkeys and speaking for God. 

What can we do? We might start by focusing on intentions. Like Abraham, we can strive to be motivated by love. And like Balaam, we can try to open ourselves up to real divine revelation, and hope that in the end we will find our way towards a blessing. 

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on July 20, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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In Genesis, Hagar, cast into the desert and dying of thirst with her son Ishmael, is saved when God reveals to her a well of water. Abraham cuts a deal with Avimelech over the well at Beersheva (literally the “Well of Seven”), offering up seven ewes to secure his water rights. Isaac, Jacob and Moses all find their wives at wells, while Isaac must re-dig the stopped-up wells his father Abraham had dug long ago to reclaim his patrilineal heritage of blessing and peace. More than a physical locus, the well is a resonant symbol of connection, transformation and blessing, the nexus where love blossoms, marriage matches are made, treaties are struck and revelation unfolds. 

Perhaps the most fascinating and mysterious of all the biblical wells is Miriam’s Well, the spring of fresh water that accompanies the Israelites on their long wilderness sojourn. This miraculous well, said by the sages to have been one of ten supernatural things created by God at twilight on the eve of the very first Shabbat, follows the people thanks to the merit of Miriam, the midwife and prophetess, dancer and drummer, revered elder sister of Moses and co-leader of the people. 

In this week’s Torah portion, Miriam dies in the wilderness of Zin and, inexplicably, the people do not mourn her. Instead, they grouse and rebel against Moses and Aaron, their remaining leaders, because suddenly there is no water. The fabulous well has disappeared.

Reading this story year after year, I often wonder what might have happened if the people had taken time to mourn, to grieve the loss of their beloved leader and all the losses they sustained through their many years of wandering — the plagues, the punishments, the people incinerated on the altar of God and swallowed up by the earth. If they, along with Moses and Aaron, had been able to deeply feel the pain of all they had lost, to mourn the whole generation that had emerged from the slave houses of Egypt only to die in the wilderness, to truly let their hearts break, maybe the well would have continued to flow, fed by streams of their tears of anguish and sorrow.

Instead, the people become belligerent in their demand for water. And Moses responds in kind, angrily calling them out as rebels and striking a rock in frustration rather than speaking gently, faithfully, as God has instructed him. In his anger, his dishonoring of God’s word, Moses seals his own fate; he too will die in the wilderness, barred from entering the land of promise with this people he has carried so far for so long.

Like the ancient Israelites, we don’t always take the time and space we need to mourn our dead, our lost dreams. Jewish mourning practices wisely follow the example of the biblical patriarch Abraham, who comes to sit with the body of his beloved wife Sarah when she dies, telling the story of her life and wailing in grief. 

Traditionally, mourners stay at home for seven days after the burial, sitting close to the floor, silent or weeping or speaking as needed, remembering and telling stories of their loved one, nourished and held in the embrace of community. They stay close to home for another three weeks, taking time to gradually feel their way into this new, emptier world, absent the physical presence of their beloved. Each day, supported by a minyan of at least ten fellow pray-ers, they recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, reaffirming faith in the face of loss.

Perhaps by the time of Miriam’s death, the Israelites were too stressed, too traumatized to open to the pain of one more loss. Yet the proverbial well does reappear later in our Torah portion, summoned this time not by a single charismatic leader, but by the whole community:

Then Israel sang this song:
Rise up, O well! Chant her up!
Well that the princes dug, that the willing people carved out …
A gift from the wilderness.

The Hebrew word for well, b’eyr, comes from a verb root that means to make plain or distinct, to clarify. When a community comes together to dig the well of grief, streams of life-giving water can flow from the depths, fed by their tears, called forth by their song. Then clarity and balance can gradually return, gifts from the wilderness of grieving. 

We grieve because we love. In this time of great stress and unspeakable loss, may we take the time to mourn, to hold one another in our grief, so that love and hope can once again well up in our hearts.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on July 13, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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But as Americans celebrated Independence Day this week, democracy is top of mind for many of them, and especially American Jews. In the United States, we’re facing a looming presidential election amid contested interpretations of the last one and ongoing debates about voting access. In Israel, there are high levels of mistrust in elected officials after more than a year of massive weekly protests — first over the judicial overhaul and then about hostages and the current government. 

This week’s Torah portion gave me another reason to reflect on democracy. A year after escaping Egypt, the 12 tribes are wandering in the desert when their bitter complaints evolve into political rebellion. And not just one rebellion, but three of them: one led by Korach, another by Datan and Aviram, and a third by 250 chieftains.

It’s that last group, the 250 chieftains, that caught my eye. Their complaint against Moses is that the entire community is holy. How then can Moses put himself above everyone else? Everyone should have a say in leading the community! To 21st-century ears, this argument by the chieftains (who, the Torah tells us, were chosen in the assembly) sounds like a passionate call for democracy. 

My work at the Shalom Hartman Institute brings me to Jerusalem each summer, where I am writing from now. In Israel, conversations are not just about democracy, but specifically on the relationship between Judaism and democracy. Some Israelis advocate for a Jewish theocracy governed by Jewish law. Some ask how a state can be Jewish while also serving all of its citizens, including the 22% of citizens who are not Jewish. Some celebrate Jewish control over limited areas of government (Shabbat, kashrut, personal status like marriage and conversion). And some want complete separation of Judaism and state.

Too often, these debates are flattened into the question of whether Judaism and democracy are compatible, or whether having a state religion is compatible with democracy. But there are plenty of democratic nations with a Christian state religion — the United Kingdom, Greece and Costa Rica among them. So there is little reason to question whether Israel’s democracy can function with a state religion. And clearly Judaism and democracy are at least somewhat compatible, since the Jewish state’s parliamentary democracy has been stable for more than 75 years. 

So rather than ask whether they are compatible, it would be more interesting to ask: How might Judaism influence and shape democracy, either in Israel or in the U.S.?

We know that Judaism shaped the early development of democratic ideas. Historians have argued that democracies draw many of their distinctive features from the Jewish tradition. One scholar’s list included consent of the governed, the presumption of innocence, the exclusion of self-incrimination from court proceedings, and a commitment to the sanctity of life and the inestimable preciousness of each unique individual. Can Jewish tradition still offer insight today when democracies are under threat? 

The section of the Torah we have recently read offers some insight. The Israelites have only recently escaped from slavery Egypt. Under Pharaoh, their ability to self-organize was extremely limited. Now, as an emancipated community, they must figure out how to govern themselves. The three rebellions can be understood as part of a trial-and-error process on the path toward determining a form of governance. Moses and God have no compassion for the rebellions, and the organizers of the rebellion receive only divine wrath. As readers, we are meant to interpret their acts as unhelpful uprisings against authority.

But there is another story from the period with a different message. When the Israelites’ complaining reaches a fever pitch, Moses throws his hands up and tells God he can’t take it anymore. God’s response is to instruct Moses to gather 70 leaders who “shall share the burden of the people with you.” This is a core democratic move: When the stakes are high, and crisis is imminent, we do not put all of the burden on a single charismatic leader. Instead, individuals are selected to share the burden of the people.

What is the difference between the 70 elders and the 250 chieftains? Perhaps it was their tone and intent: The chieftains wanted to replace Moses’ leadership, while the elders said, “We’re here to help carry the burden.” For those of us who are concerned about the future of democracy, whether in the U.S. or in Israel, this is our only real option: To get involved and take on some of the burden of the people. If you aren’t already doing so, perhaps this is your moment to carve out a portion of your time and energy and dedicate it to the democratic process.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on July 6, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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I’ve heard many such stories this year about family, old friends, colleagues. I even know of marriages in which the war cannot be discussed, planting a new inhibition that begins to seep into everything.

I want better for us. On the other side of this terrible time we are in, I want there to be a Jewish community that can still hold each other in love. I want friendships and family relationships to emerge intact. I don’t want this to be the time people point back to as the moment the unhealable schisms emerged. How do we hold conflict now so we can still be family in the future?

The Talmud (Eruvin 13b) tells of a dispute between the students of Hillel and the students of Shammai. We are not told what the dispute is about, only that it has been raging for three years. These rival circles are, in my imagination, close to fisticuffs when a bat kol, a heavenly voice, clears its throat and famously proclaims: Eylu v’eylu divrei Elohim chayim. Both these and these are the living words of God.

This is unexpected. Instead of simply declaring who is right, the heavenly voice announces that there is something divine flowing through both camps, even if their conclusions are in opposition. 

This is a radical thought — that the argument of the person whom we are so quick to dismiss as misinformed or uncaring or naive might nonetheless be divinely inspired. Perhaps if we look carefully enough, if we can peer through the tough words and argumentative heat, we might perceive a holiness underlying our adversary’s words, just as we might imagine a holiness underlying our own position.

Hearing the divine in your opponent’s words is a big ask in these tense times. We are all made in the divine image, the Torah tells us, so maybe we can find the divinity in each other’s words by listening closely for the deep humanity within them. When you say words about the war, words that I think are wrong, can I let myself hear the deep humanity, the divine humanity, that is vibrating underneath them? Can I hear your fear for Jewish survival, the pain of your ancestors, your desire to belong, your hope for a better world, your prayer for peace? Can you hear mine? What would it be like to listen to the adversary who is also a childhood friend or colleague or cousin and say, “I hear your words, and I’m hearing in them a fear for our future. Am I right? I fear for our future too, although I am led to a different conclusion.”

This is a skill I want for all of us, to find what connects us at the root even though it blossoms differently in each of us. I should point out that while this can help us carry conflict less damagingly, I am not suggesting that everyone’s view is right and everybody wins. Because sometimes a decision needs to be made, a course laid. Perceiving divinity on all sides doesn’t change that. In fact, in our Talmud story, after announcing the divinity in the views of both parties, the heavenly voice declares: “However, the law is in accordance with the school of Hillel.” 

If both views are God’s living words, why does the school of Hillel carry the day? The Talmud says it is because the school of Hillel is notably humble in its process, listening, restating and trying to understand the arguments of the school of Shammai before venturing their own ideas. This is an ancient way of saying, “I hear you” — and meaning it. 

It’s also worth noting that the legal rulings of the school of Hillel are generally more lenient and favor compassion. They are rulings designed with kindness in mind, while those of the school of Shammai elevate principle over impact. This seems to suggest that the choices we make should not cause harm. All things being equal, go with the viewpoint that effects a net increase in happiness.

So that’s the recipe for holding conflict. It might not bring agreement, but it could change who we are in these conflicts and who we are after them. Let’s not give up on each other. Let us bet on a future we can’t quite see, in which we still care about each other, still talk, and still see the divine humanity in each other’s words.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 29, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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I was reminded of this again when reading this week’s Torah portion, Beha’alotcha. The portion describes the Israelites in the wilderness as they prepare to depart from the Sinai desert for the promised land. Everything is carefully choreographed. The tribes with their banners are arranged in order with the tabernacle at their center. Moses creates silver trumpets to help announce to the people when they were to travel. The people even have a divine GPS — a cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night — to guide them. Everything is perfect, culminating in a verse that reflects the elation of a people ready to embark on a sacred mission: “When the ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, O God. May Your enemies be scattered, and may Your foes flee before You.” (Numbers 10:35)

And then, to quote W. B. Yeats, “things fall apart.” 

Deep in the wilderness, the people start murmuring. The Israelites are tired of their daily manna and they complain to Moses. They want meat, recalling the delicacies they ate in Egypt: “The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, ‘Who will feed us meat to eat? We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.’” (Numbers 11:4-5)

These remarks are truly astounding. Egypt was a place of slavery and genocide. Did they not remember the bitterness and the horror? How can the people so quickly forget the tyranny and oppression they suffered? 

The challenge is not simply the length of the journey to the promised land, but the allure of the past, which offers us a frank and stark revelation of the pitfalls of the human psyche: No matter how horrific Egypt was and how much we want the promised land, we will get distracted on the journey by things as trivial as melons and onions.

What’s worse is that this becomes a pattern. The rest of the Book of Numbers can be described as a series of murmurings and catastrophes — from the sin of the spies that kept the Israelites in the wilderness for a total of 40 years, depriving an entire generation of freed slaves from seeing the promised land, to the rebellion of Korach that challenged the leadership of Moses and Aaron. 

Many of the calamities have to do with internal dissatisfaction, with the travails of journeying in a wasteland with seemingly no purpose for so long. But others are precipitated by external enemies. The Amalekites attacked the Israelites, signaling to others that the Jewish people were not invincible. The Midianites and Moabites launch their own assaults. 

The tension between the idyllic departure and the actual journey mirrors our current experience. We live with nostalgia for eras in which everything was supposedly fine, ignoring the lived experiences of our ancestors. Many of us live with the pain that even today our reality is far from what we want. Almost daily since October 7th I feel visceral pain from my broken illusions, illusions that the world had rid itself of much of its antisemitic hatred, illusions that the evils perpetrated against defenseless Jews were somehow a thing of the past. Today we live with the pain of being in the wilderness — knowing there is a promised land, but stuck wandering in the dense thickets of uncertainty. 

As I was writing this, a friend sent me a video from another funeral of another young Israeli soldier. And as has become ubiquitous in these funerals, I watched as thousands of mourners sang Ani Ma’amin — “I believe in the messiah” — their tears expressing not just the despair we feel at the brokenness of it all, but a desperate belief that things will get better. 

It is here perhaps that our Torah portion offers comfort, reminding us that the past was never perfect, that that gap between the real and ideal has been part and parcel of our human and Jewish DNA from time immemorial. It also encourages us to draw strength from those who have already traversed the wilderness. Their story reminds us that even when the journey is difficult, the promised land can still be reached. They remind us that we are stronger than we think and that every generation can make things better. And they remind us, as Michael Walzer so pointedly noted, “that the way to the land is through the wilderness. There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.”

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 22, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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Though the start of the holiday of Shavuot was celebrated widely this past Tuesday night, the exact date of the festival has been a bone of contention for millennia. The ambiguity stems from the instructions given in Leviticus 23, which states that a certain type of offering (known as the Omer) should be initiated “on the day after the Sabbath,” and seven weeks counted from that point before celebrating Shavuot. The context makes clear that the Sabbath in question falls during Passover. But while the rabbinic tradition understands “Sabbath” as a general term for “holiday” (in this case referring to the first day of Passover), others have insisted that “the Sabbath” must refer to Shabbat. According to this view, the Omer ought to be offered, and the count begun, on the Sunday following Passover.

One result of this approach is that Shavuot would always fall on a Sunday, as is the case with the parallel Christian holiday of Pentecost (literally “Fiftieth”), which is celebrated 50 days after Easter. Sunday, the day on which Jesus was said to be resurrected, has always been important to Christians, who considered it the “Lord’s Day” even before it was designated as the Christian day of rest in 316 CE.

It is possible that the idea of Shavuot always falling on the holy day of a rival religion contributed to the rabbis’ insistence that the Shabbat in Leviticus 23 could not literally mean Saturday. Or perhaps the dispute had nothing to do with early Christianity and was simply a disagreement between rival Jewish sects. In a scene bordering on pantomime, the Mishnah (Menachot 10:3) explains how the Omer offering was harvested with enthusiastic audience participation and explicit disavowal of the ways of the Boethusians, a group that rejected the thinking the Mishnah considers authoritative. Interestingly, the Mishnah claims this harvesting would even happen on Shabbat, which is curious because this would mean that Passover began on Thursday night, which the rabbinic tradition is careful to make sure never happens.

Although Boethusians these days are few and far between, other contemporary groups refute rabbinic orthodoxy. Communities of Samaritans and of Karaites, who follow the literal instructions of the Torah and reject the interpretative tradition of the rabbis, do indeed count their Omer from the first Shabbat during Passover and will celebrate Shavuot this Sunday.

All this might seem a bit silly and irrelevant, but consider for a moment how much control of the calendar impacts society. This goes beyond which days we are granted paid time off from work, extending into more fundamental areas like how we understand time, authority and arguably even reality itself. That we have a seven-day week is possibly one of the Bible’s biggest impacts on the modern world, and is far from normative through human history. The Romans had a 10-day week, while the Mayan calendar’s shortest cycles are of 13 and 20 days.

When we declare that today is Shabbat and not simply Saturday, our subjective identity creates a frame through which we perceive objective reality. The same goes for considering this year 5784, rather than 1445, as Muslims do. That the global consensus says we are in 2024 implicitly recognizes Christian hegemony, and labeling the count CE (Common Era) rather than AD (Year of Our Lord) is a more or less superficial adjustment. This is why the power to decide time — and even, on occasion, to declare a radical new beginning — has long been a hallmark of revolutions. Correspondingly, the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 both broadcast the power of Rome to adjudicate time, and demonstrated the limits of its authority, with Protestant and Orthodox countries holding out against the change for almost 300 years. 

The rabbis were well aware that control of the calendar was intimately linked to their authority over the Jewish people. While the announcement of the official new moon was initially broadcast using mountaintop bonfires, it was replaced with human messengers to stop rival sects from corrupting the system. In a powerful and disturbing story, the Talmud also relates how Rabban Gamliel insisted that his own teacher Rabbi Yehoshua submit to his ruling on the correct timing of Rosh Hashanah, forcing Yehoshua to publicly profane the day he calculated to be Yom Kippur.

In our day, the traditional rabbinic power over time has diminished. Reform Jews dispense with the practice of celebrating two days of festivals in the diaspora, a hangover from the ancient messenger system. Many people take this autonomy further, for instance choosing the closest convenient weekend on which to hold a Passover seder.

And as for the correct day to observe Shavuot? According to the Talmud (Chagigah 17a), Shavuot should really last seven days — and indeed, elements of the ancient festival did, allowing pilgrims to complete all their offerings. Even though we do not keep a seven-day Shavuot, the fact that mourning practices are suspended for this week hint at its festive nature. And what’s more, according to the Torah itself, Moses was on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights, suggesting that Shavuot is really a multi-week period of revelation.

Perhaps appropriately for a festival celebrating the disruptive meeting of heaven and earth, the indeterminate timing of this holiday taps us directly into these deeper issues of calendar, authority and meaning.

So whichever way you cut it, is it a Jewish holiday today? Well, maybe.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 15, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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That said, the power a rabbi draws upon to transform two individuals into a married couple by American legal standards does not come from Judaism. Toward the end of the ceremony, just before a glass is stomped on, I declare as officially as I can, “By the power invested in me by the Commonwealth of Virginia, I hereby declare you married.” I’ll further certify what I have declared by signing (in duplicate! in black pen!) the wedding license and returning it (within five days!) to the courthouse. This is what makes the couple legally married in the eyes of the state.

There is no part of a Jewish wedding ceremony when a rabbi (or cantor) marries a couple. While we have been certified by our states to perform weddings that have legal standing, we have no special Jewish powers to turn single people into a couple married in the eyes of God. To guests, it may appear otherwise. After all, the rabbi chants Hebrew prayers and blessings, pours wine into cups, and instructs the couple on what to say. But in reality, it is the bride and groom who marry themselves with two transformative practices.

The first occurs just before the ceremony when the ketubah, the wedding contract, is read. The traditional ketubah is a legal document that a groom presents to a bride in which he stipulates precisely how he will care for her during the marriage. In liberal and interfaith settings, the ketubah is more egalitarian, affirming the terms that both partners will adhere to in their relationship. Typically, it speaks of love, mutual support and being on a shared journey through life together. 

A wedding ring appears during the second transformative practice. In liberal settings, rings are typically exchanged and the couple makes a mutual declaration to the effect that the rings symbolize the joining of their lives. In traditional settings, the groom typically gives the bride a ring and declares that she is now consecrated to him in accordance with Jewish law. By accepting the ring (or some other token of value), she indicates her agreement to the terms he has set forth. 

The performance of these two practices constitute a Jewish marriage. While a rabbi typically directs the couple through these and other parts of a wedding ceremony, any layperson with Hebrew facility could do this. Interestingly, it was not until the Middle Ages that rabbis got into the wedding act as officiants. Before that, Jewish weddings were largely economic proceedings arranged by families. 

So why engage a rabbi for a wedding at all? There are many reasons why I encourage couples to turn to a rabbi at this important milestone in their lives.

As a spiritual guide, a rabbi can help the couple see their wedding as part of their Jewish journey. As a gentle teacher, a rabbi can help them discover the Jewish wisdom and values that can lift up their lives together. Together, they can study the history and multiple interpretations of Jewish wedding practices and learn how to connect to them in a way that feels meaningful. When the ceremony takes place, the couple will not feel like passive observers. If they have learned to adapt ancient practices to their modern sensibilities, that is a skill they can turn to for future life-cycle events and holiday celebrations. Rabbis with special training can also provide premarital counseling from a Jewish perspective. For interfaith couples hoping to one day have children, the rabbi can share wise paths others have taken. And for sure: the rabbi will prepare the Jewish member of the couple to step up and find a supportive Jewish community if he or she wishes to one day have a Jewish home.

It can be challenging to find the right rabbi to play this role. But for the reasons I have suggested, I encourage couples to search for a rabbi — and not at the last minute, as often happens, but at the same time they look for a venue or consider a date. And here’s one more reason: When a rabbi officiates at a wedding, a couple is making a powerful statement about their identity. They are saying: “Judaism matters to us.”

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 8, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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Notably, the curses are much longer than the blessings. And the descriptive nature of the curses is brutal in a way that is incommensurate with the light nature of the blessings. For instance, the blessing of peace and safety reads: “I will grant peace in the land, and you shall lie down untroubled by anyone; I will give the land respite from vicious beasts, and no sword shall cross your land.” (Leviticus 26:6) This does indeed sound like a sweet future, but compare it to the depiction of danger: “And if you remain hostile toward Me and refuse to obey Me, I will go on smiting you sevenfold for your sins. I will loose wild beasts against you, and they shall bereave you of your children and wipe out your cattle. They shall decimate you, and your roads shall be deserted.” (Leviticus 26:21) The rhetorical violence and anger of the curse section is over the top, with references to starving parents eating their children and the land being left entirely desolate. 

What is the purpose of these depictions? Much depends on the historical context of the chapter’s composition. There are three ways to think of this: 

Warning: The Torah presents these blessings and curses as warnings, received by Moses at Sinai and communicated to the people of Israel. Understood this way, the chapter underlines the importance of these laws for maintaining the people’s holiness, with God saying that violating these laws will come with severe, unlivable consequences. The Israelites better make sure to keep them.

Explanation: A second way of explicating the chapter is against the backdrop of the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE, which ended with Jerusalem destroyed and much of the population exiled to Babylonia. Understood this way, the vivid depiction of the curses is meant to explain to readers why these terrible things happened to them. Against this backdrop, the curses are less threat and more catharsis, offering some way to make sense of the recent horror. 

Hope: A third way of reading this passage is to see it as a product of the post-exilic period, in which Judeans were returning from Babylonia to live in the land again. This way of explicating the passage has elements of the previous two. On one hand, the curses are meant to explain what the Judeans suffered in the not-so-distant past. On the other, they warn the people not to repeat their sins and risk the same thing happening again. 

Evidence for this third reading comes from the final section of the chapter. After describing how the land will be emptied of inhabitants and lie fallow without the sinful population sullying its grounds, the text shifts to express cautious optimism for what will come next: “Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, annulling My covenant with them: for I, Adonai, am their God. I will remember in their favor the covenant with the ancients, whom I freed from the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God: I, Adonai.” 

What the author is saying is: Don’t give up. What happened in the past is something to learn from. The curses are not meant to express the vicious anger of a spurned deity, nor are they a simple statement that the author knows what his people went through. Rather, the curses communicate to readers that while the past was terribly frightening and traumatic, and could even repeat itself, despair is not the right response. Instead, the people who are now resettling the land after a century of exile need to think about the mistakes of their past and how not to repeat them. 

This message is actually empowering. It’s effectively saying: We Judeans survived a horror, but miraculously enough we are now getting another chance. If we fail again, the horror will return. But if we take our responsibilities seriously, a life of blessing is just around the corner. It’s up to us to choose which path to take. 

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 1, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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While the Temple in Jerusalem is the only Jewish temple mentioned in the Bible, there were other Jewish temples, including one in the Egyptian city of Elephantine. Built in the sixth century BCE and destroyed in 410 BCE by priests of the Egyptian god Khnum, the temple was a place where local Jews, often Israelite soldiers hired by Egypt, could offer sacrifices. According to some scholars, the description of the temple at Elephantine is similar to the mishkan, or tabernacle, described in the book of Exodus.  

One of the interesting features of this community, aside from that it performed Jewish sacrifices outside of Jerusalem, is the presence of female functionaries in the temple. One of these, Tamet, was a freed slave who was dedicated as a lachanah, or temple servant. Her husband, Anani son of Azariah, was a lachan, the masculine version of the same term. Both of them lived in a house that shared a wall with the temple. 

Israeli archaeologist Gad Barnea has recently translated a fragment from Elephantine, written on a pottery sherd. Barnea has indicated that the text is part of a ritual intended to get vengeance for theft, in a somewhat similar way to the tablets at Bath. The inscription partly reads: “Behold, my tunic, which I left in the house of Yah … command the lion and let him consecrate it…” In this ritual, an individual dedicates a tunic to the temple, thus granting it to the Israelite god. (The “lion” is a term indicating either the deity or a priest.) 

In rituals like this, the tunic would be a replica of the stolen one, and God would thus become the owner of the stolen property. God would then seek out the thief for punishment. This type of ritual transaction, according to Barnea, occurred throughout the Mediterranean region. The tablets of Bath are simply a slightly different ritual mechanism for a similar purpose: cursing the thief and compelling the return of stolen property. This ritual is not mentioned in the Torah, but the Torah does discuss property, such as fields and livestock (Leviticus 27:28), being dedicated to a sacred shrine. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Elephantine inscription is that its language suggests a Jewish priestess is conducting this ceremony. She is the one who “commands the lion” to consecrate the tunic, according to Barnea’s reading of the text. Similarly, in the Jewish temple later built in Leontopolis, another ancient Egyptian city, a fragmentary text refers to a kahenah, a feminized version of the Hebrew term for priest, kohen. The text found at Elephantine seems to indicate that the biblical norm of having only male priests was not universal. How ironic that the record of a theft might one day allow us to glimpse a woman’s role that was stolen from history. 

The religion scholar Bernadette Brooten also reports Jewish gravestones where women are described as priestesses, including one in Leontopolis. It is even possible, as I have been suggesting in my writing elsewhere, that in ancient Israel proper, there may have been women with the title kahenah or kohenet. One of the gifts of this fragment from Elephantine is that it gives us a more diverse picture of who could be a spiritual leader among ancient Israelites, and perhaps might inspire a broader leadership model today. If this priestess is our ritual ancestor, might that affect our understanding of the past and our Jewish practice in the present?  

We’ll never know if the Jewish man in Elephantine got his tunic back, or why it was important enough to him that he went to the priestess in the temple. Yet his attempt to make his plight known to God has come down to us, and has alerted us to the existence of a woman who conducted rituals for Egyptian Jews, a reality we might otherwise not have discovered. How extraordinary the mechanisms by which something lost can be found again.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 25, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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This week, I find my heart as scraggly as the wilding beards I see on the Brooklyn subway, as we are not only midway through the Omer, but also just marked a trio of “yoms” — Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day), Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day). 

In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi calls our holiday observances acts of “ritual remembering,” a method by which Jewish collective memory is preserved through rituals, ceremonies and liturgical practices rather than just historical records. We don’t just hear about the Exodus from Egypt, we taste it as we eat matzah and saltwater at the Passover seder. We sing and feast to celebrate our liberation, and we care for the downtrodden because we know what it means to be enslaved. And yes, the old joke about typical Jewish holidays (attributed to Alan King) encapsulates our typical ceremonies succinctly: “They tried to kill us, we prevailed, let’s eat.”

This year, that process is more fraught than most. It has been only six months since the massacres of October 7th, and we are still engulfed in a brutal war. How can we engage in acts of ritual remembering when we are living in between “they tried to kill us” and “we prevailed?” 

Our processes of mourning and memory can provide some guideposts. When a close loved one dies, we sit shiva, seven days at home in which our community ensures we do not grieve alone. Friends provide food and comfort, listening as we share raw expressions of loss and memory. We aren’t ready to make meaning. It is too soon with our fresh losses and ongoing trauma. Instead, we gather, share stories and support those in the depths of grief, collectively waiting for the time when we might begin to make meaning. This sharing is the beginning of a narrative process during which memories become stories, eventually burnished into legacy when they motivate our actions. 

My late father shared a poignant story from another challenging time in our history: Simchat Torah during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. With shades drawn down across Tel Aviv for air raids, every neighbor had a loss to mourn, a shiva to attend. Amidst the heavy grief and omnipresent reality of war, he suddenly heard sounds of singing. A throng was dancing with a Torah through the streets of secular Tel Aviv. They proclaimed, “If we cannot dance in the streets with the Torah, then what is the point of fighting at all?”

They knew the laws of sitting shiva are paused for Shabbat, and ended for the festivals. And they were following the teaching of Rav Nachman of Breslov, who said that it is forbidden to despair. As long as we carry forward Torah, as long as we reach toward and seek to reflect God’s light, we access a source of hope. As future ancestors, and descendants of Abraham and Sarah, we embody an indomitable spirit that affirms life even in the darkest of times.

What if we could, even now in fresh grief, still weather our despair with the memory of past redemptions? What if our rituals this year could reflect not only the sorrow of those we have lost but also our indomitable spirit, and a stubborn hope for peace and security? What if we allow ourselves this Shavuot to truly receive the gift of Torah to give us strength and hope?

As hair grows and tears flow through this Omer period, we add new stories of collective and personal sorrows. Someday our current sorrows will be memories, woven into the tapestry of our shared destiny, where time and again we “sow in tears and reap in joy,” in the words of the psalmist. As we count down to Shavuot, we are reminded that, just as we stood together at Sinai, we will once again gather in the celebration of Torah and the renewal it promises. 

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 18, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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The practice of counting each day between Passover and Shavuot is commanded in the Bible, but over time these days have become chiefly seen as a period of mourning in observant communities. The Talmud notes that over these seven weeks, 24,000 students of the famed sage Rabbi Akiva died because they did not treat each other with respect.

While the Talmud does not explicitly connect this to any mourning practices, most observant Jews today do. In my Jewish day school, we learned that the deaths of Rabbi Akiva’s students is the reason we don’t perform weddings, celebrate engagements, or host big parties during this time. Some people refrain from buying new clothes, listening to music, or even getting a haircut. Most Jews who observe these practices continue them until the 33rd day of the Omer, known as Lag Baomer, which is celebrated as the day on which the great mystic Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai died. His death signified a joyful reunification with God and marked the end of the deaths of the students. 

These strictures bothered me mostly because the story behind them felt tenuous. My exploration seemed to prove me right — these practices developed over time, and not in the way I was taught. I wrote about how mourning practices were not introduced in talmudic times, but much later. Around the ninth century, for example, we first see weddings and engagements prohibited. As the centuries rolled on — especially in medieval Ashkenaz — more and more mourning was added to these days and tied to the students of Rabbi Akiva.

There are good reasons to wonder about all of this. The famed medieval authority Maimonides, who systematically categorized all of Jewish law, didn’t include these mourning practices in any of his extensive writings, an omission that hints at their late development. And some scholars suggest they became especially important in medieval times because Jews experienced the tragedies of the crusades and found in these rituals of mourning an acute relevance to their own grief.

When I submitted the paper to my professor, I felt a bit triumphant. I had taken a tradition that most around me observed uncritically and excavated its layers of historical development. But as I’ve grown a bit more mature, I realize how wrongheaded my approach was — not because I tried to understand a tradition or its development, but in thinking that the Jewish observance of this sacred time should be valued less for being the product of history.

That’s because the Jewish calendar wasn’t (only) set by God. The biblical commandment to mark the new month inaugurated a practice of marking time, which Jews have done ever since. We have added rabbinic holidays like Hanukkah and Purim to biblical holidays and infused our days and months with meaning inspired by different Jews across time and space.

Daniel Sperber, an expert in the development of Jewish customs, poignantly observes that the Ashkenazi tradition of mourning during the Omer “reflects the tragedy of the persecutions of Tatnu [the first crusade in the 11th century]. Blood touched blood; the blood of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples is mixed with the blood of the martyrs of Ashkenaz, who sacrificed themselves for the sanctification of God’s name.”

To observe Jewish time then is to be bound by Jewish peoplehood and Jewish solidarity. It’s to live our lives not guided by scientific history, but by a memory that commands and rewards us with ties of fraternity and even love. That means that when I mourn during the Omer, I am connected to my people — connected to the talmudic rabbis who described a massive tragedy that occurred to an entire generation of students, and connected to every tragedy thereafter that moved Jews to add more grief to these days.

This coming week we will mark Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance for fallen Israeli soldiers and victims of terror who were killed since the state of Israel was established in 1948. This day was created to honor those who paid the ultimate price for creating a safe refuge for Jews — a day to which new names are added every year, and which after October 7th will hit many of us much harder. We will then transition to Yom Ha’atzmaut, the day celebrating the establishment of the state of Israel, a day connecting us to the millions of Jews whose prayers for Zion across generations have been given new life in our lifetime.

This year, when I mourn and then celebrate Israel, I will not just be reaffirming my commitment to how Jews have continued to add to and develop the Jewish calendar, but I will honor how that living and breathing calendar links generations of Jews together in solidarity.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 11, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

The post Observing Jewish Time appeared first on My Jewish Learning.

It wasn’t until I moved to California that I learned there are places where rain has its own designated season. As I began to feel the California rhythm, I realized it was the same as the land of Israel: winter rains running from Sukkot until Passover, then dry summer for the remaining six months of the year. But Jewish tradition does not characterize the summer season as one of dryness, but by the presence of dew, which continues to quietly, gently nurture the land. 

With the arrival of Passover last month, we left the rainy season behind and entered the season of dew. This seasonal shift is marked in our Jewish practice in a couple of ways. First, the words of our daily Amidah prayer are slightly altered, dropping the language of rain in favor of praise for God as the bringer of dew. In addition, we have two grand prayers that act as gateways from one season to the other. In the fall, on Shemini Atzeret, we recite a prayer for rain in which we name different biblical figures, referencing their special relationships with water, and ask God to give plentiful rain by their merit. Then in the spring, on the first day of Passover, we recite a prayer for dew in which we poetically invoke the gentle, nourishing qualities of dew.

I love how the change of seasons and the memory of an ancient agricultural life continue to be reflected in contemporary words and practices. And I wonder about it too. I think about my distant ancestors leaving the Mediterranean basin, migrating over the Alps into the green, wet hills and plains that they would call Ashkenaz. When they arrived in this unpredictably rainy climate, what made them decide to continue to pray according to the seasons of the old country? Why choose — because at some point it was someone’s choice — to carry forward the climate of Israel in our bodies and prayers, despite the summer rains of Europe and the importance of fertile soil there too? The rain and dew seasons continue to live in us, no matter the land in which we live.

The last time we offered the formal prayer for rain was last Shemini Atzeret — October 7th. While the prayer brought no more or less rain than you’d expect, that day unleashed a storm in our world – torrents of violence, shock, and reprisal. Since then, we have been waterlogged with grief, soaked with sorrow, inundated with the impulses that emergency brings. We have swum in ancestral agonies. And we have pulled and clawed at each other with the desperation of people trying to keep their footing in rising floodwaters. The storm has continued because the suffering has continued — the suffering of Israelis and the suffering of Gazans and the suffering of all of us caught on the outskirts, wanting peace and safety and sustenance for all. 

Now it is dew season and I am more than ready for it. Our ancestors thought that dew fell overnight, a gentle rain from a clear sky. But we know better. Dew is not top-down but bottom-up. Dew is the condensation of water molecules from the air forming on the thin grass at ground level. Dew materializes without causing harm — no roof collapses, no floods, no downed trees. It emerges fresh each day, and each day it offers itself up, evaporating and rising into the air like an incense offering on an altar. 

I am ready for this gentleness. My prayer for dew season is that we let whatever is stirring in us emerge in the morning and condense on the landscape of our day — our sadness, our worry, our eagerness, our fear, our shame. That we let it form like tiny droplets and then offer itself up — evaporating in the light of day, ascending like a prayer, leaving us unburdened enough to turn to the work and words of peace.

There is an undeniable majesty in the drama of the thunderstorm, and an impulse to be right in it. Whenever my sister and I, both seasoned Californians at this point, are back in Chicago, we race outdoors during thunderstorms, drawn to the drama despite (and even because of) the risk. But in this moment of crisis, we don’t need more thunder and lightning. We need the gentleness of dew. We need to let things arise and evaporate, released like a prayer to the ears of the still-listening Divine. We need the chance to be our best selves without the fear of being washed away in a deluge.

May the healing dew come this season. And as the text of the dew prayer concludes, may it come for blessing and not for curse; for life and not for death; for plenty and not for scarcity. 

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 4, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here. 

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