Watch, Listen, Learn

Using Jews as a wedge to break apart the world order is not new.  We must be honest about what’s happening here.

When your most precious resource faces grave risk, you create a sanctuary to protect and nurture it. You hold close the seeds, so that when the conditions are right, you can replant and rebuild.

We are lost and disoriented.  How can the core values of this week’s Torah portion supply us with a compass to navigate the landscape of moral injury?

Yitro reminds us, in the twisted reality of our time: do not quiet your intuition. Defy the new norms. Live from your deepest moral convictions, not your most callous political calculations. And do not eat the tainted grain— no matter how hungry you are. Keep searching for an alternative food source. There is always another food source.

– Rabbi Sharon Brous | B’shallakh 5785 Four postures our tradition warns against, in the face of grave threat: Do not snail. Do not capitulate. Do not meet become the mirror image of your enemy. Do not render yourselves preemptively powerlessness. Instead: do what you know

We are all struggling in this moment of deep darkness – either riding the constant emotional rollercoaster or already feeling numb. The thing is that both of these will destroy us. Instead, we need to stay connected to our humanity and each other to get us through. That is the only way we will find ourselves back in the light.

This is the moment to remember who we are, to ground ourselves in the story that stands in determined opposition to the story of tyranny.  To tell of a God who cares about the vulnerable.  To become again a people whose faith compels us to protect the frightened.

After 15 months of catastrophic loss, unspeakable heartache, and the utter undoing of not one but two peoples—in body and spirit, we stand—at this moment—at an inflection point. May this be the beginning of the end of the suffering. May it be the beginning of the path toward a just peace.

Even as the fires burn, let us hold on another, give voice to what we have lost, and turn toward what remains.

How did Joseph, a man hardened by one life experience after the next, soften his heart to forgive his brothers?  A remarkable midrash imagines a conversation between Joseph and Benjamin that changes everything.  Ten names and all the worlds of meaning, of missing, of memory they contain.

What is Joseph’s legacy? And what can we learn from the character with the most costume changes in all of the Torah?

Jacob tried to flee from his estranged brother. Did he fear more the battle, or the potential reconciliation? What happens when victimhood is built into our self-definition? What do we lose when we stay at the table, and what might we gain? What will it take for us to understand that there is no future until we see one another?

There is a teaching in Pirkei Avot that says that the mouth of the well was made during the first Shabbat of creation. We have long accepted it to be Miriam’s well, but what if it’s the well from this week’s parsha – the one Jacob encounters after his dream, and where he meets Rachel for the first time? If it’s that well, then maybe we, like Jacob, have to find the well, roll off the stone, and discover what exists underneath.

Who is Isaac?  The man perpetually trapped by his father’s story, still bound to the altar, forever defined by the core trauma of his life.  What will it take to break free?  For the once bound to become unbound?

After a life of heartache, two estranged brothers affirmed each other’s humanity, and rediscovered their own. We, too, can make that choice. Let us push back on the encroaching darkness as a force for good—a light force—that counters the cruelty, racism, and violence poisoning our culture with compassion, tender presence, and forgiveness. This is what solidarity looks like.

Loving your neighbor, who is like you, whose identity you share, is not enough.  You must stretch the boundaries of love to wrap into its embrace the stranger, the people in our society who are furthest away from power.  To counter the frenzy of rhetoric and the aspirations of policy that demonize these human beings, we need to love them fiercely.  We need to love them fully.

One day our dreams will be realized. Just not today. And not tomorrow. And maybe not for many years. But just as hope doesn’t die, dreams don’t die.

There’s an eerie resonance between the Noah narrative and this week.  What does Noah’s Flood teach us about navigating chaos and coming once more to land?

After the death of a beloved child in our community to suicide, we reaffirm our commitment to combatting shame with tenderhearted love, to meeting one another in the dark, to never giving up on each other. May Benjamin Ellis’s memory be a blessing.

Sukkot reflects our people’s ancient narrative, balancing the transience of a wandering nation and the fragility of life with our yearning for home and the Eternal Divine. How does our tradition compel us to relate to those who yearn for home, but who are left to wander?

There is a dominant story in America today—a story of isolation, alienation, and narrow-minded extremism, fueled by a deeply unsettling convergence of right- and left-wing antisemitism. This story—propagated by a would-be authoritarian—plays on our worst instincts: the smallness, the fear, the ever-present sense of scarcity. And it threatens to do untold damage. We must write something new.

The only way forward is one broken heart next to another, crying together, awakening to the reality that grief is our common bond.

The Torah of Joy, and the Power, Promise, and Necessity of Laughter in Dark Times. | Rosh Hashanah II 5785

Hope doesn’t die, and despair is a privilege we cannot afford. | Rosh Hashanah I 5785