There are forces that want to bathe our joy in inescapable grief, as we learned on Oct. 7, Simchat Torah just 3 years ago. But there are other forces, better forces, Godly forces, that can be an antidote to the disease of hate.

Miriam and Shamir were in Boston this past week and had the opportunity to visit Lehrhaus, the hipster mashup of restaurant, tavern, and beit midrash. A message board nestled amidst the books in Somerville features a quote from American Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj. It reads in all caps: PAINT THE OPPOSITE OF ANTISEMTISM. The hatred of our people is on a lot of our mind, I think. It’s in the news and on the tongues of prominent politicians. It’s coursing through our social media feeds. And certainly, it was a central message this week as many of us sat in our chapel to absorb the woeful words of Eicha on Tisha B’Av. Our burning Temples, pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, the Shoah, October 7. The epigenetic weigh of Jewishness.

But this Shabbat is our annual escape hatch from that national Jewish day of Mourning. Shabbat Nachamu beckons us forth from grief, from the worst of our history, and the anxiety about the worst of our present circumstances, into an awareness of the many blessings surrounding us, and the possibilities of a brighter future. Today, this Shabbat, begins our march toward Rosh Hashanah, toward renewal and restoration.

My question for us is this: how might we paint the opposite of antisemitism? Or more specifically, how is Shabbat Nachamu an antidote to the pain of Tisha B’Av? As you may know, Tisha B’Av marked the conclusion of a period called bein hametzarim “between the straits,” the three weeks between the 17^th of Tamuz and the 9^th of Av. Shabbat Nachamu is the first of seven shabbatot of consolation, the shiva d’nechemta. So, three weeks, then seven weeks, after which we celebrate our New Year. But after those seven weeks, there are another three weeks, exactly 21 days between Rosh Hashanah and Hoshanah Rabbah during Sukkot, understood to be the real conclusion of High Holy Day season. Is there a relationship between the three weeks of mourning and these three weeks of introspection and, ultimately, joy?

The Hassidic masters believe there is. The Maor Vashamesh, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Epstein writes in the 19^th century (Parashat Pinchas):

כ”א יום הם כנגד כ”א יום שבין ראש השנה עד הושענא רבה

“The 21 days correspond to one another.” How?

אלא שאלו בין המצרים הם בהעלם, ואלו הימים שמראש השנה עד הושענא רבה הם באתגליא

“The Three Weeks are in concealment, whereas the days from Rosh Hashanah through Hoshana Rabbah are revealed.” What might be revealed? The 20^th century Slonimer Rebbe, the Netivot Shalom teaches that just as the Three Weeks are the root of sadness for the entire year – Sukkot is shoresh haSimcha, the root of joy. He draws on an earlier tradition from the original Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the late 18^th century Apter Rebbe, who taught that the 21 days we just completed in Av and those 21 days of the fall chagim correspond to yet another 21 days: the eretz yisraeli Biblical festivals throughout the Jewish year. Shabbat counts as 1, Rosh Hodesh 1, Pesach 7, Shavuot 1, Rosh Hashanah 2, Yom Kippur 1, Sukkot 8 = 21.

All of this is to say that this moment in our calendar holds great potentiality, is pregnant with possibility. In a world filled with too much hate, bullies and their cheap words, despots and their costly actions, mobs and their terror, our tradition holds secrets for healing and wholeness. And this Shabbat, as we step from three weeks of pain into seven weeks of comfort, can ignite within us, if we let it, a force to carry us toward those fall holidays and into the New Year beyond. I want to suggest that shabbat Nachamu plays a catalytic role. How is this is a shabbat of love? Sadness may be the waters that have surrounded us. Joy is the ultimate destination, a wellspring of flourishing. But love propels us across the surface of those waters. It is the antidote to Tisha B’Av. “Hate cannot drive out hate,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “only love can do that.”

So, it’s no coincidence that this Shabbat Nachamu is always Parashat V’Etchanan. And V’Etchanan contains not only the Ten Commandments but Shema and V’Ahavta. “You shall love the Lord your God, b’chol levavcha, with all your heart, b’chol nafshecha, with all your being, u’vechol meodecha, with all your substance” (Deu 6:5). Eicha! “How,” asked Parashat Devarim (1:12) and the book of Lamentations? “Ahavah, Love,” answers V’Etchanan.

But you might ask, isn’t V’ahavta about loving God? How is loving the Holy One meant to increase love in our world, in our lives? The poet Marge Piercy has a response, and one rooted in the best of our tradition:

So you shall love what is holy
with all your courage, with all your passion
with all your strength.
[…]

We should love ourselves, for we are of G-d.
We should love our neighbors as ourselves
We should love the stranger, for we
were once strangers in the land of Egypt
and have been strangers in all the lands of the world since.
Let love fill our hearts with its clear precious water.
[…]

We must choose life so our children’s children may live.
Be quiet and listen to the still small
voice within that speaks in love.
Open to that voice, hear it, heed it and work for life.
Let us remember and strive to be good.
Let us remember to find what is holy
within and without.

The cynic, or the skeptic, may hear these words and find them naïve. Love doesn’t win battles. Love doesn’t reach into the hearts of the truly intolerant and rescue them from their hate. There are battles worth fighting, of course. Words, despite the pacifist’s best intention, cannot stop a bullet or a prevent a genocide as our people have learned throughout the history we just commemorated on Tisha B’Av. But words do have a role, a critical role, in creating the conditions for fewer wars, less conflict, interrupted cycles of violence.

When Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, wrote that the best remedy for hate speech is not enforced silence but “more speech,” he meant we should confront hate, admonish haters. But he also understood that societies who seek, first, to silence speech of one kind, especially with force, offer little protection against the silencing of dissenting voices of any kind. Those are societies without a free press, the right to peaceably assemble, the permission to protest. Shabbat Nachamu, out of the ashes of our suffering, offers us a counterpoint to our baser instincts—the possibility of connection, of compassion, of love.

Anyone listen to the Hartman Institute’s Identity/Crisis Podcast? There was an episode recently in which Yehuda Kurtzer interviewed Shaanan Streett, the Israeli hiphop artist and frontman for Hadag Nachash. Streett and Kurtzer were discussing the popular rap “Harbu Darbu,” the rage and hate-filled song by Ness and Stilla which became wildly popular in the months after October 7. Streett explained that he had met the duo, even performed with them. “They’re not crazy fascists,” he said. “They’re just ordinary Israelis that were swept in the moment…very humiliated, very angry. And that was their artistic response.”

Streett’s response, though, was different. He felt, beyond the battles, after the war, the only lasting way forward was the path of attempted understanding. So he recorded his own song titled “Chabru Dabru.” “Harbu Darbu means ‘destroy and hit’ in Arabic, he said, ‘but my song, you change around the letters and it becomes ‘connect and speak.’” That is a path of love.

“Paint the opposite of Antisemitism.” In my pre-Shabbat video, I mentioned Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his teaching that the best response to sinat hinam, the baseless hatred which our Sages say caused the Temple’s destruction, is ahavat hinam. Free love. Not the Northern California kind of free love; boundless love, causeless love. Choosing to seek love when only hate seems possible.

The week after Tisha B’Av is all about love. The 9^th of Av is a day of catastrophe. The Shabbat that follows is one of comfort when we read the directive, “love God” and learn through that how to love our fellow. And then comes the 15^th of Av. What’s that? It’s Jewish Valentine’s Day. It’s our national day of love. Tu B’Av starts this Tuesday night. So, this week, let’s ask ourselves, how might we climb aboard that Love Boat, a vessel capable of carrying us across the waves of our sadness? What words might we choose when others tug at us from our fear and worry? Hevre, we have seven weeks to get ready for the next three. And then three weeks to prepare for Simchat Torah. There are forces that want to bathe our joy in inescapable grief, as we learned on that holiday just three years ago. But there are other forces, better forces, Godly forces that can be an antidote to the disease of hate. Love the Lord your God. The rest will follow.

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Jewish tradition is clear on the importance of hachnasat orchim, the mitzvah of hospitality. Hamakom has done it’s share and then some! Welcome banners, balloons, videos of our arrival. My face on banners. My face on posters. My face on electronic displays throughout the building…. Please know, I am truly grateful for the incredible efforts this congregation undertaken to extend a powerfully warm welcome to me personally—and to Miriam, Eliyah and Shamir. Truly grateful… and just a little embarrassed.

If you’ll allow, it all reminds me a bit of Rabbi Don Goor formerly of Temple Judea here in Tarzana who once told a story about being invited to a congregant’s home for sukkot. When Rabbi Goor walked into the man’s sukkah, he was bemused to find the sukkah decorated on all sides with pictures of himself—Rabbi Goor. Don was honored but uncertain as to why the congregants had done this. When he inquired, they responded, “this is the first year we’ve built a sukkah, and we weren’t sure what to do. Our friends attend Chabad, and they put pictures of their rabbi all around their sukkah!...”

So, while it’s an honor to see the posters and banners, it’s especially nice to see each other today, in three dimensions, face-to-face.

Shall we learn some Torah? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible wanders through the ages…it speaks in every language and in every age…In fact, it is still in the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its content having hardly touched the thresholds of our minds; like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie, waiting to be discovered” (God in Search of Man, p. 242).

We call Torah an Etz Chayim, a living tree. And it’s true, it is always growing and, as it does, it shapes us, grows with us throughout the generations. But Torah is also a treasure trove to be mined, or an ocean to be explored. We dive deep into its waters, claiming those pearls, applying its timeless wisdom to new contexts. We grow when we learn the lessons of our tradition in relationship to contemporary questions or challenges.

This feels like a worthy message on this, the Semiquincentennial of our country, America’s 250th birthday. There is much to love about this country, its beautiful landscapes as my family and I recently experienced, its commitment to our basic freedoms and representative democracy, the hamburger. But what I love best about America, and what is in some ways the most Jewish thing about this country, is the foundation of basic human equality upon which the nation was founded when the 2^nd Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

I’ve served three congregations in my years as a rabbi. The first one, Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago, features striking stained-glass windows in its historic sanctuary, including in a ceiling skylight. Included are the words “All men are created equal” in English, words from the Declaration. But immediately above these are Hebrew words from Bereishit: “na’aseh adam b’tzalmeinu kidemuteinu, let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness.” The implication of course, the midrashic move if you will, is that America’s promise of equality is rooted in Torah values, the radical Jewish concept that each of us is created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image, and is therefore deserving of honor and dignity.

This is no accident in that the founding fathers were largely Hebraophiles, wishing to root the American experiment in what they saw as Christian Old Testament values and the Bible’s frequent call to justice, fairness, dignity, and prosperity. Now, if we’re being honest, Jefferson’s language was not as expansive or inclusive as I hope most of us believe our country should be in embracing human equality. In 1776 and long after, “equality” did not include, for example, women, people of African descent—even we Jews were not afforded de jure, full equal protection under the law until many, many years year. And today, there continue to be many societal inequities worth working to correct or improve.

But what I want to suggest to you today is that that is exactly why this anniversary is so important, so powerful. Because America, like Jewish tradition, is not only about the human being, but the human becoming. What we are is an invitation to who we might be. There are legal systems, political systems, social stratifications in the world which insist large segments of their societies are trapped in their station, defined inexorably by their race or gender or caste.

This, I believe, is not what America stands for. “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Not only being but becoming, pursuing.

And Torah, too, unfurls itself to us, revealing an internal Jewish struggle to live up to the principle of tzelem Elohim. Our parasha includes the b’not Tzlophehad, five daughters who come to Moses with a claim of unfair practices.

תְּנָה־לָּ֣נוּ אֲחֻזָּ֔ה בְּת֖וֹךְ אֲחֵ֥י אָבִֽינוּ׃

“Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen,” they demand (Num. 27:4). It is unfair that just because we have no brothers, our family’s property should pass to another! And what’s amazing about this passage is that when Moshe brings the case to the Kadosh Baruch Hu, God insists not only that the b’not Tzlophehad get their due, but establishes a new legal precedent based on their claim. “Further, speak to the Israelite people as follows: ‘If a man dies without leaving a son, you shall transfer his property to his daughter’” (v. 8).

Humans becoming, society evolving based on a clear founding principle – equality. It’s this principle embedded in the Declaration of Independence that has led Americans to push for a what the constitution calls “a more perfect union.” In 1852, nine years before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist who made his home in my previous home of Baltimore, delivered a speech in honor of Independence Day. His remarks draw on the tradition of the ancient prophets who call upon us to uphold our values, of Tzelophehad’s daughters who insist halacha abide by Torah’s own first principles.

Douglass doesn’t in any way reject the Declaration of Independence” Rather, in the spirit of American pursuit of happiness, he claims it in the name of a brighter future. “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men,” he says. “They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age…. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

And then Douglass admits with great sadness the truth of 1852, of a man who escaped slavery, but whose brothers and sisters remain in bondage. “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary!... The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me…. This Fourth July is yours, not mine….” Nevertheless, says Douglass, “I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.” His quote is from Isaiah 59 (v. 1). He’s prophetic; Sure enough, eleven years later Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. And by June 19, 1865, American slavery was at an end.

America is a land of becoming because the project of America is one that makes reinvention, reimagination possible. That’s why so many Jews came here, to Hollywood, making movies to tell stories both about an America they loved and also about an America they hoped would become more fully realized. That’s how Jewish poet Emma Lazarus was able to reimagine an enormous statue in New York Harbor, a gift of liberty presented by the French on July 4, 1884, but which Lazarus understood to stand for immigrants seeking a better life. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Her poem, written one year prior, would remake Lady Liberty as a beacon of welcome for people like my grandfather who would come to flee Nazi Germany in 1938. But in 1883, the same year Emma Lazarus penned “The New Colossus,” she also wrote a series of articles titled “An Epistle to the Hebrews” in which she coined the phrase: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Lazarus was concerned in that essay about Jewish complacency, that comfortable and assimilated American Jews were not sufficiently concerned with the plight of suffering Eastern European Jewry and the repatriation of our fellow people not only to America but also to Eretz Yisrael. “I do not hesitate to say that our national defect is that we are not “tribal” enough;” she wrote, “we have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated.”

To enjoy the freedoms of America is not to disappear into some great melting pot. And it’s not to insist everything is perfect. It’s to celebrate the many wonderful things about this country, now a quarter of a millenium old. And it’s to honor the diverse and rich humanity which pulsates through this great nation. This Independence Day, may we seek to be and become, to confront our past not with shame but curiosity and love of a country that has given our people so much. May we continue to insist on the call to equality enshrined in our Declaration of Independence.

And Hamakom, as we begin our new journey together, may I be worthy of the values that undergird this wonderful community. We too are in a process of becoming, and I’m so very excited to see where we go from here!

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It’s been a while so thanks for your patience! I’ll be sharing my recent first sermon in my new shul (text and podcast) soon, with more to come!

Meanwhile, as I’ve been in the process of transitioning from Beth Am and Baltimore to my new synagogue Hamakom of Los Angeles, CA, I’ve been reflecting on sixteen wonderful years in Reservoir Hill. An incredible committee led by Clara Salzberg and Marc Ershler put together an unforgettable weekend including joyful Kabbalat Shabbat Services in Druid Hill Park and a fabulous Nefesh Mountain concert! The incomparable Shana Kroiz compiled a stunning tribute book which I will treasure for the rest of my life. Miriam, Eliyah, Shamir, and I were incredibly touched by the gratitude expressed and the effort put into celebrating our time together.

Throughout the Shabbat of June 12-13, 2026, there were touching speeches, some of which were recorded. For those who were unable to attend, here is a playlist from Beth Am’s YouTube channel with some of the speeches and performances. In it you’ll find:

• Governor Wes Moore’s tribute

• City Council President Zeke Cohen’s moving personal story about the loss of his mother and finding comfort at Beth Am

• A hilarious song from the Beth Am Purim spielers

• Heal Us Now performed by yours truly with my children

• My farewell sermon

• Rabbi Tyler Dratch’s blessing

L’Shalom,

Rav Daniel

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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests that the book of Leviticus, “invites us to consider what it would mean for us to live a consecrated, dedicated life.” In Hebrew, the book in which we currently find ourselves is named Vayikra, meaning “and God called.” Rashi says this is לְשׁוֹן חִבָּה, God’s love language. For Sacks, this evokes the key Western concept of vocation or “calling.” “Not everyone who finds meaning in life does so in moral terms,” he writes. “But they almost always do so in terms of some project involving challenge, dedication, commitment, and effort that takes them beyond themselves.”

Today, as we celebrate Beth Am’s annual Volunteer Shabbat, we honor so many of you who have demonstrated this kind of altruism. Thank you! And today, I want to further explore this question of dedication, of holy commitment. Our parasha includes a strict admonition against eating hekdesh, that which is set aside for God.

וְכׇל־זָ֖ר לֹא־יֹ֣אכַל קֹ֑דֶשׁ

“No lay person shall eat of the sacred donations” (Lev. 22:10).

These terumah offerings were voluntary gifts provided to the priests. What’s the origin of the word terumah? It derives from the shoresh רום which means to elevate or exalt, which is the source of the archaic translation “heave offering.” In other words, once something has been elevated for sacred use, it cannot be claimed or consumed in the regular way. Terumah is for the kohein alone, or more specifically his household.

The haftarah, too, refers to hekdesh, commitment to the irreducible holy. In Ezekiel’s description of Temple worship he says, “The meal offerings, sin offerings, and guilt offerings shall be consumed by them....”

וְכׇל־חֵ֥רֶם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לָהֶ֥ם יִהְיֶֽה׃

“Everything proscribed in Israel shall be theirs” (Ez. 44:29). As Bible scholar Michael Fishbane points out, the language evokes next week’s double parasha, the concluding section to Sefer Vayikra. The Torah also uses the word חֵ֡רֶם which we often think of as a ban or excommunication. But here it means devoted—that is permitted to the priests but “banned” for everyone else.

אַךְ־כׇּל־חֵ֡רֶם אֲשֶׁ֣ר יַחֲרִם֩ אִ֨ישׁ לַֽה…

“But of all that anyone owns, be it man or beast or land of his holding, nothing that he has proscribed for the LORD may be sold or redeemed…”

כׇּל־חֵ֕רֶם קֹֽדֶשׁ־קׇדָשִׁ֥ים ה֖וּא לַה׃

“Every proscribed thing is totally consecrated to God” (Lev. 27:28).

This is the say that once we set aside anything to God—an animal, home, land—it must remain so. No take backs. The consecrated life is about elevated living. In Judaism (unlike gravity) what goes up, must stay up.

And the concept, it seems, applies to people as well. When Manoach’s wife dedicates her son Shimshon/Samson as a nazir, he remains a nazir. When Chana dedicates her son Shmuel for service, he must serve. This is why we have the mitzvah of pidyon haben, the redemption of the first born. Because just by virtue of one having been born first, we are obligated to the Temple. An elaborate ceremony is supposed to be performed, even to this day when beit hamikdash no longer stands, to redeem such a child from this service.

But this concept of the irreducible holy also applies beyond its strict application to priests and the Temple. Blessings, too, seem to be irrevocable. When Yaakov tricks his blind father Yitzhak, pretending to be Esav, what is Yitzhak’s response? Not to revoke the blessing as fruit from a poison tree.

וָאֲבָרְכֵ֑הוּ גַּם־בָּר֖וּךְ יִהְיֶֽה׃

“I blessed him,” Isaac proclaims, “so blessed will he be!” (Gen 27:34).

And famously, on Chanukah, how do we light the candles? We follow Beit Hillel who say we add one flame each night instead of subtracting because we should be “ma’alin bakodesh, v’lo moridin, we should only go up in holiness, not down.”

All this is hopefully inspiring, but know the world often does not work this way! The question for us then is less about the priesthood which is mostly vestigial in a post-exilic Jewish world. Our parasha’s challenge to us is how might we commit, vocationally, as a calling, to greater holiness in our lives? And how might that commitment uplift possibilities for future generations?

One example can be found in a middle-school student at Lincoln Square synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Having impressed her Hebrew school instructors and rabbi, 12-year-old Elena Kagan couldn’t understand why girls were not permitted to celebrate their coming of age with bat mitzvah. In those days it was uncommon for girls in Conservative shuls to read from the Torah—and unheard of in Orthodox ones like Lincoln Square. Young Elena was not permitted to. But on Friday night May 18, 1973, after fighting tooth and nail for the privilege, she did become the first girl at her shul to celebrate a bat mitzvah. “She certainly raised my consciousness,” said Rabbi Shlomo Riskin who years ago made Aliyah and has continued to evolve in his own thinking. Nowadays it’s de rigueur for Orthodox girls to have some sort of bat mitzvah celebration, and not uncommon for them to read Torah, including at Lincoln Square. Meanwhile, Elena Kagan would go on to become the first female dean of Harvard Law School and the first woman to serve as solicitor general.

So, it seems fitting that as the Supreme Court all but dismantled the last key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week, Justice Kagen took the rare step of delivering her powerful dissent aloud from the bench. This law “…was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” she said. “It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court.” She might as well have been chanting a maftir or a haftarah from our prophets. Her Jeremiad is rooted not in nostalgia, but real concern for the degradation of rights and representation for Black Americans.

There is much to be said, and no time to say it now, about the history of the VRA and the importance of Black and Jewish alliances during the Civil Rights Era. These histories have been written. Where I’d like us to land today is in considering how hard it is to maintain upward momentum in our Jewish pursuit of justice. As Jews, it should concern us when hekdesh, achievements of a higher order—robust and diverse democratic participation, for example—are torn down in the name of progress. The question for us is not whether polling access for minorities is much better than it was in 1965. It is. The question is why.

And one big reason why is because of the protections afforded by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As another pioneering Jewish Supreme Court justice wrote in 2015 when SCOTUS dismantled the preclearance provision of the same landmark legislation, “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” A recent study published in the Journal of Politics shows throwing away the umbrella has had a marked effect on the racial gap in voter turnout since Shelby County v. Holder, translating to literally “hundreds of thousands of uncast ballots by voters of color.” Unfortunately, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg feared, it’s been a pretty soggy decade since the last time SCOTUS took up the Voting Rights Act.

What’s to be done when some seem to be working so hard to reduce the irreducible holy? First, we study our history. What is one of the first things you learn when learning to drive a car? Check your mirrors. New drivers are hyper-focused on the road ahead. Experienced drivers know we also have to look behind us: Your rear view, side mirrors, blind spots.

Consider our own Jewish history of disenfranchisement and suffering. There has been much focus in recent years on increasing Holocaust education. But as Holocaust Historian Daniel Greene argues in the new issue of Sources (“Holocaust Education for Today,” Spring 2026), in the battle to combat the very real and precipitous rise in Jew-hatred, cause and effect is less clear. Of course we should study the Shoah, and it should be studied more frequently not less, particularly with the rise of Holocaust denial, misinformation and disinformation campaigns. And some people are, undoubtedly, more sympathetic to Jews because of their knowledge of that history. But it would be inaccurate to claim that Holocaust education has decreased the overall rate of antisemitism. The evidence is overwhelming to the contrary.

Ultimately, we study history because it happened, argues Greene. The goal of learning about the past is not to “instrumentalize” it, it’s to understand it, to grapple with it. Likewise, understanding why African Americans were disenfranchised during Jim Crow is one critical step in the process of fighting for more inclusive elections.

Legislation, a new umbrella, may be part of the answer. A bill exists that, if passed, could help a lot. But trying to pass new laws without doing the relational work is unlikely to yield lasting results. Without a set of agreed-upon norms and values, what we do with our past is “up in the air,” so to speak. Holy is as holy does. We continue to have b’not mitzvah because our communities (including many Orthodox shuls) have agreed this is important. We have to win arguments, not just legal battles. We have to build empathy not only shout our displeasure online. We must build coalitions of people who remember their neighbors, not just their party affiliations, when they step into the voting booth.

And we must be open to the possibility of repair. On Mother’s Day, my family is going to see Holes at Center Stage. How many of you have read the book? Seen the movie? Seen the play? Holes is, at its heart, a Jewish story about healing. It’s the tale of two friends who redeem a century of injustice through kindness, fellowship, and by fighting for their futures. It’s about restorative justice. It’s about keeping our eyes set on road ahead, while checking the rearview mirror.

We Americans have dug ourselves into a hole of late. And there is real danger in feeling trapped by that hole. But we’re not. I don’t want to minimize the suffering, the fear, and anger. They are real and understandable. But if we think about it, we’ve always known that the irreducible holy is iterative. Our tradition may say we must only go up, but there are forces pulling us down; they are strong and they are determined. To live a “consecrated, dedicated life,” to achieve an aspirational society, requires stamina, patience, and a belief in a higher purpose for this complicated world. Gravity is gravity. It’s as old as time and space. But long before 1965, we humans figured out how to fly anyway. And recently, Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a moon mission, piloted humanity higher, further than we’ve ever flown.

So what’s next?

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My first Baltimore Justice column appeared in the second issue of Jmore in late 2016. Editor-in-Chief Alan Feiler had asked if I would be willing to share some reflections in the new monthly publication. Frankly, I was surprised. What value would a column about Jewish views on urban-oriented social justice hold in a glossy lifestyle publication geared mostly to a Pikesville crowd? Circumstances in America were changing rapidly, though. Donald Trump had just been elected. Many of us were grappling with what this new political reality would mean—for the Jewish community, the city of Baltimore, indeed for the nation.

And less than two years prior, Freddie Gray’s arrest and subsequent death had unleashed rage, reflection and a reckoning here in Baltimore. I had gained some national attention though my writing as an urban rabbi proximate to the uprising, with perspectives on both the history and legacy of Black-Jewish relations and with thoughts about what our robust Jewish textual heritage might have to offer as guidance. I told Alan I was honored to be asked. Thus began my new adventure as a regular columnist for Jmore!

Over the course of ten years and more than eighty columns, I’ve done my best to uplift local stories and challenge conventional wisdom on contemporary topics such as intersectionality, #MeToo, allyship, and America’s reckoning with Confederate statues. I’ve also written about Baltimore City’s relationship with the racism that defined its antebellum and Jim Crow eras and new possibilities for Druid Hill Park. My interest in what I call relational justice has also meant a strong conviction that we Jews need to stand up for who we are (from Baltimore to Israel) and our essential place in American society—and resist the othering that too often comes with America’s majority Christian culture.

The greatest throughline, however, has been my belief that Beth Am’s historic neighborhood of Reservoir Hill should flourish as what I’ve called The New Jewish Neighborhood, mindful of our history while working to soften artificial and counterproductive boundaries in favor of pluralism, inclusion, and mutual-esteem. This approach has also meant reminding our broader Jewish community at times that love for and investment in the city is both a sacred obligation and a win-win proposition. Where to begin? I’ve humbly suggested it all begins with relationships!

In June, I’ll be completing my time at Beth Am and in Baltimore. Miriam, our family, and I depart with abiding love for our adopted home, many enduring relationships, and great pride in what our synagogue, neighborhood, and city have accomplished. Rabbi Tyler Dratch will be taking over as Senior Rabbi here in Reservoir Hill. I leave our work of advancing urban Jewish Baltimore in his capable hands; the shul has never been stronger and more vibrant!

I wish to convey my abiding gratitude to Alan Feiler and Publisher Scott Rifkin for creating space for conversations about justice in the pages of Jmore. I am humbled to have penned this column for so long and hope that my doing so has contributed meaningfully to our discourse around some of Baltimore’s and the Jewish community’s thornier and most pressing issues.

A decade on, much has changed, but unfortunately, much remains to be accomplished. The forces that divide, minimize, and dehumanize are even more ascendent and persistent than when I began.

The equation (and my related hope for you, dear readers) is the same: an honest accounting of who we are, what we stand for and who we’ve been, plus a compassionate and curious approach to our fellow human beings, equals a more just society.

Here’s how I concluded that first column back in late 2016:

To better inhabit our Jewishness, we must be expansive in our concept of community. Baltimore’s greatness, like America’s greatness, is in its people. We Jews have flourished in this country and city because, despite real obstacles, here we have found a place to call home. So, let’s start at home. Making the world better requires making our neighborhoods better. And, wherever you live, city or county, making your neighborhood better requires making mine better too – and vice versa. Why? Because making Baltimore great means also identifying the parts of it that never were.

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Where does this idea come from, this notion that a skin ailment can be attributed to slander? Well, it’s not in Tazria or Metzora. It comes, eisegetically I would say, from two sources. I’ll take them in reverse chronological order. The first is from B’ha’alot’kha in the book of Numbers when Miriam and Aaron come to Moses with a complaint: “Vat’daber Miriam v’Aharon b’Moshe al odot ha’isha hakushit…, Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married…” (12:1). The midrashic tradition assumes the affliction of tza’arat that follows nine verses later is a direct result of this lashon hara which literally means the “evil tongue.” But, while plausible, it’s not necessarily the most likely explanation. First of all, the Torah is explicit that Miriam, and not Aaron, is affected – but both of them spoke, yes? Disparity aside, perhaps Miriam was punished for challenging Moses publicly.

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A contemporary rabbi (Norman Cohen) suggests it could be a punishment for racism. Miriam doesn’t like the darkness of Moses’ Cushite wife, so God turns her excessively white – measure for measure, midah k’neged midah. But that’s almost certainly incorrect. Dark skin is no liability in the ancient Near East, and while prejudices of various kinds have existed as long as humanity itself, anti-Black racism as we understand it today is hundreds not thousands of years old.

Rashi, for his part, imagines them critiquing him for abandoning his wife, Tzipora! Even the translation “against” Moses is an interpretation; while the preposition “b’moshe” is atypical, it could still mean they spoke “to” Moses. The point is, there are any number of possible causes to Miriam’s ailment – and even if we take the text at face value and assume there is a cause at all, the conspicuous absence of any etiology in numerous chapters of Tazria or Metzora makes the Numbers case the exception, not the rule!

The second example connecting this disease with harmful speech comes earlier in the book of Exodus (Ch. 4) and is even more tenuous. Essentially, God gives Moshe two magic tricks to impress Pharaoh: transfiguring his staff into a snake and giving himself tza’arat before curing it just as quickly. The midrash says the skin ailment was a result of Moses’ questioning the Holy One’s command to go before Pharaoh, but there’s scant evidence for such a claim. For these reasons, though, our Sages say that the term metzora, one afflicted with this leprous condition, is an acronym for motzi (shem) ra, one who brings forth a bad name, one who gossips.

Tenuous though this may be, the wonder of Torah is that it is always revealing itself to us in new ways. My teacher, Prof. Walter Herzberg, would say perhaps the most important thing to keep an eye out for when studying Torah is “perspective.” Sometimes to really understand a text we need to look at things from a different angle. It’s April, so perhaps a baseball story is called for:

There’s a young boy with a bat in hand, practicing his hitting by tossing a baseball into the air and swinging at it. He does this once, tosses it up, takes a good swing and, swish, misses the ball entirely. He does the same thing a second time. Swings and misses. The third time, he tosses the ball in the air, and carefully keeping his eye on the ball, he watches it go up… and as it’s coming down he swings cleanly across his body and… woosh. Misses it again. “Strike three,” says the kid to himself, “I had no idea I was such a good pitcher!”

So, considering this alternate perspective, here’s another way of thinking about tzara’at. Since the Torah is clear in our double parasha that this disease has no cause, nor any discernable cure, perhaps the Rabbis are not so fanciful in viewing it less as a treatise on the nature of disease but as a powerful metaphor for the nature of speech. In what ways do gossip, slander, lashon hara, manifest like a disease? How do hurtful words corrode a person? How do they leave us feeling ugly – disfigured and vulnerable? How do they force us to live in partial or even total isolation? Aren’t they, literally, communicable?

The Torah says, “lo telekh rachil b’amekha. Lo ta’amod al dam rei’ekha…, Do not go as a talebearer among your people, do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Lev. 19:16). And tradition suggests the two clauses in the verse are not unrelated. Speech can kill, sometimes literally – as in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia where the tale bearing of neighbors lead to catastrophic loss of life. And in this internet age of social media our society provides vehicles upon vehicles for defamation, disinformation – or perhaps violent ICE dragnets. How many stories have we heard about kids who are mercilessly bullied, resorting, God forbid, to acts of self-harm?

But the arrested heart is only one version of death. Evil and destructive speech can also undo a life in other ways – by obliterating a friendship, unmaking a marriage, or ruining a career. Rabbi Israel Salanter, founder of the Mussar Movement says, “If you say of a rabbi that he does not have a good voice and of a cantor that he is not a scholar, you are a gossip. But if you say of a rabbi that he is no scholar and of a cantor that he has no voice – you are a murderer.” But think about it, inasmuch as death is a permanently altered state, the victim of slander or gossip is deprived of the life she once had. She may be born again, but it will be, on some level, Phoenix-like, out of ashes. The metzora, having no appearance of malady, may re-enter the camp. But the man who enters will not be identical to the one who left. The world is filled with human beings sporting scars invisible to the naked eye.

And, as the Talmud points out, it’s not only the slandered who is culpable. The bystander, too, bears some responsibility, perhaps a lot. “One who listens to l’shon hara is worse than one who recites it” we read in Masechet Pesahim (118a). For, as the verse in Leviticus makes clear, to stand idly by our neighbor’s blood is to condone, even support, and perhaps aid and abet the destructive act we witness.

But here’s the interesting thing; Jewish tradition makes a far more radical claim: In addition to being culpable, all three parties are, paradoxically, damaged as well. Not just the victim, but the slanderer and bystander, too, have lost something of their humanity. If, as the Torah teaches, we are all created in God’s image and likeness, to defame another is to diminish ourselves. Think about a time when you said something hurtful. How did you feel? Perhaps big for a moment – but, if you’re a good person, as I know all of you are, I bet it wasn’t long before you felt yourself deflate.

The Talmud (Arachin, 15b) teaches: [Slander and gossip] kills three persons: the one who tells, the one who hears and the one about whom it is said. And what is the range of such devastation? The Gemara continues:

Rabbi Hama bar Hanina said: what is the meaning of “Death and life are in the ‘hand’ of the tongue?” (Proverbs 18:21). ...It tells you that just as the hand can kill, so can the tongue. One might say that just as the hand can kill only one near it, thus also the tongue can kill only one near it, [but we read in Psalms (64:4)]: “Their tongue is a sharpened arrow.” Then one might assume that just as an arrow kills only within [a short distance], thus also the tongue.... Therefore, the text states: “They set their mouths against heaven and their tongues range over the earth” (Psalms 73:9).

The range of speech, positive and negative, is limitless – as the Chassidic story reminds us, doing lashon hara is like opening a feather pillow outside on a windy day – and then trying to collect all the feathers. And what could be truer in our modern world of cyber-technology? The number of lives who are literally snuffed out by their own hand or that of another is so utterly dwarfed by the number of people who are irrevocably harmed each and every minute of each and every day. So much bile courses through the invisible wires that connect us, ricochets between satellites. One hundred forty years ago, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan penned a book called Chafetz Chayim. Its chief purpose was to enumerate the laws of shemirat halashon, proper and improper speech. His analogy? That of a telegram. “Notice how carefully they consider each word before putting it down,” he writes. “That is how careful we must be when we speak.” Words have always been precious to Jews, but now even the printed word, the texted word, the reposted meme is cheap and oh so ubiquitous. How much more relevant it is in our day that nearly one quarter of the forty-three sins listed in Yom Kippur’s Al Chet prayer are sins committed through speech!

Each Shabbat, we offer a Mi Sheberach, a prayer for healing. We consider those whose lives have been turned upside down by illness, whose families have been absorbed in their suffering. This week’s parasha masquerades as a text about a fantastical disease, when in reality it is a powerful metaphor for an all too real condition. The world, which God lovingly created with speech, has become eroded by it. What is the best response? As with disease: refuah, healing. We shouldn’t be naïve, the cure for a pandemic isn’t simple as all of us learned far too well in 2020, but here’s one small place to start: Let’s speak a bit less and listen a bit more. The rabbis point out the human head has two ears and one mouth. Which do you think we’re supposed to use more? Do we get credit for holding our tongues or their proxy, our keystrokes? Usually not. Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “Only God can give us credit for the angry words we did not speak.” But speech unmade is also sin undone. It’s not a bad place to start.

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We have something akin to this with Pesach—there are powerful lessons, of course, about liberation, care for the vulnerable, power and faith. But since Passover frontloads its most salient ritual elements – the seders – those of us who abstain from chametz for the entire eight-day chag but may not come to shul each day, find ourselves focused (I suspect) less on grand themes and more on menu options. For the six final days of the holiday theology gives way to gastronomy. We plan our respective post-Pesach carbo-loading ritual: pizza, pasta or whatnot. Some of us pack up the Pesach dishes, schlep out the year-round utensils. And for next few days, if you’re like me, we’re focused on all the things we now get to eat and drink that we somehow survived without during the festival.

It happens to be, this year, that we also have a parasha appearing right after Pesach which, itself, is largely focused on food. Chapter 11 of Vayikra is our most detailed account of the Jewish dietary laws. Before your eyes glaze over, I don’t plan to talk about kashrut per se. Instead, I want to consider two verses toward the end of the catalogue of forbidden animals.

כֹּל֩ הוֹלֵ֨ךְ עַל־גָּח֜וֹן וְכֹ֣ל ׀ הוֹלֵ֣ךְ עַל־אַרְבַּ֗ע עַ֚ד כׇּל־מַרְבֵּ֣ה רַגְלַ֔יִם לְכׇל־הַשֶּׁ֖רֶץ הַשֹּׁרֵ֣ץ עַל־הָאָ֑רֶץ לֹ֥א תֹאכְל֖וּם כִּי־שֶׁ֥קֶץ הֵֽם׃

Anything that crawls on its belly, or anything that walks on fours, or anything that has many legs, you shall not eat from among all things that swarm upon the earth, for they are an abomination (v. 42).

And then in Verse 43: You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through anything that swarms; you shall not make yourselves unclean therewith and thus become unclean. While there are a number of foods forbidden to observant Jews, there seems to be something especially problematic about the sheretz, creepy crawly things like lizards, snakes, scorpions, insects, etc. In fact, the word used to describe them, sheketz, is also used in describing idolatry, one of the cardinal Jewish sins.

Everyone seems to agree that if the Jewish people are to be a mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” we must separate ourselves from certain behaviors of our ancient pagan neighbors. To be holy to God is to be distinctive, ritually and ethically. Distinctive gastronomic requirements remind us to be distinctive in other important ways.

But Verse 45 of Ch. 11 in our parasha implies something more about the sheretz specifically—that the physical lowness of such creatures, their proximity to the ground, is somehow antithetical to our higher aspirations. We know from the Passover holiday that’s just concluded we praise God again and again for having brought us out of Egypt. Asher hotzeiti me’eretz Mitzrayim. But our pasuk doesn’t say that, not exactly.

כִּ֣י ׀ אֲנִ֣י ה הַֽמַּעֲלֶ֤ה אֶתְכֶם֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם לִהְיֹ֥ת לָכֶ֖ם לֵאלֹהִ֑ים וִהְיִיתֶ֣ם קְדֹשִׁ֔ים כִּ֥י קָד֖וֹשׁ אָֽנִי׃

Our verse doesn’t say “For I the LORD brought you out of the land of Egypt…,” it reads haMa’aleh etchem, who brought you up from the land of Egypt. This is strange, and the Rabbis pick up on the subtle difference. The context of the discussion in the Bavli, Mas. Bava Metzia (61b) is Sages’ discussion about God’s ability to make distinctions beyond human capacity. Rava, the 4^th Gen. Amora asks (rhetorically):

אָמַר רָבָא: לְמָה לִי דִּכְתַב רַחֲמָנָא יְצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם בְּרִבִּית, יְצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם גַּבֵּי צִיצִית, יְצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם בְּמִשְׁקָלוֹת

“Why does the Merciful One mention Egypt (in Torah) in matters of interest, tzitzit, and honest weights and measures?” Rava’s suggestion is that if the Holy One can distinguished in Egypt between the drop of seed that became a firstborn and the drop of seed that did not become a firstborn in order to carry out the 10^th plague, God can certainly make keen distinctions required to distinguish between real and fake techelet. This is a hermeneutic device called kal vachomer (a fortiori).

A couple generations later, Rav Hanina asks Ravina, co-editor of the Talmud itself, about our verse. Rav Hanina waits patiently as Ravina parrots back some version of Rava’s original statement. If God can distinguish between firstborn and second born in Egypt, the All Knowing One can surely make other distinctions. Rav Hanina, though, is not satisfied. “Ana hama’aleh ka kashya li!” I’m not asking about why Egypt is mentioned. I want to know why it’s a different verb in Lev. 11:45. Why does it say, in the context of creepy crawly things, “who brought you up from the land of Egypt,” and not “out of the land of Egypt?” What does Ravina answer? He cites the school of Rabbi Yishmael who taught, “Had I brought the Jewish people up from Egypt only for this matter, that would have been enough.”

I don’t recall this line from Dayeinu at the seder…but that’s the gist of Ravina’s answer. It would have been enough for God to redeem us only so that we would not become impure from eating the sheretz!

And here is where I want to leave you. The hyperbolic language is meant to say something less about food per se, I think. Less about kashrut specifically. This is symbolic. There is powerful symbolism in resisting the lowest common denominator, whether it’s bugs and snakes that crawl and slither around in the dirt or behavior that debases on degrades our sacred calling. Rashi puts it this way:

In all other places it is written, “I brought (you) forth”, and here it is written “who brought you up from the land of Egypt” …it should be regarded by them as an elevation for themselves — this is what is implied in the expression used here: מעלה (I raised you above the people of the land of `Egypt).

That is, you who were oppressed, made low, must now stand tall! On Chanukah we talk about being ma’alin bakodesh, elevating our chanukiot each night. On Yom Kippur, we abstain from food in order to ascend to the place of the high priest. We dress in white, in a kittel, a garment evocative of the one who stepped into the Holy of Holies. On Pesach we purge of domiciles of chametz. But when we depart not only from the Passover holiday but from Mitzrayim, Egypt itself, we step into a different way of being. We are what we eat, Torah seems to be saying to us in Parashat Shemini. What we put into our bodies says something about who we aspire to be.

I’m not here today to browbeat you about kashrut. The choice to become more observant is a complicated one, and Rav Tyler or I would be happy to discuss with you in private why we find it so meaningful. Rather, my goal here is to invite us into the consciousness of this period. If more of us are focused this Shabbos (as we were last week) on what we eat and what we don’t, might we lean into that awareness and consider the heights to which that awareness may take us. Today is the 9^th day of the Omer, gevurah sh’b’gevurah, strength within strength, a double dose of courage! This year as we come out of Egypt, let’s also consider our parasha’s invitation to come up from Egypt. And in this symbolic aliyah, consider how we might stand tall, stretch upward toward something more holy and, through it, more fulfilling of our Jewish calling.

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To my dear readers near and far:

Please forgive the long break between posts! Many of you know I have been in the midst of rabbinic placement these past several months. This July I will become the new Senior Rabbi of Hamakom, a dynamic, warm, and wonderful congregation in West Hills, CA.

Now that contract negotiations, home sale, home procurement, kids’ college considerations, etc. are wrapping up, I am delighted to re-engage with my Substack! Over the next several days, I’ll be sharing some podcasts of previous sermons and teachings. I’ll also share an advance copy of my final essay for Jmore, after more than a decade of writing their monthly Baltimore Justice column.

As my family and I make the transition to LA, I hope to use this platform to muse on my new work and adventure while reflecting back from time to time on my years in Baltimore. I’m intensely curious as to how my passion for fostering diverse and pluralistic communities will translate to this new geographic and cultural context.

Stay tuned….

Earlier this month, a group of us spent a magical Shabbat with the mountain gorillas of Bwindi National Park. We began the previous week with 19, praying and singing with Abayudaya, the Jewish community of Uganda. By the following weekend, 11 had returned home to Baltimore and 8 of us continued on to the Buhoma Community Rest Camp in Bwindi, on the edge of the Impenetrable Forest. It was like a dream: a verdant façade confronted us across the valley, a vertical Tolkienian landscape of ferns and twisted vines, Ceiba and Cecropia, towering old growth mahogany.

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We settled in to our rooms, then circled up for Kabbalat Shabbat, candle lighting and a homecooked meal of pumpkin soup, tilapia, chickpeas in a curry sauce, and boiled potatoes. Saturday morning, we walked into the bush and ascended one thousand meters (over three thousand feet). Aside from our tour company owner, guides, and porters, at 49, I was the youngest of our Beth Am delegation. The oldest was 81. With varying degrees of assistance, we all made the climb.

The heavy rains came around hour 3.5. We scrambled to pull ponchos over our heads, stepped over streams of fire ants, squatted on logs under the vast tree canopy—a quick Shabbat lunch while Fiona, the local ranger, went ahead to coordinate with our trackers. Finding gorillas is common, but not a given. They are wild and travel where they will. We were Shabbat guests in their home.

But find them we did. Around hour 5 we lowered our voices and donned surgical masks, a jarring reminder of the recent pandemic and also that we share over 98% of our DNA with the largest of the great apes, making disease transmission a danger to both species. For a full hour, we stood silently, surrounded by some fifteen gorillas. We observed mothers nurse their babies, a one-year-old noodge his older brother as the latter laughingly attempted to beat his chest, all while the majestic silver-back sat silently on a rise, arms crossed, watching over his family.

Some members of our group were shabbat observant. Others took photographs. For me, personally, as someone who throughout the previous week had sought the perfect shot—of elephants, giraffes, hippos, pied kingfishers, lions, leopards, and ubiquitous antelope—the experience of unmediated appreciation was surprisingly liberating. I’m grateful for our guide Paul Tamwenya who, not Jewish, captured many wonderful images that Shabbat. And, believing as I do in Jewish pluralism, I appreciate that for some of our group, taking photographs of the mountain gorillas did not diminish their Shabbat experience, and may even have accentuated it. But for me, the chance to observe them without capturing their likeness reminded me of Shabbat’s role as a counterpoint to everyday living.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote the Sabbath is for turning from “the results of creation to the mystery of creation.” Jewish tradition calls traditional Shabbat practice sh’mirat shabbat, literally to “guard” or “observe” the Sabbath. Rather than a litany of restrictions, the point of abstaining from certain labors is to better appreciate our place within, not above, the created universe. It’s when we can make, unmake, or capture things—and don’t—that we cultivate a sense of beingness attuned to the ultimate and singular Beingness we call God. And God, we feel, is best experienced in community; it’s why we require a minyan for prayer. Seeing those majestic gorillas in the wild alone would have been special, no doubt, but in Judaism, shared holiness is holiest.

Even more than this, collective Shabbat observance fuels our worthy collective labors the other six days of the week. The next day, we drove six hours to Lake Mburo National Park where we embarked on our final game drive, observing more of God’s wonders beneath the raised roofs of our safari vehicles. Our lodge that night was at the end of a muddy narrow road flanked by deep ditches. Dodging a stranded flatbed truck and minibus carrying Belgian bike tourists, our Toyota Land Cruiser slid from the road and tipped sideways into the embankment. Almost immediately, the Ugandan culture of collective responsibility kicked into gear. Observing one another in distress, drivers and passengers alike worked together to free the vehicles. Afterward, against the setting sun, handshakes were exchanged and weary travelers sought rest just up the road.

On those last two days of our Beth Am Uganda Adventure, I was reminded how collective achievement is a biproduct of shared observance. But being Shabbat observant is not simply about ritual, it’s about really observing, with meditative awareness, our remarkable world. Jewish observance extends well beyond Shabbat to places of work, recreation, and—yes—ditches along muddy African roads. Observance is a branch of observation. Observation is the key to collective thriving.

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A version of this article will appear in the March/April issue of Jmore.

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There are “wait and see” people in this world, and there are “jump right in” people. Our community lost two of the latter recently. In November we said goodbye to Stuart Stainman. On New Years Day, Juanita Thompson Garrison left us as well. Each person was connected deeply with Beth Am and Reservoir Hill. Stuart was a longtime member of the shul, quietly and firmly advocating for accessibility and environmental justice. Stuart was an amateur historian, docent, and serial volunteer. He could often be found digging holes in front of the shul and around the neighborhood – in order to plant new trees.

Of Stuart, his godson Samuel Abrams wrote: “American life is filled with extraordinary men whose names never appear in newspapers, whose achievements are never posted on social media, and whose virtues are visible only to the families and communities shaped by their quiet constancy…. Last week, one such man died suddenly…. He was not famous. He did not seek attention. He lived without pretense. And in that ordinariness, he was exceptional.”

Abrams describes just how rare and special it is for a person to eschew attention while painstakingly giving their own attention to others. “At a moment when American institutions feel brittle—when men are withdrawing from work, community life, family formation, and civic and religious institutions—Stuart’s life is a reminder that a society depends on millions like him. Ordinary men who wake each day and choose to care. Men who love their children without hesitation. Men who sustain synagogues, coach teams, tend parks, and keep neighborliness from disappearing. Men who save quietly so they can give quietly. Men who see service not as sacrifice but identity.”

Juanita Thompson Garrison, like Stuart Stainman, also led a life of service – to family, community, and God. For years, until her last, she sported a money piece hair dye, a little pizazz resting above her forehead, drawing attention to her beautiful eyes and broad smile. “Hey baby,” Ms. Juanita would say as she sauntered over with her little black dog pepper. She was, in the words of Rabbi Matia ben Harash, “the first to extend greetings.” But she often bemoaned this fact. She wanted others to get better at saying “hello,” especially some Beth Am congregants who might drive into the community, park, and walk to the synagogue without doing so. One year, IFO, Beth Am’s sister non-profit of whose board Ms. Juanita was a founding member, created a “just say hello” campaign.

Juanita, like Stuart, was devoted to the essentials without any expectation of reward. Beth Am’er and friend Dianne Schwartz called her a “live life to the fullest lady.” They would volunteer together, registering returning citizens to vote, go for walks together, “gab” together. “In all her story telling,” Dianne said of Juanita, “I kept looking for someone who might be angry about how the city of Baltimore went through terrible times and how the Black community was horribly marginalized over the course of many decades throughout her life. but she would get mad when I tried to ask about things race related. She would yell that we all just need to care about our neighbors and our family and our friends and take care of one another. And learn how to be polite and respectful.”

Of Stuart, Samuel Abrams wrote, “What makes his death so painful is what makes his life so important: There is no flashy story, no viral moment, nothing that fits our culture’s thirst for spectacle. Only steadiness, devotion, reliability, sacrifice, curiosity, and love.” The same could be said of Juanita. Rabbi Matia ben Harash, who like Ms. Juanita, reminds us to “say hello,” also advises: “Be a tail unto lions and not a head unto foxes.” Leaders sometimes lead from the front and other times from behind. These beloved people did some of both. But each was acutely aware of the need to serve with pride (pun intended) and not deceit. The old saying goes, “we’re only as good as the people we surround ourselves with.” But when you care about your neighborhood, your synagogue, your church, and your family, you don’t always have that luxury. Instead, taught Stuart and Juanita, you just take the people around you and make them better.

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A version of this post will appear in the February issue of Jmore

The beginning of this week’s parasha hints at a happy ending:

וַיִּשְׁלַ֤ח פַּרְעֹה֙ וַיִּקְרָ֣א אֶת־יוֹסֵ֔ף

Joseph is freed from jail and elevated in Mitzrayim. But Miketz itself does not have a happy ending; in fact, it doesn’t have an ending at all. Two years ago, in the midst of the Israel-Hamas War, I gave a sermon on this parasha titled, “A Lament from the Messy Middle,” reminding us that The Empire Strikes Back is, definitively the best Star Wars movie because (in contradistinction to Shawshank) it presents the heart of an ongoing saga. Miketz insists on two paradoxical truths: First, that the messy, painful middle will end, that we won’t be

here forever. How? Because we know that next week Judah will stand up for his brother Benjamin, that Joseph will reveal himself, that the brothers, long estranged, will reconcile at last. And the second truth is that any ending of this chapter of our story is but a beginning of the next. Here’s a bit of what I said a couple years ago:

We meet our protagonist rotting in prison, until Pharaoh has unsettling dreams that no one can interpret… Pharaoh’s dreams and Joseph’s ability to interpret changes everything. He’s cleaned up, given a shave and a haircut and thrust before the king…. he is elevated to vizier and placed in charge of agricultural policy for all of Egypt. And that’s how he comes to encounter his brothers once more…. Joseph spends the remainder of the parasha toying with his brothers. And since this is the messy middle, the portion doesn’t offer resolution….

Our parasha, I said, ends similarly to “Empire” leaving us to wonder: has Joseph become the enemy of the story, adopting a Pharaoh’s malevolence? Has he succumbed to the dark side? Will the brothers repeat their sins, leaving Benjamin for dead and probably destroying their father Jacob for good? Will the old Judah show up, the one who suggested they sell Joseph, who called for his daughter-in-law’s execution? Or will there be a nechemta, a reproachment, a truce, a reckoning, a stable and lasting peace?

That was then, in December 2023, and I was very focused on that Shabbat (throughout that entire year really) on the trauma of Oct. 7, on the horror of rising antisemitism, on the suffering of our living hostages, on the seeming intractability of the War. Since then, some things have changed, some have not.

But though Israel’s plight continues to tug at my heart daily, though I was privileged to spend Chanukah this week at the Embassy in DC as Ran Gvili’s sister lit the chanukiah, today I come not to talk about Israel. I got thinking about happy endings this week for another reason: because of Rob Reiner. My God, folks, what is happening in this country?! In this world?! The beaches of Sydney, Australia, soaked with the blood of our people. Ten-year-old Matilda. 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Marika. Murders at Brown and MIT.

There’s more, and I don’t mean for one moment to minimize any of these, but I got thinking about Rob Reiner and happy endings because of the utterly tragic and so very unhappy end he and his wife Michele met this past week. To me, it was such a counterpoint to so many of Reiner’s own wonderful films. A Few Good Men, The American President, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…. The American President ends with Michael Douglas (nice Jewish boy) growing a conscience and getting the girl. The Princess Bride famously concludes with Peter Falk (another nice Jewish boy) describing the perfect final kiss between Wesley and Buttercup to his grandson played by Fred Savage (yet another nice Jewish boy). Misery ends with the author’s escape. Sally, of course, falls for Harry in the end. Even A Few Good Men has its own version of a happy ending with Jack Nicholson (possibly but probably not of any Jewish ancestry) getting his just desserts from Tom Cruise (definitely not a Jew).

But truth be told, as I began to reflect on the film legacy of Rob Reiner, I began to realize there’s a better way to think about the endings. Some are happy. Some are less so, like Stand by Me, based on the Stephen King story “The Body,” which ends with the group of boys encountering the horror of death for the first time. Yet, I’ve always loved the final line from that film: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Who delivered that line? Richard Dreyfuss. Yup, Jewish. And what I realize about the endings of great and memorable movies, Reiner’s and so many others, is that whether they’re happy, bitter-sweet, or incredibly sad. They’re satisfying. They feel right.

The next couple weeks of our Torah cycle finds our ancestors gathering in Egypt. Joseph’s story comes to an end, and his end is satisfying if not entirely happy. It’s the beginning, after all, of a terrible story of hundreds of years of slavery, of trauma, and suffering. But it’s the right ending because it sets us up for the theophany, the revelation at Sinai and the continuing and revelatory relationship between our people and God through engagement with our most cherished book. It’s satisfying because of the iterative redemption that comes with yetziat mitzrayim, our arrival to Eretz Yisrael, the thriving of Jewish life across the globe over millennia, the upbuilding of Medinat Yisrael in our ancestral homeland.

Torah and our Jewish interpretative tradition offer a constantly unfolding Jewish story. One of my favorite lines from Pirkei Avot (5:22) is Ben Bag Bag’s comment,

הֲפֹךְ בָּהּ וַהֲפֹךְ בָּהּ, דְּכֹלָּא בָהּ.

Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein.

וּבָהּ תֶּחֱזֵי, וְסִיב וּבְלֵה בָהּ, וּמִנַּהּ לֹא תָזוּעַ,

Look into it; And become gray and old therein; And do not move away from it,

שֶׁאֵין לְךָ מִדָּה טוֹבָה הֵימֶנָּה:

for you have no better portion than it.

The paradox of Torah is it is both circular and linear. We read this parasha last year and two years ago. Our people have read it over thousands of years. Our descendants will continue to do so. We literally roll Torah back to the beginning as we stand on the banks of the Jordan. We begin again and again and again, learning, growing, hopefully progressing in each subsequent generation through our encounter with those first generations of our people.

But our history within and beyond Torah, within and beyond Tana’kh is decidedly more linear. In fact we Jews more or less invented the concept of linear time, not only that our own people has an origin story and a destiny, but that history moves inexorably forward from a starting point toward some distant future, that unlike the Greek gods or those of the Sumerians and others before them, lords of the ever-turning Wheel of Time, our God is a God of history and of justice.

Thomas Cahill wrote about this in his 1998 book The Gifts of the Jews. “All evidence points to there having been, in the earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was profoundly cyclical. The assumptions that early man made about the world were, in all their essentials, little different from the assumptions that later and more sophisticated societies, like Greece and India, would make in a more elaborate manner….. Jews saw time differently,” says Cahill. “It isn’t an endless circle; it’s linear moving towards a triumphant destiny. And every generation – every person – is contributing to writing and shaping the story…. Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible, and an individual life can have value…. “The Jews, he says, “were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world.”

This is true. So yes, I’m a sucker for a happy ending, but too often, I think, we get suckered by happy endings. We focus so much on the conclusion we yearn to see, we forget that endings, themselves, are iterative and additive. There’s a quote I like often misattributed to John Lennon: “It will all by ok in the end. If it’s not, it’s not the end.” The line’s true source seems to be Fernando Sabino’s 1988 Brazilian Portuguese book The Checkerboard. My point though is that Parashat Miketz reminds us that to be a Jew is to contend with a world in which we are open to endings to come. Joseph’s satisfying ending becomes our people’s sojourn and then suffering. Our suffering gives way to salvation and revelation. Our wanderings bring us from the wilderness to the Promised Land. Our exiles from there in 586 BCE, in 70 CE are not permanent either. And our current struggles in the world and within Israel will yield new endings – may they be redemptive and restorative.

I’ll close with this. Recently, I had the opportunity to stay in a Best Western. It had been some time, and I was reminded of a wonderful song by the singer-songwriter Richard Shindell. This week, having rediscovered it, I found myself playing it on repeat. It’s the tale of a hapless trucker who flips to a Christian radio station in the middle of the night on I-80 East. While the preacher gives a fire and brimstone sermon, the truck driver struggles both with his ebbing faith and his own weariness at 4 am. Nevertheless, he offers a modest prayer: to make it safely to his destination – by way of the next motel, one leg on a continuing journey across a vast network of highways. I’ll sing you the middle verse and the chorus:

Did he who made the lamb
Put the tremble in the hand
That reaches out to take my quarter?
I look him in the eye
But there isn’t any time
Just time enough to pass the tender.
The highway takes its toll
The green light flashes go
And it’s welcome to Ohio.

Whoever watches over all these truckers
Show a little mercy for a weary sinner
And deliver me, Lord, deliver me
Deliver me to the next Best Western

Joseph in jail might have sung something similar. Our ancestors in bondage too. And our people under the thumb of one repressive regime after another. Today, in the messy middle of Parashat Miketz, amidst the interlocking circular and linear journeys of our people, Jewish faith means we know that despite false starts, flat tires, or wrong turns, there will be rest and restoration for us weary travelers, a satisfying ending just over the horizon. Or just beyond the next bend in the road.

On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi regime in Germany carried out its infamous November Pogrom, Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass. 400 Jews were murdered or driven to suicide. More than 1400 synagogues and 7500 Jewish businesses and homes were destroyed. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. In the days that followed, 30,000 Jewish men were transported to concentration camps.

Did this pogrom materialize out of thin air? Of course not. Antisemitism was nothing new to Germany nor to Europe. And most of the 1930’s saw marginalizing of Jews, stripping them of rights, and subjecting them to violence. According to the Jewish Museum of Berlin, “For years already, the Nazi regime had been pursuing a plan of forcibly expropriating Jews and, in particular, “Aryanizing” Jewish businesses to finance Germany’s re-armament process.”

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And then, of course, there was a spark that lit the fuse, a pretext to justify attacks on Jews in the minds of those itching to punish them for their crime of simply existing in Germany. The scapegoating came in the form of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan who, on 7 November 1938, shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, who died of his injuries two days later. The Jewish Museum’s website writes the following: “The assassination provided a welcome pretext to strike out against the Jewish population with unprecedented brutality. Nazi propaganda portrayed the violence as an outbreak of ‘spontaneous national rage.’” Of course, as we know, it was exactly the opposite, an orchestrated attack by Hitler and Goebbels, by the SA and SS, with popular support from a willing public.

I share the story of Kristallnacht, because for me it was the beginning of my own paternal family’s immigration story, the day my grandfather’s home was ransacked and he escaped, eventually joining his sister in Chicago. He was accepted to this country as a refugee, fleeing oppression and seeking to build a better life in America. The US did not make it easy. There was rampant antisemitism in the State Department that blocked so many Jews from escaping in the years when that was still possible. But he did come and I’m here because of it.

I want to touch on the theme of immigration today, and truth be told, I hesitated to share this story at all. First, because drawing Holocaust analogies is really almost never a good idea. In considering our American response to the recent and inexcusable DC shooting of Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe and murder of Spec. Sarah Beckstrom, there will be some who want to claim some sort of parity between these acts or types of acts, that these two young men and their actions, nearly 90 years apart, were equally culpable of taking lives or equally innocent because of the geo-political context in which they came to their violent acts. I want to caution us against drawing these types of comparisons between Hershel Grynszpan or Rahmanullah Lakanwal. They are different people. The national and historical contexts are far from identical. The sociological question of what societal conditions help to breed violence or when or against whom violence might be justified is in interesting one, but not one I feel prepared to address at this time.

No, I share the story of Kristallnacht because I’m interested in how societies relate to outsiders, how they can weaponize racist tropes against foreigners, including when those so-called foreigners are legal residents, citizens even. I’m not going to restate today my specific concerns about Ernst Fraenkel’s “normative” and “prerogative” states and I how I fear his framework is increasingly relevant to life in America today. That sermon from Yom Kippur is online if you wish to review it.

What I want to consider today is what we might do when faced with the erosion of basic democratic norms and civil legal protections, when minority populations are subject to leaders or citizens from the majority making blanket claims about their own insecurity while asserting blanket condemnations of entire populations that they consider to be, well, “garbage.” Beyond important and necessary legal challenges, beyond OpEds and protests, what are some non-violent tools available to us to push back against the scapegoating of migrants, of racist and xenophobic rhetoric condemning the cultures of entire countries and their millions upon millions of inhabitants and expatriates?

Years ago, at the height of the #MeToo Era, I gave a sermon on Parashat Vayishlach, this week’s parsha, about the rape of Dinah. I spoke of a Tarbut Ra’ah, the Talmud’s term to describe a culture of pervasive tolerance, even permissiveness surrounding bad behavior. I suggested then that Jacob’s silence on the rape of his daughter may have been reflective of that culture, the tendency to blame women for sexual violence or undervalue considerations of consent.

Here we are, now eight years later, and Stephen Miller is claiming the tarbut ra’ah, the irredeemably wicked culture, is that of Afghanistan, of Sudan and Somalia. “You are not just importing individuals,” Miller tweeted (on Thanksgiving, for God’s sake). “You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

To be clear, I don’t disagree that these are, in many ways, failed societies. The brutality in Sudan is horrific. The Taliban’s totalitarian oppression of women and dissidents is terrifying, which is why our Afghan neighbors selling their wares at our Boutique last Sunday are here, in the United States! But how Miller justifies his own family’s immigration story and American success after his great-grandparents fled Czarist pogroms, I have no idea. Does he honestly think the Nazi Germany from which my grandfather escaped was anything other than a “failed state?” By such logic, am I and my children somehow tainted by the tarbut ra’ah, the societal rot that forced Grandpa Montrose to flee, that caused the extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry? Orwell himself would be hard-pressed to imagine a more Orwellian inversion.

I am deeply concerned about global terror and how it affects Jewish communities around the world, but I would submit that if there is a tarbut ra’ah, a pervasively dangerous culture that threatens America urgently at this moment, it is in fact the increasing normalization of nativism, of white nationalism, of antisemitism and anti-Israeli-ism, of racism, sexism, islamophobia, and more. In Parashat Noah, there’s a famous debate about Noah. Was he truly “blameless?” Was he a hero for having been a good man against the backdrop of his failed society? Or was he only “blameless” in comparison to them? No matter the answer, the implication of such a debate though is that it is quite difficult to buck a trend, to be good when bad behavior surrounds us. That’s the danger of a tarbut ra’ah, and it’s one the characters of our parasha contend with as well.

Not long after the Rape of Dinah narrative, and just before Rachel tragically dies in childbirth while delivering her son Benjamin, the Torah offers an enigmatic passage:

וַתָּ֤מׇת דְּבֹרָה֙ מֵינֶ֣קֶת רִבְקָ֔ה

Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died,

וַתִּקָּבֵ֛ר מִתַּ֥חַת לְבֵֽית־אֵ֖ל תַּ֣חַת הָֽאַלּ֑וֹן

and was buried under the oak below Beth-El;

וַיִּקְרָ֥א שְׁמ֖וֹ אַלּ֥וֹן בָּכֽוּת׃

so it was named Allon-bacuth.

Who was this Deborah? In a text where we infrequently hear details of women’s lives, let alone the particulars of their deaths, why would the Torah take time to tell us about Rebekah’s nurse? The thirteenth century Catalonian sage Ramban suggests the verse is not really about Deborah at all. Drawing from Bereishit Rabbah (81:8) he writes, “for the weeping and anguish could not have been such for the passing of the old nurse that the place would have been named on account of it. Instead, Jacob wept and mourned for his righteous mother who had loved him and sent him to Paddan-aram and who was not privileged to see him when he returned.”

But Rashi in Troyes two centuries earlier thinks different. He reminds us that decades earlier, after Jacob bargained for Esau’s birthright and stole his brother’s blessing, Esau wanted to kill him. So, Jacob fled to Haran, to the house of her Rebekah’s brother Lavan. וְשָׁלַחְתִּ֖י וּלְקַחְתִּ֣יךָ מִשָּׁ֑ם, she says. “I will send and fetch you from there” once your brother’s anger dies down. Jacob, of course, stays a long time, twenty years, and the question is, does Rebekah actually send for him? According to Rashi in the name of his teacher Moshe HaDarshan, she does in the form of her maid Deborah.

But the real question is why does it take so long to leave? What is happening in Haran that keeps Jacob there? We know his uncle Lavan is manipulative, that he switches his daughters under the chuppah, that he compels Jacob to work for him for fourteen years, but the midrash suggests something even more sinister was going on. That the household of Lavan and his father Bethuel before him was a tarbut ra’ah, a depraved culture. One midrash argues that the reason they try to hold Rebekah (Gen. 24:55) for ten days before allowing her to depart with Abraham’s servant is related to the reason Lavan, a generation later, delays Jacob’s departure. This was a household that abused women.

In Rebekah’s case, the midrash in Yalkut Shimoni (Gen. 109), suggests that Bethuel, king of Haran, had introduced jus primae noctis, a custom granting lords the so-called “right of the first night” with a virgin bride before she is given to her husband. Bethuel and then his son Lavan after him were about to exercise that “right” before God intervenes and Rebekah is able to flee to Canaan with Abraham’s servant and her own nurse by her side.

This midrashic tradition is probably what Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, the twentieth century leader of Yeshiva University, has in mind when he posits an intriguing theory about Deborah, the maid who Rashi says goes back home to fetch Jacob, who spends decades with him, and who is honored with a burial in today’s Torah reading. “Apparently,” he writes, “Deborah played a major role in shaping the history and destiny of the Jewish people.” How? “Deborah was the leader of a moral underground movement.”

The Rav’s argument hinges on Rebekah’s quality of chesed. Much like the ancient debate about Noah in his time, he asks how someone who is raised in such an abusive household could be so kind? He writes, “Rebecca was brought up in the house of Bethuel and Lavan, in a pagan orgiastic society – how did she exhibit such great humility and chesed?... Why was she not influenced by her family and society? There must have been an ‘underground community’ in Haran, preaching Abraham’s morality. Rebecca was part of this underground movement. She studied and absorbed Abraham’s philosophy and adopted his weltanschauung (his worldview) – living by his principles of justice and righteousness.” Deborah, as Rebekah’s nurse, he argues must have been the conveyor of these values. That’s why she merits to be named in our parsha. That’s why she is buried at Alon Bachut, the so-called “weeping oak.” She was the jedi master, a subversive teacher of kindness against the backdrop of her tarbut ra’ah.

Hevre, I don’t know the extent to which our current circumstances call for an underground movement. As I said, we should be careful to honor distinctions between this political moment in this country and others that might serve as a cautionary tale. And yet, this era is, on its face, a dangerous one for many who dwell in this land, most of whom are responsible, hardworking, and fully deserving of the opportunities afforded my family, Stephen Miller’s and just about all of yours. I do believe there are things, both public and private we can be doing to support immigrants, including of course, the many who arrived here lawfully, many of whom have protected status, and some of whom are friends of this congregation.

For those who are getting up to speed or could use a reminder of the administration’s actions following the shooting of Wolfe and Beckstrom, the US Customs and Immigration Service issued a new policy memo this past Tuesday reiterating actions that the agency has been instructed to take. These are:

· Placing a hold on all affirmative asylum case decisions

· Placing a hold on all pending applications for immigration benefits including applications for work authorizations and green cards) from nationals of the 19 travel ban countries

· Conducting a re-review of all approved immigration benefits requests from nationals of the 19 travel ban countries

Given these circumstances, here are a few specific things we might do at the national level (with thanks to Evan Serpick for helping compile these resources).

· HIAS, the century-old Jewish organization which advocates on behalf of immigrants and refugees suggests going to Refuge Council USA (rcusa.org) and follow their action alerts. You can also go to congress.gov to contact your elected officials and insist they resist isolationist and/or racist policies.

· Contact the ACLU who are mobilizing legal and political advocacy responses.

In our Reservoir Hill neighborhood:

· Support and/or volunteer at Beth Am’s weekly produce distribution on Tuesdays or Byron McKenney-Powell Free Market on Thursdays, which support about 100 Afghan migrants living in the neighborhood as well as other neighbors in need.

· Support and/or volunteer at the Reservoir Hill House of Peace, 2401 Eutaw Pl., which provides stipends, housing, and community for asylum seekers, fill out the contact form here and/or contact Ruth Clemens, 410-935-1862, ruthkclemens@gmail.com

· Support and/or volunteer with ERICA, which is looking for volunteers to co-teach English classes for Afghan women in Reservoir Hill on Tuesdays from 9:30-11:00 (contact Daniel Jacoby, 443-756-7377, djacoby@erica-baltimore.org).

Baltimore Citywide:

· CASA is the largest and most organized local organization providing direct support to migrants under threat, including emergency legal support, family support, and legislative advocacy.

· Our partners at JUFJ work closely with CASA to advocate for local immigrants. They are currently asking people to urge Baltimore County officials not to require law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.

· The Esperanza Center offers English as a Second Language (ESL) education, healthcare, and low-cost immigration legal services.

Friends, let me end with this. I know many of us feel paralyzed by the volume and range of things coming our way these days. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Start small. Pick something you can dedicate some time to. Think about what is the best use of your time as well as the most effective. And remember, a Jewish commitment to the stranger, the foreigner, is both a reflection of our own historical experience as a people who have been shut out (or worse) from so very many societies and nations.

It’s also at the core of our Torah text which reminds us again and again to notice and respond to the ger, the resident alien in our midst. It will take moral communities, above ground and perhaps underground, to continually remind our country and fellow countrymen who we ought to be. We Jews know what it is to be scapegoated, which I believe means we have an obligation to speak out when we see it happening to others. How we do that effectively is always a critical question. If only we could ask Deborah of our parsha, of Soloveitchik’s imagination, the underground warrior-nurse. I’m sure she would have some ideas for us as well. Meanwhile, we’ll do our utmost to do some good in her stead.

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This year, our 1895 Baltimore rowhome turned 130 years old. We live on Eutaw Place near Beth Am and, beginning in the early twentieth century, a succession of Jewish families purchased and lived in the home. Sometimes I consider our deep wooden windowsills and wonder how many previous menorahs shone there in the decades when Reservoir Hill was at the heart of the Jewish community. For many years when the kids were younger, we placed our family hanukiyot in those windows so that passersby could see them from the street. (We did so again in 2023 after Oct. 7 as a reminder we need not and would not be afraid to identify ours as a Jewish home). In most recent years, though, they’ve lived on our dining room mantel and radiator, still by a window, but where we can admire their glow while eating our latkes.

Jews have a longstanding tradition of placing the Hanukkah menorah in a publicly visible place:

“It is a mitzvah to place the Hanukkah lamp at the outside of one’s house within the handbreadth closest to [the edge of] the entrance, so that the mezuzah will be to the right and the Hanukkah lamp to the left. And if he was living in an attic [or second story apartment], he should place it in the window that is closest to the public domain. One who has placed the Hanukkah lamp above twenty cubits has not done anything, because it is not recognizable.”

— Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Megillah v’Hanukkah 4:7

Maimonides’ rationale, based on the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 23b), is pirsumei nisa, publicizing the miracle of Hanukkah. This may not be a given. Hanukkah memorializes an era, not entirely unlike our own, in which Jews endured great pressure to assimilate. Some were Hellenizers. Others were observant Jews insistent on maintaining their traditions despite societal pressure (and imperial decree) to do otherwise.

This value of pirsumei nisa was so important that if an impoverished family had funds sufficient for either kiddush wine or a Hanukkah lamp but not both, the priority was the Hanukkah lamp because that would enable the family to proclaim their Jewishness publicly and proudly.

What exactly is the miracle we are meant to publicize? One possibility is that it is the unlikely victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Greeks. The more common story justifies Hanukkah’s timeframe, suggesting one small cruse of oil was sufficient to keep the menorah burning for eight days. Modern thinker Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg writes about the Jewish spirit implicated in such a legend: “Pessimists and assimilationists have more than once informed Jews that there is no more oil left to burn. As long as Hanukkah is studied and remembered, Jews will not surrender to the night. The proper response, as Hanukkah teaches, is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle” (The Jewish Way, P. 282).

A Talmudic tale imagines an unlikely origin story for the festival of Hanukkah. Adam, the first human, was created on day six, but crucially not long after Rosh Hashanah, in a season when the days get shorter and darker earlier. When he noticed this he said, “Woe is me; perhaps because I sinned the world is becoming dark around me and will return to chaos and disorder…. He arose and spent eight days in fasting and in prayer” (Avodah Zarah 8a). While the Gemara references pagan festivals Kalenda and Saturnalia, it’s hard not to notice a nod toward Sukkot, the eight day fall holiday that follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

We know from the book of Maccabees that there is a connection between Sukkot and Hanukkah, each an eight-day holiday, one around the fall equinox and the other frequently soon after the winter solstice. The connection is downplayed by the tale of the oil, but the legend from the Talmud offers some reprieve for Adam. The world wasn’t growing darker because he sinned, it was growing darker because winter was coming. Once Adam crossed the threshold of the winter solstice, however, things changed and the days began to get longer. Adam observed another eight days, this time feasting and expressing gratitude simply for the “order of the world” One interpretation of this fantastic tale is that Adam invents both Sukkot and Hanukkah, seasonal festivals that would be appropriated by pagans before, one day, becoming Jewish expressions of joy and light.

This month brings us Hanukkah, our Jewish festival of illumination, a celebration filled with candles in the darkness. In a darkening world, where a litany of evils swell and rise, where antisemitism threatens to force our people into hiding once more, our tradition insists we increase our light. Isaiah proclaims we are to be an “or lagoyim,” a light unto the nations (42:6).

A miracle of this Hanukkah is that 130 years after our house was built, we can still place our hanukiyot in the window, that we survive to tell these tales thousands of years after the Greeks became the latest (but unfortunately not the last) empire to try (and fail) to stamp us out. In Adam’s time, the miracle of this season was that the world began getting a little brighter. In our time, it’s the miracle of Jewish hutzpah, our insistence on lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness.

A version of this post appears in the December issue of Jmore.

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American Buddhist author Tara Brach teaches Mindfulness Meditation around the world. She often shares the joke in her classes while exploring identity and masking. We all wear masks. How do we know when someone is being authentic? “The word ‘person’” she reminds us, “is derived from the ancient Greek term persona, which referred to the masks actors wore to represent certain humans, animals, or gods. In our daily lives, we habitually put on our own personas to suit particular situations.”

Think about your own lives. What masks do we wear? Who sees when we’re angry, disappointed, excited, curious? How often and in what contexts do we reveal the real us? How much energy do we exert hiding? In our parasha it’s none other than God who grapples with how much to reveal to Abraham. The KBH is planning on destroy S’dom and Amora. And the verse tells us: “Now the LORD had said,

הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ מֵֽאַבְרָהָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֲנִ֥י עֹשֶֽׂה “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”

The Holy One takes Abraham into His confidence (as it were). God asks and then answers the question: “…Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him? For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is just and right צְדָקָ֖ה וּמִשְׁפָּ֑ט…” (Gen 18:17-19). In other words, God reveals the divine plans for Sodom and Gemorrah because to charge Abraham to be a man of justice is to demonstrate that the Source of justice is, in fact, just. When Abraham cries out:

הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כׇּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?”

It is because God has shown God’s hand. Abraham understands that God isn’t just dressed up as a god. Hashem is the real God. In so much of history, according to our Sages, God is hester panim, hiding the divine face. But here the Holy One says,

“?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙, shall I hide? No. Let’s be real with one another.”

?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ It’s hard to chew on this question, “shall I hide?” without considering the inverse, “shall we seek?” Relationships, whether egalitarian or hierarchical, turn on this push and pull, this negotiating the boundaries of other and self. Another interesting question here is not simply, “why does God remove the mask?” but “how surprised do we think Abraham is when God does?” How much of that confession is information Abraham already assumes about God? – that God seeks justice, that God welcomes dialogue and debate, that God wishes to be a teacher with curious and motivated students?

The question of whether to seek is, at its core, a question of how much we believe we already know about another. So often we simply assume we understand and appreciate the person sitting across from us – what she’s thinking, what they care about, whether his still waters are shallow or if they run deep? This is important, because relationships demand obligation. We’re accountable to our partners, our parents, our children, our colleagues, our fellow congregants, our rabbis – and they to us. The nature and contours of those obligations grow out of these connections.

My teacher Elana Stein Hain, Rosh Beit Midrash of the Shalom Hartman Institute, considers the nature of obligation in an essay from last year’s spring edition of the journal Sources. “My second model of obligation,” she writes, “comes from thinking about the very possibility of maintaining a relationship with God or with another human being or community.” She references sociologist Adam Seligman who makes a distinction between the “sincere self” and the “ritual self” (“Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, no. 4, 2009, 1082–83). “The sincere self,” says Hain “is what I subjectively think or feel at any given time: it is the self that is sometimes tired, sometimes happy, angry, in love, bored, etc. We can ask this self: how are you feeling about this? The ritual self, on the other hand, is found in what am I doing: I might be dancing or eating or reading or sleeping, etc.”

Considering this framework, I would suggest that if you are someone who craves sincerity, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, if you are the type of person who when asking yourself, ?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ Shall I hide? your inclination is “no,” than you are probably disappointed with (and maybe surprised by) people whose performative “ritual” selves are misaligned with their “sincere selves.” To you they’re just dressing up. On the other hand, if you are someone who is skeptical, maybe even cynical, about most people’s ability or inclination to harmonize these selves, if you yourself are not what our Sages call tocho k’varo, if you personally feel disinclined to reveal your more authentic self to others, then you likely have fewer expectations that others would do so.

Seligman, though, offers a different perspective on this question of obligation, suggesting that healthy relationships actually require us to create space for both selves, that it is a fools errand to strive for absolute harmony, that performing, even with our most intimate partners is a necessary investment in deep connections we wish to maintain and further develop.

Consider the words, “I love you.” Seligman writes, “We can in the end distinguish two forms of the words ‘I love you.’ The emotionally wrought confession by the star-struck young man appeals to the sincere mode…. On the other hand, we also have the ritual ‘I love you,’ whose performative aspect is more important than its denotative function.” Dr. Hain explains it this way: “[While] there is a sincere form of ‘I love you’ that means ‘I am feeling love for you right now,’ there is also a ritual ‘I love you’ that is said as a means of maintaining relationship: ‘I am in this loving relationship with you.’ It is tempting to value the former and to disregard the latter, but Seligman argues that the sincere self and the ritual self are both necessary forms of the self. Both are not only legitimate but needed when we want to be connected with others.”

But there’s a final layer to explore here, because the assumptions we make about others, whether and how they are masking, suggests we can know not just who someone is, but who they will become. I do think intuition and curiosity, real engagement, go a long way toward understanding and appreciating someone, but who among us is a finished product? The very nature of existence is formation, evolution. We are learning, adapting, and growing all the time. We are beings, becoming. The trap we so often fall into is to believe we ourselves are capable of growth, but others are trapped by their own past, their preconceptions, some algorithm that shapes their future.

There’s a midrash that considers the future of an important character in this week’s parasha. Sarah and Abraham have just exiled Hagar and her young child Ishmael, a child Abraham loves and had hoped would become his heir. Wandering the desert near Be’er Sheva, their skin of water having run dry, Hagar leaves Ishmael alone under a bush and bursts into tears. She cannot bear to watch him die. The Torah tells us:

יִּשְׁמַ֣ע אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־ק֣וֹל הַנַּ֒עַר֒

“God heard the cry of the boy,” which is already interesting because the text said Hagar was the one who cried. And the verse continues, “an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is.”

“Where he is,” בַּאֲשֶׁ֥ר הוּא־שָֽׁם, three words that seem unnecessary. Most commentators assume the verse means God responds to Ishmael in the place where his mother had left him, out of earshot from her, under the bush. But the midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 53:11) implies the text is not concerned with where he is but when he is – and who he will become someday.

The ministering angels rose to accuse Ishmael. They said, “Lord of the Universe, here is someone who will one day slay Your children with thirst. Will You now provide him with a well?” God said to them, “What is he now, righteous or wicked?” They said, “righteous.” God responds:

אֵינִי דָן אֶת הָאָדָם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁעָתוֹ.

I judge people only as they are in this moment.

What an extraordinary statement! God knows that Ishmael would become an enemy of Isaac’s descendants, of the Israelites. God knows that Ishmaelites would one day sell Joseph into servitude in Egypt. The prophecy in last week’s parashah even stated he would be a “wild ass of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (Gen 16:12). He will not simply dress up as a clown. He will become that clown. But here, right now, he is none of those things. He has no descendants. He has done nothing wrong. He is a dying child, and God insists that means his life ought to be spared.

While in Israeli custody, three years before he was released along with 1,026 other prisoners in the Gilad Shalit deal, Yahyah Sinwar had a terminal brain tumor. Israeli doctors operated and saved his life. Fifteen years later, Sinwar planned and executed a terrorist rampage that saw the worst violence done to the Jewish people since the Shoah through which he also further advanced his reign of terror against Palestinian civilians. Were those doctors wrong to perform that surgery? With the benefit of hindsight, we might say “yes.” My point here is not to argue that Sinwar should or should not have been saved given what the Israeli government knew about him at the time. That’s a different conversation. My point is that the vast majority of people are not Sinwar, they are not irredeemably monstrous. They’re decent, flawed people, stumbling through life like the rest of us. And who can say with any certainty who any of us will be in the future?

The fundamental problem with how too many of us think about others is that we make a thousand calculations as to whether we should act in one way or another toward someone and expend much less energy meeting them where they’re at.

אֵינִי דָן אֶת הָאָדָם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁעָתוֹ.

I judge people only as they are in this moment.

What would it be like if we committed right now to judge our fellow human beings not as we fear they might be but ba’asher hu sham, as they are? People are not personas, they are people, created in God’s image. Some portion of us lose or never had the ability to access that divine goodness. But most of us do. We are beings, becoming. Who are we to rob someone of that possible future by insisting we know better what it might behold?

“Shall I hide?” It’s a personal choice and a situational one. The ritual and sincere selves each have value in our relationships. “Shall we seek?” My hope is that, if nothing else, more of us will do a bit more of that.

Prelude:

This coming Tuesday is the 30^th Anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Monday is his yahrzeit. It’s hard to believe it’s been three decades. It’s even harder to wrap my head around how much has changed – and how much has stayed the same since then. Rabin was killed on November 4, 1995, by a Jewish extremist who wished to upend the Oslo Peace Process. It came on the heels of several Hamas run terrorist attacks. In summer of ‘96, I arrived in Israel for Ulpan and a year of study at Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus. On kibbutz in the Galil, I met Janis Coulter, also a student, who would be murdered years later by Hamas at Hebrew U during the 2^nd Intifada, in a cafeteria we once frequented. In November of ‘96, though, Janis and I joined several friends and traveled to Tel Aviv for a peace rally and memorial marking one year since Rabin’s assassination.

In the months that followed, I found myself processing a cascade of feelings and experiences during a dizzying time. On one hand, I was having an amazing year, making friends, learning and exploring my Judaism in Yerushalayim, traveling around the country at a time when peace still seemed possible. I had an internship at the WF Albright Institute in East Jerusalem. I would walk down from Har Hatzofim, stop at my favorite Palestinian falafel stand, spend a few hours labeling pottery sherds and then enter the Old City through the Damascus Gate, occasionally stopping to get a treat at the Arab suk.

On the other hand, Netanyahu had just been elected Prime Minister for the first time. He and Arafat both would prove disinterested in making real concessions or pursuing lasting solutions. Months after Rabin’s murder, just after Ramadan, and a few months before I arrived to Israel, Hamas has done its own very substantial damage to the peace process when it planned and executed four terrorist attacks in nine days, killing 61 and injuring over 200. The last of these took place at Dizengoff Center, in the heart of Tel Aviv, on Purim, as children milled about in their costumes. The bomb, laced with nails and screws, wounded 130 Israelis and killed one soldier and twelve civilians, including five who were thirteen years old or younger.

In early ’97, still living on Mt. Scopus, I wrote a song called “Jerusalem 5756,” reflecting on the year including and following Rabin’s assassination, the year that concluded with my Rosh Hashanah on kibbutz. I’d like to play it for you today. The song is a chronicle of a young man’s heartbreak and confusion, trying to discern my own place among the Jewish people, confronting the ferocity of anti-Jewish hatred, yearning for peace. The tune concludes with the narrator, present at once in the newly renamed Rabin Square and also on Mount Herzl where the slain leader is buried, reflecting on Rabin’s final moments, chuckling at his awkward smile and his tone-deaf singing of “Shir L’Shalom,” wondering what would become of this country with which I had fallen deeply in love. Here’s my love song, my tribute, to an embattled ancient city and a resilient ancient people. This is “Jerusalem 5756.”

The sun was going down as we drove into town on the bus coming from Tel Aviv. As we rounded the turn I could feel my heart yearn for the city I’d so longed to see. But my eyes found instead the roadblock ahead, and a soldier stepped out of the booth. And we all heard him say, “there were more killed today,” as he cautiously waved us on through.

At the close of the day I found my way to the heart of the city of gold. Then at last the sun fell, and the siren, it welcomed the bride to her city of old. And as the men gathered round I drank in the sound of their prayers rising up from the wall. But when they turned around I just stared at the ground like a child lost in the dark.

And I feel so helpless again as I wander at night through the streets. And I cry for Jerusalem for the 3,000 years she has seen.

When the month reached its end I cried again as my vision had vanished in flames. From their prayer they had turned to an anger that burned and a vengeance which could not be tamed. Four times the Earth trembled in fear and in hell as countless were lost without need. And I closed my eyes tried to block out the cries of the children who’d died in the streets.

And I feel so helpless again as I wander at night through the streets. Tell me why my Jerusalem do you suffer for all that you’ve seen?

Remembering one year ago when the candles burned slowly to rhythms and visions of peace. Then he sang the last song as the cheers lingered on and we laughed at the smile on his face. But when he left our sight, three shots in the night. And “why” was all we could say. And I looked around, took a stone from the ground, and I placed it on top of his grave.

And I feel so helpless again as I wander at night through the streets. And I cry for Jerusalem for her struggle at last to be free. Yes, I feel so helpless and then in the night I cry out from the streets. Still you try my... Will it end? Oh... Close your eyes my Jerusalem. Close your eyes for perhaps in the dark, we can dream.

©1997 by Daniel Burg

Postlude:

“Amar Rabbi Yochanan, Rabbi Yochanan said: In your eyes there is a white part, through which you are not able to see, and a dark part in the middle of the eye, by means of which one does see. In other words, one can [only] see out of the dark part of the eye….” 29 years ago, I prayed for dreams of a better tomorrow to emerge from the darkness. We dream with our eyes closed, but we see, through darkness, with our eyes wide open. This week, on this 30^th yahrzeit, we remember a man, battle scarred, who dared to dream, whose very life was bound up in service of Medinat Yisrael, who knew well the darkness of war, who died skeptical, clear-eyed yet hopeful, al kiddush Hashem, a grudging martyr, for an unlikely peace. Yehi zichro baruch, may his memory be for a blessing. And may his hope against hope ultimately prove not to have been in vain” (Midrash Tanchuma Tetzaveh 6).

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Potential

by Daniel Cotzin Burg

I hear they found a grenade at Be’eri

two years after the kibbutz attack when 101 farmers and writers and foreign workers and mothers, fathers, children were slaughtered.

And 32 kidnapped to Gaza.

Two years ago this month I stood in the remains of a community, helmet and flak jacket, trembling in the freshness of it. Gingerly I stepped across the rubble looking for anything dangerous underfoot. The army had cleared it of the bodies

and munitions.

But burnt out, crumbling buildings, soiled bedrooms, knives, reddish-brown shadows of the dead (still tacky), the smell

lingered. And one undiscovered grenade hidden until yesterday.

I’m told the hostages are coming home. They’re saying the fighting will stop and Gaza will be rebuilt. And peace may yet break out.

The Hebrew word for grenade is rimon, pomegranate, the fruit we eat at the New Year because it’s full of seeds. The blood-red juice is tart, and it stains.

They’re rebuilding the kibbutz. A construction worker found the device at Be’eri.

unexploded.

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Nearly two years on, grenade used in October 7 attack found on Kibbutz Be’eri

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Oh no! In the story, the Ziz is a bit of a shlemiel, but usually he’s able to fix his clumsy mistakes. This time, sadly, he cannot. The children use the vegetables to decorate their sukkah each year. There is simply no way, even for a mythological beast, to repair the damage he’s caused. Feeling guilty and bereft, the Ziz flies off to Mt. Sinai to ask God what he should do? God instructs the Ziz to search the whole earth and bring back “the hardest word.” After bringing back scores of words – “goodnight” from a child who doesn’t want to sleep, “spaghetti,” from another who can’t pronounce it, “rock, rhinoceros, Rumpelstiltskin!” – the Ziz eventually learns that “sorry” is, in fact, the hardest word.

This is a children’s story, so we might think that while saying “I’m sorry” is really hard for kids, adults (being more mature) would be much better at it. Guess what? We’re not. It seems simple, doesn’t it? Who of the parents among us has not said plainly to our children, “if you do something wrong, say sorry.” Why, then, is it so very hard for grownups to follow our own advice? Part of the problem is that we don’t always know which situations call for an apology.

In Ezra Klein’s interview of Salman Rushdie last year, Rushdie was reflecting on the journey he went through in the immediate aftermath of Khomeini’s fatwa, long before he survived the near-fatal knifing at Chautauqua in 2022. “About a year or a year and a half into the story, when I was very, very depressed and didn’t see how it would ever end,” he said, “I thought maybe what I had to do was to reach out to the Muslim community and try and apologize. And I did, and it rebounded very hard in my face. And actually, my sister, whom I love and is closer to me than anybody else in the world, called me when she heard me making these apologias. She said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?’ And I thought, you know, ‘Yes, I have.’” Of course, Rushdie didn’t have anything to apologize for – certainly not any more than Toni Morison, George Orwell, or Margaret Atwood owe an apology to Moms for Liberty.

The truth is, apologizing when we shouldn’t have to or apologizing when we’re not really sorry can make a situation worse. Think of times in your life when you said “no” to invitations, dates, or other social engagements. Maybe you tried to let people down easy: “I’m so sorry, but I just can’t make it next Tuesday.” “Sorry, but I’m just not looking for a relationship right now.” A UT-Austin/Dartmouth study (“The Impact of Apologies on Social Rejections,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2017) found that when social rejections are accompanied by apologies, the rejected party often ends up feeling worse, not better. This is probably because saying “I’m sorry,” before saying no to a hang out, date, or group collaboration, compounds feelings of rejection with guilt for the rebuffed party. It’s sort of like saying, “it’s not you, it’s me.” Most people know intuitively that if someone says, “it’s not you, it’s me,” it’s most definitely you!

A bigger problem, though, is that many of us don’t know how to apologize. Authors Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy suggest six steps to a good apology. (Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies, p. 28):

1. Use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” (“Regret” is not apology!)

2. Say specifically what you’re sorry FOR.

3. Show you understand why the thing you said or did was BAD.

4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses.

5. Describe the actions you’re taking to ensure this won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it, which is to say, try to make a repair.

Notice that saying “sorry” is a component in our greater pursuit of accountability or teshuvah. Don’t worry if you can’t remember all the steps. You can find them on the authors’ website: sorrywatch.com. But, on this Yom Kippur, I think we need to consider something deeper at work. It’s not only that many people don’t know how to apologize. What I’m most concerned about is that our society seems to be moving away from apology as an agreed-upon norm. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody to good,” says the old proverb. At least in the public discourse, apologizing is becoming decidedly uncool.

Part of the problem is that to the extent Americans enjoyed a social contract honoring apologies and encouraging forgiveness, that contract has frayed and many people are now reluctant to apologize. There are two countervailing trends at work. The first comes out of justice and accountability movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter which instigated a culture of public calling out and very public, online apologies. Many of these apologies were necessary, but the public and permanent nature of social media also taught observers that admitting an error means your acknowledgement of that error will exist forever in cyberspace, incentivizing some against taking responsibility. The Viddui is punctuated again and again with s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement – after apologizing and doing real teshuvah, the sinner is meant to attain a clean slate. But if some aging tik-tok video or facebook post becomes a demerit for every future relationship or job interview, why bother to apologize?

But we also live in a time when leaders, put simply, behave badly, and there’s plenty of evidence that children and adults alike take cues from our leaders. Leaders behaving badly is, of course, nothing new. One model Jewish leader, King David, had many flaws as you know. And yet, when Nathan the prophet confronts him about his sin with Uriah and Batsheva, David admits responsibility, a key component to any worthy apology:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר דָּוִד֙ אֶל־נָתָ֔ן חָטָ֖אתִי לַ֑ה’

David said to Nathan, “I stand guilty before the LORD!” And Nathan replied to David, “The LORD has remitted your sin; you shall not die.”

As you know, this is my final High Holy Day cycle at Beth Am. My very first Rosh Hashanah, fifteen years ago, I shared a teaching in the name of Rav Yosef Be’er Soloveitchik who observed that both King Saul and King David committed great sins in their lives. Why then was Saul rejected, and David hailed as progenitor of the messianic line? Soloveitchik explains that it was simply David’s ability to acknowledge his mistake and ask forgiveness. “A great nation is like a great man,” said Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, “when he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.”

Failed leaders like King Saul abound, and politicians were modeling stubbornness and sometimes shamelessness long before this political moment. In 1988, Vice President Bush declared, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are” (p. 177). President Clinton did apologize for the Tuskegee experiments, but never directly to Monica Lewinsky. It’s been 850 years since King Henry II of England donned sackcloth and walked three miles to publicly confess his guilt in the death of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket. Henry allowed himself to be beaten with rods by bishops and eighty monks before spending the night in vigil at Becket’s tomb. Can you imagine the leader of our country doing that? Me neither.

In fact, when Trump was running for president the first time, he was interviewed by Jimmy Fallon (I’ll try not to dwell on the irony of him talking to a late-night comedian). Fallon asked him back in 2015, “Have you ever apologized, ever, in your life?” Trump answered, “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong…. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.” As we well know, much less than taking responsibility for his sins, Donald Trump consistently wields his unapologetic nature as a cudgel against anyone who he perceives has slighted him, from Jimmy Kimmel to Jim Comey. Trump, of course, was an acolyte of Roy Cohn, the McCarthyite thug, perpetrator of the 1950’s Lavender Scare, whose philosophy was: never apologize, that every punch, deserved or not, was to be met with a harder counterpunch.

This attitude of the President’s was on full display during Charlie Kirk’s funeral last week. The penultimate speaker was Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk who somehow found it in her heart to forgive her husband’s murderer. While I hesitate to cast judgment on a grieving widow’s impressive capacity for grace, from a Jewish perspective, it’s hard to argue that Tyler Robinson, thus far unapologetic, is deserving of such forgiveness. But Trump, who spoke last, didn’t seem to care much about the young man who pulled the trigger. He was too busy declaring war on the “radical left.” And then, he apologized. Charlie Kirk, said the President, “did not hate his opponents…. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” said Trump, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want what’s best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry Erika.”

We live in a time when leaders have been supplanted by influencers, an “attention economy” in which indignation and grievance feed the algorithm, which demands (and monetizes) greater outrage. But apologies, write Ingall and McCarthy, “are evidence of a society that cares about itself, a society that honors other people’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings as precious. In tiny ways and larger ones, apologies move us toward justice.” But it has become en vogue to mock apology as weakness or blusterfully eschew accountability. Salman Rushdie calls shamelessness “the weapon of our time.” If so, how do we fight back? Jewish tradition, this season of teshuvah, of accountability, provides our answer. Don’t give up on apology. Do it more and do it better.

Hevre, we are a society in crisis. The prevailing winds, those “ill winds,” have been blowing us in the wrong direction for some time. But, as mid-19^th Century spiritualist Cora L. V. Hatch said, “…you could not direct the wind, but you could trim your sail so as to propel your vessel as you pleased.” How many of you know how to sail? I’m no expert, but I learned to sail as a kid at Jewish summer camp in Oconomowoc, WI. And many a July I can be found skippering a 22 ft. Ensign or a single-handed Laser on Lake Walloon in Northern Michigan. What’s interesting about sailing is that you can travel in just about any direction. This is called your “point of sail.” For example, if you’re traveling with the wind, you’re in a run or broad reach. But you can also sail against the wind. This is called a beat or a close haul. There is actually one direction in which you absolutely cannot sail. Any idea? You can’t sail directly into the wind. If you turn your craft into the wind without enough momentum, your sails luff and you’re in irons. You’re stuck.

Now I share this, not to show off my knowledge of sailing terminology. (Ok, a little bit to show off). But mostly I share this because I think it’s a great metaphor for the art of apologizing. Contrary to the prevailing winds, blowhard politicians, or braggarts in the Manosphere, apologies are not weak. Apologizing is, in fact, one of the most courageous things we can do. Sorry is, after all, the hardest word, and hard things are what brave people do. Here’s the thing about sailing though: The point of sail called a run, in which your boat is traveling completely with the wind, is boring. Yes, it’s the most efficient. You’re moving quickly. In a race or trans-Atlantic voyage, you want the wind at your back. But, sort of like being in a hot air balloon, you don’t really feel the movement. The most exciting point of sail is a beat, a close haul, when you push a boat whose sails have a high aspect ratio at closer and closer angles to the wind. This is called “pointing higher.”

Pointing higher in a strong wind is when sailing gets really fun, leaning off the port hull, over the water, feet tucked under the hiking strap, one hand on the tiller, the other firmly gripping the sheet off the winch, the cool spray catching your back as the craft heels against your weight, your body and the mast forming a “v” with the starboard hull almost kissing the surface of the deep. Pointing higher. It’s one of the most liberating experiences I’ve had.

You know when else I feel that kind of liberation? When I’ve done something wrong, and I finally figure out I blew it, and I ask for and receive forgiveness. The weight of sin can be imperceptible until we unburden ourselves of it. And the reason I think it’s so liberating is that the practice of apology, if done right, brings us closer to one another and to God. One of my favorite teachings (Tanya Igerret HaTeshuvah) imagines we, each of us, are connected to God with a thick cord. When we sin, the cord is severed. When we do teshuvah, the angel Gabriel comes and ties a knot. On Yom Kippur, we’re reminded that sinning is a lifelong enterprise, but so is repair. And the beautiful thing is that each one of our cords, riddled with a lifetime of knots, is necessarily shorter, meaning that we are closer to God

מקום שבעלי תשובה עומדין, צדיקים גמורים אינם עומדין

“Where those doing teshuvah stand, not even the totally righteous can stand” (Berakhot 34b). Those who sin and make amends are closer to heaven, they point higher.

What’s the relationship between apologizing and teshuvah? The first is a component of the second. The relationship between apology and atonement is not unique to Jewish tradition, but in every framework, the goal is to point higher. Writer and disability justice advocate Mia Mingus suggests there are four steps to accountability: self-reflection, apologizing, repair, and finally changed behavior. The Ho’oponopono Prayer also has four components: I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank You. I love you. I wish I could tell you I learned this from Miriam who, as usual, is in Hawaii right now. But I didn’t. I got it from watching “The Pitt.”

Within the Jewish tradition, we look to Maimonides who delineates eight steps to Teshuvah.

1. Recognize your harmful behavior and actions

2. Feel remorse

3. Stop the harmful behavior and distance yourself from it

4. Undertake the work necessary to transform yourself

5. Verbally confess the harm you caused (and be specific)

6. Make amends or restitution

7. Apologize and ask forgiveness from those you’ve harmed

8. Resolve to do better. Make better choices.

The interesting thing about the Rambam’s framework is that apology comes not first but actually toward the end of the process. You might wonder why? In a study called “Better Late Than Early” (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2004), Oberlin psychologist Cynthia Franz found “study participants had the most positive feelings about the apology they received after having a chance to express their annoyance and irritation…. It was important to them that they felt heard” (Sorry, Sorry, Sorry. P. 21). The harmed party feeling harmed is exactly why we should focus much less on public social media apologies and more on the interpersonal. For most of us, most of the time, it’s about picking up the phone, sending a note, sometimes sending a text or DM, or just sitting down face to face over coffee and saying, “I’m sorry.”

Which method is best is situational (and to some extent generational). But if I were to leave you with one final thought on this Yom Kippur, it’s this: Don’t let the perfect apology be the enemy of the good one. Sorry is the hardest word for a reason. The inertia of inattention, lack of introspection, anxiety about getting it right can go a long way toward keeping us from doing better in the coming year. The goal isn’t perfection. Point higher. The wind can be shifty. Keep pointing higher. Influencers may try to convince you that saying you’re sorry is weak. Ignore them and still point higher. Remember, apologizing, like sailing, is a process. As Rabbi Alan Lew z”l writes, “Transformation does not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. We never reach the end of Teshuvah. It is always going on. We are awake for a moment, and then we are asleep again. Teshuvah seems to proceed in a circular motion. Every step away is also a step toward home” (This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. P. 154). Or put differently, the wind may push us this way and that. But if we can set our sails, grab the tiller, and point just a bit higher, we’ll make it back to shore.

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But it was Sneakers that made me fall in love with Robert Redford. I was a Junior in High School and Redford was already 56 by the time I settled in to watch the movie about aging fugitive computer hackers and the dangers of government surveillance. The movie featured an all-star cast including Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd and Sidney Poitier. The scene that sticks with me all these years later is from the end of the film where, in exchange for their silence, our heroes secure a bunch of absurd payoffs from NSA Operations Director Bernard Abbott (Abbott having been played by none other than James Earl Jones, who also tragically left us just one year ago September). Redford gets his name cleared. Poitier and his wife get a trip to Tahiti. Aykroyd gets a Winnebago. But when it’s Whistler’s turn (the blind character played by David Straithairn), he demands “peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” Abbott in Jones’ resonant baritone is indignant: “We are the United States Government! We don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Rabbi Hanina Sagan ha-kohanim said: pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, every man would swallow his neighbor alive” (Avot 3:2). According to the Shulkhan Arukh, Rabbi Hanina, second in line to the High Priest, was executed by the Roman Empire (O.H. 580). Our Sages understood something important about power and authority. Governments are necessary, societies need structure and laws to protect citizens from outside forces and from one another. But Chazal also understood governments can become corrupt and dangerous. Sometimes they are the ones not protecting but scapegoating the stranger, disappearing the dissident, swallowing people alive.

“We are the United States Government! We don’t do that sort of thing.” It all seems a bit wistful now, doesn’t it? I wonder if our high schoolers in the room today even get the joke which hinges on movie-goers’ believing, on some level, our government’s job is to make the world a better place. Redford, of course, cared deeply about the planet. But he’s gone and we are here this Yom Kippur, a day on which we yearn, from the vantage of our unredeemed world, for the possibilities of a better tomorrow. U’v’khen/and so…

וּצְמִיחַת קֶֽרֶן לְדָוִד עַבְדֶּֽךָ, וַעֲרִיכַת נֵר לְבֶן־יִשַׁי מְשִׁיחֶֽךָ, בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵֽינוּ

“May the light of David, Your servant…be kindled speedily in our day.”

Yom Kippur is also a day of liminality and transition, the culmination of the past year as we fully step into the next. In that spirit, it’s not lost on me that this will be my last Yom Kippur here at Beth Am, and my final opportunity to address you, on the High Holy Days, from this bima. I’m not leaving just yet. I have a bunch more torah to teach before I do. There’s a weekend coming up in June for us to say farewell, and I suspect I’ll have some parting thoughts for you then. The dates are in the program, and I hope you’ll mark your calendars! Nevertheless, I have been thinking a great deal about what I’d like to say to you today, given this is my last Yom Kippur sermon.

You may not remember this, and many of you are new since then, but when I came to interview back in February 2010, I began my remarks by confessing I didn’t quite know what to say to you, because we were strangers. But that was over fifteen years ago. We are no longer strangers. We’ve learned, laughed, prayed, protested, traveled, mourned, and grown together. Back then I was concerned about overstepping, making assumptions about what you needed to hear from some young rabbi out of Chicago. Today, I’m less young… and I find myself pondering precisely the opposite. I ask myself, should I say what I think I must?

Truth is, the sermon I feel I must give, is not the sermon I want to. I want to talk about happy things. (Can you talk about happy things on Yom Kippur?) Or Kashrut, whatever! I want to give a “reflective” sermon, or a “looking forward” sermon, or a “what I’ve learned from you crazy people” sermon. But those will have to wait because our country, our very democracy, is teetering, and I cannot pretend that it’s not. To be clear, this is not about party. It’s not about whether I disagree with every single thing this Administration has done. I don’t. This is, quite simply, about the future of our republic. Rabbi Tarfon says, וּבַעַל הַבַּיִת דּוֹחֵק “the Master of the House is knocking” (Avot 2:15). There is a Master of a house greater than the one on Pennsylvania Avenue. Some knocks must be answered. Some doors must be opened.

What I’ve learned from 20 years in the rabbinate, and from my friend and teacher Rheda Becker, is that what we say from this bima is part of sacred ongoing conversation between teachers and students. What I owe you, each time I preach a sermon, is to teach the most authentic torah I can muster, right here and now. Heschel taught, “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, A Soul, and a Moment. And the three are always here” (1961 White House Conference on Aging). On a different Yom Kippur or in another community, I might have had something else to say. But this is where we are. This moment. My soul. Your Soul. And the Holy One knocking.

On Yom Kippur 2017, I mentioned Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, his 1935 dystopian novel about the rise of American Fascism. The book features an elected populist leader, playing on white nationalism, expressing disdain for Black folks, scapegoating Jews. The novel begs a question, I said. Can it happen here? My answer then was, unfortunately, yes. As long as people in power can find a good scapegoat, I said, “there is always a chance that the grand and fledgling experiment of American democracy will give way to a more sinister and ancient form of governance.” And I shared that a dear congregant had said to me soon after Trump’s first inauguration: “The elasticity of our democracy is about to be tested.” That congregant was none other than Efrem Potts z”l, our first Beth Am president and my mentor. When Efrem said that in 2017, it was indeed being tested. In January ‘21, it nearly succumbed to an assault on our capitol. Since January of this year, American democracy is being stretched as never before. Even the most elastic things, subject to prolonged and extreme pressure, will break. I shudder to think what Efrem would say now.

When Rabbi Hanina Sagan ha-kohanim said: “pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, every man would swallow his neighbor alive,” he assumed an iron-fisted authoritarian regime. That’s because he was living under such a regime, a regime that would come to brutally execute him and other venerated Jewish leaders. The great Rabbi Akiva, too, was put to death by the Roman authorities. For what crime? For the crime of learning and practicing Judaism.

The Talmud relates (Berakhot 61b):

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: פַּעַם אַחַת גָּזְרָה מַלְכוּת הָרְשָׁעָה שֶׁלֹּא יַעַסְקוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל בַּתּוֹרָה.

The Sages taught: One time, the evil empire decreed that Israel may not engage in the study and practice of Torah. Pappos ben Yehuda came and found Rabbi Akiva, who was [nevertheless] convening assemblies in public and engaging in Torah study. He said to him: Akiva, are you not afraid of the empire? Rabbi Akiva answered him: I will relate a parable. To what can this be compared? It is like a fox walking along a riverbank when he sees fish gathering and fleeing from place to place. The fox said to them: From what are you fleeing? They said to him: We are fleeing from the nets that people cast upon us. He said to them: Do you wish to come up onto dry land, and we will reside together…? The fish said to him: You are the one of whom they say, he is the cleverest of animals? You are not clever; you are a fool. If we are afraid in our natural habitat which gives us life, then in a habitat that causes our death, all the more so.

Rabbi Akiva goes on to explain the moral of his story: Torah is to Jews as water is to fish and as air is to foxes (and humans). If we give up our habitat, the very thing that sustains our life, even when our very existence is threatened, what does that mean for our survival? And then, the Talmud describes Rabbi Akiva’s savage execution.

What does it look like for a government to slide from republic to מַלְכוּת הָרְשָׁעָה, an evil empire? How to identify the fishermen’s nets? The foxes? Three years after Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here and seven weeks before the Nazis ransacked my grandfather’s home in Idir-Oberstein, shattering my great-grandmother’s porcelain dishware on Kristallnacht, a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel fled his home in Berlin. Two years later, he completed his manuscript and published it as The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. In it, Fraenkel recounts how the Nazi regime maintained a “normative” state which operated under set rules and regulations and a “prerogative” state which exercised “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” (p. 17). This allowed the authorities to maintain, for most citizens, a veneer of normality, while increasingly restricting the rights of a targeted and maligned minority. “The trick,” according to University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq who studies Fraenkel, “was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”

Huq argues in The Atlantic that “we are witnessing the birth of a new Dual State.” I am worried that he’s right. While most Americans enjoy the trappings of our normative republic and the legal protections afforded us by the Constitution, the growing prerogative state celebrates insurrectionary violence, intimidates law firms and judges, extorts media conglomerates, prosecutes political adversaries on flimsy charges, cynically disappears immigrants and asylum seekers to countries they have never visited, all while enriching the Executive and his family. It’s important that we talk about this, because it’s real and it’s happening. Here. “Building a dual state need not end in genocide,” writes Huq. “Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression.”

I would caution us against our playing in the suppression Olympics, this weird debate over who is really in danger: Jews, immigrants, women and girls, Muslims, Black folks, brown folks, Queer folks. All these folks and more are in danger, all of us are in danger, because America is in danger. Yes, each person and each group experiences that danger differently in character and degree. Yes, I worry about antisemitism in this country. It’s real and it’s expressed in a range of forms across the political spectrum. I’m just waiting for the conspiracy theory that says the Jews shul down the government for Yom Kippur! And being concerned about the reality of antisemitism on campus, for example, does not mean turning a blind eye to its use as a blunt instrument to withhold critical research dollars, or deport people for Constitutionally protected speech.

Meanwhile, as historian and author Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) reminds us, “anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.” I’m concerned, as a recent survey showed, that many Jewish students here and around the world, increasingly feel the need to hide their Jewish identities, to curb their own speech and expression for social acceptance or faculty approval. That’s why I encourage us to wear our kippot, Star of David necklaces, or hostage pins with conviction and pride. Beware of self-censorship. Too often, the first ghetto is one of the mind, the one we enter willingly.

I’m reminded of an old story: Mendy goes to the tailor to try on his new custom suit. The first thing he notices is that the sleeves are too long. The tailor says, “no problem just bend your arms a bit at the elbow and hold them out in front of you. See now the length is perfect.” “But the collar is too high.” “Nonsense, just hunch your back a little. A little more that’s it. Nice!” “But I’m stepping on the pant cuffs.” “Oh, but you have to bend your knees a little.” “There, now look in the mirror. The suit fits perfect! Like a custom suit should.” Knotted like a pretzel, Mendy shuffles out into the street. Two ladies walking by take notice. “Look at that poor man. I wonder if he was born that way?” “Who knows? But thank God he found a suit that fits.”

Hevre, aspiring authoritarian governments excel at intimidation. They get us to question one another and doubt ourselves, contorting ourselves, our words, our views, until we’re convinced our twisted posture is the just way we’ve always been. Rabbi Akiva understood, even at the risk of his own life, the necessity of swimming in a sea of Torah. What is the torah of modern America? It is the First Amendment – not just cherry-picked clauses; the whole damned thing! Free speech, free expression, free press, freedom to assemble and petition, freedom to believe and practice, freedom from being told what to practice and believe.

As Jews, we need not choose between our own parochial concerns and those of this country. To be an or lagoyim, a light in this nation and unto others, is to use what power, influence, education, and resources we have to uplift the normative and resist normalizing the prerogative. And our experience as a religious minority can be helpful. As Matt Taylor from the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies here in Baltimore has shown, much of this chilling of speech is bound up with rising Chistian Nationalism, the alignment of America’s majority religion with its power structures: the Justice Department, the FCC, the military. Consider the Secretary of Defense (or is it War?), who recalls hundreds of top generals from their strategic global positions to fat shame them and, with the President, charge them to use American cities as “training grounds” in a “war from within.” It is no accident that in May, Hegseth began a weekly Christian prayer service at the Pentagon during which his longtime pastor said, “Lord, may this become a place where Christians come together to do just this, and we see you move in power, not just through the Pentagon, but through our nation’s capital and down throughout this great nation.” Legal scholars immediately flagged it as a First Amendment violation.

But contrast this with President John Tyler’s 1843 correspondence with prominent Jewish Baltimorean Joseph Simpson. Simpson had expressed concern that General Winfield Scott, Commanding General of the US Armed Forces planned to address a missionary conference. Tyler’s response was clear: “If he attends, it will not and cannot be in his character of general in chief of the army. He will, necessarily for the time being, lay aside his sword and epaulets and appear… in no other light than as a citizen….” And then President Tyler reminded us of the cruciality of free speech and expression. “The United States have ventured upon a great and Noble experiment,” he writes to Simpson, “which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent – that of total separation of church and state.” After stipulating religious freedom for Muslims, Hindus and others, he continues, “The Hebrew, persecuted and downtrodden in other regions, takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid… He may evermore turn his eye to Judea, resting with confidence in the promise that is made him of his restoration to that holy land, that he may worship the God of his fathers after the manner that that worship was conducted by Aaron and his successor in the priesthood, and the aegis of the government is over him to defend and protect him. (College of William and Mary Quarterly, July, 1904).

What has become of us? What to do? I wish I had easy answers. There are people in this room, though, who are doing incredible work, in law, in medicine, in education, in journalism, in and out of government. I’m proud of you. We salute you. It will take all of us, together, to reclaim a more righteous path for our republic. Keep it up.

My goal today is simply this: to remind us that our government works for us, all of us, no matter how or whether we voted. It serves at the pleasure of a nation whose citizens hold it accountable to certain agreed-upon principles: L’État, ce n’est pas moi, the state and the Executive are not the same. The military and the state are not the same. Congress is its own branch of government. As are the courts. We the People have a voice. We, each of us, has a voice.

I stand before you today as one man with a voice, who believes the lifting up of that voice is a sacred act, a sacred duty as an American, as a Rabbi, as a Jew. You, too, have a voice. Use it. Use it wisely and thoughtfully, with compassion whenever you can, with resolve when you must. Don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t or, God forbid, that you can’t.

In just a little while, we’ll daven Musaf, including a 3^rd Century poetic addition to the Amidah which occurs in the Kedushah on Yom Kippur. Three times we’ll say u’v’khein/and so.

U’v’khen/and so, “we know true sovereignty is Yours.” Which is to say, we put our trust in you and not in any king of flesh and blood.

U’v’khen/and so, “Bestow honor to your people, Ad’nai.”

U’v’khen/and so: “the righteous will rejoice… evil will be silenced, and all wickedness will disappear like smoke.”

When will that be?

כִּי תַעֲבִיר מֶמְשֶֽׁלֶת זָדוֹן מִן הָאָֽרֶץ

“When You remove the tyranny of arrogance from the land.”

When You remove the tyranny of arrogance from the land. Peace on earth may be a stretch right now. But as Elijah Cummings used to say, “We’re better than this.”

I still believe it. If you do too, keep swinging for the fences.

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