Consumed with Care

“V’achalta, v’sava’ta, u’veirachta” (Deuteronomy 8:10). “And you will eat, and you will be satiated, and you will bless!”

With these three words, Moses outlines how the Israelites are supposed to retain a sense of humility in the “good land” they will soon enter. Wandering in the wilderness created a sense of dependency in the people, unmoored and relying on God for manna and direction. Once they are settled, though, and contributing their own labor to cultivate the land, Moses worries they will over-inflate their role in creating the abundance they will experience. And so, when they eat their fill, they should bless God as their ultimate benefactor. Blessing is intended to decouple having full bellies with having (overly) full egos. 

In Jewish halakhic tradition, these three words establish the blessing after meals, birkat hamazon, and give shape and substance to the blessing as well. 

I also see in these words an inner dynamic that functions beyond our relationship to food. The word for “eat”, achalta, is also used to describe what fire does to things - consumes them. God is described as an esh ochla, “consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24). In the Talmud (Sotah 14a), the sages struggle to reconcile this image with another image of walking after God (Deuteronomy 13:5). How are we supposed to walk after fire? Doesn’t that sound dangerous? Instead, they describe following God as modeling our behavior on God’s - to clothe the naked, visit the sick, to console mourners, etc. What they are describing is practicing care. And I think the experience of caring and the feeling of a consuming fire are not so far apart after all. Often, it is a spark of empathy that ignites a sense of responsibility and energizes our acts of care. Acting with care often leaves us feeling warm inside. 

But acting from a place of care can also leave us burnt out. Which leads us to “satiation / saturation / too-much.” There is a fine line between feeling satiated and feeling sick. Medieval commentator Chizkuni defines sava’ta as when “one’s soul becomes disgusted by food.” When you have taken in so much - of work, family care, attention in one area or another, news - that you cannot possibly imagine biting more off, something has to change. The fire has gotten out of control.

Poet and critic Maggie Nelson writes that, “while we may fantasize about our care as limitless - and it may even be so, in a spiritual sense - in our daily lives, most of us run up against the fact that care, too, is an economy, with limits and breaking points… [Art critic Jan] Verwoert goes to note that, to stay engaged in the ‘disciplines of care’ that matter to us most in a media environment and economy dedicated to exhausting time and attention, one has to learn how to set limit. In some situations, Verwoert observes, ‘to profess the I Can’t’ can sometimes be ‘the only adequate way to show that you care - for the friends, family, children or lovers who require your presence, or for the continuation of a long-term creative practice that takes its time…’ It may sting when you get (or give) an I Can’t, but it likely indicates that care is engaged elsewhere.” (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint). 

At the point of being consumed and saturated, burnt out from the infinite demands of care, we have two levels of response. First, set limits. We are only human. Second, bless God. By that, I think we are talking about acknowledging the fullness we are feeling and re-orienting to something larger than ourselves, perhaps to the Source of Compassion (av harachaman), the orchestrator of care in myriad and mysterious ways beyond any individual’s capacity to accomplish. 

V’achalta, v’sava’ta, u’veirachta. Let us be consumed by care, satiated and saturated to the right degree with how we tend to each other, and resting in the blessing that it isn’t all on our shoulders, even if at times it feels like it. 

Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Looking Out from the Mountain

On Wednesday night, thirty of us gathered on a hilly Queen Anne park to chant and read the book of Lamentations, whose Hebrew name (and first word) Eicha more accurately rephrases its content as a bereft question - “how [could it be]?” That book contains haunting poems written in the aftermath of the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem and exile of the ancient Israelites to Babylon, over 2,500 years ago. The observance of Tisha B’av began after the destruction of the second Temple nearly 2,000 years ago. 

As we peered back into the depths of time, we also had a distinctly beautiful view over the city of Seattle, glimpsing sailboats in Lake Union, the Space Needle rising up between the newer skyscrapers that make its futurism seem quaint. A soft moon peered over the evergreen trees, as if it too were sharing our perspective from this overlook. There were locals admiring the view as well, but for me at least, being on a hill for Tisha B’av wasn’t about beauty but evoked instead the peculiar melancholy of seeing the immensity of the world, its joys and sorrows all mixed up and bittersweet. 

A little over 3,000 years ago, another Jew climbed a mountain in order to get a bittersweet view. After over forty years of leading the Jewish people, Moses is destined not to enter the Promised Land, and in this week’s Torah portion, Vaetchanan, he reveals that he pleaded with God to let him into Israel, “to see the good land on the other side of the Jordan” (Deuteronomy 3:25). God tells him he will not enter, but to ascend Mt. Pisgah and look out at the entire land. 

When I think of modern Israel, I think how incredible it is to be able to enter a reconstituted Jewish country, to do with relative ease what Moses could not. Of course, most of the time I am right there next to Moses, looking from a distance at a place I am deeply invested in. Like Moses, I yearn to see a “good land” - a land in which Jews live out the values of Torah and Judaism (the Talmud, Berachot 48b, connects “good land” to “good teaching” in Proverbs 4:2). 

I yearn to see a land where Jews take seriously not just security concerns but “love the stranger”, not just the desire to reclaim every possible inch of ancestral land but “hinei ma tov- how good it is for siblings to dwell together”, not just great care of ritual observance but practicing “who is wise? One who learns from everyone”. Since last November, when the current government coalition formed, we have seen the leaders of Israel preach a Torah of violence, exclusion, racism, ideological rigidity, and above all - power. We have also seen historic protests within Israel, and solidarity protests organized by expat Israelis all over the Diaspora. At the core of this crisis of democracy in Israel is the Knesset’s push to reform the judicial system. For a few good resources to understand the context and stakes, learn more here:

• The Promised Podcast (including Linda Gradstein, who has talked about Israel with Kavana before)

• Identity / Crisis Podcast 

• On Israel’s lack of a constitution

• A really interesting conversation on how the protests got started

Standing on the mountain (living in Diaspora), some of us convince ourselves “this is an utterly good land”. No wrong can be done here!

Some of us walk back down the mountain, and live our lives immersed in our localities - because what is happening in Israel now as well as the occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank is overwhelming or confusing or frustrating.

Some of us look out and, like Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai emerging from a cave, scorch to the ground with fiery eyes every person and organization and government that doesn’t meet our standard of justice.

Honestly, I understand each one of these reactions. These days, I’m mostly interested in bittersweet conversations, ones that the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai might have described in his poem, “Inside the Apple”:

You speak to me. I trust your voice

because it has lumps of hard pain in it

the way real honey

has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

To talk of Israel / Palestine and lack either honey or the lumps of hard pain…

Now is the time, if ever there were a time, to support protesters within Israel who are fighting for democracy. Now is the time to live your vision of Judaism with passion and persuasion, to say to those in the government who would define Judaism narrowly that our tradition pulses with pluralism. Now is the time to learn from and with Palestinians, to sow the seeds of peace even in seemingly salted earth. Now is the time to climb mountains and look out bravely, honestly, and compassionately at a land full of honey and pain, and then do our part, like Moses, to help make it a Promised Land full of goodness.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Learn to Do Good

This week opens a new book in Torah, the book of Deuteronomy (from the Greek for “second law”, referring to how Moses recapitulates many of the laws and stories we have previously heard) or Devarim (Hebrew for “words”). In many ways, the theology of Deuteronomy marks a departure from what we’d seen in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. 

Professor Tamar Kamionkowsky writes: “The phrase, to love the Lord your God, appears eight times in the Book of Deuteronomy, two times in Joshua and nowhere else in the Bible! The demand that Israel fear God never appears in Torah before Deuteronomy, where the phrase occurs nine times. Following the Five Books of Moses, this demand appears only a handful of times. The phrase, to walk in his ways, is a Deuteronomic concept that is repeated only a few times in the Bible by proponents of Deuteronomic thinking. Finally, the mandate that one is to serve God with all of one’s heart and all of one’s soul is unique to the Book of Deuteronomy. In short, what God demands here is unique to this particular book of the Torah…We can thank Deuteronomy for teaching us the importance of yirat Adonai (fear of God) and ahavat Adonai (love of God), two concepts which often merge. It is this voice in Torah that compels us to bring our whole beings into relationship with God as we walk in God’s ways.”

Deuteronomy has a particular project for us. A wholeness of being and service…shleimut. It is no coincidence that all of the passages cited above are key texts in Mussar practice. Love and fear (or awe) are two of the deep soul-traits to work with, grounding almost every other facet of our character. “Walking in God’s ways” is understood to mean that we should act with kindness and follow God’s ethical example (Talmud Sotah 14a).

We also start reading this book right around Tisha B’av, which memorializes the destruction of the first and second Temples. The first temple fell to the Babylonian Empire. The second temple fell to the Roman Empire. If you read historians, you’ll quickly realize how tiny the kingdoms of Israel and later Judea are, how the land is situated at a crossroads of great nations such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia. It seems clear to me that you can describe the destruction of the temples and the various political misfortunes of the Jewish ancestors as part of a larger geopolitical drama. Jewish kings made strategic mistakes, their land was a geographic key to the ambitions of surrounding empires, and the resulting devastation is not really so surprising. 

What is surprising is how Jews began to interpret the loss of temple and homeland. Instead of stating the obvious and acknowledging the vast power of the Romans, for example, the Talmud teaches: “The humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas caused the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem” (Talmud Gittin 55b-56a). In fact, as the central rabbinic story of why the temples were destroyed unfolds, we consistently see political power sidelined as a mere consequence of the real tragedy, sin’at chinam (“baseless hatred”), and underdeveloped character, such as Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas’s misapplication of humility. 

Essentially, geopolitical conflict results not from power struggle for resources, but from spiritual and ethical atrophy. For the rabbis, without mussar - the introspective and spiritual practice of developing our character and ethical action - politics will fail us. Trying to transform policies, systems, structures, even laws and rituals, will ultimately fail us if we don’t also try to transform ourselves. 

Our haftarah this week tells us what a good society looks like (and crucially, one that will thereby endure). 

“Learn to do good.

Devote yourselves to justice;

Aid the wronged. 

Uphold the rights of the orphan;

Defend the cause of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17)

I like this as a definition of loving God, of fearing God, of walking in God’s ways, of serving God with your whole being - “learn to do good.” It will take a lifetime. Let’s learn together. 

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Chapters of Life

“These were the journeys of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron…The Israelites set out from Rameses and encamped at Succoth. They set out from Succoth and encamped at Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness. They set out from Etham and turned about toward Pi-hahiroth, which faces Baal-zephon, and they encamped before Migdol…” (Numbers 33:1)

Numbers 33 is a chapter that lists place after place where the Israelites encamped in the wilderness. The great 11th century commentator Rashi immediately asks, “Why are these journeys recorded here?!” Like other chapters that exhaustively list seemingly unimportant details, there must be some deeper significance to unfold - so let us start gathering clues!

Normally when describing our travel, we might say “first we went to x, then to y, then to z”, an itinerary of destinations. But this chapter doesn’t frame the list as “these are the places they stayed” but rather “these are the journeys”. In other words, it emphasizes the movement rather than the idling. 

The early 20th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, translated by Ulrich Baer)

Perhaps at each encampment some inner movement was happening that reverberated into the more apparent physical action of marching on to the next place. Inner work needed to happen in order to unlock the next wave of forward momentum, of spiritual growth as well as physical travel. 

The founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov (18th century Ukraine), notes that if you count up the number of journeys, “they are 42, and these [segments] correspond to each person from the day of their birth until their return to their [soul’s ultimate] world. And understand… that birth is like the Exodus, and you go on journey after journey until you reach the land of supernal living (i.e. the Promised Land, which is a metaphor here for the afterlife). The encampment relates to contracted consciousness (mochin d’katnut) and the journeying relates to expanded consciousness (mochin d’gadlut)” (Sefer Baal Shem Tov, Masei 1)

All of this rather dense language suggests that our life has chapters. The ancestors wandered 42 times in the wilderness, and in our lives we too have 42 chapters. Some are long, some are short. Some begin in ways we can anticipate, such as graduating from high school or getting married. Some begin without much warning, such as the death of a loved one. Some chapters we don’t realize we were in until we are into the next one already. Each chapter has its own work. While we are “encamped”, we may appear idle, stable, stuck, in a groove or in a rut. While “journeying” we are in a place of expanded openness and possibility, which comes with its own mix of exhilaration and anxiety. 

The Jewish spiritual practice of Mussar strikes me as one way to describe what we are doing while encamped and journeying. In Everyday Holiness, Alan Morinis describes mussar in two ways: “(1) it offers us a “map” of the inner life and (2) it offers us a body of practices we can employ to transform our inner ways” (p. 17). 

The mussar map consists of naming and working with inner qualities called middot (singular: middah), such as patience, anger, humility, and trust. So much of how we yearn to move forward in life requires awareness and skillfulness with our own personalities and temperaments. Mussar takes each middah one by one and focuses us on how to bring it into balance, to be more or less patient, for example, depending on which one you need to have more of in your life. Perhaps different chapters of life will benefit from different ways of expressing patience! 

No matter how we live, with mindful intention or in a state of constant distraction, we will move through the 42 chapters we get. The promise of mussar (and of course other spiritual/ethical traditions as well) is to bring more compassion to the aspects of the life journey that we have little control over and more deliberate agency in those aspects where we do have influence. The goal - to live a more conscious, present, and responsible life, and in so doing experience the shleimut, wholeness, of being human and our unique selves and alive.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

On the Way to Wholeness

Shabbat Shalom! Let me start with what is usually my sign-off, to linger for a moment with that word shalom. When we greet each other on Shabbat with that phrase, I usually think about it as wishing someone a peaceful day of rest, or perhaps a day of generalized well-being. 

But consider this teaching: “Everything that came into being during the six days of Creation requires improvement - for example, the mustard seed needs to be sweetened…also humans need tikkun (rectification, improvement)” (Bereishit Rabbah 11:6). 

And this teaching: “Shabbat is 1/60th of the World to Come” (Talmud Berachot 57a).

The six days are for the labor of the world, for cultivating and maturing both externally and internally. And Shabbat is for glimpsing what the end result of all our labor will be like - a peaceful wholeness (shleimut, from shalom), where everything has been harmonized to sweet perfection. So when I say, “Shabbat shalom,” perhaps I’m hoping that you and I will have even one small moment in the week that reminds us of our most cherished visions for ourselves and our world. We pause the striving, and rest in the awareness of deep enoughness. And then on Sunday, start improving ourselves and the world once again. 

We are intentionally brought into being imperfect, on the cusp of Shabbat’s promise. “The one stone on which the entire building rests is the concept that God wants each person to complete (mashlim, from shalom) themselves body and soul…” (Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Da’at Tevunot). 

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Yesterday (July 6) was a minor fast day in the Jewish calendar, the Seventeenth of Tammuz. It marks the historical breaching of the walls of Jerusalem which eventually resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. And it inaugurates the three weeks of mourning leading up to Tisha B’Av, which mourns the day of destruction itself of both the First and Second Temples (among other tragedies). From Tisha B’av through Rosh HaShanah, we are in a time known as the “weeks of comfort/consolation”, a spiritually fertile and ethically charged season of introspection and character development. 

These ten weeks are an opportunity to delve deeper into our Jewish tradition and our human nature, as we seek to mashlim ourselves, bringing ourselves closer to integrity, wholeness, holiness, healing, or whatever term captures for you the ultimate goal of a good life. 

One rich and pragmatic Jewish practice for moral and spiritual improvement is Mussar. Mussar is based on a virtues ethics approach, where we thoughtfully attend to specific values, character traits, and emotions in order to bring them into balance and express them skillfully and wisely in our lives. We’ve had some opportunities to begin exploring Mussar at Kavana in the last year, through monthly Shabbat gatherings and through a weekly Classics of Mussar class. The next opportunity I’m excited to announce is a “Kavana Reads” experience! We will be reading what has become by now a classic of contemporary Mussar literature, Everyday Holiness, by Alan Morinis. Please consider purchasing a physical or digital edition of the book, share with a friend or small group, or let us know if you would like to borrow one from a limited number that Kavana has purchased. And stay tuned for more details soon on how our learning will be organized! 

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Mussar shows up in an intriguing way in our Torah portion, Pinchas. Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, five daughters of a man who has died and left no male heirs, approach Moses and point out a flaw in the inheritance system. In this overwhelmingly patriarchal system, only men own land. The daughters ask, “Why should the name of our father be lost from among his family, just because he had no son? Give us a possession amongst our father’s kinsmen!” (Numbers 27:4). Moses doesn’t know the answer. He asks God, who replies that the daughters have a good point. “If a man dies without having a son, then you shall assign his inheritance to his daughter” (Numbers 27:8). Presumably, when those land-owning women have children of their own, if they have sons only the sons will inherit, so it is still far from an egalitarian system. 

Nevertheless, it is a remarkable moment when literally disenfranchised women confront a man with power and seek change. What character qualities enable the women to act as they did? Courage, certainly. A sense of justice. And what character qualities must Moses muster to act as he did? He could have ignored them, belittled them, or gotten defensive. But here he lives up to his reputation of humility and simply turns to a greater authority for help responding to their request. And what about God’s character? 

“When the daughters of Zelophehad heard that the land of Israel was to be divided according to tribes, according to the males and not the females, they gathered together to make a plan. They said, God’s mercy and compassion is not like the compassion of human beings. Human beings favor men over women. God is not like that. God's compassion extends to men and women alike.” (Sifrei Bamidbar 27)

Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah perceive an opportunity not just to benefit personally, and not just to partially shift the needle towards a more inclusive and egalitarian society, but to infuse a flawed human understanding of compassion with the divine fullness of its potential. 

To learn Mussar is to sit at the feet of these women and learn about courage and compassion, to study humility with Moses, and to aspire to be molded in the image of a radically compassionate God. 

Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Thanks for Your Support: A Year in Review

This letter is written by our Director of Operations, Liz Thompson

During our recent staff and board appreciation dinner, each attendee shared a highlight from the year. Unsurprisingly and in Kavana-like fashion, the highlights were incredibly varied and also super meaningful to each individual, ranging from the annual camping trip, the High Holidays, and the Annual Partner Meeting to personalized lifecycle events, relationships with kids in our youth programming, and so many more. As I listened, I couldn’t help but realize how much was packed into the last 12 months – not only the number of opportunities, but also the number and depth of changes that took place on the operational side of our cooperative. So, as our fiscal year wraps up today, I’d like to share some operational highlights and some pictures from the year, too -- as operational updates can only be so exciting!

Staff and board members share highlights from this year during the recent annual Staff and Board Appreciation Dinner.

Highlight #1: Behind the scenes, we have been working very intentionally to build the infrastructure needed to support this vibrant community. This work has been supported by Project Accelerate, a cohort program in which we have been learning and growing alongside seventeen other innovative, high-performing, small and medium sized Jewish organizations that are at a similar stage of development. It has been a real honor to have been chosen to participate in this cohort program over the past two years! Our three main areas of focus have been: community engagement, technology, and professional development for staff and our board – and we have made huge strides in each area, with next steps on the horizon.

Over 100 partners joined us for our Annual Partner Meeting this past May. The focus of this year's gathering was to bring folks up to speed on the Project Accelerate work, share a financial review and program highlights, and to spend time together small groups to ask some initial questions around growth.

Highlight #2: This year we hired new full-time staff members to round out what I like to call Kavana’s Dream Team. A huge thank you to our team of full-time staff, part-time educators, musicians and administrative support staff, and to our incredible board of directors for pulling together an incredible year of meaningful opportunities to engage in Jewish life and community: 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, Executive Director
Rabbi Jay LeVine
Avital Krifcher, Director of Community Engagement
Rachel Osias, Director of Education
Liz Thompson, Director of OperationsBen Farkas, Administrative Assistant 
Ana Franco, Custodian
Kohenet Traci Marx, Musician/Spiritual Leader
Chava Mirel, Musician 
Abbot Taylor, Bookkeeper
Educators: Maxine Alloway, Liv Feldman, Jack Hogan, Maya Itah, Rebecca Mather, Rachel Nagorsky, Sophia Nappa, Anaelle Oiknine, Noah Segal, Michael Taylor-Judd, Lon Wolton and Daniel Zelinger
Dana Bettinger, Board President
Marni Klein, Board Secretary 
Steve Lewis, Board Vice President
Sharon London, Past Board President
David Sabban, Board Treasurer
Board Members: Callista Chen, Chuck Cowan, Ingrid Elliott, Matt Offenbacher, John Policar, and Betsy Rosenman

As you can see, it takes a village! In addition to this amazing staff team, many of our partners played key leadership roles in supporting programming and community building opportunities – thank you so much for leaning in and engaging in this community so meaningfully! You put the “co-op” in the Kavana Cooperative!

Kavana partners volunteered to make meals this spring, so we can support our community members in times of need. 

Highlight #3: 17 years into building and co-creating this community, Kavana's Executive Director, Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum is currently on her first ever sabbatical. While I really miss working each day with my closest collaborator, I am so excited for her to have this opportunity to rest. There is a lot of research around the benefits of sabbaticals, and we are proud to be living our Jewish values by implementing this new Sabbatical policy (eligible staff will be offered a sabbatical every 7 years). It is not until this year that we have been able to build a team that can sustain and support the organization in such a healthy way. I’m so proud of our organization for reaching the level needed to function (dare I say continue to thrive?!) during a key player’s extended absence.

Rabbi Rachel in action; leading the family service at this year's High Holidays.

Highlight #4: We are ending this year financially healthy with a net-surplus, in part due to the success of our What’s Your Why Campaign. Thank you to everyone who helped us surpass our fundraising goal, and to our small but mighty fundraising team led by Board President Dana Bettinger. These funds are allocated to initiatives such as hiring a full-time Community Engagement director, launching a brand new website and taking a deep dive into fundraising/development training. We’ve also been working with consultants to create new HR and organizational systems since our team has grown significantly. And in the fall, we plan to launch a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. 
While infrastructural work isn’t very flashy, it is critical for ensuring that Kavana can continue to build meaningful relationships and offer a wide array of pathways to engage people more deeply in Jewish life.

Kavana's annual camping trip is always a fan favorite for building community and deepening connections among all ages and stages of life!

As we plan for next year, we are again deliberately preparing to operate at a deficit, as a few larger chunks of our Project Accelerate work will actually take place next year. We plan to actively start spending down some of our reserves to sustain our staff team and better support our community.
To that end, if you haven't had a chance to contribute yet during this current fiscal year (July 2022 - June 2023), or if you feel moved to make an additional contribution now, we would be very grateful for your support. Please click here to contribute to Kavana online, or mail donations to Kavana, PO Box 19666, Seattle, WA 98109.

Kavana partners lean in and help create rich and meaningful experiences for the community. Here, Partner Stacy Lawson leads a yoga session during the High Holidays.

On July 1, Kavana will be entering its 18th year – which feels significant given the connection in Judaism between the word chai (life!) and the number 18… I can’t wait to see how the year unfolds given our hard work behind the scenes on operations! We are now poised to support our partners better than ever before in “creating an innovative Jewish cooperative that empowers each community member to create a meaningful Jewish life, develop positive identity, and receive support on their journey.” 
On behalf of our staff and board of directors, I am so grateful to YOU, our partners and supporters, for helping to make this new chapter of growth possible for Kavana! 

L’Chaim!

Liz Thompson, Director of Operations

All The Community Are Holy

This letter is written by our Director of Community Engagement, Avital Krifcher

Most folks who grew up attending Jewish summer camp are familiar with this week's parsha, Korach. Throughout my seven years at an East Coast Jewish summer camp, I listened to the story of Korach on Shabbat, participated in skits, discussion groups, and even mock trials about the parsha. Last summer, during my time at the Brandeis Collegiate Institute program in California, we dedicated a Shabbat afternoon to carefully reading the text of Korach, assuming characters, and engaging in youthful and goofy dramatic readings. Despite all these encounters with the parsha, I still find myself feeling deeply unsettled when I read Korach’s story.

The story of Korach revolves around a rebellion led by a man named Korach, who approaches Moses and Aaron with 250 men and questions why only they are granted the High Priesthood when "all the community are holy, all of them, and God is in their midst" (Numbers 16:3). This challenge incurs Moses’s wrath, prompting Moses to call upon Korach and his men to offer incense as offerings to God to see who is right, while Aaron and his men do the same. In the end, Korach and his followers are swallowed by the earth and consumed by fire, seemingly for challenging the leadership of Moses and Aaron and questioning the distribution of spiritual connection.

There are lots of questions swirling around concerning Korach’s challenge. Was he genuinely speaking on behalf of the people, or was he driven by personal ambitions for leadership? In exploring this parsha (this time around), I choose to separate the man from the question and instead focus on what Korach reveals about the power structures and dynamics of his time. The question that he poses to Moses and Aaron feels to me to be not just a valid question, but an inherently Jewish one, and one championing inclusivity and fairness. Shouldn't all members of our people have had the opportunity for a profound and meaningful relationship with the divine? Why are they punished for seeking that connection? 

In our post-temple era, our understanding of divine relationship and communication has evolved. We now know and believe that every individual has a direct line to the divine if they choose to engage with it. It hurts my heart when I speak to folks in this community and beyond who feel they are somehow less Jewish or less connected to their Judaism due to their lack of knowledge, atheism, or any other reason. In many ways, Korach was the original advocate for a form of personalized Judaism that we are familiar with in Kavana. I would even argue that Korach’s cause has been realized and that today we are a people that recognizes that each individual is holy in and of themselves. 

In today's society, inclusivity and fairness are not always championed as they should be. We have and have had modern-day Korach’s who have worked tirelessly for the rights and well-being of marginalized folks, only to face admonishment and punishment. As we celebrate Pride month, we must remember the trailblazing leaders and icons like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and modern activist Qween Jean who have fearlessly advocated for the ongoing struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community, despite facing systemic repercussions (learn more about Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in this collection of interviews and transcriptions). The determination of these leaders and others in their pursuit of a better world, even at personal risk, is inspiring. Their demands to be heard and respected in a world that is cruel to them is revolutionary, and oftentimes, life-changing for the folks around them. While Korach’s fight came to an end in the parsha, we have the opportunity today to recognize, support and uplift those who are engaged in the sacred work of advocating for equal treatment in society. Showing up as one’s full and authentic self and demanding to be seen, welcomed, and accepted is holy. And it becomes even more sacred when done on behalf of others who also face marginalization and discrimination. 

As we reflect on the powerful lessons from Parshat Korach and its resonance with modern struggles faced by the LGBTQIA+ community, we invite you to join us tonight at Pride Shabbat. This gathering, co-sponsored by many Jewish communities here in Seattle, will be a celebration of the diversity in our community and an opportunity to open our ears and hearts to the voices of queer Jews around us. Just as Korach and queer leaders challenged and continue to challenge the status quo, we too will gather to challenge societal norms and foster a space where all are welcomed and accepted.

Shabbat Shalom,

Avital Krifcher, Director of Community Engagement

Moses - The Original Director of Jewish Education

This letter is written by our Director of Education, Rachel Osias. 

The Kavana team and I are proud to announce that our 2022-2023 Youth and Family Education programmatic year has come to a successful end. Sound the silver trumpets! On this drizzly Friday morning I woke up to a heart full of tenderness and a cascade of sweet memories on standby. Today’s letter is about sharing these with you, and celebrating our Kavana community.

As I started exploring this week’s parasha I became immediately overwhelmed with the amount of details (#classicBookofNumbers). The Menorah in the tabernacle, the consecration of the Levites, the sacrificial offering details for Passover, silver trumpets, upset and complaining Israelites, sibling strife over marriage, clouds and fire… I mean my goodness! Considering this is my first d’var Torah I really picked a doozy to try on for size. But as luck or fate would have it, this week's portion, Beha’alotcha, translates to “when you step up”. Thanks Judaism for calling me out. Or perhaps calling me in?

I’ll admit that I read this parasha more than once, but each time I found myself centering the same moment over and over again. A group of men who became tamei (contaminated) by a dead body were not permitted to bring the korban pesach (Passover offering) on the right day - the 14th of Nissan. They approach Moses and ask why they should not be permitted? It feels unjust, and unfair. Moses models, almost effortlessly, the value of not knowing. He responds that they should wait while he seeks God’s instruction concerning them. There are at least three times where Moses is asked a question for which he does not know the answer. Here - right before us - Moses, who experienced the highest level of prophecy, who engaged with God panim-el-panim (face to face), reveals a lack of knowledge. His humanness. Surely, if Moses - the first person to really have access to teaching the Torah - could admit not knowing…couldn’t we all? Here is a remarkable paradigm of a Jewish educator. Moses in fact was the first “Director of Jewish Education”. Going so far as to even hire a “teaching staff” of 70 tribal elders later in the parasha to aid in the teaching of the Torah to the people of Israel. And what do we see? A humbleness and vulnerability in admitting what he does not yet know.

Arriving on the scene at Kavana I brought my extensive background (and passion) for education and teaching, but a lack of knowledge and experience as a “Jewish Educator”. My relationship with our staff, youth, families and Kavana community began with excitement. As Kavana’s Director of Education I was opening the door to new opportunities, growth and learning, while also being vulnerable in admitting moments of “not knowing”. Over this past year I have had the best teachers I could have asked for in our teaching staff, rabbis, colleagues and most prominently our youth. Side-by-side with our Kavana youth and families we explored the big J of Judaism. I shared in their wonder as they connected stories - people - places and themselves into the tapestry of the Jewish people. Our Kavana-learners are the Jewish heartbeat of ‘asking why’ - of being curious and of never wanting to “know it all” because then there is no more to learn. 

Kavana is a place of learning, vulnerability, and connectedness. This past year was a showcase of “big wins” - in particular, being back together post pandemic isolation. I saw toddlers learning to share toys to middle school and high school students sharing ethical dilemmas and deep conversations. I loved seeing our Moadon Yeladim students’ addiction to learning as they climbed higher and higher on their mountains of knowledge. One of our 8 year old Moadon Darom students bounced over to me sharing a thank-you card and loudly proclaimed that she wrote shalom in it, in Hebrew! This society of ours has cultivated young people into thinking that adults know everything, and because of that they are hungry to learn more. But the truth is, we are all life long learners, a mixture like Moses of knowledge and not-knowing. So I ask you: When do you share the deep knowledge you hold? When are you vulnerable and admit you do not know? In what areas do you crave and seek learning with others? In our delightfully eclectic Kavana community we ALL have the opportunity to be students and teachers of one another. Let’s continue to share what we know, savor the feeling of not yet knowing, and to pursue knowing more together.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rachel Osias (Director of Education)

Keep Going, Everything is Awesome

“Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you're part of a team…” If you know the song, I’m not at all sorry for reviving this earworm in your mind. These lyrics (from Tegan and Sara) form the mission statement for The Lego Movie, a feel-good story of learning to embrace yourself and become part of something bigger. In other words, these lyrics also represent a core aspect of religion - personal growth within commitment to a larger community. The centrality of team spirituality finds a home in the Jewish concept of minyan, which requires a minimum of ten Jewish adults for certain activities. We might re-work the lyrics to something like “Everything is Awesome! Everything is holier when you’re part of a minyan…” 

The emphasis on collective experience stretches back to biblical times, when Israelite identity centered around tribal affiliation. Even personal sacrificial offerings, a primary religious activity, happened through priests in a centralized location. Almost every spiritual action located the individual within the web of the Israelite people. And so it is surprising in the Torah to discover a ritual of radical spiritual individualism. Bamidbar chapter 6 introduces us to the nazir, or “nazirite”. Medieval commentator Rashi explains that the word means “separate, aloof”. 

Primarily, the nazir separates from drinking wine, or consuming any grape product at all. They cannot cut their hair or shave, and they cannot be in proximity to dead people. They could be a lifelong nazir or just be a nazir for  a predetermined amount of time, but for the duration of their time as a nazir, if they accidentally encounter a dead person or otherwise mess up the practice, they have to entirely shave their head and start the whole term over again. This all sounds a little extreme and strange, but the strangest part of all is that this practice is entirely optional. Only people who want to voluntarily avoid grapes and dead people and grow their hair long need to do so. 

There are very few examples of detailed, voluntary spiritual practices in the Torah, and the ancient rabbis had mixed feelings about the nazir, because in effect what the nazir does is to separate themselves from other people. They opt in to become holier-than-thou, if only for a limited time. A debate in the Talmud (Ta’anit 11a) revolves around whether the nazir is in some way sinning because of self-deprivation, or whether they are extra holy because of it. While the larger principles revolve around what role self-denial plays in spiritual growth, we can see the discomfort as stemming as well from the degree to which an individual cultivates their own spiritual practice rather than participating in the team practices that Judaism historically emphasized. When you are invested in everything being awesome when you’re part of a team, someone seeking the Awesome in a more solitary way might feel a bit subversive. 

As you may know if you’ve been reading these essays over the last month, we are exploring Torah through the lens of Rabbi Adina Allen’s Jewish Studio Project rules for art-making. We have followed pleasure, noticed everything, and refrained from commenting on what others are doing. Like the nazirite rituals offering an individual practice nestled within spiritual community, these rules carve out a container for personal exploration within creative community. (Of course, creativity and spirituality are deeply interwoven!) Our final rule is “Keep Going.” And it highlights the tensions and possibilities of personal work within communal context. 

We all have our own rhythms, pacing, and intuition about when to begin and end activities. One of the wonderful things about solitude is being able to flow exactly as makes sense for you. Of course we aren’t always so good at listening to our own cues, but they are there and when we attune to our senses and the wisdom of experience, we know exactly when to go for a walk, when to finish eating, when to pick up a pen and when to put down a paintbrush. 

But when we gather together, our rhythms and pacing cause some dissonance. We are almost never on the same page about when to start and stop. This gives rise to complaining, and to the stoic patience of someone resigned to sitting through an activity they are pretty much done with but alas, cannot get out of. When we are making art with the Jewish Studio Process, we have a set time for art-making. I’m on my own - no commenting - but not necessarily on my own time. Most often, the time flies by and, stunned by the bell, I want to do more work. Rabbi Adina often says, "Find a comfortable or uncomfortable stopping place.” But on other occasions, I finish what I thought I’d do only to find there are still fifteen minutes left for art-making. I get a strong urge to twiddle my thumbs, stare into the canvas, or hop up and walk around aimlessly. This is when the rule comes into play: Keep going. Take advantage of the dissonance between my own rhythm and the pacing of the group. Make more marks on the page until a new idea arrives, or a surprise emerges, or I suddenly realize I was doing something different all along. “Keep going” is an invitation to unexpected revelation. As Rabbi Shefa Gold says, “Boredom precedes breakthrough.” 

Our Kavana Cooperative is built on the potent tension between the personal and the communal - “personalized Judaism in a community context.” Here you can take on your own version of the nazirite vows - a set of creative constraints and commitments that you are responsible for, and no one else. Everything is awesome and welcome - every way that you can dream up to deepen Jewish practice, personal growth, spiritual exploration. And it is cool when we are part of a team, an intentional cooperative where we witness, support, boost, and participate in each other’s spiritual lives. Find the niches that nurture you, and in those places where you show up and then aren’t sure what to do next - keep going! You never know what wisdom will come of being a little lost for a while. Just know that even when you are on a personal journey, you are never all alone. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

What “No Comment” Reveals

Spirits are high in our brightly-lit classroom turned art makerspace. I feel the carbonated delight that comes from a good chevruta (partnered learning) session: minds melding, excited exclamations bubbling to a din, texts opening portals to new ways of seeing. I announce that now we’ll transition from text-based learning to art-making, and just a few rules apply. (Many of these rules Rabbi Jay has introduced in preceding newsletters!) Perhaps the guideline most subject to skepticism is the friendly silence the Jewish Studio Process calls “No Comment”. For the entirety of our use of materials, participants refrain from chatting about, interpreting, or in any way interjecting about what another is doing in their art. We also refrain from commenting on our own work, benching our inner critics if only for the allotted twenty to thirty minutes. Inevitably, eyebrows furrow in protest and hands raise to ask about exceptions. (Yes, you can ask someone to pass the scissors.)

The silence invoked in the Jewish Studio Project creative process is a gift, not a punishment. For a moment it can seem awkward or even rude not to pepper our communal art-making with the compliments and constructive feedback. Creativity is vulnerable, and I am no stranger to the glow and relief that can come from a kind reflection - a validation that what I’m daring to put out has worth, or at least, that I chose a cool color to make marks with. 

Yet the absence of commentary or any expectation of it in a shared space can create a new way of listening inward that is, dare I say, revelatory. In those quiet ‘alone-together’ moments, we return to a way of knowing evoked in the wilderness at Sinai - that unique transmission of Divine wisdom that we celebrate this week on Shavuot. However you interpret revelation, the Torah’s account of Sinai offers us a radical, accessible vision of communal transformation that celebrates the wilderness within each of us, and allows for a transmission of wisdom that benefits the collective without stifling the individual.

The Rabbinic midrash Shemot Rabbah 5:9 relates:

Come and see how [God’s] voice would go out among all of Israel - to each and every one according to their strength: the elders according to their strength; the young men according to their strength;... the babies according to their strength; the women according to their strength; and even Moshe according to his strength…(Exodus 19:19) 

Implied in this midrash are the conditions that allow each and every individual standing at Sinai to have an unfiltered, uninterrupted experience of receiving the Divine wisdom. Only by holding a reverent silence together could each human be receptive to hearing the unique way that Divine wisdom wanted to be channeled through them.

The “No-Comment” rule creates a container of trust and solidarity among creative souls so they can hear the unique revelation intended for them. Critically, though the Israelites each receive according to their unique capacities and needs, they do not stand indifferent to one another in this space of holy transformation. A teaching transmitted by David Elcott relates that when Israelites stood at Sinai, God resided in their midst only when the people looked “into each other's eyes” (Numbers 14:14). Sinai’s revelatory delivery does not happen until the people communicate to one another (inaudibly) that they are in this awesome moment together. Silently, but potently, the people shared their readiness to receive God’s word, alone-together, and only then did each hear what they needed to, as they were able to.

Similarly in the JSP studio, just because we’re not commenting doesn’t mean that we feel an absence of Presence. Quite the opposite - to collectively agree to be vessels open to giving and receiving creativity together is profound in a way that amplifies a simple solo experience. We are conscious witness-bearers, we are courage-stokers, we affirm that each of us belongs here as much as the next person.

Infinite creative seeds of wisdom were planted at Sinai. Rather than expect each to grow identically, God saw to it that each could act on their own unique potential. Rabbi Hilly Haber notes,  “As Jews, we celebrate the particular joy of Jewish unity that was forged at Sinai - a unity that is the very opposite of uniformity, for, as Audre Lord teaches, our diversity is our source of power.”

She continues:

“At Sinai we learned who we were and who we would become in the world: a border-crossing people, confined to no single territory, no single language, no single expression of Jewish identity; a multi-vocal, multi-racial, multi-ethnic movement still trying to live out the radical lessons of revelation.” 

Rabbi Haber reminds us that the potency of ‘No Comment’ is not only felt at the individual level, but it undeniably strengthens the potential of the whole.

When we meet each others’ eyes in the studio, on the dance-floor, in sanctuary and in navigating life’s challenges with the commitment to ‘No Comment’, we restoke the creative fires of Sinai that allow us all to go where we’re called intuitively, and learn by getting lost and finding our way home. The comment-free freedom we give each other, even for a few moments, allows us to emerge with a more resilient roadmap for navigating the wilderness ahead.

Chag Sameach!

Rabbi Laura Rumpf

Guest written by Rabbi Laura Rumpf, Director of Project Kavod at Jewish Family Services and Jewish Studio Project Facilitator

Notice Everything

After taping a large sheet of watercolor paper to the wall, I dab some gobs of pink and red tempera paint onto a plate, grab a brush, and get busy making art. A flick of the wrist creates one vivid streak, then another. The awkwardness of starting gives way to the intent exhilaration of creative flow. The room fades from consciousness - it is just me, the paintbrush, the tempera, and the unexpected world emerging on the paper. This is the zone, where all of my attention coheres into one activity, blissfully free of distraction. But as I turn to get more paint, I see Holly a few feet away, clearly in the zone as well. Her use of bright and dark colors draws me in as she merges them together. The room comes back into focus, and I take a minute to scan what everyone else is doing. Wait - is that someone making a tinfoil sculpture with a strange little yellow wig on it?? Whoa - I’d never thought to speckle paint on a canvas with a toothbrush like that before! Mm - how interesting that Elyza has expanded the corner of her canvas with a page from a magazine, sticking out beyond the edge. I return to my mark-making with new ideas to steal borrow. This is the magic of making art together through the Jewish Studio Process. And in particular, what happens when you follow the rule of: Notice everything! 

The fourth book of Torah, which we begin this week, offers through its English and Hebrew names two models of noticing. In English, we call this book Numbers because there are multiple censuses taken of the people. Dozens of paragraphs detail the tribal enrollment numbers, a proactive and precise form of noticing. Reading the first few chapters of Numbers, you start to become impressed with this ragtag group of formerly enslaved people who have transformed into a well-organized and orderly nation. However, the Hebrew name of this book hints at the messier stories that characterize the later chapters - Bemidbar, “In the Wilderness.” In the wilderness, the people send scouts into Canaan to notice on their behalf, but the scouts only notice what will be difficult about settling the land. Again and again, the people notice every opportunity to complain and take full advantage. Wilderness noticing in this book seems often tinged with negativity, but it also summons forth the powerful noticing of the prophet Balaam, who sees in the people nothing but blessing. In the wilderness, noticing itself is wild with danger and possibility. Noticing in the wilderness is a form of wandering attention, not directed but responsive, not precise but present to whatever emerges. 

One powerful mode of noticing the self is to do a body scan. (Here’s one version that I find very accessible. Please note that this may not be a useful activity if trauma or overwhelming pain is present.) The purpose of a body scan is to practice noticing the body (and all the thoughts and emotions that come up when we think of our bodies) without judgment, simply to notice what is there. In the body scan, the two modes of noticing blend - we notice in a particular order (Numbers) and yet while our attention rests in one area we soften into wandering with what’s there (Bemidbar). Often, mindful teachers will explain that there are three general categories for what we notice - pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings draws our attention often, and we pursue pleasurable sensations intuitively. Neutral areas can be rich places to deliberately spend more time noticing, since we spend most of our lives ignoring them.

Sacred text. Returning us to Torah, imagine reading it like a body scan! Where do you notice pleasure - words that inspire you or where you see clear alignment with values, stories that resonate with your lived experience and offer new ways to make meaning, perhaps intellectual delight in tackling an interesting text and exploring the ever-expanding world of commentary. 

Where do you notice unpleasant words, stories or laws that cause some discomfort? For many of us, the sacrificial offerings or some depictions of God may be difficult to stay with. Yet, there is deep wisdom within those words if we can be present without judgment and explore them a bit more. There may be stories that are not always productive or safe to engage with, what feminist scholar Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror”, in which “the story is alive, and all is not well.” 

And then there are the neutral aspects of our text, the places where the subject material is just not that compelling or understandable. Like a census, for example… But if you look closely even at the parts that normally you glide right over, you may discover hidden vitality pulsing. After a lengthy listing of each tribe’s enrollment, Numbers/Bemidbar 1:44 reads: “Those are the enrollments recorded by Moses and Aaron and by the chieftains of Israel, who were twelve in number, one participant from each ancestral house.” A basic summary, I suppose. But medieval commentator Sforno declares that we should take it literally - Moses and Aaron had personally counted every single person. A tremendous feat of noticing! And this is how many of the sages of the past read Torah - attending to every verse, word, even letter. 

Notice everything. Methodologically. Spontaneously. With curiosity and care. And of course imperfectly. In the Jewish Studio Project, “noticing everything” assumes that I need to learn from others who are seeing things differently. I can’t personally see everything myself! But when I see what others are doing, how they are using the materials and making creative choices and interpreting familiar texts in new ways, my field of noticing expands. This is true for us all individually, and collectively it is so critically important to notice the world through perspectives that have historically been marginalized. When we hear voices of women, lgbtq+ folks, people whose bodies and minds work in diverse ways, people with different racial and ethnic identities, our noticing leads to more justice, more truth, more creative joy. 

Here at Kavana, over the next several months, these newsletter openings will come not just from my perspective, but will sometimes feature the voice of others on our staff as well, one way of broadening perspectives within and beyond our community and noticing in new ways. 

This Shabbat, may you notice in new and nourishing ways!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Follow Pleasure

The final chapters of Leviticus offer a meditation in time and purpose (or rather - moments of apparent purposelessness). Leviticus 25 sets the maximum degree to which land and people can be pressed into productive service. Land and people observe a shabbat - rest. Indentured slaves must not be oppressed (their human dignity must remain intact - our understanding today assumes even the “kindest” slavery violates human dignity). In other words, this chapter carves out time where our reality is not only consumed with labor, productivity, and cultivation. But what are we to do in this open time?

Leviticus 26:2 answers in part: “Et shabtotai tishmoru!” We might translate this as: preserve these shabbat times! Keep them sacred, don’t let anything override these reminders of our full human dignity and agency. One sage, Sforno (16th century, Italy), stresses this point: “Even in days of servitude or oppression, even though the restfulness (menuchah) of them just reminds us [painfully of our lack of] freedom.” Sometimes our attempts to be fully ourselves make us confront how many forces are restricting or rejecting us, trying to control or erase us. Nevertheless, sh’mor shabbat - preserve that non-productive bubble of time. 

But that still doesn’t answer what we are to do within the shabbat time. How are we to experience ourselves as fully whole? The Jewish tradition developed a rich framework of Shabbat observance, which through its many “do’s and don’ts”, has created a beautiful communal container for counter-cultural connection and soul nourishment. But I think there is more we can do to internalize oneg shabbat - the delight of shabbat - as a daily practice. 

That’s where the Jewish Studio Project’s studio rules come in. As I mentioned last week (link here), JSP has four rules that create a container for art-making. “Follow pleasure” is the most delightful and sometimes the most bewildering rule. Is pleasure actually good to follow? That sounds a bit self-indulgent, dangerous even if we’re just looking out for our own gratification! Now that I think about it, what even is pleasure? Do I know what feels good to me, not what I think should feel good? How do I hear my own voice amidst all the advertising and social pressure and cultural expectations? Can I trust myself? 

Notice young children playing and you’ll rarely catch them doubting or wondering about pleasure. Rabbi Adina Allen explains that “There is something very playful about art-making... It is a process of letting oneself be led by pleasure, it allows other parts of oneself to come to the fore. It is a chance for adults to practice what children do all the time: parallel play.” If the opposite of shabbat time is work, then perhaps one aspect of shabbat is play. 

But it is something we lose touch with as we grow older. Shel Silverstein had a tragic little poem that highlights the consequences of forgetting or fearing what brings us pleasure.

“Masks”

She had blue skin,

And so did he.

He kept it hid

And so did she.

They searched for blue

Their whole life through,

Then passed right by - 

And never knew.

And according to Rebbe Nachman (an early Hasidic master), it isn’t just us who lose pleasure when we hide away from it (Likutei Moharan I, 60:6):

“There are people who are virtually asleep their entire lives, and even though it appears to the world that they serve God and engage in Torah and prayer, even so, God gets no pleasure from any of their efforts, because all their work remains below and cannot rise and ascend above.”

Art-making, and specifically granting ourselves permission to follow pleasure and practice listening to our own senses, is a way of re-awakening to ourselves. The call to follow pleasure is urgent, spiritual, ethical - not a distraction or disaster. Alive to ourselves we can appreciate the aliveness of other beings and protect them from abuse and exploitation. Reclaiming our right to say, this feels good and that doesn’t, disarms the manipulative messages that bombard us. “Pleasure,” writes adrienne maree brown in her book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, “is a measure of freedom.”

Leviticus 26:13 declares that freedom powerfully: “I Adonai am your God who brought you out from the land of the Egyptians to be their slaves no more, who broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect.” Kom’miyut - erect, upright, free, standing in your truth and power and dignity and agency. Kom’miyut - an interior reality that arises when you follow pleasure, learn to trust your intuitive wisdom, and play creatively in the world.

Wishing you a pleasurable, playful Shabbat!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Forget Your Perfect Offering

He shall not enter behind the curtain or come near the altar
for he has a defect (moom).He shall not profane these places 
sacred to Me, for I Adonai (yhvh)have made them holy.
(Leviticus 21:23)

Last week, the Torah called us to be holy. This week, it says you have to be perfect to access the holy. I mean, first you have to be born male into an elite priestly family, and then you have to be perfect, at which point you can dare to dart through the curtain and be in the room where it happens - the Holy Place in the Temple. Here, a most profound spiritual practice occurs, the transformative magic of ritual offerings, linking the earthy world of cows (etc.) and the lofty imaginative spheres of the divine. Here at the altar, you can access Connection, Purpose, Meaning, Love, Success, Insight, Belonging. But again, only if you have no "defects".

In order for the Torah to be relevant in a time with no Temple, this instruction manual for the priests must be read as if we are all priests, and we can in some way strive to enter into the holy space where all of our greatest fears melt away and our deepest yearnings well up. Parshat Emor presents a difficult path, one that might turn us away altogether. There are so many voices in the world telling us we are not enough, we don’t belong, for a hundred different reasons. It is painful to turn to Torah for sustenance only to see exclusivity, elitism, patriarchy, ableism, and apparent divine sanction for all of that right at the center of this book’s spiritual vision. 

There have been beautiful teachings in past centuries seeking to help us walk through the curtain and access joy and meaning in this text. One that I’ve recently studied comes from the 18th century Hassidic rabbi Avraham Dov Auerbach of Avritch, in his book Bat Ayin (Emor 40):

And this is what the verse says: “[A priest] who has a defect (moom) shall not approach…” Moom in gematriya is elohim. This interpretation means that each priest who had a moom [in fact had within himself] the aspect of elohim, which is the aspect of judgment, the aspect of contracted mind, the aspect of divine hiddenness. The interpretation of “...shall not approach…” is that the priest is unable to approach God, because they don’t have wholeness of service until their essence clings to the soul-trait of lovingkindness (chesed).

The Bat Ayin transforms moom from physical imperfection to a lack of lovingkindness. This flips our natural first reading on its head - because now judgments about falling short of imperfection (rather than imperfection itself) are exactly what disqualify the priest from his holy station. Kindness is the key to wholeness, not precise perfection. 

For the past 18 months, I’ve been training to be a facilitator with the Jewish Studio Project, along with my wife, Rabbi Laura Rumpf. At the core of what we are learning is the Jewish Studio Process, designed by Rabbi Adina Allen and building off the work of her mother and colleague Pat Allen. And at the core (you might imagine this as the Holy of Holies) of the Jewish Studio Process is art-making. For me, making art is one way to encounter the image of my own imperfection. When I grasp a paintbrush, I also grasp every weapon of judgment there is - an armory of ugly assertions about my worth not just as an artist but as a rabbi and human. And - when I bring kindness to those voices and firmly tell them, I’m going to make art anyway, the paintbrush starts to feel just a little bit holy. I am stepping into my wholeness when I embrace imperfection. 

Rabbi Adina Allen teaches what she calls a “Torah of Creativity”: 

God’s first act is one of creativity. Only a few verses later we read that humans are created b’tzelem Elohim (“in the image of God”). If God is, first and foremost, a creator, and we are created in God’s image, then we too are created to be creators. Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.

Daring to be creative means by default asserting that what is still needs transformation. Surrounding the art-making in the Jewish Studio Process are four rules that hold a safe container for us to encounter hard voices, to play and explore, to transform materials and ourselves. 

• No commenting

• Follow pleasure

• Notice everything

• Keep going

For the month of May, I plan to share in each week’s newsletter interpretations of Torah and our world through the lens of one of these rules. And if you want to experience the full Jewish Studio Process - please join us this Thursday night for our final monthly Kavana Art MakerSpace this programmatic year! We will learn Torah, and we will make art, but all you need to bring or know is your wonderfully imperfect self. 

Rabbi Adina says in a forthcoming book, “We bring our struggles, our questions, our longing or our pain to the page and invite forces beyond ourselves into our process. Without fail, the universe will give us back a gift: understanding, insight, comfort, connection. It will always weave us back into the fabric of all of life. Our art is our offering on the altar, it brings us back into relationship with ourselves and with that which connects us all.” 

Art is our offering on the altar…an altar every one of us has access to, that requires no perfection, only the brave willingness to tolerate and learn from imperfection. 

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Searching for a Calling

“All the voices of the wood called ‘Muriel!’”

So starts the poem “Then I Saw What The Calling Was” by 20th century Jewish-American poet Muriel Rukeyser. What a wonder, to walk through the world and feel called by each creature, to know: I am known! I belong and I matter. My life has significance.

Our Torah portion, Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, contains one of the most mysterious callings in the entire Torah, a calling not from the voices of the wood but from the voice behind all voices, the Source of Creation. God tells Moses: “Speak to the whole community of Yisrael and say to them: ‘You shall be holy (kedoshim tih’yu) because I, God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). 

Holiness is the mysterious vocation of the Jewish people. 

How are we to be holy? Leviticus 18:3 clarifies that it means to walk a different path from other peoples: “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws.” 

Holiness comes with responsibility and ethical ambition, not arrogance and ethnic exclusivity: “The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I Adonai am your God” (Leviticus 19:34).

Holiness is intrinsic to the idea of being a “chosen people”: “For you are a holy people to Adonai your God, and God has chosen you to be God’s treasured people from all the nations that are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6, and 14:2). The Jewish people have a calling, an aspiration, a significant difference to live out in the world. 

Or do they? In the continuation of Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, the voices she hears calling her name suddenly reveal themselves in part as her own projected desire for special significance.

“All the voices of the wood called “Muriel!”but it was soon solved; it was nothing, it was not for me.The words were a little like Mortal and More and EndureAnd a world like Real, a sound like Health or Hell.”

In the verbal Rorschach test, she heard all of these words that are a little like “Muriel” and mistook them for a personal calling out. But actually, she wasn’t that special. 

In the haftarah (selection from the biblical prophets) that accompanies our Torah portion, the specialness of being chosen gets destabilized as well. 

“To Me, O Israelites, you are

Just like the Cushites

—declares Adonai.

True, I brought Israel up

From the land of Egypt,

But also the Philistines from Caphtor

And the Arameans from Kir.” (Amos 9:7)

Oh! There’s obviously a lot to unpack here theologically and politically. The deliberate pairing of the Torah portion and Haftarah by the ancient rabbis makes me think that they wanted us to wrestle with this deep need to be special. To acknowledge how much of our behavior stems from a need to be seen, to make a difference, to have a purpose, to belong and matter. And to be wary of the harms that can result from the self-centered desire to be superior. That yearning to matter (or the deep despair and anger of not mattering) has started wars and ended them, has sparked violence and pushed some into the good fight and ennobled others to remarkable feats of peacemaking. 

Although the Jewish tradition generally leans heavily on us having a calling (with the rare exception like the Amos text), Muriel Rukeyser gives us a different perspective. A secular world where no one - God or creature or person - is necessarily calling to her at all. It is a lonely world in a way, one that has resonated with me from time to time, where I begin to wonder - do I matter? Do I have a purpose? Where do I belong? How do I gather the facts of my experience into something meaningful? What do I do with a lurking fear that the universe is indeed random, and nothing matters? What’s the point of it all? These questions sound melodramatic, but how we answer them has a direct impact on our well-being. Humans need significance to survive. Luckily, Rukeyser moves through her own destabilizing awareness that no one is calling to her in an extraordinary way:

“Then I saw what the calling was: it was the road I traveled,the cleartime and these colors of orchards, gold behind gold and the fullshadow behind each tree and behind each slope. Not to methe calling, but to anyone and at last I saw: wherethe road lay through sunlight and many voices and the marvelorchards, not for me, not for me, not for me.I came into my clear being; uncalled, alive, and sure.Nothing was speaking to me, but I offered and all was well.

And I arrived at the powerful green hill.”

May you come into your clear being, and rededicate yourself to what you have to offer.

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Sacred Scrolls, and Sabbatical

In our Jewish tradition, we have a mechanism -- a "spiritual technology," if you will -- for remembering the events of our people's past. All of us are familiar with the most prominent example, as we just celebrated Passover, where we recounted the Exodus from Egypt at seder tables everywhere. The Exodus story is also encoded in our weekly practice (e.g. the words "zeicher liytziyat mitzrayim" in Friday night kiddush) and in our daily liturgy (with shirat hayam, mi chamocha, and more). Other important historical memories, too, find their way into our liturgy throughout the year. If you are familiar with the Ten Martyrs of Roman times, it may well be because you've heard the liturgical poem Eleh Ezkerah (the heart of the Martyrology section of prayer) recited on Yom Kippur. The destruction of the Second Temple lies at the heart not only of our Tisha B'Av observance, but also in a set of fast days sprinkled throughout the year. We recall how the biblical villain Amalek attacked our Israelite ancestors through a special Torah reading on the Shabbat before Purim, when we also connect the events of ancient Persia through our reading of Megillat Esther. And, as Rabbi David Golinkin of the Schechter Institutes in Jerusalem points out, although there are countless historical, scholarly books about the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, because that event hasn't become embedded liturgically in our ritual, it is relatively less known.

This question of Jewish national memory and how we mark time liturgically has been at the forefront of my mind this week. As I write, we find ourselves on the Jewish calendar located 15 days (two weeks and one day) into the counting of the Omer, book-ended by two contemporary holidays: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) this past Tuesday, and Yom HaZikaron (Israel's Memorial Day for fallen soldiers) and Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) this coming Monday night/Tuesday and Tuesday night/Wednesday respectively. These holidays feel like an especially big deal this year because the numbers are round: it's been exactly 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and 75 years since the founding of the State of Israel.

On Tuesday of this week, I happened to wake up to an email from the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, and I quickly hopped on an early-morning Zoom call. (I regret that I hadn't paid enough attention to this event in advance to share it with the Kavana community; I will endeavor to do so in coming years!) This online event was an international reading of a relatively new text: Megillat HaShoah (the Scroll of the Holocaust). As Professor Golinkin explained in an interview (click here to listen), this new scroll was initially the suggestion of a Holocaust survivor named Alex Eisen in 1999 (someone who lived through seven labor camps during the war). Eisen knew that he and his generation would not live forever to tell the story of his experiences, and he wanted to record the Holocaust not just through history books, but also in living, liturgical Jewish memory.

In response to this suggestion, the Schechter Institute commissioned now-retired Professor Avigdor Shinan -- an expert in Jewish literature, midrash and aggadah -- to compose a new liturgical text for Yom HaShoah. Shinan settled on a six-chapter scroll, in memory of the 6 million Jewish victims, with each chapter focusing on a different major aspects of the Holocaust: 1) historical antisemitism & Nazi's plan to destroy Jewish people, 2) the Warsaw Ghetto, 3) the Nazi labor camp, 4) the destruction of Jews in Auschwitz, 5) an elegy (in the style of Tisha B'Av) eulogizing the 6 million, and 6) the survivors and rebirth of the State of Israel. On Tuesday's zoom call -- the International Reading of Megillat HaShoah -- I heard Shinan's text read by readers from all over the world in a multiplicity of languages (Hebrew, English, Spanish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian this year). I hope that this online reading, which came to be during/because of the Covid shut-down in spring 2020, will remain a tradition into the future. With its international audience, this virtual meeting felt like it symbolically united the entire Jewish people to recall the horrors that transpired in Europe some eight decades ago, in a sacred liturgical format. To read the powerful text of Megillat HaShoah yourself, in the English-Hebrew version (something I highly recommend), click here.

Next week, as I said above, we will also mark Israel's Memorial Day followed by its 75th birthday. For Yom HaZikaron, Kavana is once again co-sponsoring a Joint Memorial Service which brings together Israelis and Palestinians (see below for more details). 

For many communities, a straightforward celebration (falafel and Israeli folk dancing? a 75th birthday cake?) might feel appropriate for Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel's Independence Day. But, as I've shared in past weeks, Israel's future as a democracy hangs in the balance right now. Locally, members of the Israeli expat community here in the Puget Sound region have been gathering weekly to rally in favor of democracy, coordinating their messages and content to match the flavor of the large-scale protests that have been happening every Saturday night over the past several months in the streets of every major Israeli city. 

As members of this Israeli pro-democracy group (which calls itself "UnXeptable") have come together locally and discussed what would constitute a meaningful Yom HaAtzmaut observance for the Seattle area this year, they have settled on a celebration that features not only Israeli food and dancing (although yes, those!), but also a reading/study of Megillat HaAtzmaut, Israel's Declaration (literally "Scroll") of Independence, proclaimed by David Ben Gurion on May 14, 1948 (5 Iyar 5708) -- click here to read this text for yourself. Like the annual reading of the new Megillat HaShoah described above, I believe that an annual reading of Megillat HaAtzmaut could serve an almost liturgical function, recentering Jewish people everywhere on the ideals with which the State of Israel was founded. I hope that some Kavana folks will be able to attend this gathering (see below for details -- Congregation Kol Ami is hosting in Kirkland), and that moving forward, we will be able to institute a new tradition in our community of reading this sacred scroll each Yom HaAtzmaut.

Lastly, shifting topics a bit, I also want to share the news with the broader Kavana community that I will be taking a three-month sabbatical during the months of May, June and July. This is a plan that's been in the works for a number of years. Kavana will be turning 17 this summer, and this will be my first extended time off (with the exception of parental leave many years ago... but trust me, that wasn't really down time!). ;-) The Kavana board agreed to this sabbatical at my last contract renewal point, several years ago, and this year -- now that we have hired new staff members, including a second rabbi -- it finally felt realistic to schedule this time off. I am deeply grateful to the Kavana board and to our partner community for the support to do this, and to my fellow staff members for making this time off a reality.

The idea of a sabbatical has its origin in the Torah, of course, and right now, there is also a movement underway in the nonprofit sector to encourage sabbaticals in order to reduce burnout, retain talent, and spark new ideas. Back in the fall, I was even awarded a sabbatical grant from a new group called R&R, which wants to promote the value of sabbaticals in the Jewish world (and indeed, assuming all goes well, it is my intention to implement a new sabbatical policy for all of Kavana's full-time staff upon my return). I plan to spend these three months of down-time recharging my own batteries... rekindling relationships with old friends, spending time with family, taking some hikes, reading for fun, and traveling to a few places I've never been before. 

Returning to the framework of liturgy for a moment, I have purposefully scheduled my three sabbatical months for a quieter time of the Jewish year. I will depart soon after Yom HaAtzmaut, in the middle of the Omer period, and I plan to return to the office in early August, soon after Tisha B'Av but well in advance of the month of Elul and the Jewish New Year that follows. In my absence, the rest of the Kavana staff will be pitching in for coverage, especially Liz Thompson, who will serve as Interim Executive Director, and Rabbi Jay LeVine, who can field all rabbinic and pastoral questions. I look forward to returning refreshed in August, and to being able to share what I have gleaned from my sabbatical time with you all then.

Wishing you all a Shabbat Shalom, in this week that is so saturated in Jewish memory,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Holy Mess in the Middle

Leviticus is well-known as a dry rule-book for archaic purity rituals, a manual for a profession (priests) that has long been out of business. It has within its twenty-seven chapters only two stories. But if its contents are not as accessible as some of the other books of the Torah, its structure holds remarkable beauty and meaning. 

In the 13th century CE, the great scholar Moshe ben Nachman (Ramban, or Nachmanides) noticed that the structure of the Mishkan (the portable temple built in the wilderness) mapped onto the instructions for boundaries around Mt. Sinai at the giving of the ten commandments. The people could gather at the base of the mountain but go no higher. Similarly, regular people could enter the Outer Courtyard of the Mishkan. Mid-way up the mountain Aaron, his sons, and the elders ascended. But only Moses reached the top where God’s intimate presence communed with him. Similarly, the regular priestly class could cross the first screen in the Mishkan and access the Holy Space. But only the High Priest could enter through the second screen into the Holy of Holies, from where God’s presence emanated. Both Mt. Sinai and the Mishkan create a three-tiered structure of access to holy intensity.

In her book Leviticus as Literature, the anthropologist Mary Douglas maps that same three-part structure onto the book itself. She imagines the act of reading the book as a tour through the structure it revolves around. I won’t go into the details of how she arrives at the layout (if you want to go deeper on her work without reading the whole book, here is an excellent 15-page article with illustrations that elaborates on this particular idea.) The key point is that the two stories in Leviticus function as the screens in the Mishkan, the gateways from one area to the next. Both stories involve violations of the rules laid out in Leviticus. The second screen, Leviticus 24:10-22, relates the crime and punishment of one who gathered firewood on Shabbat. The first screen is in our Torah portion Shmini. We learn the fate of Nadav and Avihu, two of the High Priest Aaron’s sons, who offer “strange fire” and are themselves consumed by divine fire for their misstep. 

These stories that transport you from one place to the next are about messy moments. They remind me of the second act in a play. If Act 1 is about establishing the rules and the stakes of a story, Act 2 causes lots of damage and mayhem. In Act 2, everything seems to fall apart, although by Act 3 most stories bring about a cathartic resolution. The two stories in Leviticus are Act 2 stories, messy middle stories, mid-way points from one place to another. 

In the Talmud (Kiddushin 30a), we learn that there used to be people called sofrim, often translated as sages or scholars because of the root meaning of sefer as scroll/book. But that word can also mean “to count”, and the Talmud teaches that these counters would “count all the letters in the Torah. They would say the letter vav in ‘belly’ (Leviticus 11:42) is the midpoint of the letters in a Torah scroll. Darosh darash ‘diligently inquire’ (Leviticus 10:16) are the midpoint of the words…”

So if you were to find the mid-point, the messy middle of the whole Torah, you’d land right in our Torah portion! The phrase darosh darash is particularly significant as a beating heart of the Torah, because that root is all about interpretation, learning, study, inquiry - in other words, the principle way we engage with Torah. 

These words come right after the story of Nadav and Avihu die. Aaron and his other two sons appear to do something that Moses didn’t direct them to do, and he becomes angry and challenges them. They end up convincing him they are right, but it is an odd moment. Everyone is still grieving - perhaps Moses was afraid after losing some family members to an incorrect ritual that he is about to lose more relatives to sloppy ritual. Or perhaps we are getting yet another glimpse of Moses’s habitual anger that will continue to get him into trouble. 

The 18th century Moroccan commentator the Or HaChaim has another take: “Personally, I think that Moses had not yet decided to permit consumption of the meat of that sin-offering…We may therefore understand the words darosh darash (diligently inquiring) that Moses was still busy researching the applicable ruling. The repetition of the words is a hint that it could have either of two rulings. The reason Moses was angry was not because Aaron and his sons had done wrong but because they had taken it upon themselves to decide the issue without asking him.”

What I love about this reading is not that Moses appears to be micromanaging Aaron, but that he is still involved in learning. God doesn’t just lay out every rule for him to parrot. Moses has to study hard to discern Torah. We get a glimpse of the Moses the Student, not Moses the Teacher. And it happens right in the middle of the Torah, right at the messy Act 2 story that also serves as a sacred doorway into a holier place. 

What I take from this is that when we are in messy moments (and who isn’t?), when we are feeling lost, confused, unsure, hopeful but not confident, when we are struggling to see the horizon, or feel sad or alone, we might take comfort in this: Messy, hard moments are where we also learn deep and wise Torah, and messy, hard moments are a precursor to holiness. Or as Brene Brown says in her book Rising Strong, “the middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.” I don’t wish messy middles on anyone, but I know we will all move through them from time to time. May we, like Moses, darosh darash, seek out meaning, and look for the doorways to the next holy home place on our journey.

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Jay LeVine

We Are Not Yet Free

This evening at sunset, we will move into the Shabbat before Passover, known on the Jewish calendar by the special name "Shabbat HaGadol" ("the Great Shabbat"). The 16th century Jewish law code Shulchan Arukh (in Orach Chayim 430) records a custom that on the afternoon of this special Shabbat, people would gather in the synagogue to recite sections of the haggadah. Presumably, the goal was for the whole community to familiarize themselves with its contents in preparation for their own home-based seder rituals.

Taking up this old tradition, I want to use this opportunity, as we head into Shabbat HaGadol, to invite us to reflect on the central meaning of the Pesach festival, now just days away. The heart of the Passover seder resides in the maggid, the 5th of the 14 sections of the haggadah's ritual, where we tell the Passover story. And as you may know, maggid opens with the famous "Ha Lachma Anya" passage, an Aramaic text which translated means:

"This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are needed come and celebrate the Passover with us. Now we are here; next year may we be in the land of Israel. Now we are slaves; next year may we be free."

In preparation for the seder, I want to draw our attention to the last part of this declaration. Next Wednesday and Thursday evenings, as we sit down to our Passover banquets, we will open our telling of the story with these words to remind ourselves that "we are here," implying that this is not where we want to be.* [*In my reading of this text, "land of Israel" doesn't necessarily have to mean the physical land of Israel... if it did, it wouldn't make much sense that this text is still recited even at contemporary Israeli seders; rather, this refers to a redeemed, post-exilic world which we have yet to achieve/reach.] Despite the fact that we clearly have enough material sustenance that we are able to invite others to join us in our meal, we still assert that "we are slaves," meaning that we are not yet free. In other words, we enter into the core act of story-telling by highlighting that -- even as we recall a history of having moved from injustice to freedom -- we still fundamentally see ourselves a residing in a world that is, as yet, imperfect and unredeemed.

This powerful beginning to our sacred story-telling begs the question: in what ways are we "here" rather than there, enslaved rather than free? With this orientation, it is clear that it's not enough simply to read the words of the haggadah and recount what happened to our ancestors. We must consider the world we live in and pay serious attention to enslavement, oppression, and injustice as they play out around us. 

This is why, in my opinion, the best seders aren't the ones where every word of the haggadah is read, taking turns around the table, but rather, seders that also feature genuine and dynamic conversation and debate about the imperfections of our world. The goal is to draw on our people's story of past liberation to inspire us to make a difference here and now, bringing us all a step closer to redemption! 

Of course, the trick is that there's no one "right topic" to be talking about at the seder. The themes of the Exodus resonate when applied to our individual human psychology, to our relationships and family dynamics, to nature and the environment, to a wide range of societal issues. We explicitly ask "Why is this night different from all other nights?," but could equally use "Ha lachma anya" to ask ourselves "Why is this year different from all other years?" (or, to paraphrase, what are the particular arenas in which the seder ritual could serve as a helpful lens this year?).

At my seders this year, I imagine we'll touch on the tyranny of gun violence and the oppressive targeting of queer folks (especially trans youth) in our American society. I hope we'll talk about the events that have unfolded in recent weeks in the Israel, as hundreds of thousands of people in the streets have rallied to try to steer their country away from dictatorship and towards greater democracy. We may put something gold or silver on our seder plate again and pull out the great resource that Kavana created last year to anchor racial justice and reparations conversations in the seder. We may follow the lead of Kavana partners Vicky & Jeff, Suzi & Eric (see the invitation at the bottom of this email about an event happening this evening) who are connecting the stories of Afghani women fleeing their home country to preserve their lives and rights to our people's story, and we might talk other immigrant narratives as well, particularly as our government continues to debate asylum and immigration policy.

What will YOU be talking about at your seder this year?!? As you recite the words of "Ha lachma anya" -- "Now we are here; next year may we be in the land of Israel. Now we are slaves; next year may we be free" -- what examples of oppression, enslavement, and injustice do you feel called to address?

I send wishes to our whole community for a Shabbat Shalom and, of course, a joyous and meaningful Passover. May it inspire us to move ourselves, our community, our society, and our whole world towards liberation and justice, freedom and redemption.

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

AI and Jewish Story

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?”

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”

-Thomas Friedman, “Our New Promethean Moment”, The New York Times

At this point, I am getting tired of being in the midst of historical transformational moments. It wouldn’t be so bad to imagine that five years from now will look much the way things look today. Let alone twenty or thirty years. But, here we are! I’m not even confident I can predict what next year will bring.

In the last few days I have seen article after article and several of my go-to podcasts ramping up attention on artificial intelligence (AI).  A new iteration of ChatGPT just released and companies like Google and Microsoft are integrating artificial intelligence into their products and platforms. It feels surreal to me, something I could not fathom and definitely dismissed as unrealistic in my lifetime. Of course, it is entirely possible that AI will not blossom into the fullest version of what people imagine. But AI represents a wild spectrum of risk and return, ranging from a useful tool to an existential threat to our species. I believe we need more moral and strategic models to ground our relationship to artificial intelligence. 

If you (like me two weeks ago) have only the foggiest idea of what AI is and what the stakes are, you can just google and find tons of articles. Here are a few resources that I’ve encountered recently that go deeper into the weirdness of AI. 

• Ezra Klein, “This Changes Everything”

• Thomas Friedman, “Our New Promethean Moment”

Friedman, in particular, tries to help us understand this moment through two literary references - the chaotic tornado that brings Dorothy to a vibrant and confusing new land of Oz; and the Greek myth of Prometheus, who granted humanity the radically transformative technology of fire. While the lesson Dorothy learns is that at the end of the day, there’s no place like home, there’s no turning back from the gift of Prometheus. Home is forever in the past. 

The quote I started with from John Milton resonates with two other literary references we can use. First, Mary Shelley uses is as an epigram to begin her work, Frankenstein. A creature we bring to life and consciousness leaves us shaking with horror… 

But Milton’s words are placed in Adam’s mouth, of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And that feels to me like a good place to start in generating Jewish resources to ground us. For Milton, Adam bewails his banishment from the Garden, reminding God that he didn’t make himself. Why should he suffer for the design flaws of the divine creator? 

I prefer to read the story of Eve and then Adam eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as an archetype for technological paradigm shift. Like with AI, the fruit gives them exponentially greater access to knowledge. And what does God do? God reminds them of their humanity, or rather “curses” them into experiencing their mortality and their humanity. Labor, pain, and death are not so much curses as the foundations of our shared humanity, and in a moment of leaping forward, this story teaches us to come back in touch with our animal selves, and integrate the new capacity slowly. 

The Tower of Babel also gives us insight into the present moment. In that story, all humans come together with a joint project of building the world's tallest tower. They aim for the heavens, and once again God “curses” the people by making them speak different languages. No longer able to collaborate, the project falls apart. 

Today, there is an AI arms race among companies and governments. It appears to be the opposite of the Babel project, but I think there is in fact a shared language driving the speed of building this new technology. This is the language of competition, fear, greed, and “me first”. Many of the commentators on the Babel story suggest that in their desire to build swiftly, the people would lament when a brick fell but ignore humans falling to their death. They lost sight of the dignity and worth of human beings. 

If we were able to speak more fluently the language of ethics and responsibility, we wouldn’t be able to collaborate so well in the competitive drive to succeed first regardless of who gets damaged along the way. 

A third Jewish resource for conceptualizing our relationship to AI is none other than the book of Leviticus! This book generates a vision of Israelite community oriented around three big ideas: (1) God’s holiness is the source of good and also powerfully dangerous; (2) human nature means we will mess up; (3) so we implement safeguards and create pathways to repair the mess. 

I am in no way trying to equate God with AI, just to be clear. But what I find most compelling about Leviticus is its obsession with holiness and its fear that people will approach it in the wrong way. One of the only two stories in the book has Nadav and Avihu offer “strange fire”, and they in turn are consumed by God’s fire. While some say they made a mistake, others suggest that they so yearned to experience God’s presence that they willingly offered themselves into oblivion. In a 2022 survey, AI experts gave a 1 out 10 chance that AI would cause “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. And these are the people actively developing AI! 

Leviticus offers us a model that brings human nature into balance with a mysterious, dangerous, yet ultimately beneficial Presence. The stories of Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel, and the big picture teachings of Leviticus, all bring a clear-eyed assessment of human nature’s failings, and yet they remind us that when we balance our drive to succeed and discover and invent with our also-human capacities for compassion, kindness, justice, and ethics, we have a hope of enduring thriving, even amidst great changes. 

All of these thoughts are very much just the beginning of my thoughts on AI and its relationship with Judaism. I’d love to hear more from you about what questions, concerns, and ideas you have! 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

From Crowd to Community

In this week's parasha, Vayakhel-Pekudei, Moses assembles the Israelites and they spring into action on a giant community project: the construction and assembly of the Mishkan (also known as the Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary they used during their 40 years in the wilderness). As Exodus 35:21 reads, "And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit was moved came, bringing to God an offering for the work of the Tent of Meeting and for all its service and for the sacral vestments." The next many verses detail the kinds of gifts and unique contributions that the Israelites bring: brooches and other gold jewelry; colorfully dyed yarns, fabric and skins; silver and copper. Skilled women begin spinning and trained artisans begin to cut stones, carve wood, and assemble tapestries. Piece by piece, a sacred structure emerges from the efforts of ALL the people, regardless of gender or status or even ability-level. 

In his book The Home We Build Together, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that this shared project is what turns the crowd of Israelites into a community. He writes: "A nation -- at least, the kind of the nation the Israelites were called on to become -- is created through the act of creation itself. Not all the miracles of Exodus combined, not the plagues, the division of the sea, manna from heaven or water from a rock, not even the revelation at Sinai itself, turned the Israelites into a nation. In commanding Moshe to get the people to make the Tabernacle, God was in effect saying: To turn a group of individuals into a covenantal nation, they must build something together."

I love this piece of Torah from Rabbi Sacks, because here at Kavana, this idea of creating -- of "building something together," of tackling shared projects together -- is one of the go-to plays in our playbook. Week in and week out, we bring together individuals from our community with a shared purpose or project. Not only do we accomplish a lot in terms of outputs, but we also manage to forge community in powerful, connective ways! 

Over the past week alone, we've had so many examples -- here are but a few:

1) Feeding Hungry Neighbors: Kavana volunteers Alex, Aviva, Danny, Diane, Isaac, Julie, Karling, Robin and Ronnie teamed up last weekend to provide a meal to the residents of the Low Income Housing Institute's Othello Village. Each person prepared a single pot of soup, a loaf of bread, or a dozen cookies at home... but together, this added up to a full meal prepared and delivered with love! As an added bonus, this project has been a partnership between Kavana and Minyan Ohr Chadash (a Modern Orthodox community in Seward Park), which means in addition to connecting our chefs with one another and with our low-income neighbors, it's also been a beautiful way to build ties across the Seattle Jewish community. (Huge thanks to everyone who has participated so far! The next opportunity to participate will be on April 23 -- menu details coming soon.)

2) Taking a Stand about Israel: Braving cold weather and an early wake-up the morning after springing our clocks ahead, many Kavana folks turned out in Bellevue last Sunday to protest Israel's new ultra-right coalition and to call for democracy there. This, too, was an opportunity for us to connect with a broader Jewish community (and a sense of peoplehood), as the UnXeptable rallies are grassroots endeavors being organized by Israeli expats living around the world. Everyone is welcome to join us this Sunday again, at 10am on the north side of Bellevue Downtown Park!

3) Teen In-Service: Last weekend, the young adults in Kavana's High School Program had the opportunity to dig into some important Jewish texts and grapple with our tradition's take on responsibilities to community and on tzedakah priorities. Their boisterous beit midrash-style conversations were accompanied by action; here are the students, holding some of the 60 wound-care kits (complete with bandaids, gauze, sterile gloves, antibiotic ointment, etc.) that they assembled for Aurora Commons. Of course, along the way, these wonderful teens are creating strong bonds of friendship with one another!

4) Kavana's Caring Committee: Across multiple house parties, Kavana cooks and bakers teamed up to prepare soups, stews, lasagnas, and baked goods with fresh ingredients. We purposefully chose meals that would freeze beautifully so that we can keep a great stash of food on hand and have meals ready to go whenever a need arises in our community. Our volunteers also had a blast together and forged new ties as they worked side-by-side in the kitchen! Best of all, now we have delicious food ready for you... so please don't hesitate to be in touch (email Avital) if you or someone you know would appreciate a home-cooked meal and the warm community hug it represents (because of an illness, surgery, loss, new baby, or for any other reason at all!)

I can't help but notice that all of these examples I just shared from the past week were about putting our values into action through community service or advocacy. Of course, at Kavana, we also bring people together for many other purposes as well... for example, ritual groups for prayer, the singing circle, learning and discussion groups, social gatherings, and infrastructural committees. Today, our staff is even at an off-site together, tackling the shared project of reflecting on this year's programming and beginning to imagine what we could do together in the coming year, while at the same time continuing to gel into a great professional team.

At Kavana, we manage to produce lots of things together: from meals and wound kits to music and teachings. Ultimately, though, the single most important outcome of our shared endeavors aren't any of these, but rather, the community itself: a covenantal community, bound together by our shared values, our collective sense of purpose, and our strong relationships with one another. This is the essence of the parasha's title of "Vayakhel," which comes from the Hebrew root k-h-l meaning community.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

The Grammar of Community

Ninja turtles, butterflies and fairies, soccer stars and cowboys, witches and wacky onesie wearers… There were a lot of characters at our Purim megillah reading this year! Our community gathered at the exuberant intersection of brewery vats and ancient melodies (many thanks to the wonderful folks at Rooftop Brewery, and to everyone who chanted the story of Esther). One character, though, was apparently absent. God does not appear explicitly in the biblical book of Esther, a striking omission that leaves many readers searching for clues to the hidden divine.

The name Esther is taken as a pointer to hester panim, “the hiding of [God’s] face”, a warning given in Devarim 31:17. But also in our Torah portion this week, God refuses to be fully revealed. In a moment of sudden yearning, Moses cries out, “Let me behold your presence!” And God says, “You cannot see my face…” (Shemot 33:18,20)

But God does make a concession for Moses. God will pass by, and Moses can glimpse God’s “back”. 

God passed before Moses and proclaimed: “Adonai, Adonai, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness…” (Exodus 34:6)

The list of attributes that God proclaims in passing by are known as the Thirteen Middot, the qualities that define God’s goodness. There are endless beautiful and spiritual commentaries on these traits, and yet the one that I have been sitting with this week anchors itself in nothing other than the tedious rules of grammar. To be specific, in a particular Jewish methodology for reading Torah, another list known as the Thirteen Middot of Rabbi Yishmael. Here is the chassidic rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev’s insight (Kedushat Levi, Ki Tissa 14-16, translated by Rabbi Josh Feigelson):

“My master and teacher Rabbi Dov Baer taught that the thirteen interpretive principles (middot) through which the Torah is interpreted are identical with the thirteen attributes (middot) of Divine compassion… The [Divine] attribute of rachum, compassion, is identified with the principle of gezera shava [deciding a case based on an identical word in another case]. In general, when one who is wealthy is compassionate toward one who is poor, the wealthy person must identify with the poor one, connecting with their pain and marginalization. In doing so, the wealthy person and the poor person find their common humanity. We can imagine this is how the Divine relates to us, as the book of Psalms states, ‘I will be with you in moments of trouble’ (Psalms 91:15). This is how the middah of compassion is the same as the middah of gezera shava.”

Okay, if you have read this far, I hope you stick with me on unpacking the grammar of compassion here. I often think of rabbinic spirituality as a literary or linguistic spirituality, seeing letters and words as building blocks of reality and imagining life as a Book. Here, a common interpretive technique becomes an analogy for how we cultivate compassion among humans. 

Gezera shava literally means “an identical term or category”. When reading a verse of Tanakh, if the same word or phrase appears elsewhere in Tanakh, even if the context is completely different and the use appears to be unconnected, gezera shava allows the verses to collapse together, juxtaposed and creating new possibilities for meaning. 

For example, the medieval commentator Rashi notes that when Joseph encounters an anonymous ish (“man”) in the field when trying to find his brothers, another verse that uses the word ish actually refers to the angel Gabriel. Therefore, Joseph must have encountered not a man, but an angel! If Rashi had chosen to connect ish to a different verse, we might learn that Joseph encountered not a random man, nor an angel, but a mensch of good character, or a left-handed man, or - you get the idea. The common element brings two verses together, and the unexpected differences generate interpretive chemistry. 

Our teaching is interested in transferring the grammatical tool to human interaction. What might it mean to acknowledge that humans are simultaneously different from each other in radical ways, yet share “common terms”? You awaken compassion by drawing close to someone who in many ways is quite distant from you, by seeing in them something that resonates with your own identity, experience, or circumstances. The common element brings us close together - and then the creative possibilities of relationship come into being because we are so different in other ways! 

For Levi Yitzchak, one of the expressions of God’s presence, what Moses so yearned to see, is the practice of compassion and the creative experiment of community. That’s what we do in our Kavana Cooperative. We care about each other, and as we are drawn together by some shared common terms, we offer our unique gifts which interact to create new possibilities for living a life of meaning and purpose. In that sense, God was indeed present at our megillah reading, not in the text of Esther, but in the spiritual grammar of community.

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Jay LeVine