News from Israel: We Acknowledge, Hold & Invite

Kavana does not normally send emails on Shabbat or chag, but today is far from a normal day. We awoke this morning to gut-wrenching news out of Israel, and feel so very heavy and sad. We wanted to send a quick note to our community to do a few things:

1. We acknowledge: We are horrified and heartbroken about the violent and deadly attacks, unleashed by air, land and sea by Hamas against Israel. The personal accounts that are starting to emerge now from the Southern Israeli communities surrounding Gaza – of killings, kidnappings and carnage – are particularly shocking and terrifying. We stand in support and solidarity with our Israeli siblings, grieving the hundreds of lives already lost; we wish for healing for the thousands of wounded; we pray that those who are missing or are currently being held hostage will emerge safely from their ordeals. As the situation escalates to war, we lament the loss of innocent Palestinian lives as well, and decry the extremism which has fueled this violence.

2. We hold: We are here to listen if you need to talk, and here to sit with you quietly if you need to be in the presence of another human being who can share in your pain. We know that these events are bound to stir up a huge range of emotions in our community, and will touch different individuals in different ways. As more information becomes clear, we will try to convene spaces in which folks can process, learn, and join together in action. Please let us know what you need so we can offer support.

3. We invite: It feels hard to imagine dancing with joy this Simchat Torah while such tragic and scary events are unfolding for our fellow Jews across the world. And yet, we are drawn to gather with our Jewish community tonight, to be together and to muster whatever joy we can in community, for ourselves and on behalf of so many of our friends in Israel who found themselves in bomb shelters when they might otherwise have been celebrating. True joy is possible only when we also name and honor our shared horror and sorrow. In addition, we refuse to let extremists claim Torah… this is precisely the time for us to celebrate and hold fast to a Torah of peace, of truth, of healing and of love! Whether you’re already registered or not, we hope that you will join us this evening for Kavana’s Simchat Torah celebration: click here to register.
   

With gratitude that – especially when the world is so awful – we have the support of community to help us through,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum & Rabbi Jay LeVine

The Chain of Blessing

This Saturday night, we will celebrate a holiday called Simchat Torah, “The Rejoicing of the Torah”. On it we traditionally read the final portion of the Torah, called V’zot Ha-Berachah, “And this is the blessing.” We hear Moses’ final blessing of the Israelite tribes, and read the description of his final ascent up a mountain, where he dies in an unmarked spot overlooking the land of Canaan. These chapters lean heavily into nostalgia and poignancy, describing Moses as a prophet unequaled before or since. 

The early sages who created midrash amplified the deep emotion in this portion, building up Moses as a unique and gifted leader while also placing him in a chain of great leaders. In Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:1, the sages claim that the ancestors would start their blessings to the next generation only from the place where their predecessor left off in the blessing they had offered. 

In the description of Abraham blessing Isaac, the final phrase begins “And he gave…” (Genesis 25:5). When Isaac prepares to bless Jacob, the midrash imagines him saying, “From the place where my father left off, there I shall begin. My father left off with ‘giving’; I shall begin my blessing with giving.” And the Torah records that Isaac began with these words: “And may God give you…” (Genesis 27:28). 

The account of Isaac ends with the phrase beginning, “And he called…” (Genesis 28:1). Jacob similarly chooses to start his blessing of his twelve sons with “calling”, as it states, “Then Jacob called for his sons” (Genesis 49:1). 

The Torah’s narrative of Jacob’s blessing ends with the phrase, “And this is what their father spoke to them” (Genesis 49:28). So Moses, according to the midrash, chooses to begin the account of his blessing with the phrase “this” - And this is the blessing… (Deuteronomy 33:1). 

If that was a little confusing, don’t worry about it! The midrash has found a neat linguistic pattern that was almost certainly unintended by the editor of Torah, and even then the pattern requires a great stretch of imagination to fit the story the midrash tells. And yet, the story holds great power.

Here is the story without any of the midrashic distraction: The chain of leadership (or learning, or whatever chain feels important in your life) forms because each new leader chooses to link themselves to the one who came before. The new one picks up where the old one left off. The choppiness of the midrashic account reminds us that in real life, disruption and rejection are just as common if not more so than smooth and graceful transitions. Nevertheless, imagining and practicing intergenerational partnership and respect, whether as leaders, teachers and students, biological and chosen family, or anything else, can restore us to a greater wholeness, where any one moment forms a complete blessing only because of words spoken in ages past, and words that will be spoken in times yet to come.

We are part of a vast and ongoing project, we humans. May we commit to our part of the blessing. 

Shabbat Shalom!

Yom Kippur to Sukkot: The Jonah Bridge

One of my favorite moments at Kavana this Yom Kippur was our late-afternoon study and discussion of the Book of Jonah (this has become a beautiful annual tradition in our community!). This year, we delved into the second half of this biblical book, where the reluctant prophet completes his mission. After having been swallowed and then spat out by a giant fish, Jonah makes it to the wicked city of Nineveh and gets the people of the city to repent with only a few words. This could be a happy ending to the story for God, for the people of Nineveh, and to the reader. Jonah, however, is not satisfied.

These are the concluding verses of the Book of Jonah (picking up with Chapter 4, verse 5) -- which I invite you to read closely if you aren't yet familiar with this text: 

"Now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city. He made a Sukkah there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city. 

The ETERNAL God provided a kikayon plant, which grew up over Jonah, to provide shade for his head and save him from discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant. But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered. 

And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind; the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, “I would rather die than live.”

Then God said to Jonah, “Are you so deeply grieved about the kikayon plant?” “Yes,” he replied, “so deeply that I want to die.” 

Then GOD said: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well!”

Needless to say, this is a strange ending to the book. It's unclear whether the prophet has learned any lesson at all from his ordeal. Instead, as the curtain falls on the scene, we observe Jonah sitting in a Sukkah/booth, seemingly resentful of what he doesn't have and frustrated that God's compassion has been extended to Nineveh.

Sukkot -- which begins tonight at sundown -- comes very quickly on the heels of Yom Kippur. In many ways, the Book of Jonah provides a bridge between the two holidays. Like Jonah, we are invited to sit in an outdoor booth. However, our Sukkah is meant to be an antidote to his, and the holiday practices of Sukkot are intended to leave us in a very different place emotionally than his story leaves off. For example:

• As Jonah sits in his Sukkah, he seems to be eagerly awaiting the destruction of the city of Nineveh and positioning himself to watch and gloat as this misfortune goes down (schadenfreude... not a good look for a prophet!). In contrast, those who observe the holiday of Sukkot today by moving outside and sitting/dwelling in a Sukkah are invited into a posture of vulnerability. There's a historical echo, as the Torah reminds us that God brought our ancestors out of Egypt in Sukkot ("ki va-Sukkot hoshavti," Leviticus 23:32). And, many modern-day interpreters point out that being exposed to the elements should help increase our sensitivity towards those who lack warm, dry, and secure shelter on a regular basis. In other words, Sukkot helps us foster greater empathy towards our fellow human beings (not less!).

• Jonah sits under a kikayon plant, a growing vine of some sort. When the plant dies, he is frustrated because it has been providing him with functional benefit. (In our discussion this year, most felt that his response was immature and whiny.) Today, Jewish law/halakhah holds that the material on top of a Sukkah (schach) must be natural in origin but no longer growing; the same is true of our lulav and etrog, made of four species of plants that have already been harvested and are therefore destined to shrivel up over the course of the week-long holiday. Jonah seems to believe that nature exists to serve him, whereas the holiday of Sukkot as observed today reinforces the power of nature's cycles and our subservience to them. Sukkot helps us cultivate humility, then, as we acknowledge that we too are part of the natural world and subject to its seasons.

• The final verse of the Book of Jonah is a rhetorical speech by God. God reserves the right to care deeply about the residents of Nineveh, even if they "do not yet know their right hand from their left"), and about animals. Even if Jonah misses the point, I've always felt that it's supposed to be obvious to the reader that God's compassion also extends to us. The holiday of Sukkot reinforces this idea, with Rabbi Eliezer arguing, in the Talmud, that a Sukkah is a stand-in for the "ananei kavod," God's "clouds of glory" that followed the Israelites and offered them Divine shelter and protection through their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. As we sit in the Sukkah today, we are meant to feel ourselves to be the beneficiaries of God's compassion. 

With only four days separating Yom Kippur from Sukkot, the Jewish calendar expects us to pivot quickly from "Days of Awe" towards the "Festival of our Rejoicing." As the Book of Jonah helps us to see, the bridge from the High Holidays to Sukkot necessarily passes through themes like empathy, humility, and compassion, en route to gratitude and joy.

Wishing you a chag sameach -- a joyous Sukkot -- in which the many themes of our Jewish tradition come to life in ever-new ways,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

A Partnership of Meaning

This is a season when many of us feel an extra call to show up - to ritual, to prayer, to text study, to community. These are the Days of Judgment, Days of Awe, Days of Repentance, Days of Joy (Sukkot). In short, these are days of Meaning with a capital “M”. So what happens when we show up but the Meaning doesn’t? What happens when we yearn to feel inspired, uplifted, spiritually challenged, ethically transformed… but nothing seems to happen? 

On Shabbat Shuvah, in between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, we read Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 32), a poetic castigation of future Israelite disobedience. Moses hands the people a flowery warning to do better. Seemingly, a fitting if harsh message for the season. (“Is this how you repay the Creator, O dull and witless people?!”) 

After reciting the poem, Moses tells the people to take his warning seriously. “This is not an empty word for you (ki lo davar reik hu mikem). It is your life! (ki hu chayyeichem)” (Deuteronomy 32:47). A midrash reworks the phrase “empty word for you” to mean “if the word appears empty - it is from you”, suggesting Meaning isn’t absent, it just requires more effort to discover (or create). Meaning is a cooperative project between texts and rituals on the one hand, and the people who study and practice them on the other. 

This isn’t to say there aren’t harmful texts and poorly done rituals. I do not believe we are obligated to suffer through them if it compromises our well-being. But I do think it is helpful to push ourselves into active partnership with the Jewish tradition wherever we find opportunities to do so. When something feels confusing, boring, uncomfortable, obvious, too familiar or too unfamiliar, imagine the experience as a desert well. If you dig a little deeper, you may unleash living waters, the unpredictable vitality surging underneath Jewish words and actions. It isn’t empty - it is your life! 

We often try to reconnect with vitality by seeking newness - new places, new melodies, new translations and interpretations. An innovative interpretation is called a chiddush, something new. The impulse to seek lost vitality through newness might be captured by the phrase chadesh yameinu k’kedem - make our days full of newness [so we feel the spark] as of old. If the well of meaning has dried up, move on and find new ones!

But if we take the sages seriously when they say the words can never be fully emptied of possible meaning, we can try the spiritual practice of abiding. Writer Maggie Nelson captures the delight that can emerge from stubbornly sticking by the same old things. “I know now that a studied evasiveness [i.e. seeking the new] has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again - not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

Whether you are innovating or revisiting in this season, may each word draw you in with endless curiosity, may each melody stir yearning and awe, and may each ritual fill you with meaning.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

L'Chaim and Shana Tova from Rabbi Rachel

Tonight at sunset, we will simultaneously move into Shabbat – the final day of the week – and into Rosh Hashanah. I’m excited for all the potential that this New Year of 5784 holds for the Kavana community. 

After a few years of pandemic-related disruptions and a solid year of working to strengthen Kavana’s organizational capacity, we are now ready to return our focus to the people and programs that have made this community sparkle in all the ways that it does. We enter this new year keenly aware of all the brokenness that needs fixing in the world around us. Coming together in community to celebrate both Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah will help us re-center ourselves individually, forge meaningful connections with one another, and together find the strength we need to do this work of repair. In this, Kavana’s 18th year of existence, we will embrace life together with renewed energy and brightness!

Over this Rosh Hashanah at Kavana, across all of our different programs and services, we will be drawing on the (second) Creation story of Genesis for inspiration. This story – of the first humans in the Garden of Eden – holds so many rich lessons about what it means to be human, to exercise responsibility, find companionship, make mistakes, and more. 

At the beginning of Genesis chapter 2 – the chapter we’re going to be playing with the most over this holiday – we find the “vayechulu” text which is also recited liturgically as the prologue to Kiddush on Shabbat. This is the passage in which God concludes the work of creation and then rests and is restored on the seventh day: “shavat vayinafash.” Like God, during these High Holidays – not only Shabbat itself, but really the whole window of time from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – we aspire to make metaphorical contact with the Garden of Eden, to rest through prayer and reflection during time away from our daily routines, and to reinvigorate our lives through this soul-work.

In halakhah (Jewish law), there’s a famous question about what to do when Shabbat and a holiday coincide on the calendar. The ancient rabbis wonder: which observance takes precedence? For them, this is a practical question; for example, when we recite kiddush tonight over a cup of wine, do we bless God who has sanctified Shabbat and then the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, or Rosh Hashanah and then Shabbat? On a more abstract level, they are also asking about relative importance and how we should prioritize our holy time and our lives.

The rabbinic principle that emerges in answer to this question is: “Tadir v’she’eino tadir, tadir kodem” - “[In the case of] a more frequent and less frequent event, the more frequent takes precedence.”

This is a surprising answer. Instinctively in our society, we often give great prominence to special or less usual occurences: life cycle events, birthdays, vacations, and the like. Without a doubt, these peak moments are important in adding joy to our lives, and particularly memorable. The rabbinic principle, though, reminds us that our focus on the special cannot be at the expense of the everyday. We should strive to put more emphasis on the regular patterns of our days and weeks, to consider the minutiae of our lives as we re-set our course, to think most about how we spend most of our time. This year, as Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah coincide, we get a helpful reminder: that these High Holy Days are only valuable insofar as they help us reflect on and make commitments about how we want to live – in ways both big and small – throughout the whole year. 

Tonight, as we enter both Shabbat and the New Year simultaneously, I will recite the words of Kiddush, praising the Holy One who sanctifies Shabbat, the Jewish people, and also Yom HaZikaron (“the holiday of remembrance” aka Rosh Hashanah). May we all find the pathways we need in this season to rest, reflect, and renew our lives. May these holy days prepare us to embrace the next year of life with gusto. 

L’chaim (to life!) and shana tova,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Embracing Life through the Tree of Life

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5784 (Sept 2023), Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Shana tova. It’s so sweet to be here, together, in a new space, entering into the new year in community. As we embark on this period of time - Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur - I want to share a few framing thoughts for this High Holiday season. I’ll walk you through my thought process. Kavana is in its 18th year. The Hebrew word chai is the numeric equivalent of life (chet = 8 and yod = 10). So this is a year for embracing and re-embracing life. 

Life comes up in so many ways in the liturgy. The Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, we read Parashat Nitzavim, in which God says: “I am placing before you life and death, blessing and curse. U’vacharta ba’chayim - choose life, in order that you and your descendants may live.” On the High Holidays, of course, we also have the image of the sefer chayim, the Book of Life. We say “l’chayim tovim u’l’shalom” - asking to be inscribed for a life of goodness and peace.

What does it mean to choose life, to embrace life? All roads lead to the creation story, where human life begins. It is the paradigm for our human experience - our creation myth (not in the sense of text that isn’t true, which is what I thought a myth was when I was a child, but in the sense of a text that perhaps didn’t happen in historical time but has deep truths to teach us about who we are and how the world works). This year, the Kavana staff decided to play with this text across almost all of our Rosh Hashanah services and programs. 

Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning of Genesis 2:

4. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 

5. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a human to till the ground. 

6. And a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 

7. And the Lord God formed the human of the dust of the ground – “Vayipach b’apav nishmat chayim, vayehi ha-adam l’nefesh chayah.” – and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living being. 

8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there God put the human whom he had formed. 

9. And out of the ground made the Lord God every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; with the etz ha-chayim, the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is going to be the one that gets the first human beings in trouble. (Messing up, feeling guilt and shame, and suffering consequences for our actions are all themes worth revisiting as we get to Yom Kippur.) For today, though, on Rosh Hashanah, where we celebrate the creation and birthday of the world, I’ve been musing on the relationship between the human being and the other tree, the Tree of Life. 

In the Torah story itself, do you know what happens to the Tree of Life? This tree is mentioned just two more times at the beginning of Bereishit. Once humans eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, their eyes are opened and God worries about what will happen if they also eat from the etz hachayim… vachai l’olam, and live forever. The Tree of Life, it seems, is the secret to mortality and immortality. Perhaps that’s why, at the end of chapter 3, the human beings, Adam and Chava (Adam from Adamah - the earth-being - and Chava, the em kol chai, mother of all life), are exiled from the Garden, and k’ruvim - fiery angels - and a fiery ever-turning sword are set up “lishmor et derech etz ha-chayim” - to guard the way to the Tree of Life. The first humans are exiled and cannot return to the garden. They are no longer immortal; they no longer live in a place of blissful protection. There is nothing they want more than to return to the Tree of Life, but that is precisely what they cannot do. 

You won’t be surprised to hear that the Tree of Life is a jumping off point for lots of midrash, rabbinic interpretation. For example:

Bereshit Rabbah 15:6: And Adonai Elohim made every pleasant tree sprout from the ground: [With regard to the Tree of Life,] It was taught that this was a tree that spread over all living things. R Yehuda bar Eliai said: The tree of life extended over a journey of 500 years and all the waters of Creation divided into streams beneath it. Rabbi Yudan said in the name of Rabbi Yehudah bar Eliai: It is not only the boughs that extend 500 years, but also its trunk that extends 500 years.

In the midrash, the tree has dimensions of mythical proportions: it is 500 years tall and 500 years wide, as big as the world itself!

Several medieval commentators – notably David Kimchi and Rabbenu Bachya – notice and comment on the placement of the tree “b’toch ha-gan”. Reasoning that only one tree could truly have been located in the center of the garden, they decide that the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are, in fact, one in the same. Two trees emerging from a single trunk – an interesting image.

The mystics especially love the Tree of Life. If you’ve ever studied kabbalah - Jewish mystical tradition - even a little bit, you’ve doubtless seen an image of a map of the sefirot, the 10 different emanations of God. That map is also nicknamed – you guessed it – the Tree of Life.

So, returning to our story, we human beings come – at least on a mythic level – from the Garden of Eden. Once upon a time it was our home, and the Tree of Life was at the center. Our human yearning is and has always been to return to the tree. The tree has dimensions so huge that it encompasses all of life – we want to connect to the earth, to Oneness, to life itself. On some level, the tree represents God, and the deep-seeded desire in us all to connect not only to Creation but also to the Creator. Lastly, returning to the garden – connecting to the tree – means re-connecting to ourselves way back when, when we were in our most pristine human state, before anything got too complicated, before mistakes had been made. Our journey this time of year is a journey of return.

How frustrating, then, that in chapter 3, Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden and told that they can’t live in proximity to the Tree of Life any longer. 

The world we find ourselves living in today is as messy as could be. Each of us is a flawed and complicated human being. The High Holidays strips away any pretense about that… we all have individual work to do, and there are no hierarchies, no one is better than anyone else in that regard. Each of us comes from or is part of a complicated family tree. The stories we read over this holiday – about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac – certainly model that complexity. We live in an imperfect society, one where injustices large and small are part of the fabric of our society, so much so that sometimes it’s hard to see what’s right in front of our faces. We live at a moment when politicians are trying to claim lies as truth and truth as lies, when there are many trying to ensure that democracy crumbles. Watching these dynamics play out in the US (as we head into an election year) and in Israel is painful and hard. We also live on a planet where we’ve forgotten that it was once our responsibility as human beings to till and to tend the garden! We human beings have used resources of this planet with abandon, with disregard for the impact we are having, and the consequences are starting to be felt in earnest with natural disasters and smoke-filled skies, with many of the hottest days ever on record this summer. 

Accepting mortality and imperfection – of ourselves – and accepting that we live in an imperfect world – is part of the work of the season. This is what it means to choose life. 

Torah can come from anywhere, and I found this theme, of all places, in the Barbie movie. The film begins with Barbie living in a pink paradise of sorts, a version of a Garden of Eden… boring but perfect on some level and predictable. When a problem arises, she travels from Barbie world to the real world and then back again, trying to fix it. At the end of the film, the Torah of Barbie is that, even knowing the messiness of it all – that life is complicated and people will be mean and she will grow old and die, she chooses to live in the real world.

That’s us this time of year. We understand, acknowledge and accept the imperfections of ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our world. We get that we have been exiled from the garden and no longer can access the Tree of Life, and that there’s a flaming sword blocking the path back to the garden and since we’re stuck out here, all we can do is make the most of it. Can we, too, choose and reaffirm and embrace life in this real and broken world?

There is one more Jewish tradition about the Tree of Life that we haven’t talked about yet, and perhaps this is the very tool we need. The Tanakh brings up the Tree of Life again – and you know this one, a quote from Proverbs (3:18):

(יח) עֵץ־חַיִּ֣ים הִ֭יא לַמַּחֲזִיקִ֣ים בָּ֑הּ וְֽתֹמְכֶ֥יהָ מְאֻשָּֽׁר׃ (פ)

(18) It is a tree of life to those who grasp her, And whoever holds on to it is happy.

You may recognize this verse as the one we sing liturgically every time we put the sefer Torah back in the ark at the end of every Torah service. In this Proverb, what is the Tree of Life? Torah! This Proverb functions as a promise that, in fact, there is something eternal that we can hold onto… something that is forever with us, right here, right now, in this world.

This is the grand paradox that animates these High Holy Days. We want to better ourselves and try to be the most perfect beings we can. We want to return – return to ourselves, return to the Creator, return to what it means to be human, return to the Garden of Eden. We cannot return; on some level we know that the entrance to the garden is forever blocked by a flaming, ever-turning sword and by fiery angels. And yet, the Tree of Life is also right here with us and all around us. It is life itself, it is God, it is Torah, it is the tools we need, it is everything we look to for guidance and sustenance and we can plug into the source anytime we need to, on a regular basis. The paradox extends to the work of the season: we are destined to be imperfect, yet we must strive towards perfection. We must try to return, and also we’ll never be able to return. 

We seek God’s presence, but we can’t actually stay in it. We are destined to live in the flawed, imperfect world that we do, and we move in and out, getting closer and getting further away. We search for where we’ve been, and as soon as we grasp it, we lose it again. We move in and out of seeking and finding and losing and yearning. There’s a constant movement between ourselves and the tree – which looks like an infinity loop.  I heard Joey Weisenberg teach last year about what happens musically in a niggun, and it’s very similar but on a vertical axis. Every niggun begins grounded, with a part A that’s a low part, usually repeated, and then we climb and the melody explodes into a higher part B – as though we’re trying to reach the Divine. But we can’t stay there… what goes up must come back down. We move up and down Jacob’s ladder, in and out of contact with the Divine, in and out of being able to find ourselves.

This High Holiday season, I hope this framing and imagery is a helpful one to you. We are each Adam and Chava, the earthling and the mother of life. The spiritual work of these holidays is to ground ourselves again and again in what it means to be human on the most fundamental of levels. We try to remember what it was to live in the Garden of Eden and hold it up for ourselves as a model, even as we know that we can never fully return to there.

This is why we say, over and over again in this season, the line from Psalm 27:

Achat Sha’alti me’eit adonai otah avakesh: Just one thing do I ask of God, for it is the one important thing that I seek: Shivti b’veit adonai kol y’mei chayai – and that is to dwell in God’s house (or to be settled in life), all the days of my life.

This is my prayer for us, as we embark on these Days of Awe together: that each of us individually, and all of us communally, are able to engage in seeking the Tree of Life. Despite the impossibility of the task, may we grow closer in this season to who we were in the beginning and to who we are in our core and to who we are meant to be. May we hold fast to Torah – also our Tree of Life – and find that we already have access to the accumulated wisdom of our tradition that will help us make our way in this mess of a world. May we choose life in this season, and find a way to make our lives count. Shana tova.

Two Sock Teshuva

“When all these things befall you - the blessing and the curse that I have set before you - and you return to your heart…” (Deuteronomy 30:1)

“...and you return to your God…then your God will return your captivity…and you will return and hear the voice of God…when you return to God with all your heart and soul.” (Deuteronomy 30:2,3,8,10)

This section of the Torah portion Nitzavim is obsessed with teshuva, return. With the probability that we will mess up, stray from our commitments, get knocked off balance by hardship, and still greet the possibility that we can return to God, to whole-hearted and soulful embrace of our purpose. 

A while ago I was watching my toddler learning to put socks on. He quickly slipped a sock onto his left foot and tugged it up past his ankle. Success! Then he grabbed the second sock, attempted to put it on his right foot, but got stuck with an uncooperative big toe firmly outside the opening. After tugging with some frustration for a few minutes, a lightbulb went off. And so he started to put the sock on his left foot, where he’d experienced success just moments before. Two socks on, no problem! Granted, they were both on the same foot, but toddler logic insisted the job was done. 

I was struck by this strategy as an apt metaphor for how many of us go about improving ourselves. We find something we know how to do, and we double down on it, rather than suffering clumsy efforts at developing the aspects of our behaviors that we have a harder time with. As if two socks on one foot will keep the other foot warm and safe!

The same with our hearts. We learn strategies for dealing with emotions that no doubt served us when we first developed them. But as our circumstances change, sometimes we double down on old strategies and get frustrated when we discover they no longer protect us from pain or causing harm. This passage of Torah suggests that when we encounter both blessing and curse, and then “return to our heart”, we will ultimately end up with “all our heart.” A wonderful midrash collects all of the biblical descriptions of what a heart does: “The heart sees, the heart hears, the heart speaks, the heart goes, the heart falls, the heart stands, the heart rejoices, the heart cries out, the heart is consoled, the heart grieves, the heart hardens, the heart softens…” It seems, if we want to do heart-work, we need to be open to the whole spectrum of human experience and feeling. An image of balance emerges - a heart with socks on both feet if you will. 

The commentator Sforno has a striking commentary on what “returning to the heart” entails. “You must discern the contradictory parts, and return them to the heart together, to understand the truth from the lie, and in this you will recognize how far you have become from God in awareness and practice that aligns with Torah.” 

I think Sforno is teaching about holding paradox, apparent contradictions that when held in a “both-and” spirit can actually give us more of a glimpse of truth than if we prematurely resolve the tension and choose one perspective over another. Torah can be understood as containing simplistic rules - do this, not that - and teshuva functions as our way of recognizing our failures and returning to observance of the rules. But Torah seems much more compelling to me as a guide to developing complex thinking and a subtle and rich way of moving through the world. One balanced by numerous contradictions and tensions. Are we free, or obligated? Are we concerned with our self, our tribe, or with all of humanity? Is God just, or just powerful? How do we hold political power and ethical values at the same time? 

Whether I’m watching my toddler delight and struggle with putting socks on both feet, or talking with one of you about whatever blessings or curses we are encountering in life (and we all experience them in one way or another), the poet May Sarton has words that I want to offer for our hearts this season: 

The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance
To be perfectly human(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us. 

May your teshuva return you a bit closer to balance and wholeness. Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Unhewn Stones and Gun Violence

"ARE YOU SAFE? WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU ALONE? GUYS I'M SO FUCKING SCARED. HEY COME ON SWEETHEART - I NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU. CAN YOU HEAR ANY GUNSHOTS? PLEASE STAY SAFE." 

These and many more messages -- real texts, sent in the midst of an on-campus shooting earlier this week at the University of North Carolina -- were published together in a striking cover image of the student newspaper, The Daily Tarheel. Sadly, this killing of a faculty member at UNC was far from the only deadly shooting in the U.S. this week; other shootings happened locally (in neighborhoods like Lake City, Capitol Hill and Belltown) and also on the far side of the country (including the shooting in Jacksonville, which felt particularly horrific because it was racially motivated). While homicides garner more media attention, data shows that suicides actually account for the majority of gun deaths in this country. Easy access to lethal weapons and a dearth of sensible gun legislation makes the United States an outlier with regard to gun violence of all kinds.

This week, perhaps because this topic was already at the forefront of my mind, I stumbled across an important nugget of Torah that I think is germane to our national conversation about gun violence.

In our Torah portion, Parashat Ki Tavo, Moses instructs the Israelites that when they eventually cross over to the other side of the Jordan, they should build an altar out of stone. "Do not wield an iron tool over them," the text reads; "you must build the altar of Adonai your God of unhewn stones" (Deut. 27:5-6). This is not the first time that the Torah has given a command like this. In Exodus 20:22, God had instructed, similarly (albeit in slightly different language): "And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool upon them you have profaned them." 

Commentators throughout the generations have wondered: What is so problematic about iron tools? Why is it so important to build an altar of unhewn (literally: "whole" or "complete") stones? While there are many different interpretations and explanations, I am drawn this week to the answer offered by medieval Torah scholar Moses ben Nachman (a.k.a. Nachmanides or Ramban, 1194-1270). He writes:

"According to our Rabbis, the reason for the commandment [against building an altar of stones which have been touched by iron] is the glorification of the altar: [It is not right] that that which shortens life [i.e., iron] is to be lifted up against that which prolongs life. ... I say that the reason for the commandment is that a sword is made out of iron and is the destroyer of the world. In fact, this is why it is called cherev (sword) [which is of the same root as churban (destruction)]... It was for this reason that there was no iron in the Tabernacle, for even its pins, which would have been better if made of iron, were made of copper."

Ramban's explanation is that -- because iron can be used as a weapon to threaten human life -- it has no place, even as a helpful tool (like a chisel or a pin) in the building of an altar or in the mishkan itself. He is well aware that the words "whole stones" ("avanim shleimot") in our verse are not taken literally to mean uncut stones; there is an old midrashic tradition that a worm called the shamir could, in fact, cut/eat through stone and this was how the stones used to build Solomon's Temple were cut to size. But, he argues that when we build holy places, we should go to great lengths to avoid symbols like iron pins that even hint at violence, weaponry or potential harm to human beings. Keeping potential weapons far away from our holy places helps us orient ourselves towards shleimut (peace, wholeness, completion).

Parashat Ki Tavo is always read during the month of Elul, in this window of time leading us towards the High Holidays when we're taking stock of our lives and our communities and beginning to realign our priorities. In this season of this particular year (2023/5783), we would do well to take Ramban's commentary about the construction of the altar to heart and apply its principles to the crisis of gun violence in our country. We must believe that where there is a will, there is a way to create policies that safeguard lives by keeping potential weapons (particularly the most dangerous ones) out of the hands of those who would use them to harm themselves or others. There are many real obstacles to sensible legislation -- the gun lobby, cries for individual rights, etc. -- but with each shooting, messages like the texts of terrified UNC students and staff are penetrating the national consciousness more and more deeply. The generation of our nation's children, who have grown up with lock-down drills, absolutely "get it." If you're interested in making a difference, so many organizations doing important work in this arena would love your financial support (The Alliance for Gun Responsibility here in Washington State, Everytown for Gun Safety, Sandy Hook Promise, and Giffords Law Center, just to name a few), or I encourage you to check out the learning resources offered through Jewish organizations like the Religious Action Center and the National Council of Jewish Women.

A few years ago, one of the churches in Queen Anne that Kavana partners with hosted a program called "Guns to Garden Tools," bringing in an artisan to help their community take items that were once used for violence and transform them into instruments that cultivate peace. This was an embodiment of the prophetic words of Isaiah 2:4 (the "lo yisa goy" verse): "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." I love this image of planting gardens with tools that were formerly weapons... somehow it seems to take Ramban's idea that iron must be shunned and instead grant the materials of violence the power of teshuva/change. 

May this Shabbat be one of comfort and healing... for the families of this week's victims of gun violence, and for our whole society, which has grown too numb to the assaults that happen so frequently that this was "just another week in America." I pray that -- inspired by Torah -- we will find the power and courage we need in order to speak with a moral voice and make change happen in our society. Just as our ancestors once built altars free of iron tools and hewn stones, so too may we continue to build our society in ways that ensure that all are safe from the weapons of our day. 

Wishing us all a year of peace and wholeness, as we work together to build a world in which students can go back to school without fear of campus violence,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Building on Mindfulness and Mitzvot

In the past decade, mindfulness meditation has become increasingly “mainstream”, as various advances in scientific understanding of the human mind and body confirm the various benefits of a mindfulness practice. One of the most important early translators of Buddhist meditation practice for American secular culture is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who formulated the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) technique. In a world that increasingly feels urgent and hyperconnected, MBSR is a way of tapping into a slow, attentive wisdom for its health benefits, without overtly religious or philosophical claims. 

“To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in; long enough to actually feel the present moment, to see it in its fullness, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know and understand it better.” 

This quote comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 1994 book titled, Wherever You Go There You Are. The idea that we can’t actually escape being ourselves, no matter how desperate we might sometimes be to change the scenery and thereby change ourselves, has been an important one in my spiritual journey. Once we stop trying to be somewhere else, someone else, some idealized version of ourselves, or some nostalgic return to who we once were, we are finally free to inhabit ourselves in the present - the only moment where we can learn and grow. 

I was struck while reading Torah commentaries for this drash by a teaching that instantly made me think of Kabat-Zinn’s book title. A midrash on Deuteronomy reads: “Rabbi Pinchas bar Chama said: Wherever you go, the mitzvot (commandments) accompany you. When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof (Deuteronomy 22:8). If you make a door for yourself, the commandments accompany you, as it is said (Deuteronomy 6:9), 'You shall write them on the doorposts of your house.' If you wear new garments, the commandments accompany you, as it is said (Deuteronomy 22:11), 'You shall not wear a garment of diverse kinds.'...”

Wherever you go, there you are. In whatever situation you find yourself, not only are you there but there are opportunities (or obligations, depending on your framework) for meaningful action, whether ritual, spiritual, practical, or ethical. Not sure what to do? Follow Jon’s guidance and pause to really notice what is in the present moment and the present experience. Then follow Rabbi Pinchas’s guidance and begin to notice which mitzvot, meaningful or moral acts, have accompanied you. In other words, this is a mitzvah-based stress reduction technique for moving through life attuned to sacred possibility, healing, and justice.

Let’s examine one of the mitzvot a little closer. “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it” (Deuteronomy 22:8). On its surface, this seems pretty clear - you have to make reasonable safety features part of your home, otherwise you are liable for injuries caused by your negligence. 

The medieval commentary Chizkuni asks if this is only the case for new houses, but concludes that if a house comes into your possession by sale or gift (or any other way you come to be in possession of it, presumably even by stealing it!) you are still responsible for installing balcony guardrails and other basic safety features. 

We get a sense here of being mindful as not only about calm awareness, but of diligence and caution, in the vein of the phrase “mind the gap”. 

Yet, there’s an even deeper awakening into awareness that our verse hints at. The Degel Machaneh Ephraim, an 18th century Chassidic master, teaches that this verse “hints at the Day of Justice, yom ha-mishpat, which is Rosh HaShanah. For it is known that this is the day when God began the works of creation, and on every Rosh HaShanah the world is renewed, all of the things return to as they were of old, and the essence of the day awakens this [process] every Rosh HaShanah… ‘When you build a new house’ - this is on Rosh HaShanah, when the time comes to awaken [the awareness] that the world will be built into a new building!” 

The Degel continues with gematria play, connecting the numerical equivalent of the words “and you will build a parapet” with the Kabbalistic quality of gevurah (judgment) and “your roof” with the Kabbalistic quality of God’s name havayah, which stands in for compassion and kindness. So “build a parapet on your roof” means, kabbalistically, to join together judgment with compassion. 

If you’ve stuck with me this far, let me try to extract a useful message from this dense teaching! It seems to me that the Degel Machaneh Ephraim reads our verse as a metaphor for the spiritual work of Rosh HaShanah. On this sacred moment, we hope to be awakened (by the shofar, the prayers and music, each other’s company, the still small voice of the divine, meditation, however it might happen). When we are awakened, we notice that this is a potent moment for rebuilding, both ourselves and our social structures. Adding a parapet to the roof joins discipline with vision, judgment and its solid lines with compassion and its larger perspective, safety scaffolding to our spiritual ascent. This is deep work of Rosh HaShanah, one that the Degel insists will end up being “sweetened” if we balance those qualities wisely. 

Wherever you go, may you feel the blessing of being yourself, may you become aware of the mitzvot of the moment, and may you play your part in constructing new and better worlds in the coming year. 

Shabbat Shalom, and Shanah Tovah!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Justice, Justice

I've enjoyed continuing to sink back into my Kavana rhythms over these last couple of weeks. As I noted in last week's newsletter, coming back from sabbatical, I have felt the passage of time acutely and am happy to be stepping back in during this window of preparation for the High Holidays. 

I have also felt this passage of time in terms of news and world events. When I began my sabbatical back in the spring, the former president had been indicted only once; now that number stands at an astonishing four indictments. While I was away, the Supreme Court also made news repeatedly... not only for their rulings, but for serious ethics questions concerning particular justices who have routinely accepted (and neglected to report) lavish gifts. During these same months, Netanyahu's coalition continued its assault on the Israeli judicial system by abolishing the "reasonableness standard," thus strengthening the power of the legislative and executive branches (which, in Israel, are one in the same) by severely weakening the judiciary. In both American and Israeli societies -- as in many other countries around the world -- we are currently witnessing dramatic struggles between liberal democracy and extreme authoritarian rule. Sometimes it feels like the judicial system is the only floodgate holding us back from chaos... which is precisely why it is under attack. As we head towards the New Year, swirling around us are profound questions about justice: around who has the power to judge, who will and won't be held accountable for their actions in courts of law, whether justice can be carried out impartially, and more.

This week's Torah portion tackles many of these topics of justice head on. Parashat Shoftim opens with these lines (Deut. 16:18-19):

"You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that Adonai your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall not judge unfairly: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just."

These are powerful lines, advancing a rigorous and clear-headed vision of justice. The third line of the parasha is even more powerful -- it's arguably one of the most famous quotes in all of Torah (and one that is worth committing to memory if you don't already know it): “צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף, / tzedek tzedek tirdof” — “Justice, justice you shall pursue!”

This three-word Hebrew phrase -- tzedek tzedek tirdof -- has been analyzed and interpreted from many angles. "Pursue" is such an active verb that it demands action from us. But the most ink has been spilled over the doubling of the word "tzedek,": "Justice, justice." The rabbinic hermeneutic rules that govern Torah interpretation hold that no word could possibly be extraneous; therefore, each "tzedek" must have a distinct meaning. In a Talmudic conversation (in Sanhedrin 32b), two ancient sages probe the twin uses of the word for meaning. As Rabbi Menachem Creditor explains: "Resh Lakish draws a comparison to other calls for justice in the Torah, asserting that the repetition underscores the necessity to scrutinize trials meticulously. ... Rav Ashi proposes an alternative approach: the first "Tzedek" refers to the act of judgment, while the second pertains to the delicate art of compromise." Many centuries later, the Chassidic rabbi Simcha Bunem offered yet a different explanation, translating the phrase "to pursue justice justly." According to his reading, the verse comes to teach us that justice can never be achieved by unjust means. These commentaries offer but a taste of what we might learn from this short but powerful phrase.

The words "tzedek tzedek tirdof," "Justice, justice you shall pursue," are so very powerful. And yet, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat points out, the verse doesn't end there. She writes: "Torah continues, 'in order that you may live and inherit the land which Adonai your God is giving you.' We pursue justice in order that we may truly live. In order to live life to its fullest, we need to work toward a world that is just..."

As I reflect on the lessons Parashat Shoftim might teach us this year, I'm also cognizant that today is Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of the month of preparation for the New Year. Exactly one month from now, we will arrive at Rosh Hashanah, also known by the name "Yom ha-Din," Day of Judgment. During this whole season, we are called on to scrutinize our own deeds and actions, considering how they might stand up in a heavenly court of law. We think about orienting our lives towards justice -- of strengthening our personal relationships through fairness, of working together to build communities that operate on the principles of justice, and of forging a just society.

During the month of Elul, my teacher, Rabbi Steve Sager (z"l), had a tradition to read Genesis 18 with his congregation. That chapter contains the story in which Abraham bargains with God over the fate of the people of Sodom. The dramatic climax of that text comes when Abraham asks the rhetorical question: "ha-shofeit kol ha-aretz lo ya'aseh mishpat", "[Is it possible that] the Judge of all the earth would not deal justly?!" Reading this text liturgically in the lead-up to these days of awe and judgment adds yet another layer: even God must be held accountable for justice at this time of year.

As we move towards New Year 5784 -- against the backdrop of breaches of justice, threats to justice systems, and more -- may we strive to employ the lessons of Parashat Shoftim and its call to pursue justice. May we know just when to be meticulous in our approach and when to compromise in our pursuit of true justice. May we pursue justice only through just means. May we work to support and uphold judicial systems characterized by the highest standards of ethics and fairness. And may all of our endeavors draw us closer to the vision of living together in society with justice for all. 

Chodesh tov -- wishing you a meaningful month of Elul, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Sabbatical Reflections from Rabbi Rachel

It feels great to be back, following a three-month sabbatical. I can feel the passage of time acutely right now: as I stepped out of the Kavana office in the spring, we were still counting the Omer, and as I re-enter now, the New Year of 5784 is just around the corner! 

The modern concept of a workplace sabbatical is, of course, modeled after the biblical rules about letting land lie fallow for one year in every seven-year cycle. The idea of punctuating our time with periods of profound rest and rejuvenation is deeply Jewish. This notion is baked into the Torah's creation story, into ideas about agriculture and the remission of debts, and into our calendar as we count days, weeks, and years. As Ezra Klein and Judith Shulevitz name so articulately in a beautiful podcast ("Sabbath and the Art of Rest" - I highly recommend a listen!), “implicit in the practice of the Sabbath is a stinging critique of the speed at which we live our lives, the ways we choose to spend our time, and how we think about the idea of rest itself.” 

My sabbatical was designed carefully, with intention (kavana), and the time was indeed restorative for me on a personal level. I managed to pack a lot into three months, including one-on-one weekend trips away with each of my three children and quality time with friends and family members across the country. While my kids were otherwise occupied at their respective Jewish summer camps in June/July, my husband Noam and I traveled to Scandinavia, where we explored Stockholm's great museums and beautiful archipelago of islands, and enjoyed Copenhagen's canals and urban design with good friends. Throughout the three months, I also read books just for pleasure, visited Jewish communities/synagogues in other cities, and sought out great food and coffee everywhere I went. I had hoped that stepping out from my usual day-to-day rhythm would help me gain new perspective, recharge my batteries, and re-enter my work at Kavana feeling reinvigorated. Truly, I gained all of this and more, as I found that reconnecting with people from every chapter of my life helped me reconnect to parts of myself I had been missing. Mission accomplished!

According to the Durfee Foundation, “sabbaticals not only provide needed respite to nonprofit leaders, they increase organizational capacity, aid succession planning, and strengthen governance.” This line certainly feels relevant to my experience of the last three months, as well. My sabbatical had been approved by Kavana's board several years ago, but we waited until the timing felt right -- meaning, the crisis moment of Covid had passed, and we finally had the staffing in place -- to make it actually happen. I am deeply grateful to the board for championing this idea, and even more grateful to the entire Kavana staff for stepping up in my absence. In particular, I couldn't have taken this time off were it not for Rabbi Jay LeVine, who provided rabbinic coverage (for lifecycle events, pastoral needs, holiday programs and more!), and for Liz Thompson, our Director of Operations who took on interim Executive Director responsibilities (budgeting, development, working with the board, etc). As I re-integrate into the Kavana staff team, we will be distributing some responsibilities differently, which will boost professional development for our staff and ultimately benefit the greater Kavana community. Lastly, I want to note once again that I am grateful to R&R for their grant funding, supportive guidance, and for the work they do to promote the idea of sabbaticals in the Jewish nonprofit world. Their permission for each grantee "to rest, travel, reflect or renew in whatever manner they propose" felt incredibly supportive as I planned my time away.

I re-enter now ready to recommit to this work, to this community, and to the shared vision we've developed over the past 17 years, for how Kavana can support the building of Jewish community and the creation of meaningful Jewish life and positive Jewish identity. And, it's a good thing I'm feeling ready, because this is a very busy time to be re-entering the Kavana office! 

This week’s Torah portion, Re’eh, talks about how the Israelites will enter into the promised land when they finally arrive. For them, their choices feel stark, with potential blessings and curses proclaimed loudly from two mountains as they pass between them. Re'eh reviews the terms of the covenant between God and the Israelites, rehashing all sorts of laws that will inform the society they will build together... the foods they can eat, the festivals they must observe, and even laws governing the remission of indentured servants every seven years (there's that sabbatical cycle again!). As the Israelites prepare to enter into the next phase of their collective life, they are instructed to pause and consciously reaffirm their prior commitment. This kind of intentional recommitment resonates so deeply this week, as I return from sabbatical and affirm my role in the Kavana community. I actively choose this work over again.  

I know that it may take some time for me -- and for our staff and organization -- to continue to glean the fruits and lessons of this sabbatical time…and I look forward to continuing to share reflections with you over the coming months. Meanwhile, I hope that this year, I'll be able to figure out ways to continue to reap the benefits of the spaciousness, reconnection and fun that these months of sabbatical brought. I also look forward to drafting a brand new sabbatical policy for our organization, so that all of our full-time staff members can look forward to similarly beneficial periods of renewal and reinvigoration. And, I will encourage rest - in cycles both small and large - for each member of our community, so that we all can benefit from opportunities to gain perspective on how we spend our time. 

It's exciting to be stepping back in as Kavana embarks on our 18th year. Like the Israelites of Parashat Re'eh, we will move into Kavana's "chai" year reaffirming our vision and embracing life and blessing. I return with renewed energy, ready to work together with you to make the magic happen!

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

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