Strange Names

With the beginning of the second book of Torah, Shemot (Exodus), Moses enters the story. While he will be centrally important to the event of exodus, leading the Israelite slaves away from oppression in Egypt, the shemot or “names” in his life are also intriguing. 

In chapter two, Moses is born into mysterious circumstances. None of his family members are named (except that they are from the tribe of Levi), he is hidden for three months to evade Pharaoh’s decree of death to male Israelite children, then he is set adrift on the river in a little ark of a basket. Pharoah’s daughter, also not named, finds him and compassionately adopts him. 

Finally, she names him: Moshe, “because I drew him (mishitihi) out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). But grammatically, Moshe doesn’t mean “drawn out”, it means “one who draws out”. In being given this Egyptian name, its Hebrew resonance foreshadows his role in drawing the Israelites out of Egypt. The medieval commentator Sforno generalizes his role as “someone who saves and draws out others from their troubles (mitzarah, similar in sound to mitzrayim, “Egypt”). 

Before Moses returns to save the Israelites however, he flees from Pharaoh and finds a refuge and a family among the people of Midian. He names his firstborn son Gershom, saying “I was a stranger (ger) in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22). Apparently, he means to say he was a ger sham - a stranger there. But where exactly is “there”? 

• Is it his current residence Midian - where he was not born (Sforno)? 

• Or does it reflect a sense of involuntary alienation, that he is a refugee fleeing for his life (HaKtav v’HaKabbalah)? 

• Or perhaps even more poignantly, that he was fleeing because a fellow Israelite had slandered him and incited Pharaoh against him (Malbim)? 

• Malbim insists that he never lost his love for his people, which seems true given how the rest of the story unfolds, but nevertheless perhaps Moses felt an existential strangeness, not feeling fully at home among the Israelites, among the Egyptians, nor among the Midianites. Contemporary scholar Erica Brown writes: “Moses had no people, no tribe, no nation to call his own. Helper to all, he became friend to none.”

In naming his own first child, Moses exposes his tenuous connectedness to anyone at all.  The one who draws others out of trouble (helper to all) felt no clear and simple pull to belonging. 

The 18th century Moroccan sage Or HaChaim suggests there might be a deeper purpose to Moses’ feeling of isolation. “The words may be understood along the lines of Psalms 119:19, ‘I am a stranger on earth.’ Righteous people in this world are merely strangers, they have no permanent abode.” 

The righteous are strangers on earth… Rabbi Rachel suggested to me that we might recognize in this teaching the way that those pursuing justice and righteousness often find themselves marginalized, sticking out uncomfortably from the multitudes who tend to the status quo.

But I also wonder if “being a stranger” might be a spiritual practice in its own right. Glancing at the world with strange eyes defamiliarizes our surroundings, helps us see marvels and possibilities where habit insisted we no longer needed to bother looking. In our normal mode of being, we only notice extraordinary events. 

The French writer George Perec once described our inclination: “The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?”

For Perec, the infra-ordinary realm is one that we only see when we are out of our habit / habitat. When we are strangers in a foreign land, or manage to see our own neighborhoods with new eyes. And somehow, that ability to see the tiny, almost trivial, aspects of a place leads one to righteousness. Perhaps it is convenient to habituate ourselves so that injustice remains invisible…

Moses, though, has persistent stranger consciousness. The root of his righteousness lies in being unable to look away from things that others have trained themselves not to see. I think the significance of the burning bush points to the infra-ordinary, not the extraordinary. How long must you look to realize that the bush is not actually burning up, simply aflame? At that moment, when God sees that Moses pays attention to what others might pass by, God calls Moses into his mission of drawing the people out of Egypt.

Rabbi Jan LeVine

The Twelve Tribes of Kavana

In this week of endings, we say goodbye to both the first book of the Torah and to calendar year 2023.  

As Bereishit/Genesis draws to a close in this week's Torah portion, Vayechi, Jacob knows that he is nearing the end of his life. He clarifies his wishes for his own burial (“If I have found favor in your eyes, then swear to me that you will not bury me in Egypt, but with my fathers in Canaan”), and draws his grandchildren -- Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manassah -- near to offer them blessings. But then, Jacob does something unexpected.

Up to this point, we've seen a regular pattern emerge in Genesis: sibling rivalry and parental favoritism feature repeatedly, after which the narrative only follows a single branch of the family tree from one generation to the next. This pattern held true for Abraham's sons (following Isaac over Ishmael) and for Isaac's sons (following Jacob over Esau). But now, in the wake of a complicated family drama about Jacob's twelve sons, he gathers all twelve of them around him to share his final blessings/prophecies with them all:

"And Jacob called his sons and said, “Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you in days to come. Assemble and hearken, O sons of Jacob; Hearken to Israel your father." (Genesis 49:1-2).

The two verbs I've bolded in the quote above are the key to what's happening here: he'asfu (come together, root: alef-samech-pey, meaning to gather), and hi'kavtzu (assemble, root: kuf-bet-tzadee, meaning to assemble as in k'vutzah/group or kibbutz). We know that these twelve sons are different as can be and they haven't exactly gotten along... in fact, jealousy and resentment have led to near-death and abandonment. Jacob's "blessings" to each of them focus on both the brother's past behavior and the future of the tribe-to-be, leaning into negative prophecies as much as positive ones. 

The core point, though, is that Jacob draws his motley crew together as he speaks, telling them that they must hearken/listen ("shema") as a unit. By the end of his speech (Genesis 49:28), he is able to declare, "kol eileh shivtei yisrael shneim asar" "All these were the tribes of Israel, twelve in number." From here on out, they will be viewed as a collective unit, and the Torah's narrative will follow all twelve of these brothers/tribes together. Together, they will experience the bitterness of slavery, emerge to freedom, stand at Sinai, and strive to build a holy community.

Jacob's strategy -- of trying to actively forge a new collective unit by assembling the brothers -- feels helpful and relevant to me as we try to make sense of the world around us now and understand what the year 2023 has meant for our community, for the Jewish people, and for the world.  

Although we're still very much inside an unfolding story, we can already see that we are living through a watershed moment in Jewish history, and that 2023 will be a year cited by historians as a turning point. That said, October 7th and every day since have been so complex and multi-faceted -- there are so many aspects to what's happening -- that it can be hard to grasp the whole. Trying to make sense of the big picture while living through the day-to-day, each with our own perspective and our own sources of information, reminds me of poem by Rumi, a 13th century Sufi (Islamic mystic) philosopher and poet:

Elephant in the Dark

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.

No one here has ever seen an elephant. 

They bring it at night to a dark room.

One by one, we go in the dark and come out

saying how we experience the animal.

One of us happens to touch the trunk.

"A water-pipe kind of creature."

Another, the ear. "A very strong, always moving

back and forth, fan-animal."

Another, the leg. "I find it still,

like a column on a temple."

Another touches the curved back.

"A leathery throne."

Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk.

"A rounded sword made of porcelain."

He's proud of his description.

Each of us touches one place

and understands the whole in that way.

The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are

how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.

If each of us held a candle there, 

and if we went in together,

we could see it."

As with Jacob’s sons, Rumi describes that a big picture -- a complete picture -- can only emerge when we "go in together" and "hold a candle there." This is exactly what our Kavana community will strive to do as we move forward together into the new year of 2024. 

Kavana was created, way back in 2006, by a small group of individuals who believed that we could live more meaningful lives and better make sense of the world around us by choosing, intentionally, to be in community with one another. Kavana has always welcomed individuals and households with a wide range of Jewish beliefs and practices, with spiritual yearning and with intellectual curiosity. Over the years, our community has grown: we have become increasingly multi-generational, we now live across broader geography, and we certainly encompass a wider spectrum of beliefs and perspectives on politics, particularly where Israel is concerned. As with the b'nai yisrael, sameness isn't an option and tensions and differences must be acknowledged as our community grows, and yet, we are still in it together. 

As we move into the secular new year of 2024, the Kavana community will actively seek out more opportunities for real conversations about what it means to be Jewish and to be human at this challenging moment in history. We will welcome a multiplicity of voices, and try to make Kavana the kind of model place where people can consciously come to be enriched and stretched by one another, a place where together, we can assemble our perspectives in order to see a whole picture emerge. 

Doing so may be no simpler for us today than it was when Jacob assembled his twelve sons; however, it is possible. The endings we encounter this week each represent a new beginning as well, as we embark on a new book of the Torah and a new calendar year. It is holy work, to "come together" and "assemble" in this way, to create a holistic tapestry out of our multiplicity of voices, experiences, perspectives, personalities, interests and skills. 

With gratitude to be part of this collective project with each and every one of you, and wishing you a smooth entry into 2024,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Being a Mensch

The sage Hillel once taught, “In a place where there are no anashim, strive to be an ish” (Pirkei Avot 2:5). Although the simple meaning of ish (plural anashim) appears to be “man”, in many contexts it reads more like what we mean when we use the Yiddish equivalent, a mensch. In one sense, this teaching insists that we should be good people with character and integrity, even if we are surrounded by hypocritical, self-serving, disingenuous, and downright awful detriments to the category “human”. In other words, “when they go low, we go high” (Michelle Obama). That on its own is a deep and often difficult spiritual practice.

There’s another application of Hillel’s teaching, though, that I also find valuable. Elsewhere in the Talmud, two other sages expand on the same concept. Echoing Hillel, Bar Kappara teaches, “where there is no gvar (Aramaic equivalent of ish), there be a gvar. Abaye said: Infer from this that where there [already] is a gvar, there don’t be a gvar!” (Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 63a).

Now obviously, there is no maximum quota of menschen in a room - we need all the good, decent people we can find! So instead, Bar Kappara and Abaye seem to be identifying the role of the gvar as filling a singular necessity. In other words, you don’t need too many cooks in the kitchen. If someone is already doing the job, find a different niche in which to make your contribution. 

As we read the stories of the Jewish matriarchs and patriarchs, the early generations are characterized by divergence and exclusion. Abraham leaves his family of origin, then ultimately banishes his son Ishmael in favor of Isaac. Sarah finds she cannot tolerate Hagar’s presence as a competitive matriarch either. There is one favored role, and no other options within the family structure that the narrative centers. Isaac and Rebekah too reject Esau in favor of Jacob. 

But Jacob starts a family that for all its tensions, holds a glimmer of hope that divergence won’t lead to exclusion, but that diversity can be held together within the family structure. Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah (the four women who bring to life the twelve tribal ancestors) hold uneasy and difficult relationships to each other, but nevertheless claim their own contributions to the larger whole. The final saga of Genesis follows the enmity between the twelve brothers, as Joseph dreams of an elevated and favored role. But this week, the drama resolves into reconciliation, as Joseph understands his role as only being possible through how the brothers acted. In effect, God had them working as a team, even if they thought they hated each other. The brothers cautiously lean into their own strengths and passions, and ultimately this full ecosystem of different roles and responsibilities creates the foundation for what will become am yisrael, the nation of Israel. 

Judah in particular finally realizes that an ish / gvar is lacking in advocating for his brother Benjamin to Joseph, who is still disguised as a powerful Egyptian. The parashah opens: “Then Judah approached [Joseph], and said…” (Genesis 44:18). A midrash comments on the inner dynamics of “approach” with an extraordinary parable:

“Then Judah approached [Joseph]” (Genesis 44:18). It is written, “Counsel is like deep waters in the heart of a person, and a person of understanding will draw them forth” (Proverbs 20:5). [A parable] to a deep well filled with cold [water] - its water was cool and good, but no creature was able to drink from it. Then someone came and tied a rope to a rope and a string to a string and a cord to a cord, and drew from [the well] and drank. Everyone started drawing from it and drinking. Similarly, Judah did not cease responding to Joseph point by point until he learned what was in his heart. (Bereishit Rabbah 93:4)

Judah’s approach doesn’t just open up an authentic and deep connection to Joseph, according to the image of the well that no one could access. In establishing the connection, Judah makes it possible for future connection to keep happening with everyone. He is, in a sense, the only one who could have opened Joseph’s heart to forgiveness and reconciliation. But once he does, he enables that possibility for everyone else as well. Judah is the ish who in acting where there was no other ish broadens the imagination, enables widespread access and inclusion, and shifts the paradigm altogether. Once he does that, an ish isn’t required anymore for this particular situation.

But there are always places of problem where an ish is needed, to see something differently, to solve something unexpectedly, to imagine radical alternatives. 

To be a poet, artist, engineer, attentive listener, dreamer, tinkerer, yourself.

A related midrash (Song of Songs Rabbah 1:1:8) expands on the theme:

1. A castle where people kept getting lost, until one person tied a string along the right path. Then everyone could find their way.

2. A thicket of reeds that no one could enter, until someone cut them down with a scythe. (The environmental ethics of this are another matter.)

3. A large basket filled with good stuff, but no handle. Someone needed to invent the handle!

4. A large jug with boiling water, but no handle. (Seems like the previous inventor could have stuck around a bit longer…)

All of these examples are understood by the midrash to be analogies for how King Solomon taught Torah. He discovered some new way to use or access Jewish wisdom, which opened the Torah for everyone who followed. 

Each analogy addresses either access to a place (to a pit, castle, thicket of reeds) or a source of nourishment (water, food). Where do you need to go in the coming year? What nourishment will you seek? And how might you fill your cup in a way that creates overflowing possibility for others as well? In a world where there are not enough anashim - people solving problems and making the world better for everyone - I am grateful to be in community with so many anashim - each one of you a mensch in a totally unique way. 

Shabbat shalom!

Igniting Compassion

Rabbinic tradition has it that we read a bit of our sacred story, the Torah, every week. But it would be too easy to have one text to mull over - the rabbis add in the Haftarah, a companion excerpt from the Nevi’im, the historical and prophetic books that follow the Torah in the Hebrew Bible. These excerpts dance around the Torah portion, sometimes developing themes or highlighting resonance, other times offering intriguing counterpoint, and generally establishing a dynamic interpretive energy when we look closely at both Torah and Haftarah together. 

In this week’s Torah portion, Miketz, Pharaoh dreams troubling dreams and Joseph interprets them. Through his wisdom and discernment he is elevated to second-most-powerful person in Egypt. 

The Haftarah associated with Miketz tells the famous story of King Solomon and the baby claimed by two women (1 Kings 3:15-4:1). Solomon too has just awakened from a prophetic dream, and he too then acts with wisdom and discernment. 

Yet the parallel between these two stories that startled me this year comes from a shared phrase. Upon seeing his brother Benjamin, Joseph’s “compassion ignited” - nichmeru rachamav (Genesis 43:30). And the true mother of the baby (unlike the other woman) also had her compassion ignited - nichmeru rachameha (1 Kings 3:26). In both stories, this suddenly warming and tender compassion is the narrative pivot where truth and justice begin to emerge. 

In both stories, we have characters – Joseph and Solomon, respectively – who, through their wisdom, conduct a compassion test that results in justice. For Joseph, he seeks to know if the brothers who cruelly planned to kill or sell him off had grown in their capacity to honor and care for the youngest brother, Benjamin. They pass the test, and finally we have the first generation of siblings who see themselves as more united than divergent. Strangely though, Joseph is the one who experiences compassion - he is able to forgive his brothers and invite them into wholeness once he recognizes how they have grown from the emotional burden they have carried since treating him so harshly. 

For Solomon, he acts with apparent callousness in order to elicit compassion from the true mother of the baby. When her compassion ignites, the authenticity of her claim stands revealed. The key element here is that whatever it means for compassion to ignite, it isn’t something that can be planned or prepared for or play-acted. It seems to indicate a spontaneous emotional reaction to a deeply felt connection to another being. 

Strikingly, this verb appears in yet one more place in the Hebrew Bible in a similar phrase, this time referring to God. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How surrender you, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah, render you like Zeboiim? I have had a change of heart, all My comfort is ignited (nichmeru nichumai)” (Hoshea 11:8). In this poetic prophecy, God contemplates anger at the people’s idolatry, but ultimately rejects utter destruction (Admah and Zeboiim are deep-cut references to cities destroyed alongside Sodom and Gomorrah). Instead, God passes God’s own compassion test, in a sudden fit of desire-to-give-comfort. 

In this season of war, many of us are experiencing a time of inner tension and tensions within our American Jewish communities. (Psychologist Richard S. Stern mentions in a recent article that he just ran a workshop titled: How to Connect with Other Jews, Even When They Are Wrong and Their Views Will Lead to Catastrophe.) I believe we all want truth and justice to win out, even if we assess the situation differently, and I believe we yearn for a sense of solidarity, both with the Jewish people and with those who largely share progressive values. These biblical stories encode comforting compassion as the key to discovering scenarios where our deepest yearnings are realized. Compassion is at the core of wisdom.

But, how do we ignite our compassion? How do we get better at being spontaneously compassionate? One Buddhist teacher once said, “Enlightenment is a happy accident. We can’t force ourselves to be enlightened, but mindfulness can make us more accident-prone.” Here’s one great resource for ways to be more accident-prone. 

As we move out of Chanukkah, you might imagine little candles inside of those you care about, and when you open your heart to them their flame ignites your feeling of care. Imagine that even as we put the chanukiyah away for the year, we keep adding a candle every single night, another person and another person and another personin an ever-expanding glow of warmth. Through the repeated practice of igniting compassion, we have the capacity to rebuild and rededicate this world to peace. 

Shabbat shalom!

In the Window or on the Table?: Concealing and Revealing

In the lobby of a local community center last weekend, a group of Kavana parents -- participants in our Hanukkah session of Prep & Practice -- sat in a circle and dug into a meaty and timely conversation about Jewish identity. The topic at hand was how each of our families is choosing to celebrate Hanukkah this year... and specifically, how public we should be about our Judaism in this moment.

The specific decisions the group discussed -- for example, whether to light our menorahs in the window or on a table, to what extent we each choose to decorate the outside of our homes for the holiday, and whether/how we'll each share our holiday with non-Jewish friends and neighbors --  are all manifestations of a larger question. As members of a religious minority group in America, most of us have a choice about how "out" to be as Jews, and we are accustomed to shifting our own behavior and language subtly, sometimes even subconsciously, as we move from one context to the next ("code-switching"). This season, the context feels different to many of us; in our post-October 7th world, these questions about how we manage our public-facing Jewish identity -- that is, when we conceal and when we reveal who we really are -- are weighing more heavily on us. [As an aside, I'll note that it is jarring and scary that we're feeling the pinch of antisemitism enough to even spark such thoughts and conversations, and at the same time, we are fortunate that, for most of us, these questions feel new or more acute than ever before in our lifetimes. But all of that is probably a topic for another week...]

Concealing and revealing of identity is a theme that features prominently in this week's Torah portion as well. In Parashat Vayeshev, we embark on the Torah's telling of the Joseph story. This story begins with high drama: Joseph's brothers are jealous of and annoyed by him; they throw him into a pit, sell him into slavery, and he ends up in Egypt. There, after a stint in prison, he ultimately ascends to become the second in command, Pharaoh's right-hand man. This is an astounding position of authority for a non-Egyptian to attain, and the plot of the Joseph story (which will continue to unfold over the coming few weeks) revolves around the fact that Joseph conceals his true identity to those around him such that, later, even his own brothers believe him to be an Egyptian rather than an Israelite and fail to recognize who he really is.

As if one example weren't enough and the Torah needs to make this theme super obvious, Parashat Vayeshev also detours from Joseph's story for a chapter to tell the tale of the heroine Tamar. When her husband dies, she should be entitled to remarry within the family in order to conceive offspring within this tribal line. But when her father-in-law Judah doesn't fulfill this obligation in this regard, Tamar decides to take matters into her own hands, concealing her own identity and dressing as a prostitute, in order to become pregnant through Judah himself (see Gen. 38). 

In our society today, most of us think of healthy communities as being those in which individuals can express their true identities. We celebrate "Coming Out Day," send our kids to schools that espouse the value of diversity, and help draft corporate policies around equitable hiring (just to name a few examples of what this looks like in the year 2023). Indeed, our ancient Jewish texts support this notion. The Hanukkah story, at face value, seems that it would encourage us to be brave and forceful -- like the Maccabees -- in asserting who we are and what we believe in. Similarly, both the Joseph narrative and Tamar's tale ultimately end in big identity reveals. Being able to be open and unabashed in revealing one's true identity represents wholeness and completion; this is how things should be.

However, at the same time, Jewish tradition encodes a kind of pragmatism that gives us permission to make decisions that feel like safe ones. Last weekend with the Prep & Practice parents' group, I shared a short text from the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 21b, which reads: 

The Sages taught: It is a mitzvah to place the Hanukkah lamp at the entrance to one’s house on the outside, so that all can see it. Those who live upstairs place it at the window adjacent to the public domain. And in a time of danger, they can place it on the table and that is sufficient to fulfill the obligation.

It's clear in this text that the ideal is to be open and public about one's identity. Indeed, pirsum ha-nes, "publicizing the miracle," is a core mitzvah of the holiday of Hanukkah, and if you have the opportunity to light your menorah facing out towards the street or the public square, that is the best way to do so. 

But as we discussed this text on Sunday, many in our learning circle found it comforting to know that Jewish tradition also acknowledges that there are times when it's okay to let go of that ideal. This reminder -- that there have been times of danger in our Jewish past, that what we're experiencing right now is not without precedent, and that our tradition already contains the mechanisms for dealing with these realities -- felt like a source of solace to our group. We talked about the fact that many of us are here only because we had ancestors who knew when to keep their heads down or to go into hiding, when to conceal their Jewish identities in ways both small or large. Parashat Vayeshev underscores this notion, because the Torah's plot only moves forward by virtue of our heroes' concealment. Had Tamar not gone undercover, she never would have given birth to Judah's descendants Perez and Zerach. And, had Joseph not hidden his identity and become the vizier of Egypt under the Egyptian name Zaphnath-Paaneah, his brothers might never have survived the famine in the land of Canaan and gone on to become the Israelite nation. 

The bottom line, then, is that our tradition contains a sacred interplay between concealing and revealing. This comes through in the stories of Joseph and Tamar, and also in our traditions about lighting the menorah. We aspire to live in a world in which we can make our full selves and our full identities manifest in all times and all settings, and yet we acknowledge that we live in a real world which is imperfect... so sometimes we need to do whatever we need to do in order to feel safe. We are granted the permission to use our own discretion in deciding when to conceal or and when to reveal our identity.

In this year in particular, I hope you will hear this message as a validating one. I imagine that many of us will choose to light our menorahs in the window -- in the place where our small Hanukkah lights can shine most brightly, lighting up the darkness of night. Doing so may feel like a micro-act of strength and defiance... a little taste of Maccabbean heroism that is empowering and perfect for our moment! For others, the Talmud's permission to light the menorah on the table -- especially taken together with the knowledge that Joseph and Tamar both conceal their true selves for the purpose of advancing our people's plot line -- may be reassuring in this year. Even if concealing doesn't feel great, sometimes it's what we need to do, and the mitzvah absolutely still "counts" when done in this way.

In addition, I hope that these themes will continue to resonate in a variety of ways, throughout Hanukkah and beyond. For example, many Kavana partners have spoken to me in recent weeks about the challenges of managing personal relationships with friends, family members, and colleagues who hold very different political views. This theme of concealing and revealing might be a helpful lens for thinking about when we choose to keep our political beliefs close to our chests for the sake of preserving relationships, and when we need to assert our beliefs more forcefully in order to feel whole in who we are.

Finally -- and particularly if we are finding it hard to be fully ourselves in public spaces -- it's all the more important right now that we find places where we don't have to conceal any part of who we are. This is certainly one of the value propositions of Kavana: a richly diverse Jewish community where we welcome folks to "come as you are" and show up fully in the context of an embracing Jewish community.

Whether you choose to place your menorah in your window or on a table (and again, either is fine -- the choice is yours to make), I hope that you find a way to light it meaningfully this evening and for each night of this Hanukkah holiday. Together, may our small lights shine bright, illuminating a pathway in our world from concealment towards the revealing of light, love, and truth.

Chag Hanukkah sameach, and Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

The Walking Wounded: Limping into Light

This week's parasha, Vayishlach, features the famous story of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious being in the dark of night. Bible scholar and translator Robert Alter highlights that Jacob's adversary resists identification: 

Appearing to Jacob in the dark of the night, before the morning when Esau will be reconciled with Jacob, he is the embodiment of portentous antagonism in Jacob’s dark night of the soul. He is obviously, in some sense, a doubling of Esau as adversary, but he is also a doubling of all with whom Jacob has had to contend, and he may equally well be an externalization of all that Jacob has to wrestle with within himself.

In other words, the Torah's text allows us to imagine that Jacob's struggle is simultaneously with an external enemy -- the "other," Esau, the twin with whom Jacob has wrestled since their days in the womb -- and also represents a conflict within, a manifestation of his own internal wrestling.

This notion -- of a dramatic wrestling happening on multiple levels at once, in the midst of great darkness -- resonates so deeply for me at this moment. Like so many of you, I have continued to be gripped by news events of the past week: a tense ceasefire, a perverse daily ritual of the exchanging of lists and demands and real live humans, tension down to the wire, and now the horrible violence of rocket barrages and airstrikes and artillery shelling all over again. (All of this has cast me back in the place where I found myself in the earliest weeks of the war... with sleepless nights and waking up to check my phone for middle-of-the-night updates). As new reports and survivor testimonies from October 7th continue to come to light, and as we witness ongoing terror -- both physical and psychological -- I continue to feel angry and outraged by Hamas's cruelty and sheer evil. Reading Israeli media, I am also horrified over and over again by -- and want to fight back against -- the rhetoric and policies of extremists within the Israeli government as well. Closer to home in America, I continue to feel internal struggles and in-fighting playing out within the Jewish community as disparate voices jockey for power. And I'm sure that all of us are navigating scary antisemitism, reeling in the wake of the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, and worrying over how to best uphold and preserve our own American democracy. What does this mean for our well-being and our sense of self? Wrestling abounds!

Here is how Jacob's wrestling story unfolds in the parasha (or click here to read the text of Genesis 32:25-33 in Hebrew as well):

Jacob was left alone. And a figure wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” Said the other, “What is your name?” He replied, “Jacob.” Said he, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.” Jacob asked, “Pray tell me your name.” But he said, “You must not ask my name!” And he took leave of him there. So Jacob named the place Peniel, meaning, “I have seen a divine being face to face, yet my life has been preserved.”

Perhaps a reader of Torah might think that this entire wrestling episode has merely been a dream. However, the next line makes it clear that this is not the case; when Jacob wakes up, he finds that, in fact, his injury remains: "The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip." 

The pshat (plain meaning) of the text is that although Jacob's sparring partner (whether external and/or internal) disappears at daybreak, Jacob's injury does not. His limp is clear as could be, in the light of the day. Jacob's wound is real.

Word-plays abound in the text. Jacob (Yaakov, in Hebrew), whose own name is derived from the word for "heel," now stands at the banks of the Jabbok River (Yabok, meaning "crooked") and walks away both injured and walking crookedly himself. I'm drawn to Jacob's injury this week, because I think many of us are walking around in the world with a "crooked gait," feeling profoundly scarred and wounded, perhaps permanently(?), in light of the events of the past 56 days. Like Jacob, we find ourselves among the walking wounded (even as we continue to witness others whose wounds are even more direct and profound than our own).

In thinking about Jacob and his limp this week, I re-discovered a beautiful Dvar Torah written by my beloved teacher, Rabbi Steve Sager (of blessed memory). For anyone who is interested in delving more deeply into this Torah story and the images it evokes, I do recommend reading his essay -- entitled "Heroes who Limp" -- in its entirety. (Some particular gems include the connection he draws to angels who -- according to our midrashic tradition -- have no leg joints, and his discussion of how some rabbinic commentators seek out evidence that Jacob heals quickly from his wrestling injury. In contrast, Rabbi Sager writes: "I prefer a hero who limps, and I seek out the company of those teachers who allow me my hero.") 

To me, the most precious contribution my teacher makes here is in pairing Jacob's wrestling story with a poem from contemporary Israeli poet Rivka Miriam. (She published this poem in 2007; Steve wrote about it in the context of this parasha in 2018; for me, reading the poem now -- in the context of this current Israeli war -- is a different experience altogether.) Here is Rivka Miriam's beautiful poem, with Steve's translation into English... and for those who are interested, you're also invited to click here to access the poem in Hebrew:

And in the inner room we keep Moses' heaviness of mouth,

Isaac's weak eyes, and Jacob's dragging leg.

And when war stirs us, it is to the inner room we go

to examine them closely.

For each one who goes out to battle wraps himself in just these.

In Steve Sager's words, Rivka Miriam thus "preserves Jacob's limp as an asset, not an infirmity." Through the poem, the battle wounds, frailties, and past traumas of our ancestors are transformed into our protective gear. 

After all, Jacob walks away from his wrestlings transformed in two ways. Yes, he now has a permanent limp, but also, through the very same struggle, he also earns a blessing for himself, one which results in a new name (Yisrael) and a new sense of who he is in the world. Thus, Jacob's limp becomes a treasure. Quoting Rabbi Steve Sager once again: "It is nothing less than a struggle-with-an-angel to wrestle forth the blessing that emerges from the weak place. If we remember that we grow -- skin and bone -- most vigorously around the wounded spot, then the limp itself can be its own blessed reminder and encouragement, sunrise after sunrise."

Like Jacob, we -- members of the Jewish tribe -- have been injured profoundly, and in many different ways, through our recent wrestlings. Like our ancestor, may we come to find that these injuries have the potential to become a source of strength and blessing as well. Even limping, may we propel ourselves and the world forward, from darkness into ever-increasing light.

Shabbat shalom, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

P.S. - There are many important divrei torah to be written this week. One that I didn't choose to address above -- but I also can't completely refrain from mentioning -- is that this week's parasha also features the story of the rape of Dina (see Genesis 34). The sexual violence and rapes that transpired on October 7th -- and how these have been downplayed and ignored -- is another important story. Many organizations in NYC (including my alma mater, JTS) are hosting a protest this coming Monday in front of the UN entitled "#MeToo unless you are a Jew." Last Shabbat, my colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous -- from Kavana's Jewish Emergent Network sister community IKAR in Los Angeles -- delivered an incredibly powerful sermon on this topic and also the danger of ignoring, diminishing and marginalizing women's voices in a number of other contexts. It's called "Women Wage Peace" and it's a must-hear -- please do me a favor and find 20 minutes to watch, and then let's talk about it. (Also, in case you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the conversation between her and Ezra Klein on his podcast episode entitled "The Sermons I Needed to Hear Right Now" -- and expect that her Torah will resonate deeply with our Kavana community.)

P.P.S. - Don't forget that Hanukkah begins next Thursday evening at sunset. Looking forward to bringing some light into the world together!

Escaping from Laban the Aramean

The period since October 7th has been the hardest one of my rabbinic career. Each week has had a tenor of its own, and the past week, alone, has felt like a month. Within it, I, along with so many of you, have found myself mired in local politics around Israel, with the Seattle City Council and within the Seattle Jewish community. The rise in antisemitism has hit very close to home now, with the vandalism of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Synagogue on Mercer Island this week (oy!), on top of suspicious packages received over the last weeks by multiple local Jewish institutions. And last but not least, for days now, we have been waiting with bated breath for a ceasefire to take effect and for hostages to be released from Gaza. On this day after Thanksgiving, it is wonderful to be able to give thanks for the 25 individuals -- 12 Thai citizens and 13 Israeli women and children -- who were just freed from captivity, even as we wait to bring home the scores of other hostages still being held by Hamas.

As we continue in our Torah cycle this week with Parashat Vayetze, we follow the patriarch Jacob as he journeys in and out of the land. Sandwiched between two chapters of the ongoing family conflict between Jacob and his twin brother Esau is... yet another family drama: this one between Jacob and his uncle, Laban. 

At the start of this week's Torah portion, Jacob is fleeing from Esau, fearing revenge after having tricked him out of his blessing and birthright. He sets out to the birthplace of his mother Rebecca in Haran (modern-day Turkey). There, he immediately falls in love with Rachel at a well, who turns out to be the daughter of his uncle. Laban promises Rachel to Jacob as a wife in exchange for seven years of labor. However, when this period of indentured servitude is up, Laban tricks Jacob, switching out Rachel for Leah at the wedding and requiring Jacob to work yet another seven years in order to be granted Rachel's hand in marriage.

For some twenty years, Jacob continues to work for his uncle Laban. During this time, Jacob amassesses quite the entourage: four wives, twelve children, camels, donkeys and flocks. Following the birth of Joseph (son #11), Jacob decides it's finally time to leave and head back towards his home in the land of Canaan (modern-day Israel). He says to Laban: "shalcheini v'eilcha el m'komi ul'artzi; t'na et nashai v'et y'ladai asher avad'ti ot'cha" -- "release me that I may go to my place and my land; give me my wives and my children, for whom I have served you" (Gen. 30:25-26).

In this call for release from servitude, the ancient rabbis hear a foreshadowing echo of the Exodus story from Egypt. Based on this connection, Jacob's uncle "Laban the Aramean" (as he is called in this week's parasha) features prominently in Passover haggadah:

"Go out and learn what Lavan the Aramean sought to do to Ya'akov, our father; since Pharaoh only decreed [the death sentence] on the males but Lavan sought to uproot the whole [people]. As it is stated (Deuteronomy 26:5), 'An Aramean was destroying my father and he went down to Egypt, and he resided there with a small number and he became there a nation, great, powerful and numerous.'"

You may well recognize this passage from the Passover seder. Although the full story of Laban and Jacob is rather complex (and worth a read in its entirety, if you aren't already familiar with it), in the rabbinic imagination, Laban is transformed from a simple trickster and liar into a quintessential enemy of the Jewish people. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, does not mince words when he claims that "Laban is, in effect, the first antisemite" (click here if you'd like to read his full essay). 

As to what we learn from this narrative, Rabbi Sacks draws out the following conclusion: "If Laban is the eternal paradigm of hatred, then Jacob is the eternal paradigm of the human capacity to survive the hatred of others." 

This is a beautiful and important sentiment to remind ourselves of as we move into this particular Shabbat. As much as these recent weeks have been filled with obstacles, horrors, and heaviness, they have also highlighted our community's strength and resilience. 

On a webinar last week, Joel Migdal and Peggy Brill, speaking from their home in Israel, described the inspiring ways that Israeli civil society has mobilized since October 7th. Although the Israeli government has widely been described as "missing in action" during these recent weeks, the Israeli protest movement that had been organizing weekly anti-government demonstrations for nine months transformed overnight into a well-coordinated volunteer network, filling nearly every void. Some 60% of Israelis have volunteered in the last month. Here in the American Jewish community too, we are trying to figure out what solidarity and resilience look like. In the wake of the awful graffiti at Herzl-Ner Tamid, volunteers showed up to power wash and repaint the exterior of the building, and interfaith colleagues have reached out to express their solidarity.

Today, I am so very grateful for the release of this first large group of hostages. We are reminded that in our Jewish tradition, pidyon shevuyim, the redemption of captives, is considered a highest-level mitzvah; we can recite the blessing: Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam matir asurim; Praised are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who releases the captive. In addition, I am thankful for the temporary ceasefire, and very much supportive of efforts to bring in more humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people of Gaza, who have suffered in ways that are unimaginable over these last weeks.

Without a doubt, there will be more hard days to come. We will continue to pray - and push - for the release of the many hostages who remain in captivity. We will do everything in our power to speak out against antisemitism, along with all other forms of hatred and bigotry, in America and around the world. This week, may we find strength in Jacob’s escape from Laban and the continuation of his journey, as we continue our own. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Rebecca, Philosopher of Tragedy

“But the children struggled in Rebecca’s womb, and she said, “Why - this - I am?” She went to inquire of God, and God answered her: Two nations are in your womb…” (Genesis 25:22-23)

“It is much easier to live in a world in which one side is good and the other evil than it is to embrace complexity…Listening to and reading many of the folks [who see this conflict as between an all-good side and an all-bad side], I’ve been tempted to excoriate them for their moral and intellectual laziness. But under that laziness lies something many of us can actually relate to - a fear of encountering the world as fundamentally tragic.” Rabbi Shai Held

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy.” W.B. Yeats

Oof. I know that’s a gloomy way to open a teaching. Yet at the heart of our ancestor Rebecca’s experience of nurturing new life is a painful awareness of likely enmity between her two children. She is literally conceiving life as a tragedy. 

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg notes Rebecca’s “enigmatic cry…a bare, rudimentary three-word riddle: Lama zeh anokhi - ‘Why - this - I am?’”

Many commentators try to solve the riddle, mostly by reading it as a form of existential angst. Rebecca struggles to make sense of the multiple narratives she embodies. In being unable to clearly see herself as whole, unified, and coherent, she questions her own being. 

Zornberg, though, brings in a remarkable teaching from the Maharal (16th century, Prague). “Maharal…expresses some dismay at [these teachings’] existential skepticism. He suggests a modulated translation of anokhi: “Why am I sitting passively, why do I not investigate? It is my task to seek out explanations - and she went to seek God.” In Maharal’s reading, Rebecca confronts the despair of the self, and discovers that the question of meaning has a dynamic force. Her despair is not to circle hollowly upon itself, but to launch searchings and researching, inquiries for God.”

Through Zornberg’s interpretation of Maharal, we discover Rebecca the Philosopher. The experience of feeling torn - of seeing a tragic world rather than one with obvious heroes and villains - has the potential to awaken in us, as in Rebecca, the urge to investigate nothing less than the meaning of life itself. 

I don’t want to valorize tragedy in any way. But what I see in Rabbi Shai Held’s comment, in the line from William Butler Yeats’ autobiography, and in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s essay, is a sense that naming tragedy as part of our experience helps us see more clearly. A heroes-and-villains worldview (which is clearly compelling across a wide political spectrum) motivates us to act but doesn’t connect us to reality. It is a story-telling version of spiritual bypass, "the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks". 

There’s a seemingly comedic commentary on why exactly the twin fetuses were struggling with each other, from the Tur HaAroch (14th century, Spain). He notes that Esau is described as hairy, while Jacob is smooth. Obviously, then, Esau’s hairs were poking Jacob in the womb and causing all the agitation! 

I shared this teaching at a staff meeting earlier this week, and after some (mild) laughter, Rabbi Rachel plucked some profundity out of the interpretation: At the root of their conflict was a feeling of discomfort. 

I don’t know a single person in Jewish circles who is feeling particularly comfortable right now. When I think about what wisdom Rebecca Imeinu, our ancestor, teacher, and guide, might offer, these words come to mind:

May your discomfort lead you to inquire. 

May your inquiry lead to learning. 

May your learning never lapse into too much comfort. 

To encounter the world as it is with all its pain and promise, is also to encounter the Source of Life. Hold the pain tenderly, and pursue the promise as honestly as you can.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Isaac - and Ishmael

Parashat Chayei Sarah opens with the death of the matriarch Sarah. Many classical commentators connect her passing to the Akedah (the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac) from last week's Torah portion. In doing so, they make the claim that Sarah dies because she is either unwilling or unable to live in a world that is as dangerous, unreliable, capricious and cruel as the one she experiences around her. 

In contrast to Sarah, the other characters in the story must live on. They (like we) must forge a path forward from a dark and hard place, in the midst of a grand narrative featuring dramatic family dysfunction. After all, Abraham has now nearly killed a son not once but twice: first Ishmael and then Isaac. Both Isaac and Ishmael, it seems, bear the scars of their past traumas. And, with the tension between their mothers having pitted them against each other literally since before they were born, it's hard to imagine that these half-siblings could possibly want much to do with each other again.

For all of these reasons, the conclusion of this week's Torah portion feels surprising. In a book-end to Sarah's death at the beginning, at the end of Parashat Chayei Sarah, Abraham dies at the ripe old age of 175.  The text records: "vayikb'ru oto yitzchak v'yishmael banav," "and they buried him, Isaac and Ishmael his sons" (Gen 25:9). Imagine... that by the time Abraham dies, Ishmael and Isaac have somehow reconciled with one another, enough that they can take on a shared task of working side-by-side to dig their father's grave. (Noting that the text explicitly mentions that Abraham dies "contented," the Etz Hayim Chumash asks: "Can we see this as a model for family reconciliations?")

Not only do Ishmael and Isaac come together to bury their father, but a close reading of the text reveals that Isaac has arrived to his father's funeral from a very specific location. A few verses before Abraham's death, we learn that "Isaac had just come back from the vicinity of Be'er-lechai-roi" (Gen 24:62), and as soon as the funeral is over, he returns to that place: "After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac. And Isaac settled near Be'er-lahai-roi" (Gen 25:11). Be'er-lahai-roi is not just any place; this is the name of the well where God had saved a thirsty Hagar when Sarah first became jealous and expelled her from the household, some 90 years prior, according to the Torah's internal chronology. This special place is also connected to Ishmael's birth story, as it's the spot where a messenger of God first announced to Hagar that she would bear a child and should name him Ishmael (Gen 16:14). 

Pause for a moment to consider what this means. Isaac - having narrowly escaped his own killing - has been living his adult life in the very place that is associated with his brother Ishmael's existence in the world. The Torah doesn't give us more details than that about what Isaac been doing in Be'er-lahai-roi, but we can imagine that, during the intervening years, these two trauma survivors, Isaac and Ishmael, have taken refuge with one another, perhaps swapping stories of their tough upbringings, complaining about their parents. Maybe their own traumatic pasts have created an opening for a real relationship to form between them, such that the fresh loss of their father Abraham at the end of our parasha is enough to bring them into explicit reunion as they work together to complete a shared task of mutual importance.

I have been thinking about Ishmael and Isaac a lot over the past few weeks. As I've shared previously, I believe we're currently seeing an unprecedented degree of polarization around the events happening in Israel and Gaza. Social media feeds only seek to reinforce beliefs that this horrible moment we're witnessing now is all the fault of "one side"; many oppressive voices -- on both the extreme right and left -- insist (incorrectly) that if you believe X, you must also do, say, or support Y. It's coming to feel more and more to me like there are smaller proxy battles playing out within the American Jewish community too -- one that is largely (although not entirely) generational. I continue to believe that binaries and zero-sum-game thinking don't serve us at this moment -- it's not how we've ever practiced spirituality or Judaism in this community, and it doesn't ring true with the lessons of our Torah.

The more polarizing and toxic the American discourse has become, the less grounded it feels to me in the realities of the Middle East. Recently, I'm finding myself drawn towards Israeli and Palestinian voices, in an attempt to center the experiences of the human beings who are living through violence and trauma in their day to day (in a way that we simply aren't, here). I am also finding real data helpful. For example, this week I attended a webinar with Professor Khalil Shikaki (a preeminent expert on Palestinian public opinion) and learned that Hamas's approval ratings/popularity were at a historic low-point among both West Bank and Gazan Palestinians just prior to October 7th; I also learned that polling from recent weeks shows that 4 in 5 Israelis blame the Netanyahu government for the mass infiltration of Hamas terrorists on that day. These inputs support my deep convictions that the only future for Israelis and Palestinians is one in which both peoples can live in peace and security, with justice, freedom and dignity. Their fates are inextricably linked. It's not a contradiction to want to see hostages returned to Israel AND to want an end to the bombing of Gaza, to condemn Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups as terrorist organizations AND to condemn the far-right-wing Israeli government (which has allowed both settlers and its own army to kill hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank in recent weeks).

I am appreciating the voices of Palestinians and Israelis who "get" that the descendents of Ishmael and Isaac seem destined to need to find a way to live together in the small strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (Pro-Palestinian calls of "from the river to the sea" that demand Jewish erasure and the Israeli government officials who promote the idea of "Greater Israel" and support policies that result in Palestinian erasure both feel equally morally repugnant to me.) In last week's New Yorker magazine, a long-form article by David Remnick (entitled "Letter from Israel: In the Cities of Killing") featured two such voices. Retired Israeli army general Yair Golan is quoted as saying: "The most frustrating thing to me is the inability of anyone to envision how these two peoples can live together. We are not going anywhere. And they are not going anywhere. Occupation is not a solution. Our peoples should both be led by sensible majorities, but both people are being led by their extremists. This is the challenge of Israel." Palestinian scholar Sari Nusseibeh, similarly, explains that Hamas and violent extremism, in general, will not recede without a political resolution; in his words: "No matter what, we will end up where we started, with the Palestinians and the Israelis living here together and needing to find a proper formula."

I have no illusions that finding a path forward will be simple. The horrors of October 7th for Israelis (and for Jews everywhere) and the national grief and trauma of every day since in Israel -- as rockets continue to fall across the country, some 240 civilian hostages remain in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of reservists have been called up for military duty -- cannot be overstated. Nor can the casualties in Gaza (some 40% of which are children), the mass displacement of an estimated 1.6 million people, and the enormous scale destruction of homes, buildings and infrastructure... the Palestinians of Gaza are suffering at levels we here in the U.S. cannot even begin to fathom. And also, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this moment rests upon mountains of pasts traumas: the Holocaust, expulsion from Arab countries, pogroms and more on the Jewish side, and massacres, the Nakba ("catastrophe") of 1948, the mass displacement of 1967, and more for Palestinians. 

And yet, there are still bold leaders trying to articulate a vision for a shared future. Like many of them, I find hope in the observation that so many times in the past, unexpected openings and overtures towards peace have happened in the wake of great tragedies and violence (for example, the peace agreement between Israel and Sadat/Egypt was signed in 1977, still in the wake of the 1973 war between the two countries; the First Intifada of the 1980s gave way to the Oslo Accords). In order to get there, we must make space in our world -- both here and there -- for a wide range of non-extremist positions, so that we can build coalitions to combat extremism everywhere it manifests, whether it is Jewish extremism or Muslim extremism, Israeli extremism or Palestinian extremism, extremism on the political left or extremism on the political right.

If you are interested in learning more, there are many organizations committed to such work. Here are but two such examples/invitations from organizations that Kavana has partnered with many times in the past:

• This Sunday at 5pm Pacific Time, the New Israel Fund is sponsoring a conversation with the Arab-Jewish grassroots movement in Israel called Standing Together (Omdim Beyachad / Naqif Ma'an). At a time of extreme tension and strife, leaders Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green are as committed as ever to promoting a message of a shared, equal and just society, and real work and organizing to make it so. Click here for more info and to register.
  

• Last week, Combatants for Peace hosted a conversation entitled "Solidarity: A Path to Liberation," featuring their Palestinian and Israeli co-founders. Souli Khatib encouraged listeners to hold fast to their values, especially now, saying: "I feel this can offer an alternative to other people - rather than the voice of darkness or the voice of us vs. them." Click here to watch the recording anytime.

As we enter into this Shabbat, I am clinging to the hopeful ending to Parashat Chayei Sarah: the one that features Isaac and Ishmael hanging out together in Be'er-lahai-roi and uniting together to bury their father Abraham. I hope and pray that if they could find healing and reconciliation in the wake of their loss-upon-trauma, we can be courageous enough to learn from their example today. I hope and pray for an end to the terrible violence we are witnessing now. I hope and pray that we can hold fast to our values as we build a "big tent" that can combat polarizing forces and extremist tendencies in our society. I commit to doing my part from here in America to support the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael who live together in the Holy Land, such that someday -- God-willing -- they will be able to work together, side-by-side, as they undertake the task of building a shared society where there is space for all.

Wishing us all a Shabbat of comfort and healing, prayers and hope, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

P.S. For the past few weeks, Rabbi Jay and I have been focused on providing pastoral care for the Kavana community. The email above represents a conscious pivot: an invitation to engage with Torah, with current events, and with the Israelis and Palestinians who are most directly involved in a sensible, non-extremist, non-proxy way. And yet, we know that many folks in our community are still struggling mightily under the weight of this time. If you need pastoral support, please know that you're not alone and don't hesitate to reach out to either of us.

What Do I Know?

“On October 6 I knew so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Rabbi Shira Stutman said on a recent episode of her podcast Chutzpod!, “…and now what I feel at my core is that I just. don’t. know.”

In an awful synchronicity, Jews have been processing Hamas’s pogrom against Israelis and the resulting war through reading chapter by chapter from the beginning of the Torah. October 7 was Simchat Torah, the “joy of the Torah”, which marks the moment we finish our sacred book only to start reading it all over again, even as this year we felt the world had changed forever. 

Each parashah holds lessons - the origins of violence when Cain kills his brother Abel, the lonely isolation of Noah’s ark, the moment when God tells Abraham to journey to his new home, what will be known as the land of Israel. 

There are many possible lessons in this week’s parashah, Vayera, but what caught my heart’s attention as I read through it was the repetition of the Hebrew word yada, “to know.” It appears ten (10) times, yet each time it seems to mean something slightly different. As if “knowing” isn’t so precise, or perhaps there are many ways of knowing, many practices of knowing. 

I want to focus on the first and last instance of knowing in this Torah portion, because they are both about God knowing Abraham, but in very different ways.

The very first instance of “knowing” is strange. God is about to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gemorrah, but first shares the plan with Abraham, to test how he would react. God muses, “For I have known him, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of God by doing what is just and right, in order that God may bring about for Abraham what has been promised him” (Genesis 18:19).

What does it mean that God knows Abraham? Of course God knows Abraham! God and Abraham have been talking for quite a while by now!

Rashi clarifies: “This is an expression denoting "affection"... Still the primary meaning of these terms connected with the root yada is really that of knowing, for whoever holds a person in affection attaches them to himself, so that he knows him well and is familiar with him.”

God knowing Abraham isn’t about facts first, but about the primacy of relationship. God cares about Abraham, and therefore gets to know him better. Caring about someone precedes knowing or understanding them. 

When knowing precedes relationship, however, we don’t encounter a human being but just a data point. 

The final appearance of knowing comes after Abraham follows God’s directive to sacrifice his son Isaac. At the last moment, a ram is substituted for the child, yet the story leaves a horrifying aftertaste. God sums up the results of this test by saying, “Now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). 

Rashi again offers a fascinating perspective: “From now I have a reply to give to… the nations who wonder at the love I bear you: I have an opening of the mouth (i.e. I have an excuse, a reason to give them) now that they see that you are a God-fearing man.”

God knows Abraham, meaning God has a particular affection for him. By the end of our story, God knows that Abraham is God-fearing, which is a useful excuse to explain why God has affection for him. Here’s the thing: if Rashi is right, God’s affection for Abraham is not actually tied primarily to his “worthy” character!

Many of us are furiously working on knowing more right now, about the history of Israel-Palestine, about how to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza or how to protest them, how to define antisemitism and fight against it, how to see hope for the return of hostages, how to acknowledge the suffering of so many Palestinians who have no love for Hamas, how to find a path forward for safety and sovereignty for all peoples living there.

All of that is very important, and I’m engaged in it too. But I feel like quite often this form of knowing is focused on finding “worthy” reasons to support what you already hope to be true. 

I want to follow God’s example here, and prioritize love over knowing. The world will change when we know our people, not about our people. The world will change when we dedicate our time to affectionate love for them (whoever they may be) and practice that love ferociously. When we send care packages and have conversations. When we listen for stories and not for statistics. 

Practicing love creates more capacity for love. Practicing love creates more capacity for love. So love your people ferociously. And then start to ask if there are others you can bring into your heart. 

Let me be clear. I think there are people deserving of our hate right now. But I think that number is smaller than our first instinct might assume. Yehuda Amichai once wrote in a poem, “The place where we are right / is hard and trampled / like a yard. / But doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a mold, a plow.” 

What do I know? I know a hope that enough of us will turn to love, and cultivate humble uncertainty out of which something new and unexpected might grow.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Reflections from Rabbi Rachel: Pluralistic Community at a time of Brokenness

As we prepare to move into Shabbat, it's a gorgeous fall day here in Seattle -- I'm currently looking out my office window at leaves of every shade of green, gold, and red against the backdrop of a crisp blue sky! And yet, this continues to feel like a very heavy time. In the hopes that this approach is still feeling valuable and helpful, I'd like to continue holding up a mirror to the Kavana community and reflecting back some of what I am seeing from my vantage point.

This week, it does feel like we are turning a corner, emotionally. In the Kavana office, we had already been talking about the need to move from "sprint" into "marathon" mode, as we continue supporting our community in the wake of a still-evolving crisis for Jews worldwide. The visceral shock, rawness, and anguish of the days immediately following October 7th have for most -- although admittedly not all -- members of our community given way to a different kind of existential sadness and grief. I saw an Instagram post yesterday with the text: "We need to tikkun the f*%k out of this olam," which made me laugh but also gets at the deep and true reality that for so many Jews, the world feels profoundly broken right now, perhaps more than ever before in our lifetimes.

The pastoral concerns that Rabbi Jay and I were fielding a few weeks ago -- individuals reeling from the news of Israeli relatives and acquaintances having been killed or taken hostage, many reports of insomnia and numbness, etc. -- have given way to new ones. This week, I have fielded literally dozens of phone calls, texts and emails, most of which relate to questions of what it means to engage in the world, in this moment, as Jews. 

A number of you have reached out for support as you've worked to draft internal memos for your companies, organizations, or departments; others have shared some very poorly drafted (sometimes just disappointing, and sometimes scary or provoking) such memos and statements. Some of you are fearful; others are lamenting the loss of friendships or seeking advice about how to maintain relationships with relatives with whom you profoundly disagree. 

I've received many videos from Kavana folks, via text message and WhatsApp, of pro-Palestinian rallies and protests, ranging in location from downtown Seattle to college campuses around the country; these videos have been accompanied by either explicit or implicit boundary questions, about when speech and activism shades into antisemitism and becomes dangerous for Jews. (If this is indeed your question, I am pleased to re-share an article I've recommended before, entitled "How to tell when criticism of Israel is actually anti-Semitism," by Rabbi Jill Jacobs.) 

Others of you are watching American politics carefully, sharing with me videos and statements (including Barack Obama's "Thoughts on Israel and Gaza," which I found particularly eloquent), and noting, with a variety of emotional responses, how various elected officials have voted with regard to U.S. aid for Israel. Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis (who represents Queen Anne, where Kavana is headquartered) reached out to me this week to hear about how our local Jewish community is navigating this time, and we had a productive discussion about the role that local government leaders can play in ensuring the safety of all of Seattle's residents, including and especially members of the Jewish and Muslim communities and those of Palestinian descent.

Shifting gears somewhat, several members of our community have also wondered out-loud this week whether Kavana will take a specific stance on what Israel should do next, or whether the community has signed onto any petitions or advocacy statements. In short, the answer so far is no. Over the last few weeks, Kavana has maintained a posture that has been largely communal and pastoral.... which is to say that first and foremost, we see it as our core mission to take care of our people and to forge local Jewish community. We do understand the urgency of this moment, though, and since the question has been posed several times, I want to offer a bit more context:

In contrast to most other Jewish congregations, Kavana is a non-denominational and explicitly pluralistic community. On the religious front, this means that our folks come from a wide range of backgrounds and have very divergent practices and preferences -- and we like it this way! This is the reason, for example, that we offer different "flavors" of Shabbat services on different weekends of the month, and a whole array of options to choose from on the High Holidays. Our goal is to support people in navigating the landscape of Jewish tradition and finding what's meaningful to them, without assuming that the answers have to be the same for everyone. Sometimes we talk about this aspect of Kavana's approach as "personalized Judaism in a community context." Admittedly, holding political differences with a single spiritual community can be harder, but here too, we aim to support a wide array of viewpoints. 

Historically, Kavana's responses to social justice issues of all sorts have emerged in a grassroots way; whenever there's been sufficient consensus around a particular issue -- as we've had, for example, around immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and racial justice -- we've been able to do solid legislative and advocacy work as a community. Around the "hot" topic of Israel/Palestine, though, we probably see a wider range of perspectives and views than in any other arena. I do believe that our intentional community is founded on many shared values. I'm certain, for example, that everyone within the Kavana community longs for peace and justice, cares deeply about the future of the Jewish people, and sees the humanity of -- and empathizes with the suffering of -- both Israelis and Palestinians. Right now, though, this is translating into some very different "calls to action." From dozens and dozens of conversations, my impression is that most Kavana folks currently seem to support some kind of Israeli military operation to root out Hamas, while simultaneously urging Israel to try to curb the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. (This is my personal take, at least for now; earlier this week I signed onto T'ruah's "Open Letter from North American Rabbis and Cantors Responding to the Crisis in Israel and Gaza" as an individual.) That said, there is also a passionate voice from within Kavana calling for a total ceasefire and an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza. These disagreements about which policies are most likely to succeed in helping Israel and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace, and about which are most realistic, are not insignificant. Somehow, we must learn how to live in community with one another across these political differences, just as we have navigated religious differences in our pluralistic framework.

Over the coming weeks, we will continue working at this in a number of ways:

• We will connect Kavana folks up with one another for activism. If you're looking for "your people" with whom to gather and take action, let us know. There are Kavana folks who are showing up at the Federal Building daily on weekdays for a "Bring Them Home Now" campaign (UnXeptable, the organization that had been rallying for democracy and against judicial reforms has now morphed into this work to free the hostages). There are others who are organizing a local IfNotNow chapter and mobilizing to demand that President Biden and Congress call for an immediate ceasefire. Whatever your interest, if we know of others within Kavana who are like-minded, we're happy to link you up.
  

• We urge you to invest in face-to-face community-building and relationships, in a way that's supportive of your needs. This might mean showing up for the special Singing/Healing Circle this coming Monday evening, a learning event, or Kabbalat Shabbat next Friday night. I especially want to plug the "Unlearning Jewish Anxiety" weekend with Dr. Caryn Aviv that's coming up the weekend of November 10-12 -- this event was already planned, but the content feels more relevant than ever in this fraught moment. Additionally, I recommend reaching out to a friend and taking a walk together, or grabbing coffee, or setting up a Zoom call... and if you need a new connection, ping us and we'll try to help you find one. Whatever you choose, I highly recommend that you make it a face-to-face interaction, as social media is a particularly polarizing and awful place to be interacting right now.
  

• Once you're ready, practice engaging in a conversation with someone whose politics are different from your own. Some people have seen their previous views affirmed and strengthened over these last few weeks, but in very divergent ways; many others are feeling shaken, and are now questioning long-held axioms and truths. Deep listening to someone else in our own Jewish community, but whose views diverge from your own, can help to strengthen a muscle that will be very important for Kavana as we continue in the "marathon" phase of this time. 
  

• Soon we'll be turning communal attention to supporting one another. This idea emerged at last week's Kavana board meeting, that so often we have gathered to cook for others (whether that's community members at times of illness or loss, or residents of a Tiny Home Village), but that right now, perhaps what we really need most is to tend to one another. Stay tuned for some special opportunities for Kavana partners to participate in cooking parties and communal meals, as we seek positive outlets and offer mutual support to one another at this time of great hurt and need. 

Lastly, we continue to turn to Torah for inspiration and to ground ourselves in our tradition. This week, we read Parashat Lech Lecha, the beginning of Abraham's journey. This Torah portion is chock full of tensions and contradictions. In Genesis 12, the land is promised to Abraham and the text also acknowledges the presence of other inhabitants ("the Canaanites were then in the land"). As we explored this Wednesday evening in Living Room Learning through words of Rabbi Shai Held, this parasha also pairs a warning that the Israelites someday will be "strangers in a land not theirs" and oppressed (Gen. 15:13-14) with a cautionary tale about how they (we?) also possess the capacity to oppress the other (see story of Sarai/Hagar - Genesis 16:3-13). 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my read on this is that Parashat Lech Lecha brings us complexity and nuance, and resides in the messy gray space between black and white mode of thinking. We can uphold interpretations of this Torah portion -- and also beliefs about the world around us -- that are simultaneously true, yet live in tension with one another. To quote Rabbi Jay this week, we can "hold some grace for them not being mutually exclusive."

One way or another, though, Abraham is mandated to "be a blessing" and promised that "other nations will bless themselves through you" (Gen. 12:2-4). So may it be, that his offspring -- both the children of Sarai and the children of Hagar -- will someday merit to live side-by-side in peace and with justice and dignity for all, in fulfillment of this promise. 

And meanwhile, may we find the strength and courage we need to hold our tent of community open wide, so that we can continue to be a blessing to one another.

With hopes for a Shabbat of wholeness at this moment where so much still feels broken,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

From Care to Compassion

The last two weeks have been harrowing, and while there have been moments that have felt clarifying, the most consistent theme I’ve heard from others and felt myself is a deeply unsettled anxiety that oscillates between sadness, fear, and anger. Who are we to be as Americans, as Jews, as people connected to Israelis (or Israeli ourselves), as people committed to justice and solidarity, as students of history and dreamers of a brighter future? 

As Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld wrote recently (and we quoted last Friday), “I have no road map for this moment, and I am wary of anyone who says they do… Let yourself be uncertain about what Israel should do next in this impossibly painful and frightening moment… I trust that every member of this community longs desperately to do what is possible to prevent further suffering and death of innocent civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli. I hear the same longing from my Israeli friends and family as well. Let us be very, very humble as we share ideas about how best to do so. Beware of facile answers.” 

I want to share with you a story, drawn by Martin Buber from Hasidic sources. This is a hard story about our yearning to alleviate suffering. It is called, “The Angel and the World’s Dominion.”

“There was a time when the Will of the Lord, Whose hand has the power to create and destroy all things, unleashed an endless torrent of pain and sickness over the earth. The air grew heavy with the moisture of tears, and a dim exhalation of sighs clouded it over. Even the legions that surround God’s throne were not immune to the hovering sadness. One angel, in fact, was so deeply moved by the sufferings he saw below, that his soul grew quite restless. When he lifted his voice in song with the others, a note of perplexity sounded among the strains of pure faith; his thoughts rebelled and contended with the Lord. He could no longer understand why death and deprivation need serve as connecting links in the great Chain of Events. Then one day he felt to his horror that the eye of All-Being was piercing his own eye and uncovering the confusion in his heart. Pulling himself together, he came before the Lord, but when he tried to talk, his throat dried up. Nevertheless, the Lord called him by name and gently touched his lips. The angel began to speak. He begged God to place the administration of the Earth in his hands for a year’s time, that he might lead it to an era of well-being. The angel bands trembled at this audacity. But at the same moment Heaven grew bright with the radiance of God’s smile. He looked at the supplicant with great love, as He announced His agreement. When the angel stood up again, he too was shining.

And so a year of joy and sweetness visited the Earth. The shining angel poured the great profusion of his merciful heart over the most anguished of her children, on those who were benumbed and terrified by want. The groans of the sick and dying were no longer heard in the land. The angel’s companion in the steely armor, who only a short time before had been rushing and roaring through the air, stepped aside now, waiting peevishly with lowered sword, relieved of his official duties. The earth floated through a fecund sky that left her with the burden of new vegetation. When summer was at its height, people moved singing through the full, yellow fields; never had such abundance existed in living memory. At harvest time, it seemed likely that the walls would burst or the roofs fly off, if they were going to find room to store their crops.

Proud and contented, the shining angel basked in his own glory. For by the time the first snow of winter covered the valleys, and dominion over the earth reverted into God’s hands, he had parceled out such an enormous bounty that the people of the earth would surely be enjoying his gifts for many years to come.

But one cold day, late in the year, a multitude of voices rose heavenwards in a great cry of anguish. Frightened by the sound, the angel journeyed down to the Earth and, dressed as a pilgrim, entered the first house along the way. The people there, having threshed the grain and ground it into flour, had then started baking bread – but, alas, when they took the bread out of the oven, it fell to pieces, and the pieces were unpalatable; they filled the mouth with a disgusting taste, like clay. And this was precisely what the Angel found in the second house and in the third and everywhere that he set foot. People were lying on the floor, tearing their hair and cursing the King of the World, who had deceived their miserable hearts with His false blessing.

The angel flew away and collapsed at his Master’s feet. “Lord,” he cried, “help me to understand where my power and judgment were lacking.” Then God raised his voice and spoke: Behold a truth which is known to me, and only to me from the beginning of time, a truth too deep and dreadful for your delicate, generous hands, my sweet apprentice – it is this, that the Earth must be nourished with decay and covered with shadows that its seeds may bring forth – and it is this, that souls must be made fertile with flood and sorrow, that through them the Great Work may be born.”

Like all stories, this one cannot be reduced to a single lesson or point. But I particularly appreciate what the writer and activist Parker Palmer sees in the story. “Though some people see the angel as being compassionate from the outset of the tale, I do not. Compassion means, literally, the capacity to be with the suffering of another. Though the angel was ‘deeply moved’ by human suffering at the beginning of the story, the text says that he was moved only by ‘the sufferings he saw below.’ His relation to that suffering was both visual and vertical: he saw it rather than touched it, and he kept himself above it rather than entering into it… If the angel had proceeded differently - if he had asked at the outset to become a pilgrim on earth [rather than earth’s chief executive officer for a year] so that he could share the plight of the people - he would never have planted the seeds of false hope that grew into false wheat and were baked into false bread. It may be easier to act from a distance than to practice true compassion, but such action rarely results in anyone being fed.”

In this week’s Torah portion, Noah builds an ark in order to survive a flood that destroys the rest of the world. It is said he was a righteous man, blameless in his generation (Genesis 6:9), a curious qualification that leads Jewish tradition to wonder if he could have been an even better person. Noah follows God’s instructions, and honestly I often feel a similar impulse - when the flood of sorrow and violence and vicious words become too much, I want to build an ark and float away with the meager number of people who think exactly like I do. I want to close ranks, tend wounds, and disconnect. 

But no - Noah’s story, like Buber’s Angel, is a cautionary tale. Noah “did not reach the [spiritual and ethical] level of sharing in the sorrow of human beings” (Nosson Tzvi Finkel). According to the Torah, Noah simply built an ark and survived. According to the Talmud, Noah spent 120 years chastising the people and urging them to change. (They didn’t). But he never once tried to visit them in their pain. 

May we encounter each other not as arguments with legs and social media accounts, but as humans with hearts and hopes and heaviness, and care for and about each other’s pain. May we care for ourselves with kindness, and when we have capacity may we turn to curiosity and compassion. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Another Invitation from Kavana

Over the past few days, Rabbi Jay and I have continued to hear from many of you, and we are grateful for these conversations and messages. Our community, together with Israel and with Jews everywhere, is still reeling in the wake of last Saturday's barbaric attacks in Southern Israel. We are continuing to witness (and experience ourselves) quite the range of intense emotions: sadness, grief, anger, worry, fear, and more. And, of course, events are still unfolding in heartbreaking and horrifying ways: as funerals are conducted for the slain while the fate of hostages remains uncertain, as Israel mobilizes for a ground invasion of Gaza, as a humanitarian crisis of enormous magnitude looms for Palestinians, as Jewish institutions brace in the face of threats of a day of violence against Jews worldwide. This may be the hardest week I can remember in my lifetime, and I expect future generations will look back on this as a watershed moment in both Jewish and human history.

On some level we are -- of course -- "in this together." But, it's also been interesting to me to note that even within the Kavana community -- a small subset of a small subset of the American Jewish community -- our responses to this week's events have varied considerably. Perhaps this is to be expected -- that with a tragedy so enormous and multifaceted, different individuals are focusing on different pieces and processing in very different ways. This week, I've observed that within our community, we have folks who are drawn to rallies and those who need quiet vigils; those who've been glued to the videos and images on their screens, and those who can't bear to look. Our Kavana community includes Israelis-in-America and American Jews who once made aliyah, lots of individuals with relatives in Israel, and also a handful with Palestinian roots and/or deep ties with Gaza... and these personal backgrounds and relationships absolutely lend themselves to different lenses on the world, different opinions about this fraught moment.

This week, as we encounter Parashat Bereishit, the first portion of the Torah, I am thinking once again about a famous midrash that appears in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38a). It entertains the question of why God only created a single human being, adam ha-rishon. Here's a piece of that midrashic text:

The Sages taught in a baraita (Tosefta 8:5): The fact that Adam the first human was created alone serves to declare the greatness of the supreme King of kings, the Holy Blessed One, as a person stamps several coins with one seal, and they are all similar to each other. But the Holy Blessed One stamps all people with the seal of the first Adam, and not one of them is similar to another. As it is stated: “It is changed like clay under the seal and they stand as a garment” (Job 38:14). 

This midrash underscores that -- while we all share common ancestry (in adam ha-rishon, the first human being) -- we are minted as individuals, and "not one of us is similar to another." 

Kavana has always aimed to hold difference well. We have proudly built a diverse community, and we've been particularly successful at establishing a wide tent when it comes to religious practice and theological belief, offering an array of options and celebrating the "multiple entry points" into our Jewish community. Holding a spectrum of political views, particularly on Israel, has always been more challenging but we have managed. Right now, though, we are fragile and our sensitivities are heightened. We may have to work harder to be compassionate and tender with one another, to give the benefit of the doubt, to maintain the close community bonds about which we care so deeply. 

My colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous wrote the following to the IKAR community earlier this week, and I echo her sentiments as I share these words with our Kavana community: "And lastly, please let us be tender with ourselves and each other. Take a break from social media when it becomes too much. Instead, reach out to one another to check-in. Call your family and friends in Israel and let them know you stand with them in sorrow and solidarity. Call a Palestinian friend and share your hope for a better future. We can’t take each other’s pain away, but we can make sure none of us navigates the pain alone. Let us hold each other with love and grace."

With prayers that this Shabbat will bring us closer to the shalom (peace) and shleimut (wholeness) that we and the world surely need right now... and I look forward to sharing hugs and tears with many of you in the morning,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

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