Meeting Nightfall

M’erev ad boker, “from evening until morning” (Exodus 27:21). Dusk arrived softly that November night as I walked into my senior rabbi’s home. I was only a few months ordained, still figuring out the job, still figuring out the world, (ongoing projects, I’ve learned). I saw my colleague and some friends laughing and chatting in front of a television, and I walked towards them, spying along the way a Hillary Clinton cake waiting in the kitchen. The last few rays of light dipped below the window line, and then the results began coming in. Pretty soon, I told my boss I had to go home. It was way too soon in our relationship for her to see me hollow and shattered and definitely too soon in my career to see a soon-to-be beloved mentor the same way. As I drove home in the dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about that cake. A momentous, once-in-a-lifetime celebration of the first woman to become president turned into a really tasty plate of trash. The political nightfall darkened, and I could only hope that dawn would come again. 

M’erev ad boker, “from evening until morning,” is the time designated for thener tamid, the regularly kindled lamp in the Mishkan. Far from an “eternal light,” as it often gets translated, it is simply a light that we keep rekindling every time night falls. Rashi tells us that “[doing something] every night is called tamid.” You might say that in addition to meaning “always, continual, regularly,” tamid evokes a stubborn, persistent practice of meeting the darkness each timeit comes. Stubborn, persistent consciousness — amidconsciousness — throws out yesterday’s cakes (the ones we so wanted to eat) and calls us to a different course. 

M’erev, from the moment of encountering nightfall, lift up the lamp of tamidconsciousness. In moments of fear, worry, anger, depression, we are in danger of contracting and isolating. There is a misunderstanding of the ner tamid that champions the fantasy of perfect inwardness. This fantasy imagines that the flame burns brightest inside ourselves, that we can shut out the world and thrive on our own without any of the messy encounters with others. In the political realm, this fantasy moves people to support and enact cruel and xenophobic immigration policies. 

In midrash Sifra (Tzav 1:16), the sages wonder about the lamp’s source of ignition. They point out that in the Mishkan, there is an outer altar and an inner altar. The lamp is near the inner altar. Perhaps the light source nearest the lamp should be used? But no! This would be a misunderstanding of what the moment needs, choosing convenience over deeper symbolism. Themidrash insistently derives (through clever midrashic means) that the lamp should only be lit from the fires of the outer altar. 

Tamid consciousnessinvolves moving inward (for rest, renewal, holiness) but then moving back out (for new perspectives, new energy, new connection, new awareness of the darkness) and then back inward (to integrate, to plan), and so on. The ritual movement from inner circle to outer circle suggests to me Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem: 

“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.  
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.”

Night falls because of a natural disaster or an accident, political persecution or economic disruption, war or sickness. Night is an experience of our vulnerability. As another midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah 15:7) notes, only God can create light from darkness. We flesh and blood humans need other light sources to create more light. We need each other’s lights. Taking the Mishkanmetaphorically, a friend, colleague, or ally becomes the outer altar. Perhaps even those we consider adversaries have the sacred potential to ignite in us the lamp of tamid consciousness and the willingness to widen our circles and give ourselves to the tasks of care, compassion, advocacy, and love. 

Shabbat Shalom,

The Mishkan of Kavana

Before you read any further, I'd like for you to pause for a moment and think back to a Shabbat service (or other communal prayer experience) that you found especially meaningful and stirring. Perhaps what stands out was the musical experience, or the quiet solitude in the presence of others, the poetry of the liturgy itself, a moment of heartfelt yearning or connection with the Divine, or being in the company of family and/or friends.

In particular, though, I'm wondering about a detail that we don't always think about so overtly. I want to know: how was the space configured? Were participants sitting in rows of chairs or pews, all facing the same direction, or were they sitting in the round, facing one another? At Kavana, we use both of these modalities (plus other variations on the themes... semi-circles, ovals, etc.) as we gather in different worship spaces on different Shabbatot of the month. This plurality of ways that we configure ourselves when we come together can express a lot about our goals and intentions.

In this week's Torah portion, Parashat Terumah, the Israelites are instructed to build a Mishkan, a Tabernacle, where the people can assemble and God can dwell among them. As the Torah delineates how this portable sanctuary is to be constructed, every detail of the structure and its furnishings is understood to encode deep meaning.

I want to focus our attention on two nearly identical phrases -- easily overlooked, but deeply significant -- that appear in this parasha and speak to the question of orientation.

First, a pair of cherubim (winged angelic beings) are commissioned to sit atop the Ark. The text of Exodus 25:20 reads as follows (with scholar Robert Alter's translation into English):

וְהָי֣וּ הַכְּרֻבִים֩ פֹּרְשֵׂ֨י כְנָפַ֜יִם לְמַ֗עְלָה סֹכְכִ֤ים בְּכַנְפֵיהֶם֙ עַל־הַכַּפֹּ֔רֶת וּפְנֵיהֶ֖ם אִ֣ישׁ אֶל־אָחִ֑יו אֶ֨ל־הַכַּפֹּ֔רֶת יִהְי֖וּ פְּנֵ֥י הַכְּרֻבִֽים׃

And the cherubim shall spread wings above, shielding the cover with their wings, and their faces toward each other, toward the cover the faces of the cherubim shall be. 

The phrase I've bolded above is the one of special interest to me. Colloquially, it indicates that these cherubim were facing each other, but literally the language of the text is “ish el achiv,” “a man to his brother.” 

In the following chapter, we learn about how the mishkan structure itself is to be assembled. With the cloth tapestries that bound this giant tent structure (see Exodus 26:3, 26:5, and 26:6) and then with planks of wood whose tenons and sockets fit together to form the Tabernacle's walls, a parallel phrase is used: “isha el achotah,” “a woman to her sister.” For example, Exodus 26:17 reads:

שְׁתֵּ֣י יָד֗וֹת לַקֶּ֙רֶשׁ֙ הָאֶחָ֔ד מְשֻׁ֨לָּבֹ֔ת אִשָּׁ֖ה אֶל־אֲחֹתָ֑הּ כֵּ֣ן תַּעֲשֶׂ֔ה לְכֹ֖ל קַרְשֵׁ֥י הַמִּשְׁכָּֽן׃

Each plank shall have two tenons, parallel to each other; do the same with all the planks of the Tabernacle.

These two phrases -- "ish el achiv" and "isha el achotah" -- are identical, save for the one (notable) difference of gender. (On a grammatical level, the reason for the difference is pretty straightforward: k’ruvim/cherubim is a masculine noun in Hebrew and yadot/tenons a feminine noun.) 

A couple of things strike me as I consider these phrases. First, "ish el achiv" and "isha el achotah" both take the building project at hand and recast it as a sibling togetherness project. The cherubim, the cloth panels, and the wood boards are all described in familial terms, as brothers/sisters/siblings. In this way, the language of the text draws attention to the connective function of the Mishkan, and how it draws the Israelites into close relationship with one another and with God. (Closely connected to this is the way we often use "Hinei mah tov u'mah na'im shevet achim gam yachad" as a gathering song. It, too, draws on sibling language, translating to: "Behold, how good and pleasant it is that siblings - achim - can dwell together harmoniously.")

Second, though, the visual pictures that the two phrases paint are quite different. The cherubim's orientation dictates that these two carved angels face in towards one another, as they stand on top of the Ark which contains the tablets of the commandments. Their face-to-face orientation symbolizes deep relational connection, and perhaps also hints at the potential for confrontation (they stand opposite one another, or in opposition). In contrast, the planks, and, similarly, the cloth panels, must be laid side-by-side, in parallel. Oriented next to one another as they are assembled, they are unified in function and in vision. By all facing in the same direction, they create a wall that delineates the sacred space of the Mishkan.

Both of these configurations ring true to me today when I think about Kavana's orientation. We have conceived of this community as a place where people can gather face-to-face for intimate conversations and experiences. When two students sit across from each other and discuss a text in chevruta, the vision of cherubim facing one another comes to life! When we create opportunities for hard conversations to happen -- whether this is deep sharing and listening around disparate views on Israel/Palestine, or board meeting wrestlings around organizational growth tensions -- I see this kind of face-to-face and internally-focused sacred relationship in play.

But also, when I think of planks standing side-by-side, I picture volunteers working shoulder-to-shoulder in a kitchen preparing meals for our Caring Committee to distribute, or of a multigenerational group banding together to tackle a social justice issue, wall-like in their resoluteness as they represent our communal values in the world. This shoulder-to-shoulder framework -- with directional alignment toward a common goal -- allows us to build the Tabernacles of today: vessels that hold people.

Returning to the question I opened with, I am so glad that Kavana also opts for both of these modes/configurations at different times in our Shabbat prayer spaces... both because that gives our partners and participants the option to figure out which religious services feel best to them and lean into personal preference (in the context of communal experience), and also because both of these orientations matter and serve our mission on a symbolic level. 

• At Rabbi Jay's Kabbalat Shabbat service (happening tonight), attendees mostly face one direction, but in more of a "smoosh" shape and with leaders facing out. "This service blends joyous song and prayer, warm connection, and thought-provoking learning."

• At tomorrow morning's Shabbat Morning Minyan in Queen Anne , everyone -- including myself and the other prayer leaders -- face east, pointing to the group's alignment. With traditional liturgy and lots of singing, prayers are all oriented in the same direction. 

• At last week's lay-led Shabbat Levavi gathering (meaning open-armed, warm, heartfelt - and it'll happen again next month!) and also at the monthly Kabbalat Shabbat service with Traci, an in-the-round configuration puts the congregation into face-to-face connection with one another, more like the angels atop the Ark. 

Both the side-by-side alignment and the face-to-face configuration are part of our sacred story from Parashat Terumah. Both arrangements are important and holy. Together, these brotherly/sisterly sibling bonds demonstrate that the Kavana community seeks both to build and strengthen internal connections, and also to enable people to work together to make change. Our work is at times aligned and at times leaving room for healthy disagreement, at once inward-facing and outward-facing... but always intentional.

Whichever configuration appeals most to you in the moment -- whichever Shabbat service or other communal activity is calling your name -- I sincerely hope you'll jump in and join together with this sacred community, in prayer and more. In doing so, we will be both the cherubim and the planks that help delineate holy space and facilitate connections in all dimensions.

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

The Goring Ox: Then and Now

Yesterday morning, I dropped my kids at school and continued driving straight to my first meeting of the day. Alone in my car, I turned on the radio to NPR, and found myself listening to live coverage of the Supreme Court's deliberations about whether Trump's name can appear on ballots in Colorado and other states. At issue, as you may know, is the question of whether a provision of the 14th amendment -- a law barring certain public officials from serving in the government again if they took part in an insurrection -- applies in light of the events of January 6, 2021. In the clip that I happened to catch, the justices were following different lines of questioning (how much power should be granted to a single state, do the words "office" and "officer" refer to the same thing, etc.). As I arrived at my destination, I lingered in the car to hear a little more, intrigued by the legal arguments at hand. And then, a specific pair of verses from this week's Torah portion, Mishpatim, leapt to mind for me.

The verses I was thinking about are Exodus 21:28-29:

When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox is not to be punished. If, however, that ox has been in the habit of goring, and its owner, though warned, has failed to guard it, and it kills a man or a woman—the ox shall be stoned and its owner, too, shall be put to death.

At first blush, these verses don't seem particularly related to the oral arguments I had heard on the radio. The pair of Torah verses above deal with two different scenarios in which an ox kills a person. In the first, the ox gores a person with no warning; the owner of the ox seemingly had no reason to see this tragedy coming, and is not punished... after all, accidents happen, animals are animals, etc. The second scenario is different, in that the reader of Torah is told explicitly that this is an ox with a habit of goring -- that is, a pattern of violent behavior has already been observed. In this case, if the ox -- which is already known to be violent -- subsequently gores a person, the owner is indeed held liable, as he failed to note the pattern and take action to prevent future harm.

As Jewish law takes up the case, interestingly, most of the commentaries I know about these verses keep the meaning pretty literal... that is, they try to further understand the contours of goring oxen. The Mishnah names the ordinary ox (the one with no criminal history) as the "shor tam" and the habitually goring ox the "shor muad," and then the Gemara spills lots of ink parsing the qualifications for each category (e.g. how many previous goring incidents must the ox have engaged in, and within what framework of time, in order to qualify as a "shor muad"?). I spent an entire semester of Talmud class during rabbinical school learning sugyot from Bava Kamma pertaining to the related case of "shor she-nagach et parah," " an ox that gores a cow." There, the Talmud considers, for example, what happens if an ox has gored a cow and a newborn calf is also found dead at her side, but it's unknown whether she gave birth to the calf before the goring or as its result. My point is that, here, Jewish law seems to get sucked pretty far down a wormhole of legalese pertaining to oxen and their violent behavior.

Yesterday, however, I found myself wondering about what we might learn from these verses were we to read them more metaphorically. This is certainly a direction that rabbinic law takes in the wake of plenty of other Torah laws! (For example, "don't place a stumbling block before the blind" is applied to ethical business dealings about disclosure.) When I read the two biblical verses above through this lens, a clear take-away emerges. The key difference between the two situations of goring oxen in Exodus 21:28 and 21:29 is that in the second case, the owner clearly should have understood the real and present danger that the ox poses, based on the pattern of the animal's past behavior. In choosing not to take action to mitigate that threat, that owner is negligent and therefore becomes legally liable for the tragedy that ensues. With this broader framework of negligence -- the category of liability based on a failure to intercede to prevent harm -- I started wondering where else the "goring ox" phenomenon shows up in our world or might inform our thinking today.

One example -- yet another American legal case from this week -- is that a few days ago, a Michigan woman was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter because she failed to secure a gun and ammunition at home and neglected to provide her teenage son the mental health support he needed. Her son went on to carry out a school shooting. She is the first parent in the U.S. to be held responsible for a child carrying out a mass school attack. In this schema, she is like the "owner" of the ox: liable and convictable because she could have prevented the harm that happened on her watch but failed to do so.

Returning to the Supreme Court case I had been listening to on the radio, all of this got me thinking about the intense and wacky election year we are headed into. If it turns out that our country elected a leader who is capable of causing immense harm -- whose actions have already resulted in violence both against individuals and against the institutions of our democracy -- we might be able to say that the first time around, the responsibility lay not with the owner (the voters, the public, etc) but with the ox himself. But, now that the pattern of behavior is well established, who would be liable the next time around, for not failing to put the ox back into a position where he is capable of greater harm? Who is the "owner"? (Is it the Supreme Court? Us, the voting public? Congress? The media? All of the above?!?)

To be clear, as a non-profit organization, Kavana is restricted from engaging in political activity on behalf of a campaign or specific party. We can, however, speak from a place of religious values about issues of mutual concern, "encourage people to participate in the electoral process," and so on. With that frame in mind, I am most concerned with our collective desire "to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are the pride and glory of our country" (this is a quote from Siddur Sim Shalom's "Prayer for Our Country," not a partisan political stance). If human dignity, democracy, fairness, and other ethical principles are our north star as Jewish Americans, this week I ask you to consider: how might the Torah of Parashat Mishpatim motivate us to think and act in this moment? What is our obligation to prevent a habitually-goring ox from inflicting future harm? What actions must we take in order not to be negligent or complicit? 

Let us each do our part. And may the Torah of Mishpatim help draw us ever closer to our aspirational vision of a just society.

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Could Yitro's wisdom help Kimonti, and help us all build a more just society?

Last week, in our Torah reading cycle, we followed the Israelites as they left Egypt, crossed the sea, and celebrated in song on the other side. This week, the Torah's narrative pivots quickly to take up a brand new question: how might a group of people exist -- independent, free, in the wilderness -- in peace? We see, in Parashat Yitro, the first building blocks of a just society.

Yitro (Jethro in English) is, of course, the title character, and also Moses's father-in-law. He shows up at the beginning of Exodus 18, escorting Moses's wife and two children back to him (another interesting story for another time), and immediately spots a problem. Yitro's questions and suggestions contain so many strands of wisdom, that I'd like to pick them apart:

1) First, Yitro observes Moses and immediately asks: "madua atah yoshev l'vadecha" - "why are you sitting alone?" A few verses later, he pronounces: "lo tov ha-davar asher atah oseh," "this thing that you are doing is not good" (see verses 14 and 18 of the chapter linked above). Before he even understands exactly what Moses is doing and why, Yitro can see that the very act of going it alone -- of shouldering a burden or tackling a challenging task solo -- is problematic. (Yitro's critique of Moses here echoes God's observation to Adam in the creation story: "lo tov heyot ha-adam l'vado," "it is not good for a human to be alone" - Gen. 2:18.) We learn from Yitro that it is best to tackle challenges in the company of others, in community.

2) Second, Moses explains to Yitro that what he's observing is that the Israelites are bringing him disputes and questions, and he is sharing God's teachings and laws in order to resolve these disputes. From this conversation, it becomes clear that the realm they are discussing is judicial. From here, we learn that one primary building block of a just society is an effective system of justice. (Later in this week's parasha, we'll arrive at the Ten Commandments, and next week in Mishpatim, dozens of other laws follow. It is significant that even before any of these laws have been stated, the Torah insists that there must be an organized judiciary and ways to adjudicate cases.)

3) Yitro is clear that Moses not only needs support, but needs the right kind of support. He makes the point that it is critical to identify ethical individuals to join Moses in this work: "strong people, God-fearers, people of truth who hate corruption" (see verse 21). If a society is to pursue justice, people must engage in the system for the right reasons and act in good faith. 

Putting all of these points together, the bottom line is that Yitro instructs Moses that the way to make things easier on himself and also to create a better society is by establishing a judicial system that is fundamentally collaborative and ethical. If Moses can do so, Yitro promises, the outcome will be that "all the people will go to their places in peace" ("v'gam kol ha-am ha-zeh al-m'komo yavo v'shalom," verse 23). 

The ancient themes that Yitro addresses are ever-relevant. So many of the top national and international news stories of this very week -- from courtrooms and government chambers across the U.S., to the E.U., to the UN court in the Hague -- have centered precisely around questions about collaboration, justice, and impartiality. The outcome of this year's presidential election may have everything to do with what has happened in -- and is happening / will happen in -- court-rooms.

Sometimes justice feels like a very lofty goal, and far out of our personal control. But, during this time of the year, while the legislative session is underway in Olympia, each and every one of us has the opportunity to participate in trying to build a more just society right here in the State of Washington.

For a number of years now, Kavana has been part of conversations around restorative justice; our participation in these efforts initially grew out of my participation in a clergy group of local Black Christian and Jewish faith leaders. Next Wednesday, Feb 7th, has been designated the third annual Multifaith Coalition for Restorative Justice Advocacy Day. In virtual/Zoom meetings with our legislators, we will focus on issues ranging from solitary confinement to juvenile points to sentence enhancements... all with the ultimate goal of helping to guide our legislators pass legislation so that judges can then adjudicate cases in a way that is maximally fair. 

Many of you probably recall our screening of Gilda Sheppard's beautiful film Since I Been Down and the story of Kimonti Carter that I shared in a Yom Kippur sermon a couple years ago. Kimonti was freed from life in prison in 2022, but now prosecutors want to send him back (click here to read the Seattle Times article about this). One of the bills our coalition is supporting has the potential to help Kimonti and dozens of others; at question is whether it is fair for juveniles to receive mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole. Your voice can make a difference. 

I love that this multi-faith advocacy event is grounded significantly in the wisdom Yitro shares with Moses. 1) He teaches that it is best to tackle challenging tasks in the company of others, and indeed, this activity is born out of years of relationship-building and coalition work. 2) Yitro points out the centrality of the justice system to our efforts to build a just society; this advocacy day hones in on legislation pertaining to a narrow slice of restorative justice issues because it understands the role the justice system plays is a key lever of power in trying to achieve the much broader goal of racial justice in our society. 3) Yitro insists that Moses choose partners who are ethical individuals and effective leaders; this coalition indeed brings together an awesome array of incredible people, each grounded significantly in their own ethical values and/or religious beliefs. If you're able to get involved, please click here for the full schedule and relevant Zoom links, here to learn more about this year's bills and talking points, and here to register if you'd like to be part of a lobbying team in your district.

May this -- and truly, all the work we undertake together -- ultimately lead our community and our society towards (in the language of Parashat Yitro) "places of peace." 

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

On Barbie, Miriam, and Seeds of Hope

As you may have seen, Oscar nominations were released earlier this week. On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel, host of this year's awards, quipped that Ryan Gosling being nominated as Ken while Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were snubbed for their respective awards "was kind of the plot of the Barbie movie."

Interestingly, this story is not new. This week's Torah portion, Beshalach, famously features the Song of the Sea, Shirat HaYam: a long and ancient poem attributed to Moses, that is so important that it gives this Shabbat the moniker "Shabbat Shirah" ("the Shabbat of Song") and has come to be recited daily as part of the traditional shacharit (morning service) liturgy. Moses's poem is long, too: it takes up almost a whole column of Torah (Exodus 15:1-18), and is easy to recognize in the Torah scroll because of its distinctive brick-like layout. The Song of the Sea is followed by a much shorter song sung by Miriam and the other Israelite women who celebrate together upon safely arriving at the other side of the sea after crossing out of Egypt (Exodus 15:20-21):

Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, picked up a hand-drum, and all the women went out after her in dance with hand-drums.And Miriam chanted for them:
Sing to Adonai, for [God] has triumphed gloriously;
Horse and driver has [God] hurled into the sea.

Many Biblical scholars today believe that Miriam's song was likely the original; somehow she (like Robbie and Gerwig) were snubbed when it came to who gets the credit. Professor Carol Meyers (with whom I had the privilege of studying as an undergrad at Duke) writes: 

"Exodus attributes the poem to Moses, with Miriam's rendition considered an antiphonal response. But a number of considerations support the possibility that, from a tradition historical perspective, the poem was Miriam's before it was Moses'." (Click here to read Meyers's whole article.)

Despite the fact that Miriam's song is shorter and doesn't get picked up in our liturgy for daily recitation, many traditional commentators have noted that Miriam’s leadership style is distinctive. For instance, HaRav Moshe Lichtenstein, co-rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion, cites a Gemara text (Sotah 30b) to show that according to the ancient rabbis, Moses’s song was recited in a call-and-response fashion, evoking “a mode of leadership in which the people were passive.” In contrast, he has the following to say about Miriam’s song: 

“What was special about Miriam? She took initiative and aroused sweeping enthusiasm among the women in response to Moshe’s song. The women go out after Miriam spontaneously; their response is not limited to passive repetition.” (Click here to read his whole piece.) 

Lichtenstein seems to be arguing that there is something about women's leadership that is collaborative, empowering, and can elicit collective action. 

To be clear, I am not a gender essentialist. I grew up on the core “torah” of Free to Be You and Me: that it is good to think expansively beyond the bounds of society’s gender constructs, and we need not limit our paths and life choices based on gender. I love that this week's parashah is paired with a haftarah (prophetic text) that also features a powerful woman - Deborah - and her song (see Judges 5); she is a judge, warrior and poet all at the same time. But I am also incredibly grateful that today, we have come to appreciate gender as a spectrum, not a binary (one of my own kids is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns… I am so glad to live in an age where a wide range of options for gender identity are available to all of us!)

And still, as I look at the patterns here - from Miriam and her song in this week's parasha, to this week's Oscars nominations - I can't help but wonder what our world would be like if the playing field were just a bit more level, and women's voices more easily heard? Patriarchy and sexism go hand-in-hand with so many other forms of oppression and hatred: xenophobia, racism, dehumanization, and more. How might our American political landscape look different -- and healthier -- if so much airtime wasn’t given over to “alpha male” bullying? How would the reality on the ground be different in Israel and Gaza right now if women were part of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, or if a wider range of leadership voices and styles played more prominent roles in both Israeli and Palestinian politics?

At a moment when it’s easy to despair, we have an obligation to search for kernels of hope. And this is precisely the week to do so; yesterday was Tu BiShevat, the "Birthday of the Trees" that comes in the dead of winter. This week, we plant trees and celebrate seeds; we consider the potential for new growth and renewal that lies - always - just around the corner in spring, both literally and metaphorically.

During the Torah service at our Shabbat Morning Minyan this past Saturday, I shared a poem by Rachel Goldberg-Polin (and incidentally, the Hebrew word for "poem" and "song" are one in the same). Her 23-year-old son Hersh is one of the 130+ hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza; she has emerged over the last couple of months as "the international face of the hostage families" according to this article in The Forward. In December, she composed the following poem and shared it in a speech to the United Nations in Geneva, explaining that she had written it "for a woman in Gaza" who "knows who she is." I invite you to read it now, again or for the first time, slowly, and to take in her words:

"One Tiny Seed" 

by Rachel Goldberg-Polin

There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a thousand tears before you grow to be a man.I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days.
We all have.
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.
All those tears, a sea of tears
they all taste the same.
Can we take them
gather them up,
remove the salt
and pour them over our desert of despair
and plant one tiny seed.
A seed wrapped in fear,
trauma, pain,
war and hope
and see what grows?
Could it be
that this woman
so very like me
that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years
laughing without teeth
because we have drunk so much sweet tea together
and now we are so very old
and our faces are creased
like worn-out brown paper bags.
And our sons
have their own grandchildren
and our sons have long lives
One of them without an arm
But who needs two arms anyway?
Is it all a dream?
A fantasy? A prophecy?
One tiny seed.

Like Miriam, whose collaborative leadership emerges in Parashat Beshalach at a moment of trauma, rupture and loss for the Israelites, Rachel Goldberg-Polin's words emerge from this very bleak moment. And yet, even in this dead of winter, she has the courage to give voice to a future in which Israeli and Palestinian mothers might someday drink sweet tea together in their old age, and raise children and grandchildren together in peace. This is kind of prophetic vision we need right now: a picture of what is possible, the promise of hope and of tiny seeds that lie buried, but can be watered even by our collective tears in order that they may grow.

May this Shabbat Shirah -- this Shabbat of both poetry and song -- and Tu BiShevat give us the power to dream and to hope. Ken* yehi ratzon -- so may it be God's will. [*Barbie pun intended! ;-)]

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

From Generation to Generation... and Exciting Baby News from Kavana!

[Yes, you'll find exciting baby news at the bottom of this message!]

This week's Torah portion, Parashat Bo, tells the story of the Israelites preparing to leave Egypt. It chronicles the final three plagues, commands the paschal sacrifice (a lamb per household), and details how blood is to be smeared on the Israelites' doorposts. 

In between these familiar narrative points, the Torah returns over and over again to the theme of generational continuity, to a concern about how future generations -- the descendants of the generation of the Exodus -- will understand that moment. It is a given to the author of the text that future generations will desire to know their history, inquiring about it, and that it will always be obligatory upon parents to offer them answers about the meaning of the tradition. Here are several examples:

• “You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants. And when you enter the land that Adonai will give you, as promised, you shall observe this rite. And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this rite?’ you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to Adonai, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when smiting the Egyptians, but saved our houses.’" (Exodus 12:24-27)

• "And you shall explain to your child on that day, ‘It is because of what Adonai did for me when I went free from Egypt.’" (Exodus 13:8)

• "And when, in time to come, a child of yours asks you, saying, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall reply, ‘It was with a mighty hand that Adonai brought us out from Egypt, the house of bondage." (Exodus 13:14)

I have written about these lines before. They are famous in that they give rise to the tradition of the Four Children at the seder, each of whom the parent is obligated to instruct differently, according to the child's own inclinations and ability to take in information.

This year, as I return to the text of Parashat Bo, the theme of generational continuity -- how we pass on what it means to be part of the Jewish people from parents to children, and how each subsequent generation has to seek and find its own answers to these essential identity questions -- is one that feels big and relevant in some new ways. 

So many conversations with members of this community in the 100+ days since Oct 7th have revolved around what it means to be Jewish in this moment. How do we understand and contextualize the horrific events that have transpired and are still unfolding in Israel/Palestine? What are their implications for our perceptions and self-understanding about who we are as Jews? When a child comes to us, asking (in the words of the parasha) "What does all this mean?," how will we answer and help the next generation to make sense of this moment?

Ezra Klein began one episode of his podcast with a summary of something I've been thinking lots about over these months, and that I'm sure many of us feel and understand intuitively: that generational patterns necessarily inform how we see the world, which in turn leads us to make sense of our present moment in Jewish history in very different ways. Here's a transcript of this part of his conversation, which feels like helpful context to me (and if you prefer to hear it in his own voice, I invite you to click here and listen to the first 7 minutes or so of this episode).

"Something we're seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. 

You've got older Americans - say, Joe Biden - who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews, and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could've been wiped off the map by its neighbors. They have a lived sense of Israel's impossibility and its vulnerability, and the dangers of the neighborhood which it's in. Their views of Israel formed around the Israel of the Six Day War in 1967, when its neighbors massed to try to strangle Israel when it was young, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, where they surprise-attacked Israel fifty years ago. 

Then there's the next generation -- my generation, I think -- and I think of us as this straddle generation. We only ever knew a strong Israel, an Israel that was undoubtedly the strongest country in the region, a nuclear Israel, an Israel backed by America's unwavering military and political support. That wasn't always true, at least not to the extent now. In his great book, The Much Too Promised Land, Aaron David Miller points out that before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel ranked 24th in Foreign Aid from the US. Within a few years of that war, it ranked 1st, as it typically has since. We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians. And I don't want to be euphemistic about this: an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and security and freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized, we knew an Israel where the leaders were trying, imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become, in the eyes of the world, what Israel was in its own eyes: a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one. And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi described on the show recently, that peace movement collapsed. The why of this is no mystery: the second intifada, the endless suicide bombings were a trauma Israel still has not recovered from. And they posed a horrible question, to which the left, both in Israel and in America, had no real answer then or now. 

If your story of all this is simplistic, if it is just that Israel wanted this, it is wrong. But, what happened then is Israel moved right, and further right, and further right. Extremists, once on the margin of Israeli politics and society, became cabinet ministers and coalition members; the settlers in the West Bank ran wild, functionally annexing more and more territory, sometimes violently, territory that was meant to be returned to Palestinians, and doing so with the backing of the Israeli state, doing so in a way that made a two state solution look less and less possible. Israel withdrew from Gaza, and when Hamas took control, they blockaded Gaza, leaving Gazans to misery, to poverty. Israel stopped trying to become something other than an occupier nation, it became deeply illiberal, it settled into a strategy of security through subjugation, and many in its government openly desired expansion through expulsion.

And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu's Israel, Ben Gvir's Israel. I've been thinking a lot about the panic in the Jewish community, what gets short-handed as antisemitism on campus -- and there is antisemitism on campus, and on the left, and on the right -- always has been. But to read only the most antisemitic signs in a rally, to hear only the antisemitic chants, can also obscure what else is happening there. If it's just antisemitism, then at least it is simple: they just hate the Jews, they hate us, they always have, they always will. But a lot of what is happening at these rallies is not just antisemitism. A lot of it is a generation that has only known Israel as a strong nation oppressing a weak people. They never knew a weak Israel. They never knew an Israel whose leaders sought peace, showed up to negotiate deals, who wanted something better. And I am not unsympathetic to the Israeli narrative here; I believe large parts of it...

There was this Pew study in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69% of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel. But among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56% had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics is dominated right now by people over 65. But it won't be forever..."

Parashat Bo reminds us that collectively, we have a role as a link in a generational chain of transmission of our sacred story of who we are and where we've been. And I find Klein's generational lens to be a very helpful one for understanding what our multi-generational Jewish community is seeing and feeling right now, in this moment. Today, we are equally wrestling to make sense of the messages we have received from previous generations, and our own life experiences, and the answers that we hope to convey to the next generation. This is true when we think about how we share our most foundational stories (like the story of the Exodus, and our ancient past), and also when we consider the context of current event from our recent past, the history of the Jewish people over the last century. It behooves us to reflect on all of this.

And, of course, this week's parasha is not the only place we learn of how seriously Judaism takes this notion of conveyance of values, story, and identity from one generation to the next. Every time we gather for prayer, we recite this in the words of Shema and V'ahavta (Deut. 6:6-7): "And these words which I command you on this day shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them to your children..." We also sing "L'dor va'Dor" - of our obligation to tell our sacred story and our relationship with God "from generation to generation."

The Talmud contains a baraita, a teaching (Kiddushin 29a:10), that deals with the question of parental obligations. It reads: 

"A father is obligated with regard to his son to circumcise him, and to redeem him (if he is a firstborn), and to teach him Torah, and to marry him to a woman, and to teach him a trade. And some say: also to teach him to swim." 

Admittedly, we might word a statement like this a little differently today (or at very least, our assumptions about gender and sexuality might change the framing here), but the basic ideas conveyed through this text still feels incredibly relevant to me. That is, that it's the obligation of Jewish parents to connect their children with Jewish identity through ritual and learning, to help them find love and learn practical life skills, and to them to swim... both physically (safety, first and foremost) and also metaphorically (how to survive and keep your head above water in this difficult world).

Perhaps this theme of generational transmission -- of parents and children, of the lessons that each of us imbibes and also conveys as we move through life -- has especially jumped out at me this week because, over the last few weeks, a number of Kavana partners have lost their parents. My heart especially goes out to Sharon, Craig, Sprout, and Sarah, for whom these losses are particularly fresh. I hope that as you think about the chain of transmission, naming the lessons you each inherited from your parents, will be a way of cementing their memories as a source of blessing in your lives!

And, with the same theme swirling as backdrop, I'm especially excited to be able to share the wonderful news that this week, our community welcomed a new baby into the world.  Mazel tov to our beloved Rabbi Jay LeVine and Rabbi Laura Rumpf on the arrival of their new little one this week!! They write:

"We're delighted to welcome baby girl Nava Rae LeVine, born Tuesday, January 16th. Parents, baby and big brother are healthy and excited. We'll have a welcome ritual for her virtually on the evening of February 3rd, details and zoom link to come!"

Rabbi Jay and Laura are already wonderful parents to Ami, and now -- with the arrival of another child -- their capacity to give, to teach, to love, to instruct and to answer questions only grows. 

I learned recently that babies born now -- as well as children born since 2010 -- are part of a new generation: Gen Alpha. Of course, that newest generation's identity is still being molded, and we will have to wait a few years to learn how they will make sense of the world, of their history and of contemporary realities, how they will come to view Israel and Judaism, what questions they will ask of their parents, and how the answers that we give them will land. Something to look forward to, for sure!

This Shabbat, as Jews everywhere read Parashat Bo, I invite you to spend some time reflecting on the ways in which you are a link in the chain of generational transmission. What Jewish identity did you inherit -- core beliefs and values, stories, answers to questions? How is your identity different from that of your parents' generation? What, if anything, is shifting for you in this particular moment? What do you want to be sure that the next generation will hear you convey and teach about "what all of this means"?

Wishing a mazel tov to Rabbis Jay and Laura; a life of Torah (learning), chuppah (love), and ma'asim tovim (good deeds) to their new little one; and a Shabbat shalom to each of you,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Revisiting Ritual

Today is Friday, January 12th. It is also the 98th day of the Israel-Hamas War, which means nearly 100 days of captivity for some 130 hostages, 100 days of living in an altered war-time reality for Israelis, and the same number of days of mass displacement, violence and destruction for Palestinians in Gaza. Here in America, we're moving into a long weekend of reflecting on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and also kicking off our 2024 presidential election season with the Iowa Caucuses this Monday. On the Hebrew calendar, we have just entered Sh'vat, the month that reminds us that while it may feel like winter outside, spring -- and the promise it brings of rebirth and renewal -- lies just around the corner. If all of this feels like a lot to hold -- that this moment is sending us in a whole lot of emotional directions -- that's because it is. Thankfully, we have Torah and ritual to ground us. 

This week, we - together with Jewish communities everywhere - read the second Torah portion of the book of Exodus: Parashat Vaera, Exodus 6:2-9:35. Its text launches us into the famous showdown between Pharaoh and Moses/God, and recounts the first seven of the Ten Plagues brought upon the Egyptians: 

• dam - blood

• tz'fardea - frogs

• kinim - lice

• arov - swarms (of either wild animals or insects)

• dever - cattle disease

• sh'chin - boils

• barad - hail

If you're like me, you may find it hard to read this list of plagues without instinctively taking a finger and beginning to pantomime the action we do at the Passover Seder, of removing wine from our cup, drop by drop, while reciting each of these words. Growing up, this was a memorable feature of every seder I attended. I remember paying close attention to the fact that some seder guests used their pinky fingers, while others used their index finger or even a spoon to remove the drops of wine. While techniques varied, the explanation I always heard for this ritual -- some version of which was written in each haggadah or explained by every seder leader -- was consistent: that by spilling drops of wine from our cup, we express that our own joy is diminished by the suffering of the Egyptians. (Perhaps you were taught similarly?) This has always struck me as such a beautiful sentiment: that even as we recall our own suffering and oppression, we are obligated to make space to empathize with others as well.

As I re-read Parashat Vaera this week, I kept thinking about this seder tradition and decided to do a little digging into its origins. I'll admit that I was surprised by what I found! Apparently, this familiar explanation is a modern one. While the core idea it expresses appears in multiple ancient midrashim as well, this interpretation of the wine-spilling/plague-recitation ritual is attributed alternately to two German Jewish scholars: Rabbi Dr. Eduard Baneth (d. 1930) and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (d. 1888). It seems to have really taken off in the 1940's and later, become particularly ubiquitous in American/ English-language haggadot. Truly, I had no idea! (In case you're interested in geeking out a bit on the historical background of this ritual, here are two great sources I found online: a well-footnoted article by Dr. Rabbi Zvi Ron and a scholarly responsum by Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin of the Schechter Institutes.)

So, it turns out that the idea of spilling wine as an expression of empathy is relatively new; however, the tradition of removing drops of wine while recounting the plagues has been around for quite a while. Both of the scholars cited above point to a Passover sermon of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (~1176-1238) as the earliest known reference to this custom. His explanation for the spilling of wine drops, though, is quite different; Rabbi Eleazar of Worms says that we do this "as if to say: it will not harm us." (Note that he says nothing about the Egyptians' suffering; rather, this feels like a possibly superstitious(?) expression of hope that the plagues not cause us any harm.) Similarly, other medieval rabbis in Ashkenaz seem to have sprinkled wine outside of their cups as well, explaining the custom as a way of indicating "that we should be saved from these plagues" and "may they come upon our enemies" [but not upon us]. The experience of Jews in medieval Europe was inconsistent, with periods of flourishing punctuated by periods of terrifying antisemitic violence. I can only imagine that it would have been powerful to sit at a seder table in the 12th or 13th century and spill drops of wine as a kind of prayer for Jewish safety and for vengeance upon those who might seek to do Jews harm. 

I'm intrigued that the ritual we know so well today -- of recounting the plagues that appear in this week's parasha as we spill drops of wine from our cups -- has been around for nearly a thousand years, even while the explanation for this custom has been a moving target. I especially love the idea that, with the help of scholars who have dug through manuscripts, we now know that our ritual is multi-valent. Individuals can sit around a Passover seder table together, sticking their fingers into their cups while reading the Ten Plagues, not because doing so means only one thing, but precisely because it has meant so many different things at different points in Jewish history. 

As we read the story of the plagues this Shabbat and think about our enslaved Israelite ancestors and also of the Egyptians, against the backdrop of all that's swirling in our own moment, perhaps we might give ourselves permission to spill some drops of wine and mean more than one thing by it. 

Shabbat Shalom, and wishing you meaning(s) in all the rituals of the day,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

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