Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Recommended Links of Mine for Purim This Year

Here in one place are links to the pieces I've done related to Purim and our contemporary world that I think are particularly worth a look or listen this year. For reading, listening, or watching.

Introducing Adar Conversations: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy (read and video)

Getting to Mi Yode'a ("Who Knows") -- Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World (video and podcast; courtesy of Valley Beit Midrash)

Responding to Antisemitism After October 7, With Esther As a Guide (video) -- with Rabbi Dr. Karen Reiss Medwed

Purim: The Buddy Film! (read and video)

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls: Wisdom From the Book of Esther (read)

Tov! Podcast About Judaism and "The Good Place": Chapter 24 -- Mask, Costume, True Self (video and podcast -- with Rabbi Ilana Schachter and Cantor Daniella Risman

All the videos as one YouTube playlist

A Year of Jewish Ethics #8: War and Peace

The word Shalom is probably the most widely-known Hebrew word, among Jews and also people who aren’t Jewish. Shalom means peace, and because of that Shalom is also the word for greeting someone and saying goodbye. Shalom means not just peace but wellbeing and wholeness, so when we see someone we are expressing our hope that they are well and whole, and we leave we wish them a blessing of peace.

Shalom is even part of the name of our holiest city, Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, the City of Peace. Shalom is central to the Jewish view for humanity and for our holy land.

And at the same time, Judaism is not pacifist. War is sometimes unavoidable and sometimes necessary. One question we can ask is how Judaism views that necessity.

One response is in the midrash about the reunion between Yaakov and Esav. Yaakov returns toward home after 20 years of separation from his brother Esav, who at the time wanted to kill him. So Yaakov is afraid this is still the case, particularly after hearing that Esav has 400 men with him. The Torah says that "Yaakov was very afraid and he was troubled", vayira Yaakov m’od vayeitzer lo (Genesis 32:8).

The midrash picks up on the two descriptions for Yaakov’s fear, and explains it like this: Yaakov was afraid that Esav might kill him, and he was troubled that he might have to kill Esav.

Between this verse and the brothers’ actual reunion, there is the famous story of Yaakov wrestling at night with a being. This being is often called an angel, but in one midrash, the being is described as a representation of Esav and his might. In the course of the fight, Yaakov is given a new name, Yisrael, which has inside it the word sar which means "power" or "rule." And at the end of the fight, in the morning, Yaakov is limping.

These two midrashim suggest a view of war: that being powerful is necessary, and that even justified killing is wounding to one’s soul. War can be necessary for survival, and survival is important not just in itself but in order to continue the covenant the Jewish people are charged with following. Killing in war is never desired, whether the people who die are innocent or enemies. Going to war ought to be sobering, never triumphalist, even when it’s unavoidable or the cause is just. A people who fights will be defined by that fighting, as Yaakov was renamed Yisrael, and they will always have something to heal from, as Yaakov did.

And shalom must remain a goal and a hope, embraced even when shalom between particular nations isn’t likely in the short-term. That is one of the reasons why the essential part of every Jewish service, the Amidah, always concludes with prayers of shalom.

A Message for the Start of Chanukkah 5785 (2024)

This is the note I sent our synagogue community today, before the first candle of Chanukkah. Chag Urim Sameach!

Dear Friends:

Tonight begins Chanukkah, the festival of light and miracles and hope.

This year Chanukkah comes at a time of ongoing war in Israel, and at the end of a difficult year for Jews everywhere. Hostages are still captive in Gaza for 446 days. In America we are in an uncertain period of anticipation, between elections and inaugurations. Each of us has what is going on in our own lives. And to boot, Chanukkah is beginning at the end of Christmas Day.

So what can we make this year of our festival of light, miracles, and hope?

Chanukkah is easily the simplest of our holy days, and at the same time rewards a deeper dive. What could be simpler than one light sparking another, one light joining next to another, light that refuses to run out or to succumb to darkness? So simple -- yet so hopeful, even miraculous.

Dig a little deeper, and there is more. In the earliest telling of the Chanukkah story, in the book of First Maccabees, the rededication of the altar in Jerusalem took place on the exact anniversary of its defilement by the emperor Antiochus. The legend of the miracle of eight days of oil required someone to have enough hope to squirrel away a cruse of pure olive oil to begin with, to hide it close enough to be discovered yet out of sight of the oppressor. To me, hope is the capacity to know that something better is real as long as it ought to be, even when today it isn’t real and even when you don’t know when it might be.

And the whole story of Chanukkah is set in an era that is the first precursor of our own. The Hellenistic world revolutionized by Alexander the Great, by Greek-inspired culture and philosophy. Judaism was transformed in the centuries before and after the revolt of the Maccabees at time, even during the revolt itself. Judaism was translated into Greek language and in conversation with Greek philosophy; forced to grapple with questions of power, both ethical and strategic. Jews in Judea and Egypt and throughout the Middle East were often adapting and sometimes fighting to make our place as a unique nation in a world defined by a dominant empire and its culture.

Sometime during Chanukkah, give yourself the gift of a deeper dive, into the nature of hope and into the world of the Chanukkah story that is so relevant for us.

It is still a miracle to live as Jews in our age. To live in an era of freedom and strength like Jews have never known before. Which Jews have helped build in America and still do, for ourselves and everyone, and which Jews have created and still create in the Land of Israel.

It is still a miracle to be able to create and reenergize a modern Jewish culture and a modern Torah, to bring our rich legacy to bear on the most contemporary challenges from war and peace to majorities and minorities.

It is still a miracle that there are small cruses of oil everywhere. Sources of light and energy, hidden away to be rediscovered when we need them. Reserves of friendship and community, of wisdom and resilience.

Chanukkah is for the times when we wonder if there will be enough of these to last even through today. It is a reminder for each of us to be that cruse of oil for someone else close to you or simply in our community, when they are going through a tough time. Each of us is here to light the next candle -- to help one person not have to shine alone, to help a few people with commitment become a group or a movement.

This year Chanukkah begins as Christmas Day ends, and then the two seasons run alongside each other. That’s part of the origin story of Chanukkah too. It’s no accident that on the Jewish calendar the festival begins on the 25th of the month of Kislev, or that Christmas is the 25th, both originally in dialgoue with an existing holy day. Since the very first Chanukkah in 164 B.C.E., Chanukkah has been a time to reflect on our relationship to the larger world we’re in. For the members of our community who have both celebrations in your lives -- thank you for being part of Beth Abraham, and thank you for bringing something of Judaism to the people you’re connected to who might be less familiar with us.

This year we light our candles knowing that there are still hostages hidden in the dark tunnels under the Gaza Strip. Israeli, Jewish, American, and from other nations. May the merit of our deeds during Chanukkah hasten their freedom and restore them to light, to their lives, and to their loved ones. We pray that the night skies of the Holy Land be lit only by candles, and no longer with rockets.

The word Chanukkah means dedication. Each night as we light our candles, let us rededicate ourselves -- to someone, to some worthy action we can take individually or through our gifts of tzedakah. May all the lights in our windows and from our souls join together and radiate, showing and reflecting the light of the Divine One throughout the world.

Chag Urim Sameach – A Joyous Festival of Lights,
Rabbi Jon
Dear Friends:

Tonight begins Chanukkah, the festival of light and miracles and hope.

This year Chanukkah comes at a time of ongoing war in Israel, and at the end of a difficult year for Jews everywhere. Hostages are still captive in Gaza for 446 days. In America we are in an uncertain period of anticipation, between elections and inaugurations. Each of us has what is going on in our own lives. And to boot, Chanukkah is beginning at the end of Christmas Day.

So what can we make this year of our festival of light, miracles, and hope?

Chanukkah is easily the simplest of our holy days, and at the same time rewards a deeper dive. What could be simpler than one light sparking another, one light joining next to another, light that refuses to run out or to succumb to darkness? So simple -- yet so hopeful, even miraculous.

Dig a little deeper, and there is more. In the earliest telling of the Chanukkah story, in the book of First Maccabees, the rededication of the altar in Jerusalem took place on the exact anniversary of its defilement by the emperor Antiochus. The legend of the miracle of eight days of oil required someone to have enough hope to squirrel away a cruse of pure olive oil to begin with, to hide it close enough to be discovered yet out of sight of the oppressor. To me, hope is the capacity to know that something better is real as long as it ought to be, even when today it isn’t real and even when you don’t know when it might be.

And the whole story of Chanukkah is set in an era that is the first precursor of our own. The Hellenistic world revolutionized by Alexander the Great, by Greek-inspired culture and philosophy. Judaism was transformed in the centuries before and after the revolt of the Maccabees at time, even during the revolt itself. Judaism was translated into Greek language and in conversation with Greek philosophy; forced to grapple with questions of power, both ethical and strategic. Jews in Judea and Egypt and throughout the Middle East were often adapting and sometimes fighting to make our place as a unique nation in a world defined by a dominant empire and its culture.

Sometime during Chanukkah, give yourself the gift of a deeper dive, into the nature of hope and into the world of the Chanukkah story that is so relevant for us.

It is still a miracle to live as Jews in our age. To live in an era of freedom and strength like Jews have never known before. Which Jews have helped build in America and still do, for ourselves and everyone, and which Jews have created and still create in the Land of Israel.

It is still a miracle to be able to create and reenergize a modern Jewish culture and a modern Torah, to bring our rich legacy to bear on the most contemporary challenges from war and peace to majorities and minorities.

It is still a miracle that there are small cruses of oil everywhere. Sources of light and energy, hidden away to be rediscovered when we need them. Reserves of friendship and community, of wisdom and resilience.

Chanukkah is for the times when we wonder if there will be enough of these to last even through today. It is a reminder for each of us to be that cruse of oil for someone else close to you or simply in our community, when they are going through a tough time. Each of us is here to light the next candle -- to help one person not have to shine alone, to help a few people with commitment become a group or a movement.

This year Chanukkah begins as Christmas Day ends, and then the two seasons run alongside each other. That’s part of the origin story of Chanukkah too. It’s no accident that on the Jewish calendar the festival begins on the 25th of the month of Kislev, or that Christmas is the 25th, both originally in dialgoue with an existing holy day. Since the very first Chanukkah in 164 B.C.E., Chanukkah has been a time to reflect on our relationship to the larger world we’re in. For the members of our community who have both celebrations in your lives -- thank you for being part of Beth Abraham, and thank you for bringing something of Judaism to the people you’re connected to who might be less familiar with us.

This year we light our candles knowing that there are still hostages hidden in the dark tunnels under the Gaza Strip. Israeli, Jewish, American, and from other nations. May the merit of our deeds during Chanukkah hasten their freedom and restore them to light, to their lives, and to their loved ones. We pray that the night skies of the Holy Land be lit only by candles, and no longer with rockets.

The word Chanukkah means dedication. Each night as we light our candles, let us rededicate ourselves -- to someone, to some worthy action we can take individually or through our gifts of tzedakah. May all the lights in our windows and from our souls join together and radiate, showing and reflecting the light of the Divine One throughout the world.

Chag Urim Sameach – A Joyous Festival of Lights,
Rabbi Jon

When the Oil Is Still Hidden: A Chanukkah Perspective on Hope

I shared this D'var Torah on Shabbat morning, December 14, 2024, about a week and a half before Chanukkah.

Muhammed Asefi is a physician from Afghanistan, who is an artist-in-residence this year at Arizona State University. Dr. Asefi, before he was a medical doctor, wanted more than anything to be a painter. So he did both, and by the mid-1990s in his thirties he was already a well-respected doctor and a prominent painter, with actually hundreds of his works on display in Kabul in places like the National Gallery and the Foreign Ministry.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they imposed a ban on the depiction of living creatures in art, in line with a particular interpretation of Islamic law. In fact as soon as they took over they came upon several of Dr. Asefi’s paintings, I believe at the presidential palace, and they tore them apart. He knew that it was only a matter of time before other works of his and many others would be destroyed. Dr. Asefi wasn’t particularly an activist to that point in his life, but he began to work on a scheme to save as much forbidden art as he could. Sometimes he would do something like take a portrait from the National Gallery, and hang in its place a landscape of the same size, hoping a not-art-savvy official wouldn’t notice that anything had changed and sniff around.

The more audacious project he came up with was actually to cover up forbidden aspects of paintings and leave them hanging in the same galleries. With the help of a patron, a businessman named Muhammed Saber Latifi, Dr. Asefi began experimenting to see if he could use watercolor to paint over parts of an oil painting. The idea was that to create a temporary hiding place within the painting itself, something that could be removed later on if conditions changed.

And that’s what Dr. Asefi did with more than one hundred paintings. Bit by bit, he painted over a person, or a horse, or a bird. He made a riverbank of grazing cattle into just an empty riverbank, matching the background color in oil perfectly in watercolor. He replaced people with flowers. He would take a painting and tell an unsuspecting Taliban official that he was working on repairs to it, and then he’d move things around, and put the altered piece back somewhere else, to throw them off.

And indeed, when the Taliban were deposed after 9/11, Dr. Asefi went back to all the paintings -- and with sponges soaked in water he took away the watercolor, and one after another, there were the original paintings once again.

This story I have told you is a story about hope, and it is exactly the story of Chanukkah. What Dr. Asefi did was exactly what the legend says about the kohanim, the priests in the Beit Hamikdash in the early days of Antiochus. Anticipating that Antiochus would soon come and defile the Temple and the olive oil necessary for its lamps, someone made sure a cruse of oil was hidden away somewhere in the Beit Hamikdash itself, where they could retrieve it one day, and if not them then the kohanim of a future generation. Retrieve it and restore the lights of the menorah again.

The key to Dr. Asefi carrying out his plan, at risk to his life, was hope. Another artist-activist, the Czech writer and then president Vaclav Havel, said that hope is different from optimism. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well”, ever or in the foreseeable future. “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”

Hope is the conviction that there is a picture that deserves to be seen, that deserves to be real even when it’s not real right now – and hope is living in the light of that picture anyway. That is the hope that Chanukkah comes to teach us. The key moment is stashing the oil in the first place.

I have many times linked this to the dreidel and taught that there is a deeper truth in this children’s game. The spinning top is the uncertainty of our lives, and the four plays that can happen represent four kinds of hope experiences. Taking all the M&Ms, or some; standing pat, or putting M&Ms into the pot – these describe four hope situations. Hope can go with abundance, of course, with gimel or hay.  But hope can go with stuckness, numbness, with nun. Hope isn’t a feeling itself, a prediction. Which is why hope can even go with shin, when you have to give away, when you are bereft, when the reality moves farther away.

It’s the shin I am talking about this morning. When the s’vivon lands on the letter shin, you take away from what you have and put it into the middle for now. In the phrase nes gadol haya sham, “a great miracle happened there,” shin is the last part; sham in Hebrew means “there.” The not-here-ness of what we hope for -- and yet there can be hope.

Shin hope is putting up an altered painting in the Afghan National Gallery, when its true beauty is only under what you can see. Shin is facing destruction by preparing a cruse of pure olive oil, and then hiding it near where it might give light one day.

Shin in the dreidel seems like the opposite of hope – losing plain and simple. But in some ways it is actually the foundation of hope. In dreidel, every shin eventually becomes gimel winnings at some point. Someone has to put in the M&Ms in the middle, or else there is nothing to take when you win.

That is the story of Chanukkah too. The kohanim who hid away the oil – it’s because they had already the story of the slavery of their ancestors, and the liberation afterwards. The story of Joseph’s bones, buried deep in Egypt, which he had made every generation promise to find whenever they would be freed. Yes, something was being taken in the time of Antiochus – but the kohanim of our legend made that a shin, another deposit of hope.

The Afghanis have their own such story – Dr. Asefi and others like him could only have kept their culture alive underground because they had stories of cultural destruction and reemergence going back all the way to Alexander the Great. They have for instance a story of sixteen people who survived the sack of Herat in the 1200s by Genghis Khan, and from those sixteen everything was rebuilt. (Sixteen, twice our Chanukkah number of eight!)

When the world is shin, when the miracles seem to be receding, we can be frightened and sad and oh-so-uncertain, and at the same time live with hope.

It’s true in the wide world and for our own lives also. When we are dealing with illness or sadness, with depression or loss, hope means believing that light isn’t gone, but hidden; the beauty isn’t lost, but covered up. Beneath the surface of today is the pure oil of friendships we’ve cultivated, of community; the light of our Torah’s wisdom and our people’s experience; the images and movements of characters in the stories we have told before and been inspired by.

We may not know how the dreidel will fall today, this turn or the next or the next. Some of the M&Ms we get back down the road will be the exact ones we put in, paintings restored.

Sometimes not, and today’s shin may become a very different gimel down the road. You have been thinking: why am I talking about Dr. Asefi when the Taliban are back. Which is of course why Dr. Asefi is in Arizona right now – he is in exile. But he is there because of hope. His own, because to him his work of creating and teaching is not done. And the hope of others who believe his story is not negated; it is just a shin, it will inspire someone else to be an artist for freedom. His shin will be transformed once again, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere.

And so too for each of us. We can hope when what is ahead is clear or seems positive, and we can be hopeful, we can live hope, through uncertainty, even in worry and fear. Because hope isn’t a prediction or a feeling. Hope is the oil itself, even when we don’t know yet what lamp it will light or when. Hope is the conviction that there is a hidden picture that deserves to be seen – and hope is living somehow in the light of that picture, nonetheless.

Shabbat Shalom, and an early Chag Urim Sameach! (A Joyous Festival of Lights)

NB -- While I have heard and told about Dr. Asefi before, I drew on a few published pieces this time. There was an NPR piece I heard once which I am not sure I can pinpoint now, with apologies to the creator. Here is one from the New York Times, one from the Washington Post, and one from the author Andrew Solomon. I learned about Dr. Asefi's presence and work at Arizona State University here.

A Year of Jewish Ethics #5: The Binding of Yitzchak

 

It’s impossible to talk about Jewish ethics and the book of Bereshit without addressing the story of the binding of Isaac, Akedat Yitzchak or simply the Akedah (found in Genesis 22:1-19). Avraham hears a call from the Divine to take his son to the top of a mountain and offer him as an offering. Avraham packs them up early in the morning and they travel for two days, and on the third day proceeds almost in slow motion toward this terrible act. Ultimately a messenger from the Divine speaks to Avraham and stops him.

There are so many ways to interpret the message of this story, but for Jewish ethics I want to follow a tradition in the midrash where God never wants Avraham to make this sacrifice, and Avraham knows this even though he is not sure how exactly it will play out.

So the ethical principle is that God never wants us to set aside our responsibilities for human life, ever, even when how to live up to that is complicated. No one’s death is good for a cause, no matter how good the cause. No one’s death and no group’s death can be the purpose of a cause, obviously, and just being willing to kill can never be the way you ask someone to show how devoted they are to a good cause. If you think that God’s will or some cause is so high that it overrides the value of a human life without a thought, you are always wrong.

So why doesn’t Avraham just say to God right off – “Good test – I get it, this is a command I should not obey even from you”?

I follow a way of seeing this story taught by a Chasidic rebbe known as the Izhbitzer. He sees the Akedah as a question Avraham asks himself after he has achieved some serenity and prosperity in his life. The Izhbitzer imagines Avraham saying to himself: How do I know what my own motivations are? How do I am not serving God only because things are easy?

So I imagine Avraham saying to himself: I say I have learned the principle of Tzelem Elohim, of the image of God manifest in every person. But am I really committed to it? Do I always stand up for it?

What if the only way to protect someone I care about puts someone else at risk? What if now that I am old, the only way to protect our legacy is for my child to fight for it, to risk his life for my ideals, to kill those who threaten it or threaten us if he has no other choice? What if he doesn’t know yet how to weep at the loss of life that might come from his justifiable acts, the way I hope I do? What if my pursuit of justice has blinded me to someone else’s life?

In this line of thinking, the Akedah isn’t something that happened, a demand from God, but an exploration within Avraham’s own soul. He makes himself live with the hardest dilemmas that test his commitment to Tzelem Elohim and human life. Because he does not delude himself that these dilemmas are easy.

So we have to commit and recommit to the absolute value of human life. Sometimes how to do that is clear. Sometimes it’s not, and in those cases, such as a just war fought justly, we still have to recognize that the deaths are not for God, or for the cause, and make sure at the very least that we don’t turn away.

The big idea is that God despises human sacrifice. We think we know this, and we have to continue to ask what it really means.

Gratitude for Being Together in This Country

These are my words from this past Tuesday's Thanksgiving service with the Nashua Area Interfaith Council. Thank you to Pilgrim Congregational Church for hosting us this year!

Let me start my reflection on gratitude for being together in this country with a story about Wolf Landsman, Clarence Stetson, and Eva Castillo. It’s possible I have told this story in an interfaith council setting before, and if so then I am telling it again!

Thanks to my sister Ellen, the family genealogist, I know that in 1893 just a few days after July 4^th, my great-grandfather Wolf Landsman came to the city court in Utica, New York, or as it is known in my family, the Garden of Eden. Grandpa Landsman as my dad calls him was 21, and he had been in this country for only three years. At the courthouse he declared his intent to become a citizen of the United States and renounced all allegiance to his previous sovereign, the czar of Russa. That could not have been a hard thing to do; to be a Jew in the czar’s empire was terrible, and over a few decades about forty percent sought refuge and new possibilities in the United States. The hard thing for Wolf Landsman to do would have been to do write his intentions on a form in English.

So the document Ellen found is completed in the beautiful handwriting of Clarence Stetson, a court clerk. Plus my great-grandfather’s X for a signature. What I know about Mr. Stetson is that he and his family were for at least 80 years and may still be part of the legal, governmental, and civic leadership of Utica. I want to picture him with a fancy hat, but I have no evidence he is related to those Stetsons.

Some Stetson in a recent generation was leader of an architectural design firm working in the city; travel through downtown Utica and its classic buildings will remind you a lot of our own Nashua.

My favorite part of the document is the one place where I am pretty sure there was no way to quite bridge the communication gap between Grandpa Landsman and Mr. Stetson. In the otherwise meticulous penmanship of Mr. Stetson there is the name of the Russian town where my great-grandfather was born. I think all Mr. Stetson could hear was something like Grvkimustck, so it looks like he fudged it. It looks like letters on the form, but I think it’s just a clever piece of art that looks like letters. I’d ask my sister the researcher to make out the city name, but I like my version of the story better.

Two years ago, 129 years later to the month from the date of this document, I talked about this part of my family’s origins in America at an immigration-related gathering of storytelling and affirmation here in Nashua. When I arrived, with my tightly crafted three-minute intro, I learned that everything during the evening would be interpreted into Spanish and from Spanish to English, in real time, so we should speak accordingly with pauses etc. Thank you to the amazing Eva Castillo.

The upshot of which is that the story of my traditional Jewish great-grandfather was told not just in English by a rabbi -- but in a New England, Unitarian Universalist Church, in Spanish.

That is why I am grateful to be together in this country.

In Hebrew the root-word for gratitude is unlike most words in that it has really only a single letter, rather than three. The letter is dalet ד, which makes the sound D as in Judaic and means a door. I have been thinking about why gratitude is a door, whether it’s about opening and going in or opening and going out. Perhaps this is about emerging from one’s own space into the vastness of America, the chaos that could drown out one’s presence and voice, and yet still being found and heard. Perhaps this is about going inside, to a place not only one’s own but a welcoming home that could be any of ours, and sitting around a table for conversation about ultimate issues among many voices, reaching for a highest common denominator, in a conversation made possible in a space like this that is just right.

As the great rabbi Forrest Gump said: I think maybe it’s both... happening at the same time.

Even, or especially, when we strain to make sense of the words between us, to find a handwriting to represent the histories we are passing back and forth. As we translate our thoughts into one another’s languages. Or even when we can’t quite bridge the communication gap, and all we can do together is write the simplest mark, to indicate that one tried to speak and one tried to hear and we got this far so far.

And that is why this, inside this door, this dalet, is America. This is America. We shall repeat that and repeat that, enact it and enact it, because it is true and it will be true. For that -- for you -- I am thankful.

Jewish -- Thanksgiving is Actually in Our Name

These are words I shared in 2022 at the Nashua Area Interfaith Council service right before Thanksgiving.

The first words a Jew is supposed to say upon waking are: Modah Ani or Modeh Ani, which mean “Thankful am I”. Even before we bring ourselves into focus, we are we are taught to center gratitude, and to make being thankful the frame for our existence in the day that is just starting.

That short morning wake-up prayer goes like this in full:

Thankful am I before You
Power alive and enduring
For returning my soul/my breath into me with love
Great is Your faith

Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt, also known as the Velveteen Rabbi, says this last line isn’t just acknowledging the Divine faithfulness to us through giving us life. Rather, it’s actually a separate statement about Divine faith in us. God bets on me for the day to come, that I will pay off that faith even though all I have done so far is become aware that I am here. So in the first seconds of the day a Jew is to say: Thank you, here I am, I see that I’m breathing, great is Your faith in me. And then it’s off into the day.

Though Jews talk a lot about the significance of our name Israel, which means wrestler-with-the-Divine, we don’t talk nearly as much about our more common name Jews --  Yehudim, people of Judah. Judah was the fourth son of Leah and Jacob. Leah was the unloved wife, and when the first three sons were born, Leah gave them each names out of her yearning for more love from her husband, and those names did not come true. When the fourth was born she said instead, “This time I thank the Divine.” From the word for “I thank”, odeh, came the name Yehudah or Judah. (Along the way in the rendering of yehudi from Hebrew to Greek to the Europeans languages, the d sound fell away and the y hardened a bit, hence the word “Jew”.)

This thankfulness is more grounded in experience than the first-thing-in-the-morning “Thankful am I.” Leah’s naming-gratitude is gratitude despite, in the face of. But I wouldn’t say it’s only grudging, or through gritted teeth. In Hebrew words are generally built out of roots with three consonants, and often you can hear all three sounds regardless of the form of the word as a noun or verb. But all the many forms of the word for gratitude in Hebrew share only one sound, D -- the middle letter called dalet, which means: a door.

Thankfulness is a door. More specifically, it’s the decision to open a door from this place you are sitting, a place of perhaps not enough love toward you or from you, or not enough peace or not enough justice – open it and then look toward next-door where there is more of those waiting for you, where there are partners and friends and allies. Or open it and look toward an outside expanse of possibility.

Thankfulness is acknowledging that sometimes that door feels closed, or we don’t have faith enough or energy enough to open it – but then we realize we can, and hopefully we do.

Instant gratitude first thing every day, and gratitude in-spite-of as in our very name -- these are two very different ways in which gratitude is meant to be our essence as Jews. May this Thanksgiving help us become more thankful people each and every day.

Cookbook, Scrapbook, Big Story -- What Is the Torah?

This was my D'var Torah for Parashat Bereshit 5785 (October 26, 2025), the start of the new Torah reading cycle. Here's a short video that does some of this from a similar angle.

Some of the best cookbooks are mostly not recipes. Each dish is the occasion for a story – of someone special in the family who passed the recipe along, or of a culture where this originates, or a time the author traveled to the place the recipe is from. Those descriptions can themselves be luscious, and the stories and images make the tastes even more layered when you actually make the recipe.

Should we think of the Torah as the original great cookbook? If you skipped past the introductory pages, say into the middle of Leviticus, it would totally seem like that kind of cookbook.

Scrapbooking – that’s a practice which has come a long way from scissors and bad glue. Forget about digital, I’m talking about the craft of scrapbooking. The fine papers to write on or paste on, handmade or marbled; the perfect sleeves to slip things into. Which could be anything from pictures to favorite poems to family trees. All of which tell a story -- the growth of a person, a family, maybe even over generations, helping us know who we are.

Should we think of the Torah as the original fabulous scrapbook? It’s on such beautiful parchment, presented so artfully. It’s got all kinds of things in it, with the perfect cover to slip it into and out of.

I am trying to get you thinking from other angles about what kind of book the Torah is, or if it’s even a book at all, as we embark for something like the 1500th or 2000^th-plus time leafing it through it.

It’s interesting that we call the Torah a “book” pretty automatically. It does seem to be in a book, or in a scroll, and every part of it looks pretty much the same, like one book. And yet it’s unlike every other book, where someone asks you “What’s that book about” and you can answer in a couple sentences. That’s not what we do -- we’re so used to considering the Torah’s parts – each story, each law, often each word.

So forget for a minute what you know, and consider the cookbook quality and the scrapbook quality of the Torah.

The Torah has recipes, lots of recipes, and stories of meals. It has travelogues and family trees. Price lists and blueprints and property deeds. Jokes – some pure slapstick, some edgy enough to get you cancelled and not just today, maybe even back then. Yes, laws and stories, but so many kinds of stories, traversing the known world and the mythical world, up mountains and into deepest hottest valleys, adventures and long slogs, crises and amazing triumphs, wrenching dilemmas and world-changing turnarounds.

Is there any other kind of single book that is like this? How do you classify this, what kind of genre or thing even is the Torah?

We’ll just have to call it – a Torah. It’s more than stories and laws, or laws and stories, which is often how we divide it. Halacha and aggada. It’s in a class all by itself.

So we’re starting today another year of reading it and hearing it and seeing it and acting it – and tell me there’s another book group you’re in that does all of those things! And if by chance there is, tell me that it does all of those things with the same book year after year.

We can get much out of Torah by focusing on each week’s installment, or even on a single episode or verse or word. But it’s a good idea also to zoom out and think about the whole thing, to consider what the big story is of the cookbook, the scrapbook, the Torah.

Stories are everything, and the best stories create our lives and our world, just as surely as we make stories and tell them.

I was going to say, “I don’t have to tell you that stories are everything”, but I do have to tell you, and I have to reassure myself. Last year when we began to read the Torah, Parashat Bereshit a week after last Simchat Torah, I worried out loud right here that in a world of bombs Torah would turn out to be too small, and the next week I worried out loud that in the world of lies Torah might nothing more than a temporary hide-out for us away from the world.

But lies get their energy out of stories too, and bombs are usually justified with stories. Stories give life and take life, even if they don’t do so as directly. So it is urgent that we think about what story we are trying to be within, as we start to encounter the Torah this year. Let me tell you what a few might be.

First a story I don’t think we should go with. The cookbook theory of the Torah I didn’t get from left field. There is a version of the-Torah-is-a-cookbook that was for a while the dominant academic theory about how the Torah was first assembled, by the original keepers of the sacred recipes, the kohanim, the priests. The idea is that the recipes for the holy meals, the offerings, were put in the middle part of the Torah for a reason by the priestly editors.

They wanted us to believe that the sacred meals are everything, that they were vital to keeping us connected with the Divine, and the stories in the cookbook helped us to understand why and what would happen if we didn’t. The cookbook told us that the Temple was the center of everything, and that we should admire the kohanim as priests and judges. Because we needed them to keep balance and keep us from changing the one good thing that was helping us keep our home and keep ourselves alive, as a small people in a vast world.

That was never the only view of what story the Torah is telling. And I don’t think it’s a good one even if you substitute our rituals for our ancestors’ and rabbis for kohanim. We should still cherish the recipes and the family stories around them, but that’s not the kind of cookbook the Torah should be for us.

There is another scholarly historical view that the Torah took shape when we were in exile, and that it’s the story of a people who have always been beloved of God no matter what seems to be happening around us. After all, the Torah is a scrapbook of the scrappy, full of pictures of when the first-born gets his comeuppance and the unlikely child emerges. Even Pharaoh is humbled and we come forward.

And though the Torah scraps far too many travel receipts, exile after exile, starting from the Garden of Eden and through our Genesis ancestors, the real story is that we are never permanently far from where we ought to be as the Jewish people. When we are not home, we are for most of the story in the desert heading toward a promised land, and we are never really detached from our destiny, only delayed. The brochures for where we’re going, pasted into the scrapbook in Exodus and Numbers, just get better and better.

And there is another view that the Torah got edited along the way two or three times when we were strong in our land, either really strong or stronger than we had recently been. Twice it was prophets and maybe even some renegade priests, who put this scrapbook together. They lived a bit north of Jerusalem, close enough to have the inside scoop but far enough for some critical distance. They weren’t satisfied with resting on the laurels of priests or kings, the Temple or royal power as it was.

So they assembled for us a story with the Exodus as its backbone. In Genesis we learn that we are part of humanity, and all of humanity arrived as the image of the amazing Creator. We Jews were brought onto the stage as a unique part of humanity, not because we are a different sort of human but because the Divine needed a tikkun for humanity, a pilot project that would affect the whole. Even God can’t control everything about the whole world once these majestic humans are part of it, so there’s Pharaoh out there, and we got caught by him. And we had to fight our way out and pray our way out and then spend a long time learning how not to let Pharoah seep his way into us – his way of power and the idols he imagined were real and his easy slide toward oppressing.

We would be a people at home again, we would rebuild ourselves, we would be empowered -- but we’d continue to be watchful of ourselves. In better times to build our spiritual strengths, and not to sell out and cut corners by taking advantage of our weakest. In worse times, not to lash out at each other, not to find the only answer in physical power, but to find it also in the same spiritual strengths.

Which of these stories, or their variations, will be the one we need this year, as we page through our ancestral scrapbook? Pore over the specific tales and teachings and words. Savor all the tastes and the keepsakes, the adventures and the. But don’t forget to keep the thread of the big story, the one we need to make powerful in the world of bombs and lies. Let’s find that together, week after week.

A Year Later, Back to Moshe's Final Words of Blessing -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 1

 

On Simchat Torah morning, after we parade with the Torah scrolls, we gather around to read the very last words of Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. The man who could hardly speak departs with an original song – his words, not God’s. And his last sentence in life begins: Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha. Happy are you, O Israel. Fortunate are You, O Jewish people. Who is like you. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Ashreicha Yisrael. You might recognize the word Ashrei. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people. What must it have been like for Moshe to make those his final words. Moshe, who was born at a time and place when it was against the law for him to live. Whose first recorded words were “Why are you beating your neighbor?” Who faced down Pharaoh, led his people into freedom, brought them to Mt. Sinai. All the desert crises of food and faith Moshe had gone through with them. After all that, Moshe sees his people endure, finally get their act together, and now, they are sitting still one last time. Knowing that what’s just ahead for them is a future and a fight – Moshe sings: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. Mi chamocha – there is no people quite like you.

Last Simchat Torah, October 8, knowing what we knew, we had to decide how we would sing those words. Should we just hurry through and get out of here? And what about our children? Most years our kid-friendly Simchat Torah is a quick early evening on a school day. But last year it was a Sunday morning, with no rush, so we had bigger plans. Would parents even bring their kids here on October 8, knowing what we knew?

We decided to stick to our plan. With our broken hearts, and overwhelmed, we would dance with the Torah for our kids, and for Israelis who already were begging us not to let anyone reach across the ocean and take this too away. Amazingly, parents brought their kids. And after dancing, right down there in this aisle we rolled out the Torah on a table all the way to the back. As the kids were gathered next to the Torah, I got to the chanting of Moshe’s final sentence: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. I so wanted to sing it; to promise it to our kids as Moshe promised the generation he was about to launch. I was overcome with tears, and only thanks to the kids could I sing the words at all.

As hard as it was to sing Ashreicha Yisrael, Moshe’s final sentence has more words. I don’t emphasize them generally because they are not as inspirational. Am nosha b’Adonai, magen ezrecha asher cherev ga’avatecha… ”Fortunate are you, O Israel, who is like you, a nation saved by the Divine, your helping shield, whose sword is your pride. Your enemies shall recant themselves to you, and you on their high places will tread.”

But as I croaked out those words too, I had this terrible thought: not a single part of this Torah verse was true. Not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. An enemy far from recanting, far from going back on its essence -- and who was treading on whom that day.

Was the Torah itself being kidnapped and used to mock us? How could we go just minutes later and begin the Torah again, and with rockets in the sky declare that God created the heavens, and that in the deepest darkness God said “Let there be light”?

Yet, with all the unrelenting loss and pain of the past exhausting year – and even with the escalations of the war this past week and the attack from Iran these past days – I say to you that the critical spiritual thing for us in this new year is to get back Moshe’s final words: Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people, who is like you. We need to believe that this is as true as ever, and true even as never before. Our future here depends on it.

Obviously atrocities and war are in no way fortunate. And I do not mean it is easy to be Jewish just this moment. Only that we are profoundly fortunate to be the Jews of this moment, of this era in Jewish history.

Now believe me, part of me wonders if I’m crazy to say this today. I really just want to reach out and envelop you all in a hug, and allow us to cry together among people who know the many layers of our weeping. Our congregation has many Israelis, and we are closely connected to several families who have lost people on or after October 7, and to at least five people who were taken hostage. Last fall two Beth Abraham families had their Israeli kids here in town taking refuge. We have college students too. My own daughter is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University, so we know painfully what it’s like for a child to live within an institution and a community ripped apart over the past year. Some of our tears are for the loss of dreams of peace, delayed at least for now.

Yet I keep coming back to this thought: we need Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate we are to be this unique Jewish generation, the Jews of America of this era. 

We need to say those words to ourselves. We need to carry ourselves that way outwardly in the world. I thought about talking today about any of particular things on people’s minds right now: the immediate war itself, or questions about our relations with other people here in America and anti-Semitism around us, or concerns about the ethics of the military actions we are connected to, or about Israeli policy toward Palestinians. But before we can talk about or work on any of these, we have to think first about seeing ourselves once again in the light of Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. 

Look what we have built so far. In less than 150 years, Jews have gone from a tiny presence in the United States, having gotten here in flight just like from every other place we have been in exile, to a flourishing community. Here we have not just carved out a corner for ourselves for a while. We have been essential to making our host country into a home, for us and for everyone. From Justice Brandeis to Justice Kagan, American law has been infused with our commitment to law and justice. From Philip Roth to Dara Horn, American literature has been infused with our creativity and our concerns. Healing, science. Comedy. The equality and freedom of people is infused with our ideas and achieved partly with our legwork. The best of America’s story and the best of the American Jewish story are completely intertwined. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute said this summer that even though we have always been a small percentage of the population, the bigness of America drew out the bigness of Judaism. 

In this year’s election, the candidates are a former president whose daughter is a committed Jew, and a sitting vice-president whose husband is a committed Jew. There has never been a diaspora Jewish community like this in all of Jewish history. 

That litany used to be my Ashreicha Yisrael. But in March, Franklin Foer wrote an article in The Atlantic called “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” His main evidence is the year at many universities, the turning against many Jews as well as against all these aspects of America that Jews have helped build, by many people who will be tomorrow’s American leaders. Foer argues that the conditions that made us happy and fortunate here seem to be going away.

Well he is right that the conditions are not the same. But that is not the determining story. In the past, in other places, it might have been. But there are new seeds of new strengths we have, and they too have been uniquely visible actually in this past year. I’m just going to talk about a couple.

Many of us experienced the year through the words and leadership of the Goldberg-Polins in Jerusalem, Rachel and Jon, parents of Hersh, zichrono livracha. Hersh was kidnapped from the Nova music festival after saving some lives in the attack, and his parents have urged us to advocate for their son and all the hostages every single day in every way possible. His murder a month ago along with five others was crushing.

But how Jon and Rachel have advocated is so dramatically different from what Jews like us have been used to. They hardly talk about Hamas – even in their eulogies for Hersh, they didn’t name the group. They talk about us, and what it means to value and rejoice in human life. 

In July, the Goldberg-Polins and their close circle decided that alongside their political advocacy, it was important to spend a week saturating the world with Torah and mitzvot.

So they organized a study of the whole Hebrew Bible around the clock and around the world, and a concluding international study event. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They organized an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona, a hip outdoor venue in Jerusalem. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages in Jerusalem, and if you weren’t nearby to post on their web page acts of chesed you would be doing all week anywhere. Right away you could see some 200 things, from challah making to opening up one’s swimming pool, to cultivating patience, to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel. It was like they were forcing the World to Come onto this world, and forcing us all to force it.

The Goldberg-Polins speak and act in this personal and international crisis as though the primary center of our destiny is in our own hands, and in the hands of any Jew with power. Of course there is a context. But for Jon and Rachel even hard-core advocacy for the hostages is about what is inside us, no matter the context. 

All year every day they have used the language of this season –  teshuvah, accountability, and forgiveness. At Hersh’s funeral they begged his forgiveness for what they did not do to save his life, though what more could they possibly have done. They have asked us directly as they have asked themselves over and over: What have you not done yet. Who are you, they have asked world leaders and Israeli leaders, and all of us Jews and all Americans.

They described Hersh at his graveside as someone who forced them to open their eyes and their hearts wider than they had known how to. 

In the past, even in the Golden Age, at difficult times we would mainly point our fingers outward. The Goldberg-Polins have showed us that we as Jews are strong enough to make ourselves the moral center of any story, even the most difficult story, even one where other people are also wrong and wronging us.

To have leaders and teachers like this in the Jewish crisis of a generation – Ashreicha Yisrael, how fortunate we are. That we have become a Jewish people strong enough at a time like this to respond to Jon and Rachel, to ground ourselves in both advocacy and mitzvah at the same time, to ask something both from the world and from ourselves – Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. This is what Zionism was supposed to do – in the era of Jewish self-determination, we take responsibility on ourselves as makers of history, even though we are small.

It’s only in this generation that we are starting to learn how to do that. For the first time, our bigger Jewish response has been much more than Never Again.

Some would say like Franklin Foer that this year the strains between Jews and our allies finally broke. But I saw something different up close here in Southern New Hampshire, specifically with my colleagues in the clergy.

My mission for sixteen years in the Nashua Area Interfaith Council has been to press beyond the simple sentiment of “there are many roads to God.” So that when push comes to shove, we’ll know whether we are really there for each other. This year was a big test. 

In October when I heard from almost none of my cherished colleagues, I began to write to them, to tell them what it was like to be a Jew now and also my worries about what would happen to Judaism if they gave us reason to close in on ourselves. Each one of them responded. I have been president of that group for almost a third of my time in Nashua and I was disoriented for a while. At first I just asked them to listen to me, and to pray for us, for the people we’re connected to, as they were praying for the Palestinian people their churches are connected to. They all said yes, of course.

I said at a meeting in the fall that I think the biggest difference between me and most of them is not Jesus but Zionism. A few days later, one of my colleagues reached out to ask me what I meant, and this opened up an amazing conversation about our seminaries and what we each know about the Holy Land. 

I bought about 25 copies of Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which includes Palestinian responses back and I have given it to many colleagues. They have read it; some have shared it in their congregations. Some have opened up to me about their reflections about the role the Christian world has played in pitting Jews and Muslims against each other. Most of our Christian friends have brought more nuance to their words and their discussions in church about Israel-Palestine.

I have done this work not from supplication but from strength, from a foundation many of you have built over decades in Nashua, and immodestly I will say I myself have built. Ashreicha Yisrael – it is fortunate right now to be a Jew in the interfaith community of Greater Nashua. 

And it is good for us to be in the middle of the difficult moral conversations that serious people are having. Because I pushed to see if my colleagues and I could talk this way, I could open my ears more too. So I also can and must say that we here are connected to at least one Palestinian family in New Hampshire who lost many people in Gaza very early in the war. 

It’s not easy, at all. But we can handle it; we are maturing as a Jewish community within America. Our friendships, alliances and our power are still robust, even though the conditions don’t make it as easy. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi chamocha – we are a unique generation.

And part of Ashreicha Yisrael is simply us here now. Doing what we do. Here sustaining one another, singing and thinking and crying together. Gathering as a moral community. Not because we have to, not because it’s as joyful as other years, but because this is who we are.

So Simchat Torah this year will be different, no question. We will have to honor what happened last year. But at some point we will dance and we will finally arrive again at Moshe’s last sentence.

And we will have a choice. All of us, whether what grips you most right now is anger or sadness or fear about the fighting, or the broader future of Jews and anti-Semitism, or the ethics of the conflicts. We are all like Moshe, looking out at a future that has both purpose and war.

We can say that things for Jews in America are going to be like they have been everywhere else for us in exile. And then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or we can say Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. We are fortunate to be the Jews of this era. Whose future is not determined; who have the possibility through our choices and efforts to define who we are. And rise to the occasion like no other generation of Jews has ever before.

When Moshe composed his final words, he reached back to the first song he taught the people along with his sister Miryam. You might know the words Mi Chamocha from the prayers, and it got there from the Torah’s Song of the Crossing of the Sea (Exodus 15:11). Back then, Miryam and Moshe asked us to look to the heavens and say: Mi chamocha ba’elim, Adonai? Who is like you among the powerful, O God? Now in his final words, Moshe looks up at us and says: Who is like you, O Jewish people. You are powerful, finally, among all the powerful. You are blessed and a blessing. 

In this time of war and heartbreak, may we find a way to hold each other up and see all of our power and all of our blessing. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha – how fortunate are you, O Jewish people, there is no one like you.

Shana Tova.

Patience and Impatience -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 2

The number of stop signs between my home and the synagogue has more than doubled in the past ten years. And I know why the new ones were put there: because of me.

I don’t mean that in an I’m-the-problem-it’s-me way. I have never caused an accident on Pine Hill Road or Courtland Street, tfft tfft.  I am sure at City Hall there is some traffic data or some record of citizen input behind the decisions, but I know that four stop signs were placed in Nashua as a spiritual opportunity, perhaps even a test, for me.

You see, as my kids would point out even before they got their licenses, I can be a major practitioner of the rolling stop. It goes with something else Laurie says to me often, which is that at home, when I ask her or the kids something, I often don’t give them even a second to respond, before I’m prodding them more or repeating the question. 

So ten years ago on Rosh Hashanah I decided to speak about impatience. And as I was writing I decided that one way I would cultivate my own patience was to come to full stops at all stop signs, since there were at the time three close to where I work. I would be able to notice my heart rate increase as I slow the car down extra, as I feel the small kick back of the car as it halts, then I could stop, take a breath, slow my heart rate and settle down. Once, twice, three times, at Manchester, Webster, and Concord Streets.

Apparently, the universe regarded this as a vow on my part, and not one that could be annulled on Erev Yom Kippur. And so, on cue, up went two more stop signs on Courtland Street, and two on Pine Hill Road as well. As a challenge to my spiritual discipline.

You’ll have to ask Laurie and my kids how I am doing with this, though for most of my drives here the only witnesses are myself and God. I know I stop more than I used to. And I am much better about waiting an extra beat or more after I ask someone at home a question. But still I struggle with patience and impatience.

The world is impatient, maybe more and more. Take something like reading, which you’d think would be made for a patient approach. Articles online often tell you at the top how long they will take to read. That’s a new invention of the past ten years, and it seems to have originated with the website Medium. Which is according to itself “a place to read, write, and deepen your understanding” – but a couple engineers at Medium had become frustrated that when they would open up something to read or deepen your understanding, they had no idea how much time they might be getting themselves into. So they came up with this idea and algorithm.

And we often default to expecting others to be impatient with us. A lot of times I call someone and they pick up to tell me they can’t talk, and ask if we could talk later. As though if I got their voicemail I would be impatient with them for not being at my beckon call. Even my own parents did this the other day and I reassured them I could handle their being occupied with something other than me.

What’s this all about? In Hebrew one of the words for patience is savlanut. It is from a root that means “suffering.” To be patient is to be able in the moment to accept some suffering. But is it really suffering to give someone a few seconds to digest what you said to them, and is it really suffering to make a full stop at a stop sign?

So I think the word savlanut points at something else, what we really might be suffering when we feel impatient in daily life. It’s being out of rhythm with the person we’re with. You’re all set to hop in the car so we can go get together with friends, but I’m still putting on my jacket or finding my jacket, or deciding if I even need a jacket. That’s frustrating. And maybe it’s not about the five minutes late to a social engagement. It’s maybe a little piece of a bigger longing we all have to know what it’s like to be in sync with someone else, that our lives become that elusive waltz in perfect time together.

Being human is always moving in and out of sync with other people, which is why we need patience, savlanut, in our day to day lives. Patience is a virtue, and in Judaism it’s one of the most important Divine virtues. It’s one of the thirteen qualities associated with Divine compassion, the shlosh esreh middot we chant on Yom Kippur over and over and have already chanted today. Adonai Adonai El rachum v’chanun, erech apayim (Exodus 34:6). Erech apayim means “slow to anger.” That’s a physical metaphor in Hebrew. Apayim are the nostrils, the place we feel our breathing change and speed up when we are impatient. Being angry in biblical Hebrew is called charon af, “hot nose.” Like a fire-breathing dragon.

Erech apayim means disrupting that circuit, keeping the breathing slow, not getting hot. As Alan Morinis puts it, keeping the match away from the fuse. Patience means putting time between something that frustrates us and reacting to it.

In Pirkei Avot (5:2), the Talmud’s compilation of ethical maxims, it’s taught that the reason the Torah takes ten generations to get from Noach to Avraham, from the flood to monotheism, is to show us how much God is erech apayim, how much God is patient.

The world takes a long time to get where it’s in sync with the Divine, yes. Then again, you’d think: how hard is it to be patient when you are God and have all the time in the world?

One the most haunting midrashim I’ve ever seen wonders if God can actually get carried away and be too patient. Dr. Aviva Zornberg in her book on Exodus teaches a midrash that imagines God watching the slavery of the Jews in Mitzrayim, and the angels are pressing God: Aren’t you going to do something? How can you leave them there like this? And God says: You remember, I told Avraham that they would be in Mitzrayim for 400 years, and it’s been almost 400 years. Don’t worry, soon they will be freed. One of the angels goes down to earth and grabs a brick that a slave is making, and in that brick is trapped a baby. The angel flies up to heaven, shows the brick to God, and says: This is the result of your patience! And then God snaps into action, and the story of the redemption begins.

This is what Rev. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” There are times when patience is not a virtue. When a kind of impatience is warranted. A higher impatience. A holy impatience.

Our prayers have so many words to express this impatience, some we’ve used this morning: b’karov b’yameinu, bim’heira, hash’ta ba’agala uviz’man kariv. Not just Hebrew, but Aramaic!

The hardest impatience is when we care about someone, and we feel that they aren't living right now as well as they could be.

We might be impatient with someone who is struggling to find a direction in life.

We might be impatient about someone who is just not well – not impatient with them, but for them. Impatient with their caregivers, for not being attentive enough or responsive enough or clever enough or miraculous enough.

We are impatient with the world right now. We want an end to war in and around Israel, we want our hostages home now. We want other wars to end, we want the paralyzing polarization of our country to be gone. 

We are, perhaps, impatient with God for all the suffering that isn't going away fast enough.

We might be impatient, most of all, with ourselves. If we’re not well, we blame ourselves unreasonably for not getting better faster. Maybe we’re not as caring as we know we should be. Maybe as we think back on what we resolved here one year ago, we can just be frustrated at our own slow pace of teshuvah. 

I wonder if somewhere also deep down impatience comes from a sense that time is precious and fleeting for each of us. It’s Naomi Shemer’s song Od Lo Ahavti Dai – “I Have Not Loved Enough.” She begins: With these two hands of mine, I’ve not yet built a town/In the middle of the desert, the water I’ve not found/I haven’t drawn a flower, nor quite discovered how/the way is going lead me, or where I’m going now. And the refrain: I have not loved enough, the wind and the sun are on my face; I have not said enough, and if not, if not now, when.

A lot of our impatience at what’s out there, with others, might really come from within our own soul.

Even our little impatience about getting out of the door might have something of this higher impatience. You want to be on time, out of respect for someone who is being generous by making time for us. We want to make the most of our time together; there are never enough moments with our friends or our potential friends, to get beyond chit-chat and really talk.

So if patience is a virtue, and if there is also a holy impatience, how do we get it right?

There is another biblical phrase that’s a twist on erech apayim, the hot nose or breathing nostril metaphor. The prophet Micah (7:18) describes God’s patience as lo hechezik la’ad apo. Who does not hold onto anger forever. Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, a medieval teacher of Kabbalah, says that unlike the metaphor of erech apayim, which is about not letting frustration begin and spiral, lo hechezik la’ad apo recognizes that impatience is a real thing. Even God has impatience, metaphorically speaking, because for all of God’s infinite time, God does not really have infinite power to change us or the world. So lo hechezik la’ad apo – the suffering, the anger, you can’t stop them from appearing. The key is to hold onto impatience long enough to understand it, and to understand ourselves, but only that long, and then to decide what to do with it, and release it.

So the momentary impatiences, like getting stuck in lines or traffic, those we have to let go of quickly. But even then the impatient feeling is a reminder to open our eyes to what is actually around, because even when you’re delayed somewhere that’s not all that’s happening. Rabbi Zelig Pliskin says that when you’re stuck in the waiting room at the doctor, look around at who else is there. Perhaps there is someone who needs help with something, whether it’s filling out a form, or walking when they are called. Or perhaps there is someone in the room who needs consoling or who seems alone.

What about when our impatience is about the sufferings of someone we care about, or the sufferings and injustices in the world?

We have to be aware of that impatience. If it just exists as anger, we know that makes it harder to act, and that cycle leads to resignation, to despair, to disconnecting from the person or the cause we actually care about.

And sometimes we try to relieve this type of impatience by rushing toward unrealistic expectations or simplistic solutions. I think this is the impatience of our country right now. Too many of us think that being impatient about the right things is the whole story. So vibes and feels attract all the energy, and we go in circles if not backward, and we have neither solutions nor an end to the impatience.

Sometimes we need to turn from impatience just to presence, to be with the person or the people whose suffering matters to us.

Sometimes what we need is not so much patience as perseverance. There is a Jewish word for this too – netzach. It means both endurance and triumph, because for the things that matter one triumph is never the last. 

Netzach, perseverance, is figuring out what you can actually do. When it comes to the big things in the world, it’s deciding when to be the doer and when to be the donor. It’s noticing when people are actually working on something, with the care and skill its complexity deserves, even when it’s taking time. It’s offering yourself to the people who are leading, knowing how to encourage them and get them what they need. This is one of the best antidotes to the impatience we experience when the wider world seems out of sync.

When we are impatient with ourselves, it helps to find someone to talk it out with – to help us balance expectations of ourselves with grace.

Impatience on its own is not a virtue. But it is not just patience we should learn from the Divine example. It’s lo hechezik la’ad apo – it’s reading our impatience. Impatience teaches us who are, reminds us what we value and who we love. 

So in this new year, we should definitely come to a full stop at stop signs, no matter how many there are. We should let the phone ring when we can’t talk, and trust the other person to trust that we’ll call them later when we can really talk.

And then we’ll have room for holy impatience. Instead of fiery vapors, over and over, our breath will be long shofar blasts, ever more in sync, turning from brokenness into wholeness and redemption.

Shana Tova.