I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
On this day in 1947, November 29, the United Nations approved a plan for the partition of British-governed Palestine into three areas: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a UN-governed enclave encompassing Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The entire area would be joined in an economic union.
The Jewish Agency, which was the official Jewish leadership of the territory, immediately accepted the proposal. The Arab Higher Committee in Palestine as well as the Arab League of other nations all rejected the proposal, because of the Jewish state.
The Arab State of Palestine would have come into existence in 1948, had the Arabs decided to accept the UN plan and proclaimed the state.
Partition was no one’s ideal – not the Jews, not the Arabs within Palestine, not the surrounding Arab countries, not the British. It was the least bad solution the UN could come up with.
No Jew or Muslim believed they should give up Jerusalem, as all would have been required to do. No one by 1947 was interested in a completely joint, binational governing mechanism, which had been discussed at various times within the British administration but not implemented, and among Jewish-Arab groups like Brit Shalom that had dissipated years earlier. The Arab leaderships in and around Palestine rejected the Jewish return to the land entirely. The Jews did not love the partition in principle. They were concerned about whether the small amount of land dedicated to the Jewish state would be defensible and could sustain the population. There were Jewish groups opposed to partition who had militias. The main difference the Jewish Agency Executive fought back against those militias for the most part in their attempts to sabotage the UN plan.
So partition was the UN’s proposal. The Jews’ representatives accepted the UN partition plan, and the Arabs rejected it. The Jews would have abided by the terms and map of the plan and were prepared to up until the moment of the British withdrawal, even after months of fighting, had the Arab armies not invaded.
When the new phase of fighting broke out beginning November 30, 1947, while the British were still present and then beginning their withdrawal, the Jews’ objective was to secure the areas assigned to the Jewish state, plus an open road linking Jewish areas assigned to the prospective state with Jewish areas in Jerusalem. Jewish Jerusalem was very quickly under a complete siege, with little food and water as well as bombardment and terror attacks. The road from Jewish areas on the coast went through a narrow pass in the hills that was controlled by the Arabs and frequently blocked.
The Arabs’ objective was to take over all of the territory, including that assigned by the UN to the Jewish state.
Today could have been a national celebration for Israelis and Palestinians, the 76th anniversary of a world-changing event. So many lives and communities could have been saved. If only. Instead there was a war, and the map changed because of who won or lost which battles in which areas.
There is much more to say also about what drove the parties’ considerations in 1947-1948, who prevented a Palestinian-governed state even in 1948, and the displacement of both Palestinians and Jews in the territory and throughout the Middle East in the immediate aftermath. But today 76 years ago, it all could have been prevented.
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A few connected and somewhat-connected links:
Here’s a glance at partition proposals from 1937 to 2008. The video is from 2019, so the “proposal” at the end is not something I’m endorsing here; it seems like a very bare minimum. I really recommend the Unpacked series of educational videos and podcasts. They are from a Jewish-Israeli point of view, self-critical about and within that point of view, embrace complexity and value coexistence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYWII25cxM
O Jerusalem! is a classic book about 1947-1948, from the partition vote through the war. The focus is on Jerusalem and the voices are local Jewish and Arab, with also some detours to the "halls of power". I imagine there is better history and historiography since its publishing, but it's solid and fair and descriptive. https://bookshop.org/p/books/o-jerusalem-larry-collins/7488416?ean=9780671662417
This is my D'var Torah for Parashat Vayetze, "Shabbat Thanksgiving" 5784. I wrote it while feeling grateful for the hostages who have been returned, heartbroken for those still captive and the families not returned whole, and grateful for the naming celebration at services this Shabbat.
It is Thanksgiving Shabbat and what a better time to be celebrating namings! It’s just what we need for the time we’ve been going through. Thank you to the family for giving us something extra to gather around in gratitude.
Giving thanks is not just an important Jewish spiritual practice. Gratitude is the essence of both Shabbat and the Jewish people.
It’s the essence of Shabbat, which we know from a song we sing from the psalms -- mizmor shir l’yom haShabbat, tov l’hodot l’Adonai -- a song for the day of Shabbat: Good to give thanks to the Divine (Psalm 92:1). L’hodot is the same Hebrew root or shoresh as todah, the familiar way to say thank you. The midrash says that is the first song ever written, by Adam and Chava in the Garden of Eden, and it was inspired by their first Shabbat.
And gratitude is the essence of the Jewish people because our name Yehudim comes from a moment of thankfulness. In our parasha, Leah Imeinu (our mother) gives birth to her fourth son and the Torah says: This moment I am thanking the Divine, ha’pa’am odeh et Adonai (Genesis 29:35), and she called his name Yehudah. Yehudah also comes from the same shoresh as todah. Yehudah is Judah, and Yehudi gets transliterated from Hebrew to Greek down the line eventually to English as “Jew”.
So gratitude is literally the name of the Jewish people, and it’s the original song of Shabbat. We are meant to be the thankful people, and Shabbat is Thanksgiving Day every week.
These two origin stories for Jewish gratitude have something in common, the Garden of Eden and the birth of Yehudah, and that thing is that both of them seem at first like non-gratitude moments.
The midrash makes Adam and Chavah the authors of the song tov l’hodot, it’s good to give thanks, and here’s how it happened. In midrash the whole drama of the Garden of Eden happened on the first-ever Friday afternoon. The people got to the Garden, learned their way around, heard about not eating the fruit, ate the fruit. Rupture with God, decree of exile effective immediately... and then according to the midrash, Shabbat itself came to God and said basically: I exist already but just in theory, I was getting ready to make my entrance into the world, and if you don’t let humanity have even one Shabbat in the Garden of Eden, the whole universe is going to implode.
So God said all right. And the first two people experienced Shabbat and it was a weird Shabbat. Because they knew what was coming after, that they would have to pack their bags. So they spent Shabbat looking around the Garden, and talking, and reflecting on their first six hours of existence before Shabbat and then what they had on Shabbat. And they wrote a song, and the first word is tov, which means good.
You’d think they’d write, I don’t know a breakup song -- how could you do this to me. You’d think they’d be basically angry, or basically scared, or plotting to get away from this God who has such an interest in which fruit they eat, and who showed them this glorious place and then said you can’t live here anymore.
Instead Chava and Adam start with tov, with good. They’re in a garden so they write what they know, which is botany -- the wicked flourish like grasses, miles wide but an inch deep, growing fast but withering easily, and the righteous like a palm tree will flourish, tzaddik katamar yifrach, deep- rooted righteousness overlooking everything. Even within themselves, they’re thinking, there’s all this that tempts us to act not right, it comes fast, but it can be cut off easily if we try, and we are capable of towering things. So Chava and Adam sing their way to gratitude, to tov l’hodot, for what they have glimpsed and what they can dream of, for this Garden that exists and is worth striving to get back to.
And that’s every Shabbat, a garden, where we sing together songs of what could be, where we make this beatiful garden of righteousness and righteous dreams, and we make it out of us, who we are and who we have been this week and all the stories we’ve been given as a people.
The other origin story for Jewish gratitude, about our name Yehudi, the Thankful-People: Leah doesn’t express gratitude immediately when she has her first child. We know there’s a long story of bitterness between Leah and Yaakov, between her and her sister Rachel. Leah has all kinds of good reasons to feel resentful and angry. She called the first son Reuven because the Divine has seen my suffering, and the next two names she gives are like that. But when the fourth child is born Leah says this time I am giving thanks.
Leah’s gratitude is not a contentment of having things good all in all. It’s not a blessing she says at a turning point in her life from bad to good. That doesn’t happen after Yehudah is born. Leah’s gratitude is a decision -- that to quote Rabbi Shai Held you can be disappointed and thankful at the same time. At a moment when it’s not easy in her life, Leah says todah, and she gives all of us our name.
The world right now isn’t making it easy to feel gratitude, and I know too there are many people among us for whom the holiday weekend makes a time of loss or loneliness harder. That’s the hardest part of gratitude for me, because when I’m so thankful I am impatient for anyone who is missing a blessing that I could be doing more to help them have or help you have. I don’t want my gratitude to become selfish or complacent.
Leah Imeinu gives us our name, Yehudi or Jew. She teaches us gratitude in a moment and gratitude in-spite-of. The Jewish people know how to be thankful for the first moment of awareness every day, the first breath we take and turn into Modeh Ani (thankful am I), and for each chesed we experience. And when there’s not something right here to be thankful for, we’re thankful for knowing we are people who deserve blessings, and we’re grateful for our stubborn visions of what everyone deserves.
Adam and Chava give us Shabbat as gratitude. They teach us to stop and notice the perfect within the imperfect world, and the perfect dreams that we will use to mend the imperfect world.
Here we are, aligned as we sing here in the Sanctuary and learn Torah together and talk over Kiddush, sharing food that is enough for everyone, celebrating the gift of life and the next chapter in the lives of families and our people. Shabbat makes us stop to notice these things, so we don’t miss them during the week either and feel thankful -- whenever we hear voices joined together for joy or for justice, whenever there is enough food for everyone, whenever there is a Torah bringing its insights to the world. Shabbat teaches us to notice such things all week and to be profoundy grateful each day.
And so especially now, thank you for making Shabbat together a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, and thank you to the celebrating family for bringing us together today in joy and gratitude.
This is (I think) the D'var Torah I have for services this Shabbat tomorrow. The Torah reading begins with the very beginning of the Torah. It's one week since the Hamas atrocities began. Thank you to Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal and Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for helping me unlock this, though if anything is off it's on me and not them.
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Last week on Simchat Torah, as we tried our hardest to celebrate especially for our youngest kids, knowing what we already knew, there was a verse I was chanting in the Torah that just gutted me even more. It’s the very last line attributed to Moshe in the Torah, his last words. The final line of Moshe’s blessing to the people said:
Happy are you, fortunate are you, people 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.
Ashrecha Yisrael, mi chamocha, am nosha b’Adonai
magen ezrecha, asher cherev ga’avatecha
v’yika-chashu oyvecha lach,
v’atah al bamoteimo tidroch
And I thought in that moment, is it possible that not a single word or phrase of that Torah is true?
Not happy, not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. No Mi chamoacha, no callback to the moment of escape from Egypt, from danger into freedom, An enemy far from recanting, from going back on its essence -- and who is treading on whom today.
Was even our own Torah going to be turned on us, to mock us, and on our holy day no less and in the presence of our sweet little ones. Or was this some kind of invitation toward even more faith, a faith that Torah can be as powerful as the weapons and mutated imaginations that define our reality right now.
And with those wonderings ringing in my soul we turned on Simchat Torah to the very first verses of the Torah, the first words of our parasha today, and they too seemed unreal: the creation of light in a reality hitherto dark and formless all the way down.
This is the week we are starting the Torah again. Against the backdrop of murder and kidnapping and mobilizing and bomb shelters, mourning and fearing for our loved ones and our people, this is the week we start again fresh. Each year when we get to Parashat Bereshit we’re supposed to have become better prepared by the chagim (fall holy days) for a new year of Torah, to be more receptive to it than ever before. Yet we know ahead of us is for certain a week of more death, and certainly weeks and who knows how much of 5784. What kind of strength will Torah have, this week and beyond, and what kind of strength and wisdom can it give us?
Parashat Bereshit begins with perfection, everything in its orderly place, and humans created in the Divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, and the first humans, placed in a perfect garden -- with closeness to the Divine, the end of loneliness, and a charge simply to work and to protect their beautiful place.
Everything about the opening chapter was a revolution in human consciousness in its time, and I usually say in our time as well. But so quickly it all falls apart, and the parasha descends into exile, violence between brothers, and then violence enveloping the world. Until the parasha ends with only a single glimpse of hope, the birth of Noach: -- zeh v’nachameinu, this one will comfort us, will turn us around, mi-ma-aseinu ume-itzvon yadeinu, from our actions and the sadness our hands have wrought, min ha-adadmah asher erera Adonai, what we’ve made out of this earth that the Divine has cursed.
This is not an easy parasha to begin with, a parasha about new beginnings and immediate troubles. I thought about going to other Torah this Shabbat for the comforting we all need. But maybe it is the parasha we need nonetheless.
On the first day, darkness hovers over the face of the deep seas and chasms, and God says let there be light, y’hi or -- and there is. Vayehi or, light was, all of a sudden. And God saw the light, that it was good, ki tov, and immediately God separated the light from the darkness.
God wants light. And then God makes a decision to name the darkness. In the ancient world prior to the Torah, even in parts of the Bible composed earlier than the first chapter of Genesis, the creations stories would tell of realms beyond the reach of the gods, symbolized by deep and vanquishing waters and by endless darkness. But in our Torah God stakes a claim even to darkness. Gives it a name: laila.
Why would God want in on that? Especially if the light of the first verses is considered not physical light but Torah. Why would God want there to be something that is so profoundly opposite to Torah, as one of the first things in creation?
I can only think that there are two kinds of darkness. There is a darkness that says there is nothing in the world but violence, and even seeming goodness is just self-interest, or huddling together for safety and nothing more. Darkness is believing that is all there is, not just from time to time as we all do, but fundamentally all the time.
The Torah claims, I think, that darkness is something else. Some of it and maybe all of the moral darkness is made out of imagination and language and even out of connection, out of the capacity for organization and sustained effort -- twisted for sure, and encased in the hardest and thickest klippot, cases of iron and hatred.
This kind of darkness is made of the same things as its opposite -- as goodness, as light, as Torah. So God has no choice but to claim this darkness. And our hearts, connected as they are to all hearts with their roots in the Divine Heart, have no choice but to acknowledge it too.
And God is ambitious, and ambitious for the power of Torah against this darkness. Even knowing that it’s only through us, Divine image that we are but earthy nonetheless, that Torah will show its energy in the world.
So we have been taugh each day to say this blessing precisely when it’s actually light outside: Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha-Olam, Yotzer Or u’Voray Choshech, Oseh Shalom u’Voray et Hakol. We thank God for fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating everything.
On the fourth day, God comes back to work more on light, and God creates the sun and the moon. According to the midrash -- and thank you to my friend and colleague Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal for pointing me to this Torah this week -- the sun and the moon were originally made the same brightness, and both were charged to shine all the time. The moon approached God and said: Is it possible for two kings to serve with only one crown? And God said: Then go and make yourself smaller. The moon said: I raised a valid point, so why should I shrink myself? And God said: Go and share the day with the sun, and also rule the night by yourself. The moon said: What good am I that way, as a candle during the day that no one sees? And God said: Then go and let Israel count its days and years by you. And let people see that sometimes you are small, and sometimes you disappear, and sometimes there is no other light but yours.
As there are two kinds of darkness, there are two kinds of light. A bright and certain light, so obviously guiding and warming the world, at times of peaceful unity and justice -- yes that is the light of the sun. But there is also moonlight, and Rabbi Rosenthal quotes a teaching from Rabbi Sharon Brous: That we Jews are moon people. “[T]he moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. ... the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.” We Jews have had long experience exercising that muscle, and now we need to build it even more.
Sometimes Torah is a light powerful like the sun. Twelve years ago, the week of this parasha, Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it had held captive for more than five years. It was among other things a testimony to the idea from our parasha that what Tzelem Elohim means is that we are accountable for the life of even a single individual, and the State of Israel did not break that faith with Gilad Shalit. That’s actually the Torah I taught for Parashat Bereshit right here on Shabbat twelve years ago.
Today, the light of Torah we need is more like the light of the moon. To continue to believe that the sanctity of human life is a powerful and guiding Torah, even during the weeks we are seeing more and more pictures of those who are captive and those being buried and more bombs. There is no Torah we can learn and go out and fix this with right now, even if we brought it to every minister and general and world leader. There is no Torah as that absolute a light. Still there is a Torah like the crescent moon that will help us locate ourselves, as I am trying to do right now with this Torah I am teaching, and Torah that will help us take a few steps in the right direction, even in the dark time we’re in.
In a few minutes we will bench Rosh Chodesh. We will anticipate the day this week when the moon disappears entirely and a new month commences, and we will beg God to give us a new month of blessing for us and for all the people Israel. How hard that prayer will be.
The name of the new month is Marcheshvan, which means “the eighth moon.” Eight is a special number. Marcheshvan is the only month of the Jewish year with no holy day at all beyong the new moon itself and Shabbat-- no celebrations, major or minor, not even a minor fast. Tradition says this particular new moon coming this week, the sky left only with stars, will some year launch the month when the Mashiach comes, when the messianic era begins. The month is beyond saved for the biggest festival that could ever be, the light that doesn’t ever end.
It won’t be this month. I pray that with as much darkness as already grips our souls, with as much fear as we have, that we will help each other perceive the light of the moon, even as a sliver, and not lose all hope even as we acknowledge the power of the darkness, the darkness still claimed by God. I pray that we will find a Torah of moonlight to guide us, and remain committed to finding it. May our loved ones be safe, may our mitzvot be powerful in the days ahead, for ourselves and for them.
This is my D'var Torah for the first day of Sukkot 5784 and Shabbat, September 30, 2023.
Sukkot is actually the third part of the High Holy Days. It’s not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Sukkot is the zany but nuanced third festival of our kickoff month of Tishrei.
And Sukkot is specifically a continuation of Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur we go hyperspiritual, in the sense that we put away most of our material existence – eating, physical pleasures and adornments, even our homes as we spend more time in the synagogue than any other day. Then on Sukkot it seems like the opposite – we get hypermaterial, very earthy. Outdoors, building the hut, waving the Four Species, and in contrast to Yom Kippur the essential mitzvah in the Sukkah is to eat.
What we are actually doing is bringing our spiritually-realigned selves from Yom Kippur into a stylized version of our material life. A simple house, a week of meals, getting hands-on with four types of plants that represent four basic ways we interact with the physical world of things that grow and the water cycle. It’s like moving into a prototype of the materialist world, getting the basics straight before we step out into a more complex actual world of commerce and tangible things. On Sukkot we try to align our material selves on the basis of our reoriented spiritual selves.
So in the Talmud the Sukkah is connected to the Holy of Holies, which the High Priest used to enter on Yom Kippur. That’s where the ark was with the tablets, which means the Sukkah itself is a covenantal place. It’s a design statement meant to guide our relationship to material things and to people with whom we share meals, and to people in our neighborhood. And all through Sukkot we’re reminded that our relationships with people and food are connected directly to nature. We’re always eating in the shade of the s’chach on top of the Sukkah, the shadows that remind us of the divine protection that covers us even when we’re not paying attention, a spiritual mist made up of very earthy material.
So I want to talk about one way we can prototype our material world in the coming year, so it becomes more aligned spiritually and covenantally. I am part of a group of about ten clergy in the area who call ourselves the Greater Nashua Interfaith Housing Justice Group. We have been together for about six years but we’ve been working very publicly on issues of housing for more than four years. I want to tell you some of the what and more of the why, and invite you to engage in that work with us as members of the Jewish community and the faith community more broadly. Many of us are speaking in our congregations this week on this topic. Some of you were here four years ago when we did the same.
A Sukkah is defined in the Talmud as dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling. On a Torah level this is about bringing us back to the desert, where the Jewish people lived in a series of temporary places while we got our Torah and our training. In Egypt, even as slaves we lived in houses, as we know from the night of the Exodus with the blood on our doorposts. In the promised land we would again have homes, to live in and buy and sell. Sukkot is about the experience in between. In the desert every one of us knew a vulnerability about food and shelter survival, and it was the same whether you were Moshe or Miryam or a tribal elder, or anyone else.
In our community, dirat ara’i for some people means not having any place to call home from day to day. All of our local shelters are full all the time. Thanks to the vision of many local leaders and the generosity of many including members of our shul, a new shelter on Spring Street in Nashua was opened recently by the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. Having a stable place to come back to each day, to rest and eat a meal and do homework, is a basic prerequisite for physical health, and mental health, and doing your job well or staying consistent in school. Too many kids have to couch-surf, which means moving also from school to school, and you can imagine the impact on educational progress and social development.
Because so many of our local nonprofits work so well on homelessness, our clergy group has picked up the next level from that, which has never had enough public advocates. So we work on affordable housing, which in practice turns out be primarily for renters – another kind of dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling.
In the city of Nashua, an increasing number of people rent as opposed to owning the place where they live. As a result, rents in the city are skyrocketing, outpacing inflation by about double in the past decade. In our part of the state, even beyond the city, about half of renters pay more than they can afford on housing, meaning more than 30% of income. If you work in health care, education, or retail, it’s almost impossible to find a place to rent in Nashua that’s affordable on your salary, and certainly that’s the case for people in lower paying jobs.
As a result, just the City of Nashua needs to add around 4,500 more units of housing by 2030 to stabilize our overall housing market, and of that at least another 1,800 units that would have to be affordable to people making far less than the area median income. Even this wouldn’t quite meet the needs of all the families emerging from transitional housing programs or everyone working as a nurse, a police officer, or a public school teacher who wants to live in the community where they work. It would still be a dramatic bite in the shortage.
Our municipal leaders and our state leaders have been paying more attention to this over the past five years. In Nashua, there have been some welcome achievements and our interfaith housing justice group has been part of a couple of them, as has the Granite State Organizing Project in these and others. Nashua created an affordable housing trust fund with $10 million from the American Rescue Plan, one of the Covid-19 relief programs passed by Congress. This money will increase the incentives for private builders to create affordable housing. Rentals are financed on the expectation of an income stream down the road, and when the apartment is going to be rented for less than the market rate, there’s a shortfall there that makes the project unprofitable – or in the non-theological lingo we’ve learned, “it doesn’t pencil.” To make it sensible for a developer to rent at a rate that someone could afford who is a teacher or a nurse or getting back on their feet with a new job, each unit requires an extra $25-80,000 of upfront financing. That’s what this fund will provide. This $10 million can help us bite off some 10-20% of the need we have. We’ll need more in the fund to hit our goal by 2030. As an example, a real-estate transaction surcharge on the order of a penny on every $1,000 of a sale could fund our need in Nashua in perpetuity.
We have a new inclusionary zoning ordinance that passed our Board of Aldermen with not a single dissent, which requires new buildings of certain sizes to have a certain number of units of affordable housing within them, or else the developer has to pay per unit built into the housing trust fund.
Many of you have seen the redevelopment and expansion of public housing downtown on Central Street off the south end of the new parkway, formerly the Bronstein Apartments and now Monahan Manor.
All of these are an acceleration of the pace of creating new affordable housing, but we are still behind where we need to be for 2030. So we need to advocate for more funding from the state and other sources, as the Covid-related stimulus funding comes to an end.
If it were just about numbers, I don’t know that we would be involved specifically as people of faith. How we create housing matters.
The Sukkah is about covenantal design. It’s about how housing links us together or divides us. When the Talmud discusses the construction requirements for the Sukkah, it connects the Sukkah to a chuppah, the marriage canopy, and to a mavoy, a neighborhood allyway where people often decide to collaborate in carry things around or share food on Shabbat. I’ve been thinking about the most bizarre design teaching about Sukkah, which is the booth has to be big enough for your entire head, a table, and most of your body but not all of it. Obviously this wouldn’t be a comfortable Sukkah, nor is it ideal to have a Sukkah where you can’t eat with other people. I think what it means is that you have to experience a full Sukkah mind yourself, but your eating has to keep you connected to what’s outside.
How we create housing is as important as the raw number of apartments. American public housing programs created clusters of high-rise buildings that concentrated poverty and had the effect of segregating many cities by race. The newest thinking even about publicly financed construction is that it makes a difference when attention is paid to how a building helps people connect with their neighbors, with local business and public space. Open space and common space matter, incentives to connect with other people in the building as opposed to fearing them. It makes a difference when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures live in the same building – so much informal networking happens, so much social trust can be built across difference, the outcomes are proven better for children.
It makes a difference when the people who live in a building or a neighborhood that will be rebuilt to increase its capacity for housing have a voice, in the design and in what happens to them while they are displaced.
Our interfaith housing groups call this covenantal thinking. It’s what we hope for and are already lobbying to happen around the next big projects in Nashua: redeveloping the Elm Street Middle School when the new school opens, recreating the public housing on Major Drive, what will happen next now where the asphalt plant was proposed down the hill from here, and how to repurpose Daniel Webster College as proposed in the new city master plan.
Covenant thinking might lead any one project to have fewer units, which on its own seems like a missed opportunity. But as the lens widens, new people might see themselves as partners for affordable housing, and new projects can emerge that the existing stakeholders might never have thought of.
The Spring Street Shelter has some of this covenantal thinking in it. There are community rooms, rooms for education, and former director Michael Reinke’s vision was for community groups beyond NSKS to share a life in the building. Not just to see residents are people who need things from “the rest of us” like clothing, or even skills training. But a place where community groups could offer interesting cultural and educational programming for anyone, resident or not, in a location central in our city right downtown.
The last time a group of us preached on housing we were leading into a public event, which generated momentum and new relationships with city officials and led to some of the progress to date. We’ve been able to collaborate and to critique. So too this coming Monday the community is invited to a forum with candidates for mayor and the Board of Aldermen in Nashua. We will hear stories about the housing crisis from community members, and then ask the candidates for their policy priorities around equitable, affordable housing. The forum is at the Unitarian Universalist Church near here at 7:30, and you’ll have plenty of time to make it after our Sukkah dinner and event here that night.
Whether or not you live in Nashua, you can advance the goals of more affordable housing created in a covenantal fashion in many ways. Attend the event on Monday. Sign up for our e-mail list, so we can keep you posted on public meetings of local planning boards and other bodies debating policies and budgets. We need people who are not the usual faces to come and be YIMBYs, Yes in My Backyard advocates, because almost every project is opposed by an organized group. Ask any candidate for office if they will accept a pledge toward 2,000 new units of affordable housing this decade if you live in Nashua. But things are happening all the time in the other towns too, and next year, the gubernatorial and legislative elections will have a big impact, because Gov. Sununu and the legislature the past few years have added tens of millions of new dollars statewide into affordable housing finance. The new governor and legislators should continue in that path and add even more.
And if you or someone you know has expertise in any area related to real estate or finance or construction, or philanthropy, help us connect. One of the things about our congregations is that we have so many different talents and resources among us, and it’s not just the same players as are around other tables who discuss and decide these matters.
Sukkot is a good time to reflect on the physical structures we live in and how they are connected as neighborhoods and as towns. On Sukkot we move out of our settled homes into dirat ara’i, temporary structures, which help us get our bearings as we relaunch into a year of commerce and consumption, neighborliness, political debate about how we marshall and share our collective resources. On this Sukkot, let’s complete the High Holy Day season by restoring our material lives to their spiritual roots, their covenantal roots, for the new year.
From Yom Kippur, when we put aside our material existence by fasting and spending so many hours in prayer, we move within days to Sukkot. Sukkot is by contrast a very earthy, material holiday. There is the Sukkah booth itself and the plant material that makes up its roof. There are the Arba'ah Minim, the Four Species, as well -- the lulav (palm), the etrog (citron), the hadasim (myrtles), and the aravot (willows). Sukkot helps us take the spiritual awakening we experience with the new year and bring it toward our material lives.
According to the Mishnah, Sukkot is one of the four Jewish New Year occasions, when "we are judged concerning water." So many of the rituals of Sukkot involve water or praying for the winter rains. If you shake the Four Species together, it sounds like a rain shower!
Here is an explanation that builds on work done by Nogah Hareuveni, who founded Neot Kedumim, a nature preserve in Israel dedicated to biblical landscape and agriculture. (I think the interpretation is his, but since I can't find it written exactly this way I'll take responsibility if it differs.)
Dr. Hareuveni notes that the four species represent the only four different ways that plants can be watered. The palm is a tree of the desert oasis; it draws from deepest groundwater. The willows grow by a river, water constantly flowing on the ground. The myrtles require rain -- dew or the periodic floods that go through a dry stream-bed (known as nachal in Hebrew or wadi in Arabic). The citron is a cultivated fruit, requiring irrigation -- humans gathering and bringing water.
To the pagans living around our ancestors, each source of water came from a different source and could be traced to a different god. The Canaanites actually used the same word, baal, to refer to the "master" of their pantheon of gods, and to the condensation of rainwater on plants. In some texts, the waters of the deep are referred to as Mot, the god of death. These are the deep waters in our Genesis stories that originally covered everything and had to be held back to allow the ground to emerge, or that God released for Noach's flood.
But the Israelites came to understand that the four waters were one, and had only one Source. So they bound the four disparate species together into one bundle, to symbolize the oneness of our God. The Four Species are waved in all directions, indicating an understanding that the one Source of waters and life is present everywhere.
Water remains a basic need, even in our technological society. It makes up most of our body and the surface of our planet. Our life from day to day, and our future as a species, depend on water, and many conflicts in the world or within societies are about access to water. For all those reasons, water is a common metaphor in our tradition for God and for Torah. And when everything is in alignment, the prophets describe perfection as perfect waves or an ever-flowing stream.
I've put out post a Tov! podcast episode and an identical written piece, encompassing just about everything I can think of about how The Good Place on TV illustrates, elaborates, and even improves on a core teaching of Maimonides about teshuvah, the core Jewish metaphor and practice around personal change!
This was my D'var Torah for Parashat Re'eh last Shabbat, August 12, 2023.
Two friends encounter each other late at night near the town square. It’s a classic small New England town, gazebo in the center, and it’s a particularly clear night, the new moon. The one finds the other kneeling down next to a street light looking around at the sidewalk.
“Hi! What are you doing?”
“I was here earlier and I lost my ring, so I’m looking for it.”
“Where do you think you lost it?”
“I’m pretty sure over there by the gazebo,” says the first one, pointing across the street at the village green.
“So why are you looking over here?”
“Oh! Because the light is better.”
This is what it’s like for us often, when we’re looking for something we need or we’ve lost. It’s hard to get ourselves to look in certain places, hard or scary, and often it’s easier to stay where we already know how to see the things we’ve learned how to see.
Which is why the opening to our parasha is so surprising. Re’eh Look -- I am giving in front of you today a blessing and curse. Re’eh, anochi notayn lifnaychem hayom b’rachah uk’lalah.
When the Torah wants to get our attention, it almost never says Re’eh, “see” -- it says:Sh’ma! Listen. It’s not “Look O Israel Adonai is your God...”; it’s Sh’ma Yisrael.
Seeing and hearing are two very different metaphors, and I think the metaphors are meaningful even for those of us whose physical sight or hearing is not perfect.
Seeing is the most problematic of our senses. We can only look in one direction at a time, and even those of us with good peripheral vision miss things a bit to the side. When we’re looking for something particular, we miss other things even right in front of us -- like the study where the subjects were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and count passes between players, and completely missed the gorilla walking across the court.
We have eyelids that we can deliberately close. We “see with our own lens.” We talk about “looking the other way”, in order to avoid seeing a person who needs us or a wrong we know is being done. We can use our mind to override the inputs that our eyes might want to give us. And some of the al-chets on Yom Kippur, the list of wrongs, are about our eyes -- sikkur ayin, leering at someone; aynaim ramot, looking down on someone.
And seeing is different from hearing because what we perceive through our eyes alone is always on the surface. Seeing often stands for judging a book by its cover.
Or looking in a certain direction is just hard, or painful. This week, it’s hard to look at certain places in this Sanctuary where someone is so palpably missing.
So seeing is imperfect and it’s difficult -- and it’s easier just to look in the light.
Hearing is a different metaphor. Our ears hear a voice from deep within someone trying to say something real, or a cry from the heart. We can try to plug our ears, but we can’t close them at all the way we can with our eyes. There’s no real way to turn your head in a direction so you don’t hear.
Sounds force us to pay attention even when we try not to -- if the gorilla made a sound, you couldn’t help yourself from noticing that it’s different from the dribble of a basketball.
So it’s not surprising that in the Sh’ma itself -- the prayer that opens with “Hear O Israel”-- the Torah tells us to look at our tzitzit so our eyes have something mitzvah-centered to focus on, v’lo tatura acharei l’vavchem, v’acharei eineichem asher atem zonim achareihem -- and don’t go straying after your mind, and after your eyes which you go lusting after!
Moshe in our parasha talks about doing the right thing in the future as the opposite of the desert, where “everyone does anything that seems right in their own eyes” -- ish kol hayashar b’einav. Maybe it goes all the way back to Gan Eden, to Chava taking a look at that fruit.
Sh’ma is a spiritual paradigm for us -- for being responsive to others, letting ourselves be drawn out toward them even when we’re not prepared, getting to what’s beneath the surface in the people around us. And it’s a paradigm for responding even to our own inner voice, our own prayers and our cries. Sh’ma is all over this parasha, it’s one of the most important words in the whole book of D’varim.
So why does our parasha say:Re’eh. See this important thing I want you to have, a blessing as well as a curse to stay away from. And by the way just for good measure, Moshe messes with the people: See what I am putting in front of you today, which is that in a few weeks I’m going to show it to you on some mountains across the river which you literally can’t see from where you are now.
Rabbi Josh Feigelson teaches: Nonetheless, Moshe uses the language of Re’eh instead of Sh’ma here, because we don’t have the option to replace seeing with hearing. What we can do is to make our seeing more like our hearing.
In our parasha, human eyes are generally not a good metaphor -- but Divine eyes are. Kira Sirote points out a unique phrase in the Bible that appears once in the Torah and a couple places in the prophets, and the phrase is ayin b'ayin, literally an eye in an eye.
It’s used once in the Torah for the most famous law about the eye, an eye for an eye (and there’s a nugget about that you can ask me later how it connects). But in the prophets, Kira notes, the phrase talks about a moment when the regular human eye becomes a prophet’s eye. “How beautiful on the mountains are the legs of the one who announces redemption, making sounds of peace... Your lookouts will raise their voices because eye in eye they will see the Divine returning, ayin b’ayin yir’u b’shuv Adonai"! (Isaiah 52:7-8)
Imagine seeing something as simple as another person’s leg, just a person walking, and immediately perceiving from somewhere deeper that redemption is almost here, that peace is possible within yourself or in the world -- that reunions are possible with people, and our own souls and dreams, and even I pray with loved ones across the boundary between this world and the next.
Imagine if there was an eye inside your eye, whose default was to wonder what depth or what feeling is beneath the surface of any person you see.
A kind of spiritual infrared, an eye that perceives more wavelengths when it sees, that almost hears when it looks.
An eye looking at tzitzit not to avoid being distracted, but to follow them out past their ends in each of the four directions because there is too much here not to miss.
An eye that closes long enough to replenish itself to see more, or to leave time to see dreams.
An eye inside your eye that saw when another person was looking over here because it’s hard for them right now to look over there.
That I believe was Chava’s eye in Gan Eden, which saw that the fruit was good and nourishing, and beautiful, and worth thinking about more, before she took it and shared it.
Two friends encounter each other, and one of them has lost something. The other asks, “Why are you looking over here,” and the first one says, “Because here the light is better.”
And the friend says, “Maybe we can look there together.” Or: “Would it help if I stayed around here while you went over there.” Or: “I’ll be here again if you want to look tomorrow.”
As we look ahead to the moonless night later this week that marks the month of Elul, that leads us to the new year -- may our seeing be as good as our hearing. May we help each other make our way to the mountains we can’t yet see where announcers are calling us; help each other see the blessings in the places that are harder to search. And may we all see each other with the eye inside our eye.
This is the D'var Torah I gave for Parshiyyot Chukkat-Balak 5783, July 1, 2023.
This is a picture of me at the age of 17 on top of Masada in Israel, wearing a baseball cap that says “YAZ”. I remember asking someone to take this picture, and to get me and the Yaz cap and as much of Masada behind me in the phot as possible – hence the odd composition. I was on my end-of-11th-grade trip with the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program, and getting this picture was significant to me at the time for reasons I cannot remember.
But now, this photo stands for a whole story of who I am, which I focus on especially on the Shabbat leading into Independence Day and the first Shabbat that my daughter is in Israel for her very first time.
The Yaz hat I had for about nine months, and I wore it a lot even before Israel. I got the cap I think on the bridge between Kenmore Square and Fenway Park in probably August of 1983, when our family went to a Red Sox game during Carl Yastrzemski’s final season. Yaz merch was everywhere. It’s a white kind-of-painter’s cap and by the first couple weeks of Israel it had become a bit discolored under the rim with sweat from our hikes. The cap came to an untimely end a week or two after Masada when our group was on a long bus ride and I was in front telling jokes on the microphone (we used to trade that off during our tiyyulum, our excursions from our base) and my friend Judy became carsick and needed to stop the bus and run off. I got out of her way, but didn’t get the last bit of the very top of my head out of the way quite in time. End of Yaz cap!
Masada is half of what’s important about the Yaz cap. Being at Fenway during Yaz’s last season is the other important part. When I was 1 to 3 years old, before I can even remember, my family lived in Rockport, Massachusetts. My father had recently completed his medical training and wanted to practice in a small town, and my mother did not want to live in a small town -- so they made a deal that they would try it for two years. Dad found a practice looking to add two young doctors in Gloucester. We lived there, but after the two years, Mom called it off.
What I do remember, for as long as I can remember anything, is that every year after the experiment ended we would make a summer trip out East -- a week in Utica with Dad’s family (Utica, a/k/a the Garden of Eden and the founding spot of all civilization, in Savett family lore), and a week on Cape Ann on the ocean down the street from where we had lived. And one of those days was always spent in Boston, often split between visiting our cousins and doing something in the city. Over the years growing up, we went to the Bunker Hill monument, the Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord, the USS Constitution, Faneuil Hall, the North End. I grew up when Schoolhouse Rock was new on Saturday morning TV, so none of this Hamilton-The-Revolution’s-Happening-In-New-York garbage -- it was the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock and the Boston Tea Party. I was fascinated for a time with how it wasn’t Paul Revere or William Dawes but Col. Prescott who actually rode out to announce the “British are coming!” I did not like reading Thoreau and Emerson in high school – but I did love that I had actually been to Walden Pond. The Boston history and landscape seeped into me, along with the ocean in Rockport, as a second home and as a central part of my own story and history.
So I wore the Yaz hat to connect me to my Boston, American-history roots, and I wore it on Masada as we sat as a group and debated as though we were the Zealots making our last stand against the Romans -- should we resist or flee or take our own lives. I wore it as we hollered into the canyon as Israeli soldiers do, shenit m’tzadah lo tipol, Masada will never fall again. I added a few weeks after my HSI trip ended to stay in Israel, and the moment I landed back in the U.S. I started to plan for getting back to Israel in college.
I wrote about that day on Masada for my college essays-- it was in a way both Yaz and Masada who got me back to Boston, to Harvard. I loved living there, walking the streets of our colonial founders each day with the signs of how many hundreds of years ago a particular path or road was first laid down. In the middle of that time I did fulfill my intention of going back to Israel (without the Yaz cap). Yet on the heels of a year when I was convinced I would make aliyah, I returned to Boston and found myself surprised to discover that I was deep down an American and I couldn’t give that up, and I didn’t want to.
And so, about a century after my great-grandparents came to the U.S. and Canada in flight from the czar, and had become Americans as my family had become Russian or Lithuanian or Ukrainian or Latvian some generations earlier for the very same kind of reason after living somewhere else -- I made a choice to be American.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. The Declaration begins in this passage, and in the famous passage that follows, by announcing the choice of the people of this country to become Americans and not British. And at the same time words like necessary and impel and duty suffuse the opening lines as if to say -- we choose to become who we had no choice to become. That is how it felt to me and how it feels to me, as I think about choosing to be American and feeling compelled to make that choice.
And it’s important to declare the causes of that publicly, for me and for others of us who are American Jews. And I find myself this time of year when I have a kid in Israel and so many people I know are spending time there -- I find myself feeling like a “decent respect to the opinions of Jews and Zionists” requires me to declare why here and not there. Respect to Jews and Zionists here, in this room and this community as well as in Israel. For me, living in the land of Yaz is something I can’t separate from the part of me tied to the land of Masada, and my American-ness and my Zionism are so tightly connected.
Last fall when I was in Jerusalem, I brought with me the journal I kept from my year in college there. I read to myself the statements of the me who was declaring why he couldn’t live here and had to live there, and the values I thought were at stake in becoming an Israeli Conservative Jew in the religious peace movement. I took a walk with myself and talked to myself in Hebrew about whether I could have become anything like me, with whatever strength of moral character and whatever leadership it has taken decades to develop, if I had made aliyah. Who can know.
But I think not. I have spoken to you on many Shabbatot before Independence Day about this and written about it -- you can check out the USA page on rabbijon.net so I’ll just summarize it here. I discovered, back in the fall of 1988, that I was American to the core, that American ideas and the paradigm questions and American politics were all I wanted to think about and talk about and study. And it was not only my Boston marination, but my Judaism and my Torah that were making me American.
To quote and paraphrase myself from last year and a few years before:
Jewish experience and Torah were my path to America. In my mind, this is how I think about freedom and individuality: Thomas Jefferson with his self-evident truths speaks to Moshe demanding that Pharaoh let our people go. Henry David Thoreau, who would not compromise one bit with conventional society and went off to live in the woods all on his own, who went to jail rather than pay taxes that would help fund what he thought was an unjust war – Thoreau is talking to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who in the Talmud is banished by his colleagues after he couldn’t persuade the rest of the rabbis to set the law his way, even when God sent miracles and a voice down from Heaven to back him up.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote the classic essay on individualism, speaks with Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, who wrote about sh’lichut, one’s unique individual mission in the world.
I think about how freedom is the basic, precious truth we learn from the Exodus, and how much more precious that freedom is than what John Locke or Thomas Jefferson ever wrote about. How Torah freedom compels us to stop at Mt. Sinai and enter into covenant, and what that required stop teaches about the kinds of covenants free people in America are able to make or ought to make.
I think about how freedom is also the fundamental challenge to our humanity, even the most basic idol. It was free people after all who chose the make a golden calf and worship a thing made of gold. It was free people who imagined themselves trading the challenge of rising spiritually for the fleshpots back in Egypt and the thought of a life free of difficult decisions and moral agency. The Torah of freedom talks to the challenges today, of freedom that opens up to mere materialism, to unrestrained competition in the economy and social competitiveness. A freedom that can make everything a commodity, including ourselves — allowing our interests, our time, even our unique talents to be valued in our own eyes by what they are worth in the short term to others. All of which can disconnect us from the larger and longer stories we are part of, which we author and co-author.
I think about how the long Jewish practice of tzedakah as more like taxation than charity wants us to understand the blessing we say first thing in the morning, praising the Divine she’asanu b’nai chorin, who has made us free people. I think about how Jews have been stewards of both freedom and self-government for more than three thousand years, carrying the Exodus story and wearing it around our bodies in tallit and tefillin, running even our medieval communities in a principled self-government. How does the person who wakes up into freedom also wake up into responsibility? I want to know how freedom and responsibility are linked — in talmudic detail and American detail, in philosophical detail and political detail.
It’s because of America that Torah has had to speak to issues beyond our group and its wellbeing, and become a wisdom for this nation and the world. American has brought Torah to answer questions about totalitarianism, the nuclear age, technology, racism, human rights, compelling Jewish thinkers to explore the ethics of power and the limits of human potential. And because of America, Jews export that wisdom back to Israel, whether it’s to the Conservative and Reform communities, the religious Zionist movement, or many creative secular and non-governmental initiatives and communities and think tanks. There could be no democratic, modern Israel without the Jews and Judaisms of America.
Some look at the phrase “Jewish American,” or “American Jew,” and see a space between the words, a yawning gap between two aspects of consciousness. Or they see a dash like a minus sign, where one word or maybe both take something away from the other. I see rather a chemical bond. Not ionic – charged, each trying to take something from the other. But covalent. A sign of the energy that flows uniquely when two entities are bound together, and something new emerges that is different from either atom on its own.
The hyphen in “Jewish-American” is one of the most exciting things I know. The identity, and the specific moral dilemmas that come with the hyphen -- I wouldn’t trade that hyphen for anything.
That’s why I chose to be American, and why I had to make that choice, once thirty-five years ago and over and over again since.
So that’s my story, my journal of ideas and my photo albums. The picture I showed you might not look like it has anything to do with this American tale. But the photo on top of Masada of me wearing a cap of the great Carl Yastrzemski is one photo of an overall equilibrium of how Jewish history and American history flow toward me and within. We don’t share these stories and declarations enough of why we are here and why we are us, the way we share stories of Zionism and persecution. Last Rosh Hashanah I charged us to look ahead to this year and the coming two years after, and to make a Jewish leap of faith in American democracy. Whether right now the America you experience is more like the crises of leadership and national direction in our first parasha today, Chukkat. Or whether like in the second, Balak, you’re reassuring yourself that from ten thousand feet and from the outside, we are a beacon still or at least okay.
So on this July 4th, tell your story, at least to yourself. If you have chosen to be here, be proud you made that choice -- that you have chosen this place with the moral questions that come with this place and time. Baruch she-asanu b’nai chorin -- thank you, to the One who has made us all free in this place and this time.
