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The Torah Is Not a TED Talk

This is a D'var Torah I shared February 11, 2023 for Parashat Yitro, but I'm publishing it now right before Shavuot, when we read the same section of the Torah, Exodus 19-20.

This book -- the Torah -- has been read and encountered by millions of people through so many generations, and changed their lives and changed the world.

Here are some books that have also been read and encountered, by millions of people -- Aristotle’s Ethics, the Harry Potter series. Some by nearly as many generations as the Torah, some by only a few -- and nonethless they too have changed lives and changed the world.

Are they all kind of the same?

A couple days before Rosh Hashanah of 5781, I read an article in Slate magazine online, by Amanda Prahl, and it was about kindness. It was about kindness in the TV show Ted Lasso, and the article was wise and engaging. It had me at “kindness” -- but the whole thing was phenomenal. I thought Ms. Prahl’s observations would make a great D’var Torah. I guess what I really thought was: It’s two days before Rosh Hashanah and this is better than my upcoming D’var Torah, in let me count how many ways!

Had I had more than two days, I might have worked on incorporating Ms. Prahl’s essay into a D’var Torah of my own. I did speak about kindness on the two days of that Rosh Hashanah, but not directly, and without nearly the perfect touch of Ms. Prahl. I might have woven her article into and around some stories from the Torah or midrash, had I had the same. If you’re a Ted Lasso fan just read her article!

What is Torah? Is it one of the many great books? Like Aristotle’s Ethics, which is a longer book about ethics than, say, Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy combined? What is a D’var Torah -- is it in the same category as thoughtful articles and great TED Talks? If I had woven a secular writer’s beautiful essay on kindness into a Rosh Hashanah sermon, would that make it Torah?

Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the medieval scholar who is the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, says essentially: Yes. If it’s wisdom, and if it’s truth, then by definition its source is in the Divine. It’s Torah, and we have to expand our conception of Torah to include it.

And yet. There is more to Torah than really good content.

In the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon said: Woe to the person who says that this Torah has come to present stories in regular words. For if this were so, even in our time we would be able to make a Torah using ordinary words, better than any of the stories in the Torah... even the nobles of the world have among them superior words. We could just go and make a Torah out of those words.

Rabbi Shimon’s point is that the Torah is not unique because it’s one of the great books. And a D’var Torah might sound like a TED Talk, but it’s not just a really good TED Talk, and often it’s not even as good by TED standards.  (Although to be clear, I am always trying to be as good as a good TED Talk!)

It’s not that the Torah isn’t good content well-delivered. That’s just not all it is. The midrash says that the Torah is black fire inscribed on white fire. It is that something different that we need to define. We can’t completely define that something -- we can gesture at it, just as we point at the Torah and reach toward it when we see it in the air and sing V’zot HaTorah, this is the Torah.

So mah zot, what is it?

The introduction to revelation we read today in Exodus 19 begins: Bachodesh hashlishi l’tzaytz b’nai yisrael me-eretz mitzrayim, bayom hazeh -- ba’u midbar Sinai.

On the third new moon after B’nai Yisrael’s Exodus from Egypt,
On this day,
They come to Mt. Sinai.

As our rabbis understand it, the Torah says of itself both that it comes from a particular place and time in the past, and it comes from today, whenever today is. Torah is most Torah when the day you are encountering Torah is new and fresh, and the Torah itself is new and radical to you. This day when you encounter Torah in its fullest dimensions is in the immediate afterglow of the Exodus, even if it’s 2400+ years later. Torah isn’t just the message but what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the event -- a portal not backwards in history but outward, toward the top of the mountain and toward the fellow Israelites next to you.

We say this same thing twice a day in the Shma. V’hayu had’varim ha’eleh asher Anochi m’tzavcha hayom al l’vavecha. These words, which I charge you with today, shall be on your heart.

And the words of Torah themselves -- Heschel calls them prophetic understatement. Prophetic, understatement. I think Heschel’s doing his thing of taking something that seems unbelievable and saying: You think that’s unbelievable? That’s actually the easy one and here’s the hard one.

Heschel thinks that the problem people think they have is believing that God could reduce all of God’s thoughts for all time to this book, much of which is about animal sacrifice, and that God could somehow reveal God’s entire essential self and message to this small people at one particular point in time.

What Heschel thinks is more unbelievable is that the words in the Torah, however they got there, could possibly carry Divine wisdom and a Divine charge. As Rabbi Shimon said in the Zohar, they are just words, and we’ve seen mere humans make stories and philosophy out of words that are just as amazing if not more. Believe that these Torah words uniquely contain truth? That’s hard to believe, says Heschel.

So Heschel says the Torah is not such a wild leap but a prophetic understatement. The words themselves are not complete. They hint at only a fraction of what they are about. They are the first step on a ladder -- but without them you can’t begin to climb. They are each stone at the foot of Mt. Sinai -- but without standing on them you can’t go anywhere else. Words of Torah are prophetic understatements -- the words themselves are only the beginning.

So of course the Torah has animal sacrifices. And stories and laws, and maps and recipes, and architectural drawings and shopping lists, and poems and songs and sarcasm and comic relief, and if you go out further in the Bible into the prophets you’ve even got a sports section every so often! If you’re going to make something out of human words, you’ve got to use them in every way possible.

What is unique about the Torah is not what is written -- it’s where it can take you, where it can take us together, and where it can take the world as a consequence. The words and verses, one by one and one after another, written in scrolls and books don’t do the job alone, and reading and speaking them and even chanting them are just the start.

We have to recreate the event of Mt. Sinai together -- which is why we re-enact today’s reading every time we read the Torah, calling people up the mountain and sending the words to every single person standing every single place around it.

We have find the Torah together with all our generations. That’s what’s great about the chumash, the book with the Torah text and commentaries. The best chumashim and now the best websites surround you with teachers and translators from every era. As I never tire of saying to our kids when they come of age and hold the Torah, the noise these ornaments make should make you think of everyone who has ever chimed in on any word, trying to find the rung after the rung on the ladder which is that particular word.

We get help to find the Torah from beyond ourselves, somehow. My favorite midrash about the Ten Commandments imagines us standing at the foot of the mountain ready to talk to with our own individual mal’ach, a Divine messenger who wants to engage each of us separately with each one of the Ten Commandments, to explore their ins and outs and our objections and what-if’s and really?-s.

All of that is not a book, and it’s not a TED Talk.

We need not just to read the Ten Commandments as a list of principles, which they are, but to experience them as both so obvious -- I mean really we could come up with every single one of them in a brief meeting -- and also so radical, because look how missing they are in the world. We need to let the words say to us not just implement me, but also: Figure out why I’m necessary, and what is it about you humans that could make this possible, and what it is about you humans that you have to get to the bottom of that is in the way of don’t murder and don’t covet and why aren’t you resting and renewing. That’s the black fire on white fire.

And when we bring the Ten Commandments or any teachings of Torah out into our lives or the wider world, we’re supposed to try to bring those fires.

Imagine if whenever you mentioned or taught words of Torah, or argued about them, you knew they were alive with divinity and humanity more than the other words people use that are just on paper or in air -- and all that divinity and all that humanity were standing with you when you brought up those words.

That’s hard to do, especially when the other words in our conversations are less hot -- words presented in regular essays and stories and books and position papers. Each time we bring down the Torah and cool the fire off enough to use it, we bring something unique to the table, but we risk the Golden Calf -- we risk freezing the fire, making an idol of a single teaching, even a central one like Tzelem Elohim (the image of God), and stopping our own inquiry into the word and into who we people are in relation to what those words are asking.

So that’s why we come back with regularity every Shabbat to recreate the event at Mt. Sinai, to experience the words as fire, together with each other and with our many generations.

I am often guilty of not doing that. I have often treated the Torah even at its best as a position paper, as a really good article. When that works, for you or for people I work with on pressing issues of the day, dayenu, that might be enough for the time being.

But that’s not going to work all the time, because there are other books and other articles, and often Torah is meant to be the event of experiencing Torah wisdom, not just the content of that wisdom. It’s meant to be the commitment to what the Torah is teaching and to figuring out why and how that could be and why it’s not already. 

We usually know right and wrong already, and know what we want to say about it. Torah is more.

This dimension of Torah does not require Hebrew and it’s not just Jewish. If we relate to Torah the way I’m gesturing at, then we’ll know if a book or a great article from any source is just really good content, or if it too is Torah.

To know Torah as Torah, we have to be willing to be shaken up often when we encounter it, to know that our commitment is on the line anytime we learn Torah or try to impart it. That doesn’t come from just listening to a D’var Torah or reading one -- it requires you as well as I to be active participants. But Torah is so unique and so good that Torah itself will help us allow ourselves to tremble that way, and to open ourselves.

Because this is what the words of Torah are, according to Heschel, and none of these other books are like it:

No other book so loves and respects the life of man... It has the words that startle the guilty and the promise that upholds the forlorn... It continues to scatter seeds of justice and compassion, to echo God’s cry to the world and to pierce humanity’s armor of callousness....

There are no words more knowing, more disclosing and more indispensible, words both stern and graceful, heart-rending and healing. A truth so universal: God is One. A thought so consoling: God is with us in our distress.... A map of time: from creation to redemption. Guideposts along the way: the Seventh Day: An offering: contrition of the heart. A utopia: Would that all people were prophets... a standard so bold: ye shall be holy. A commandment so daring: Love your neighbor as yourself. A fact so sublime: human and divine pathos can be in accord. And a gift so undeserved: the ability to repent.

If that’s Torah, what soul would not want to be receiving it, every day.

Whenever you hear words this way, or whenever words you read bring you that picture -- then you know what you are engaged in is not just good content, but Torah.

Israel's Declaration of Independence

 

 

I am posting this on the eve of Israel's 75th anniversary of independence. The translation is based on what I found on the Israeli Knesset website with my own revisions to bring the words closer to the Hebrew at the sacrifice occasionally of an equivalent English idiom. I have chosen to translate the term "Eretz Yisrael" throughout as "The Land of Israel", though there might be room to understand the term at the same time as "Palestine" in the sense it was understood in 1948, as that territory in question over which the British Mandate applied.

 

 

In Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) the Jewish nation arose. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first lived as a polity, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Out of this historic and traditional connection, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent generations they returned in their masses. Pioneers, immigrants in defiance of restrictive legislation and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave specific international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to establish anew its national home.

The Holocaust which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – proved anew the imperative of solving the problem of its homelessness and statelessness by re-establishing in the Land of Israel the Jewish State, which would open wide the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a full and equal member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi slaughter in Europe, as well as Jews from other lands, did not stop migrating to the Land of Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of the Land of Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.

Accordingly we have assembled, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish community of the Land of Israel and of the Zionist movement, on the day of the conclusion of the British Mandate over Palestine, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the basis of the decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel: the State of Israel.

We declare that beginning at the moment of the conclusion of the Mandate tonight, the eve of Shabbat, 6 Iyar 5708 (May 15, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the constitution which shall be adopted by the elected constituent assembly not later than the October 1, 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish state, to be called "Israel".

The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

The State of Israel is ready to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of the Land of Israel.

We call on the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to receive the State of Israel into the family of nations.

We call – even in the midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend a hand in peace and neighborliness to all neighboring states and their peoples, and appeal to them for cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to contribute its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We call to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of the Land of Israel through immigration and upbuilding and to stand by its side in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream of the redemption of Israel.

With trust in the Rock of Israel, we hereby affix our signatures in witness to this declaration, at this session of the Provisional Council of State on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, the Eve of Shabbat, 5 Iyyar 5708, May 14, 1948.

David Ben-Gurion
Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner

Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
David Zvi Pinkas

 

 

 

Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

 

Being One, Being Two, Being Seven, Being Eight

My D'var Torah for Shabbat Chanukkah 5783 (December 24, 2022).

A question I often get around Chanukkah is: Is it true that all the candle hae to be at the same level, other than the shamash? Usually the question comes from creativity -- someone who wants to repurpose another item as a chanukkiah, or who has a new vision of the candles and their combination visually or symbolically or both. So for example, artists have asked me if they can make a thing with a spiral or a certain kind of zigzag and still call it a kosher chanukkiah. Growing up I never learned that this was an issue, but you hear the question a few times and you start to think it must be a thing.

Well, as a matter of principle in halacha (Jewish law) the answer is yes, you can have these kinds of chanukkiot! Though if you think you heard that Jewish law says “no” you’re not wrong, and I’ll get to that.  The Jewish law books say first that you have to be able to differentiate each flame when you are looking at the chanukkiah. This is the opposite of a medurah, which in modern Hebrew is a campfire or a bonfire. Medurah in itself is cool, and in a medurah like a chanukkiah because you have a lot of flames, but with a medurah or a campfire they are jumbled up together and you can’t perceive each one because they are mixed up and move around. Anyway, one easy way to make sure you have a sert of distinct burning wicks, and not have it appear like a medurah, is to space them out in a sequence on the same level. That’s what the books of Jewish law actually say about the straight line. Personally I don’t really get the same level part, because if you follow the logic of the Talmud out each night representing another level of holiness, you should be able to set up the candles like a staircase or an upward ramp. The Ashkenazi tradition is to stick to the straight line but to me it’s like eating legumes on Pesach, so be Sephardi if you like and spread your candles out however you find intriguing!

What is this all about, the difference between a line of flames and a campfire? Why shold we care?

In the Torah in the Mishkan (desert tabernacle), and in the Beit Hamikdash (the Temple in Jerusalem), there were oil lamps and a wood fire, both of which were always going day and night. Oil lamps we think of in connection with Chanukkah because of the ancient seven-branched menorah, and the Temple also had the ner tamid, the eternal light fueled by olive oil.

The fire on the altar reminds me of the burning bush, fire weaving and moving around through the scraggly scrub. One midrash says that the burning bush represents the suffering and the prayers of all the Israelites, and the presence of the Divine with them -- but as a whole, undifferentiated, all of their pain and groans and prayers jumbled together. Vast but trapped in place. In contrast to all that stood Moshe, a single person in that moment, not yet a leader; and the Divine, also singular, not yet in action to save them.

These ancient fires and lamps got me thinking again about this halacha about the differentiated lights. It’s not just about what you see on any given day: six candles, rather than a blazing fire pit with six or more sticks or branches somewhere in there. I think the law is also about perception across eight nights. It’s about the ability on the first night of Chanukkah to say this is one candle, the next night to perceive that these are two candles, and so on all the way to eight.

There is a difference between each candle, and there is a also a difference between perceiving one candle, and five, and eight.

Do you experience something different about the chanukkiah on different nights?

I really noticed this year on days 4 and 5 how different the chanukkiot looked by my window, compared to day 1 and 2. I mean Captain Obvious, I know -- but it’s gotten me to challenge myself about not looking at one as a means to two, not always looking at a couple candles in order to be excited about seven or eight. In my home, the effect is especially pronounced because we have several chanukkiot going each night; the effect of the change from night to night is dramatic. For me the meaning of these teachings about perceiving one, perceiving two, etc. is not to see two people in our community primarily as a strategy for connecting with a third one. How do we get ourselves toward appreciating each of the groupings in the Chanukkah story? Really appreciating just Judith or Matityahu in action; or just Yehudah Ha-Maccabee and his brothers; and just their small band; and their large force. I know I sometimes need to remind myself not to see small numbers of people just as inferior or miniative versions of larger numbers.

My colleague and classmate Rabbi Sue Fendrick once gave a talk in which she mentioned the distinctness of different numbers of people in Judaism.

Two people together are a chavruta, a study pair. There’s something unique about two people facing each other over words of Torah, with no one else to hide behind when your partner expresses and idea or asks a question. You experience Torah differently in a pair, differently than in a Torah service and even a small discussion group.

Three people make a beit din, a court of law. They can rule on a conflict over money and property; they can proclaim officially that someone has become Jewish. Three are enough to call each other formally after a meal in gratitude -- chaverai, n’varech! -- to say the blessing called Birkat Hamazon.

Ten of course are a minyan, enabling us to have a Torah service or say the Mourners’ Kaddish and respond. Ten defines a public according to Jewish law. If you do an act that is seen in the presence of ten or more and is particularly ethical and does honor to the Divine and our people -- a Kiddush Hashem -- that’s a bigger deal than if fewer were around to see it. And the same for Chillul Hashem, if in the presence of ten one does something particularly unethical and shames us or the name of God.

I think about the 208 delegates at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 -- that’s far fewer than make up this congregation today. So too the 23 on the ship that landed the first formal Jewish community in North America in 1654, in New Amsterdam.

Seven, I learned in group psychology, might be the ideal size of a committee or task force -- the point where the chemistry of introverts and extroverts, creatives and analyticals, has the best chance of combining a good end product with good feeling about the experience.

Eight is the extra on top of that seven -- it’s the number of covenant, the leap from the best of what people can accomplish together in our reality to something we might deem messianic.

Even one, in Judaism, is a kind of group. You may be solitary, but you are never alone. Moshe, alone at the burning bush, was with the Divine, and the singular Divine, Adonai Echad, had Moshe. The first candle of Chanukkah has the shamash, the fire that links them to someone else who stored the oil and planned for you to arrive, waited for you to make them less alone.

Jews today are conditioned in a good way to think of how the people in any given “here” can spread what we have -- but our weakness is to get caught up too much on who is missing. The Chanukkah miracle of the oil was meant to reframe scarcity as not just sufficiency, but abundance and overflowing. So too we should see whoever is in the room or around the table, in any number, as abundant and overflowing. You may by now be thinking of Margaret Mead, who could have been talking about each night’s chanukkiah when she famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

So part of the sweetness of the Chanukkiah is the chance to appreciate all the numbers we find ourselves in, the partnerships and discussions and services and protests and parties. The unique and distinct character of each group where we act and learn and reflect and grow. Each day of Chanukkah is a unique festival of lights.

My colleague Rabbi Fendrick closed the talk I mentioned with this beautiful last part from a poem by Marge Piercy called “The Low Road”, and it’s a perfect kavvanah (intention) as we look at our candles each night:

Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.

Thirteen makes a circle,
a hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity
and your own newsletter;
ten thousand community
and your own papers;
a hundred thousand,
a network of communities;
a million our own world.

It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say We
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.

Shabbat Shalom, Chodesh Tov and Chag Urim Sameach!
A Good New Month and a Joyous Festival of Lights!

This Chanukkah -- Many Ideas

I am still trying to keep on top of my many channels, between this blog and the Tov! podcast and Temple Beth Abraham's site and blog, not to mention social media. (Not complaining!) I haven't put a link here yet to the many thematic Chanukkah-related writings I've got, some of them reposts from prior years and some of them new, whether it's my own thoughts about courage or links to others. You can scroll through all of that here, for now just on Beth Abraham's site and I'll get them up here eventually too. Also related is my reflection on science and religion through the lens/light of Chanukkah via Sinai and Synapses.

Hope, Chanukkah, and the Dreidel

This is one version of a D'var Torah I have given in a few variations at different times, around Chanukkah and even once on Rosh Hashanah!

I have only a couple of Chanukkah sermons, and in fact you may have heard me give a version of this in years past and even on a Rosh Hashanah. I want to talk about hope, through the lens of Chanukkah. I think we can learn about hope from the dreidel – nun, gimel, hay, shin.

The definition of hope that comes closest to the matter for me is from Czech playwright and dissident and eventually president Vaclav Havel: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The Talmud says that when we arrive at the entrance to the World to Come, we will be asked a series of questions about how we lived, and then the last question will be: “Tzipita liyshua? Did you have hope that there would be redemption for yourself, for the world?” Before you knew how your story on earth ended, before you knew the state of the world when you left it, did you hope?

So, the dreidel. On the surface -- on its four surfaces -- the dreidel seems like the very essence of randomness, the opposite even of hope. You can hold it by something firm, it comes together here on one point, but those don’t last. As soon as you put it in play, it’s just all uncertainty. Nun, Gimel, Hay, or Shin? But I have come to see each letter and each possible landing as a different kind of hope.

When you play dreidel someone brings the M&Ms, stakes the pot in the middle, and gives some to everyone. When you spin, if you land on Gimel you get everything in the pot. Hay, you take half. Nun, nothing happens. Shin, you put something in.

Look deeper into each outcome, and there’s a type of hope corresponding to each outcome. Gimelhope, Hay hope, Nun hope, Shin hope.

Gimel stands for the word gadol, meaning large. Gimel is when you win all the M&Ms in the middle.Gimel hope is going for broke, hoping and praying for everything. The final definitive cure from an illness.  Life or the world exactly as it is supposed to be. And not just praying but getting what you pray for.

My all-time favorite Gimel story comes from Rabbi Sharon Brous, who read it from New York Times columnist Nick Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. The two were living in China in 1990 and met a young village girl named Dai. Dai Manju was a terrific student who had to walk four miles to school every day. Tuition at her elementary school was an unaffordable $13 per year, and her parents certainly would not be able to pay the additional $4 a year it would cost for junior high.

Kristof wrote about Dai Manju and people began to donate money, as you would expect – that’s not the Gimel -- and one donation came through for $10,000! Not just enough for her tuition, but for a lot of tuitions, and enough to build another school. And that’s not even the Gimel. When Kristof checked in again, he found out when the bank was converting the large donation from dollars to yuan, and they dropped a decimal point. The donation was only supposed to be $100.00! But rather than take back the money, the bank just stood by its own transfer and made the difference their own donation.

Ten years later, Dai Manju had finished high school and trained to become an accountant.  She was contemplating starting her own enterprise. Every home in her village had electricity. The readers, the dropped decimal point, and all the other kids made ripples on one family, the village, and beyond. So much Gimel!

In dreidel, the odds of a Gimel are just one in four. In the real world, even less. But each Gimel keeps us going. Gimel is when the world as it is suddenly crosses with the world that we know is supposed to be, and that ideal world is real. If there weren’t Gimel in the world, we could hardly live at all.

When the dreidel lands on Hay, you take half the pot. Hay hope is for something partial. It's remission from cancer; it’s a good day during the months after a concussion. It’s a big issue win on the local level.

I feel fortunate to live in communities with a lot of Hay. I see people rallying to each other within our congregation all the time, every single week, at times of illness or loss, at times of loneliness, and it’s not everything but it’s more than something. I feel fortunate to live in an area where we have energetic leaders, in office and as volunteers, who are trying to make our city a welcoming community through culture and the library and business and government. I see young people with idealism, finding something to do in politics or service and impatiently asking what can they do next, how can they make a bigger difference because they don’t feel they’re doing enough, that it’s Hay but not yet Gimel.

I see how people hunger for Hay stories, stories of healing and resilience for a time – and I see how much people who live in other places love to know about the partial, hopeful stories of this shul or this state. When Gimel seems too much to hope for, unattainable or just not possible to believe, what people really need is Hay.

Nun is when you get nothing. This is actually the Hebrew letter in the game that stands for nes or miracle. How can nothing be a miracle, much less hope?

When I talked about this a few years ago I mentioned the Israeli leader Shimon Peres z”l, who was in one view the biggest nothing in Israeli politics and history. He was the loser of more elections than anyone else ever, and he was the champion of the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians that did not achieve peace. There was a lot of Nun, nothing, at the end of the defining initiatives of his career.

Yet Shimon Peres, even in his 90s, refused to give up his conviction that one day his visions would come true.  Half a century before, Peres had been the builder of Israel's first energy revolution, in nuclear power. As an elder statesman, he rolled up his sleeves with young innovators and entrepreneurs to help launch the newest phase of Israel's green energy revolution. Shimon Peres lived by these words of Rabbi Donniel Hartman: “It is not in our hands alone to actualize our dreams. It is in our hands to ensure that these dreams remain alive.” Nun today might mean Hay or even Gimel sometime later.

The hardest of the four sides of the dreidel to call hope is Shin -- you lose, you put something back. Shin in Hebrew stands for sham, which means "there", over somewhere else. It seems like the opposite of hope – but it's not. Shin hope is a kind of hope, that comes as we leap the distance between what we pray for and what is, when they are in fact so far from each other.

I told the story a few years ago about a call I got from a congregant named Sandi one spring day a few years ago, telling me she’d like to chant a Haftarah at the end of July, the one from her Bat Mitzvah.  Sandi used to chant frequently for us, but at the time she was dying from cancer. The previous phone call I’d had with her had been about some bad test results she had received. I wondered if she was really saying “If I’m still alive I’m going to chant the Haftarah.” Neither of us said that out loud.

And indeed Sandi didn’t quite make it. She went into hospice a week before her Haftarah, and she died two days before that Shabbat. Friends were in her room all that week, making plans for how they could chant to Sandi or even have her chant a little bit from her bed. That Shabbat right after Sandi died, when her synagogue friends could have been just too tired or grief-stricken, they came here to services and one of them chanted Sandi’s special Haftarah.

Everything about those weeks was hope with a Shin. In the hospice I asked Sandi where she found the strength to keep going and to hope. She taught me President Havel’s answer in her own words – she said she loved her shuls, here and Temple Israel, and being close to the Torah, and the people who were in her life because of the shuls, and her small family. She looked at me like: no big deal. Planning to chant the Haftarah was what she was putting into the pot -- that was her Shin, how she expressed hope and lived it. Hard as it was, all her friends and all of us have what Sandi put in.

The story of Chanukkah comes entirely from Shin. The cruse of oil that lasted miraculously first had to be given away as a Shin. At a time when others were despairing, someone made a beautiful container with a special seal of the kohanim, and hid it where the enemy wouldn’t see it. Whoever did so believed one day that someone would be in a position to find the oil – maybe not in the same lifetime, but eventually. Instead of despairing, that kohen played a Shin. They put something in, for later; they put in hope for someone else.

Nun, Gimel, Hay, Shin. Hope for the biggest things; hope for partial healing and partial justice. Hoping for others or the future; and just hoping when you can't even give any good reason for doing so.

We come here on Shabbat because this is where the M&Ms are stored. We come with however much we have in a given week, and the Torah gives us some more. Maybe you or I walk out with more or maybe we give some; for sure there is someone who leaves our Shabbat gathering with more. Shul is where we come with an absolute guarantee of Gimel in that that tens of people just in this one community will use their lips to say words of peace, love, generosity, and justice. After a week that maybe was a week of Shin, of spending or losing hope, we come here to tell the Gimel and Hay.

Hope in itself doesn't guarantee healing or Tikkun Olam. But when we hope together, when we bring together our Nuns, Gimels, Hays, and Shins, we help each other live more hopefully, on the inside and toward others.

Not everyone can hope in a Gimel way right now, or in the weeks to come. Yet I hope you can find at least one of the other paths of hope – a Hay, a Shin, a Nun. And most of all, I hope we all recognize the ways we are the cruse of oil, the M&Ms, storehouses of hope for each other in the community and for the world outside.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach!

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons From Last Week

Here are my sermons from Rosh Hashanah 5783:

First day:
Help Me Talk About What I've Been Through and Who I Am

Second day:
Right-ology: How to Be Right Better in the New Year

Wishing everyone a Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet new year!

Best of My Past High Holy Day Sermons

These are to me the best of my Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sermons from years past. I'm collecting them here because you find them useful to read and think about in Elul. They aren't in chronological or any particular order.

Hope In An Uncertain World (5777/2016)
What the Chanukkah dreidel can teach us about four kinds of hope.

Who Knows? (5780/2019)
How the story of Esther even more than the Torah can guide us to live in a world of mortal dangers.

How Good Do I Have to Be? (5777/2016)
With assists from the Green Monster, Pesky's Pole, Naomi Shemer and Reb Simcha Bunem.

Still Small Voices (5778/2017)
We are a community where many people have prayers they don't reveal out loud about the difficult things happening in our lives and families. How to be there even when we don't reveal or don't know what those prayers are.

Finding Purpose and Direction (5773/2012)
Figuring out your purpose, especially in up in the air times, or transitions in life or work.

Lost and Found (5779/2018)
When the pieces of life's puzzle aren't gone, but someone else has yours to give you back, or vice versa.

V.O.R. -- Vision-Opinion Ratio (5779/2018)
Fewer superficial reactions to public things, more visions -- how to find and speak about the things you are truly committed to, and quieting down about the rest.

Holy Impatience (5775/2014)
Some impatience is selfish, unfair expectations. Holy impatience is rooted in love, a concern for someone else who doesn't have the life or peace they deserve.

Helping Someone Else Change (5771/2010)
No one can change someone else -- but sometimes we can support other people in their changes. Starring a mitzvah in Leviticus and some social psychology research.

Busy (5776/2015)
Why "Busy" has become the answer to "How are you?" and what we can do about it.

Moral Adventure (5776/2015)
Adventure isn't just for heroes and myths. Our own lives are different when we recognize them as moral adventures, and the people we go through life with as our fellow students and sidekicks.

Long Tables, Shabbat Meals (5772/2011)
Why long tables are better than round, long meals are magical, and Shabbat creates relationships different from friendship but no less powerful.

Back to Better Than Normal (5782/2021)
As we transition from the Covid-19 pandemic, the old normal is certainly not what what we want to go back to.

Being Present in a Digital Age (5774/2013)
How to make people and not devices more central to our daily lives.

Look Up (5780/2019)
In a cynical age, we need to focus more on looking up to people -- the everyday people in our lives, the people who need us, the best leaders we know.

Body Talk (5779/2018)
How to show others we really believe they are the image of God.

Getting From Here to High Holy Days, Starting With a Party!

This is based on what I said on Shabbat morning, August 27, 2022 at the start of the month of Elul. It was the day of a Bar Mitzvah and an aufruf (blessing to a couple about to get married)!

Usually I think of Elul as a time of introspection before we get together in a big way on Rosh Hashanah. But the past few years I’ve been thinking that it would be great to start the month leading to the ten particularly intense days with a dance party, a disco party! First we should celebrate that we’ve gotten here -- we should look at each other and who’s in this together with us and going to help us look back and look ahead. And wow, this past year having been what it’s been and the year before that, we ABSOLUTELY should start it with a party. And my dream came true and I didn’t even realize it when we scheduled Jonah’s Bar Mitzvah celebration and when Rachel and Joel told me the date of their wedding. So this is how it should be. A new month, that little sliver of moonlight that says to the shade: You are going away, we’re going to make our own energy here and we’re going to gather our powers together so we can make a new year.

It's been quite a year, and we need more than the three days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to do our reflecting and our redirecting and our rebooting – our teshuvah, our returning. The spiritual recalculating on the GPS of our hearts. I don’t even know if a month is enough.

The point isn’t to come to services on the holidays. The point is to figure out what we each need from the next 40 days (really it’s more like 52!) – and what of the many offerings of spirituality and learning can support each of us:

• What do we need from parties like this when services are like a party
• What do we need from the retreats we might do in services around other people
• What do we need from the time ourselves thinking and writing and talking with loved ones and friends and mentors and therapists
• What do we need from the things we’re going to read or the music and the silence

I’ll send you daily e-mails with thoughts and ways to gather for conversation or learning or spiritual practice. But the point isn’t to read the e-mails! It’s to use them. It’s really simple: Use this month and the next for you, for the better life you’ve been thinking about having or creating. Use it to figure out your piece of making the world better -- boy do we need that.

Say thank you as many times as possible, in a world that doesn’t do that enough and where there’s plenty you’re not happy about. You don’t have to decide if the world is more bad than good, or maybe you have decided there is more bad now -- but just find gratitude every day and express it, out loud, to someone or to your own ears. That will ripple out. No one can change only out of sadness and anger. Not unless you can connect it to someone you love whose suffering is what powers your anger, your sadness. Not unless you can find a lighthouse ahead for hope, powered by someone you deeply appreciate.

This time of year is serious, but it doesn’t have to be solemn. That’s why it needs a party today, and at the end of the season on Simchat Torah we have another one! I am so happy we’re together, and thank you for listening to my prayers this first hour and saying Amen, even if you don’t know what all my prayers were. Thank you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you were doing.

So I hope you’ll tap into the energy of today, not just the energy of joy but of words of Torah in many forms, to help you launch into Elul and a month of individual reflection that’s good for you and good for us all when you do it.

Media From Me for Elul -- Tov! Podcast, Maimonides YouTubes

We're deep into Season 3 of Tov!, my podcast about The Good Place and Jewish ideas related to teshuvah. You can find all the most recent episodes here, or type "Tov!" into your favorite podcast app.

Also, I have been logging in at 12:36pm Eastern time each weekday this Elul to teach and talk about some classic teaching about teshuvah, mostly Maimonides but other things maybe too. You can join here, or you can listen to the ones I've taped:

Your Unorthodox Theology Won't Break Judaism

My D’var Torah from July 30, 2022 * 2 Av 5782

One of my favorite anecdotes about morning davvening (praying) comes from the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Chanina went to shul one day. This was some 1700 years ago, give or take, and at the time there were no siddurim (written prayerbooks). People who led knew the outline of the service, and the theme for each short section and the specific language of the blessing to end each section – Creator of lights, Yotzer hame’orot; Redeemer of Israel, Ga’al Yisrael, etc. A few prayers had been written and were well-known but the leader, the shliach tzibbur, could compose or make up his own prayer on the section’s theme to get to the very few fixed words.

So Rabbi Chanina is in shul and this guy stands up to recite the Amidah, and he starts chanting: Ha’el ha’gadol ha’gibbor v’hanora, v’ha’adir v’ha’izuz v’ha’yarui he-chazak v’ha’amitz v’ha’vadai v’hanichbad. Now you don’t need to know what all the words mean to know that what this prayer leader is doing is adding on top of the familiar prayer more praise adjectives for God. Strong, and courageous, and certain, and honored, and and and….

Anyway, the leader finishes the Amidah and Rabbi Chanina says to him: “Nu, did you get them all? I mean did you use enough words to describe the Divine, you know, better than Moshe Rabbeinu did? Because we’re using Moshe’s own words when we say Ha’el ha’gadol etc. , and some words that other prophetic figures did, and if it weren’t for these ancestors we couldn’t use any words at all to talk about the Divine. But you, you kept on going, but what did you really do? It’s like if there were a king who was known for having so much gold, and a person praised him for how much silver he had.”

So first of all I love that in shul in the Babylonian Talmud, everyone’s a critic and everyone has an evaluation of services while they’re still happening.

But I think about this teaching anytime we get into discussions like last week’s Kiddush program about theology and the Divine. It was really wonderful and thoughtful, and I appreciated everyone’s honesty in the questions you have and the views you expressed. And it did not go unnoticed by your rabbi that the ways our siddur talks about God really do not land for the vast majority of you who were there – the big metaphors of “King” and “Lord”, the importance of praising the Divine as though this was needed on high somewhere.

I just want to say a few things to open this crack more, because a lot of the ideas that you reject about the Divine and that I do not hold either — we feel like we’re breaking something when we say it out loud. And I am really working ahead about the High Holy Days, to make sure that the metaphors we are using to aid us are indeed helpful and true in the moments we need them, and I am concerned that the liturgy as it is will not help us at all unless we do some pre-thinking about it before the holy days. I’m going to say a few things today, and I have started reaching out to the people in our congregation who have been our spiritual teachers because I think we should hear many voices the coming weeks — different voices about what the Divine means to us, what it means to stand in the presence of the Divine with kavvanah, with purpose. There are people here who teach this better and more clear than I do, and you should have a chance to learn from them on Shabbat and other times. If we just walk into Rosh Hashanah without thinking about them, the words of the machzor (prayerbook) will not have depth and will not open a door for us.

So for me, one of the biggest things is maybe a paradox. I do not think of the Divine as a being in some one place, a personality of some kind whom I can address who is completely separate from myself or from us. And at the same time, I find the experience of imagining myself in the presence of a power I had no say in choosing to be very important. Visualizing that, which I do not literally believe, does something important that I won’t give up.

So to the first part of that: I wonder a bit how all of this got started and created, but not knowing doesn’t really affect my day. I take now as a given; we are here and so is the universe. It is permeated with Divinity, and just as every atom and every charge in the universe is affected somehow by every other, so too every spiritual atom and spiritual electron is linked. The totality of it is the Divine; each part of it is; and also each thing made up of it – me and you, the tent and the concrete, the trees and the engines in our cars. We are all spiritual receivers and transmitters. We have that capacity whether we use it or not, and the invisible Divinity is everywhere just as much as the gravitational force we don’t see or the radio waves that are hitting us and going through us whether we choose to tune to them or not, to produce or amplify or play for someone else. That’s my operating picture. That’s where God is for me. And in a way I can’t tell you very well I think that these Divine sparks – atoms and charges – they carry goodness and wisdom and Torah. Like a circuit that can be completed or broken by us, we can tap this goodness, which is a renewable energy and is never consumed, like the burning bush. I and we didn’t create it, but it doesn’t travel unless we extend or complete the circuit.

So I don’t think God sends floods or plagues, or heals from cancer or doesn’t, or decides on 400 years of slavery in Egypt and then its end. I don’t think God is judging or decreeing. There isn’t someone else out there doing those things. Some of the evil and suffering that happens is the fault of humans, and some just a product of nature. That’s the world as created.

Part 2 is that for me it’s good to focus on a particular cluster or manifestation of that everywhere-Divinity, on a regular basis. The metaphor of malchut, of melech or “king”, is made up for me of power and lawgiving and a selection I had no part it. And I need a reminder that there are things outside of me and that won’t disappear when I can’t hold them up, with my incomplete goodness or my incomplete spiritual focus.

Sometimes I look up at the top of the Aron Kodesh (ark) or I look up toward the Ner Tamid (eternal light) or the open sky, because I want to feel smaller than I usually do, humbler, but still present, and aware that this small person is still at the center of my horizons.

Sometimes I talk intimately to the Divine I imagine gathered up that way, atoms and charges concentrated palpably in front of me, and I like to say exactly the words in the book, and to find myself in them. To connect to the thoughts of the many, many people who put them together and sounded them out initially, and the ones who have said them before for important reasons and occasions. I like to say their words, to run them through me, because just as the Divine was not made by me — I had no say in that but I am made up of Divine stuff — so too these words change and recreate me. They make me able to say certain things and they make me into the person who can make those words more real.

I never experience my words as praise of a God “out there”, watching from afar to see what I am saying. I experience my words helping to connect the circuit, making the universe worthy of these praises, reminding me that my intentions help make the words in the siddur true when they don’t seem true in the daily news. Sometimes I’m consciously reconnecting myself to the grid, completing the circuit running through me. Sometimes I’m just noticing that there is more spiritual energy flowing than I remembered since yesterday. Sometimes it’s just cathartic to ask for things, in a chant out loud, speaking directly to the “king” who graces me with an interview. Sometimes it’s good to hear myself say the hopes and yearnings and thank-you’s out loud that I don’t otherwise say to people (but ought to more). Sometimes it’s helpful to let myself ask for things — for help for me, for a better world for you.

It helps me to approach my praying this way, with this kind of cinematography. It doesn’t bother me that I don’t believe my picture is actually there. At least, I do not anymore experience it as any contradiction. In the Kabbalah, the idea of “king” is split in two. If you look at the diagram of the ten sefirot, the ten phase-states of divine energy flowing toward our spiritual consciousness, the farthest away is called Keter, the crown; and the closest is called Malchut or royalty, sovereignty, and is identified with us, with the people of Israel. I like that the Kabbalists are messing with the king metaphor, to make it both so far away and so close by simultaneously.

That’s where I will leave it today. We are in the period leading toward Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two ancient Temples, and then toward Yom Kippur which recalls when we all were united with each other and the Divine name at the Temple in its glory. This is a time of year to experience the breaking of the circuit, the incompleteness of the Divine name, the breaking of ideas that have led us to inner destructions – the Jewish calendar wants us to do that, to see what’s not whole in our theology and to break what needs to be broken. As Rabbi Chanina reminded us in the Talmud, we don’t have to use words about God that don’t do the job, just to look good to others.

If the teachings you think you have heard from Judaism about the Divine cannot hold, let them break. Break them yourself. You will not hurt God; you will not hurt the shul or me, and you will not destroy Judaism or the world. Some of our old names and ideas for God, they are like building materials that are obsolete, or wires frayed from a lot of good use. But we have better stuff with which to understand and imagine and connect to the Divine. Some of it is brand new and some of it has been in spiritual storage for whatever reason. I’m grateful for the many teachers in our community who will help us find it all and take it out and learn how to use it, so we can build sturdy and electric for the new year.