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Yitzchak's Wells: Digging and Re-Digging Today

Genesis 26:17-18, from the Torah reading for the past week:
“Yitzchak (Isaac) went from there and encamped in Nachal Gerar and lived there. And Yitzchak went back and dug all the wells of water that they had dug in the days of Avraham his father, and the Philistines had stopped them up after Avraham’s death, and he called them names just like the names that his father had called them.”

A nachal or wadi is a river bed that flows in the rainy season and is dry in the summer. In the verses that follow in Genesis 26, Yitzchak’s people don’t just re-dig old wells but also dig new ones, and they quarrel about them with the Philistines. Quarreling is probably not just verbal. Yitzchak names two wells after the quarrelling itself – “Struggle” and “Accusation”. Then he moves a bit away and digs a well and there is no quarrel, so he names that one something like “Breadths”, “for the Divine has given us enough space for us to be fruitful in the land.” Soon after the Philistine king, along with one advisor and his military chief, approaches Yitzchak and he is surprised, believing they hate him. Instead they say they have seen that the Divine has blessed Yitzchak. So they propose a treaty, and each sides swears to it. Another well is found, and Yitzchak names it after the treaty-making.

1. This whole episode takes place in the area from the Gaza Strip to Be’er-Sheva (Beersheba). In biblical times, this is a border region for the Israelites and the Philistines. Part of the scenes take place in what today is a part of Israel called Otef ‘Aza or the “Gaza Envelope”, the communities just outside the Gaza Strip which were attacked savagely by Hamas on October 7.

2. Rabbi Matt Berkowitz of The Schechter Institutes in Israel wrote last week about Zionism something like this: Through centuries of exile Jews kept connected with the places of their ancestors in the Land of Israel and the names of those places. When they returned, they reclaimed the old wells, came to live in the places and restore their ancient names.

3. Palestinians have the same dream about the villages the lost in 1948. They say that Israel has filled in the wells, erased the ancestral names of the villages they abandoned or were forced out of in the war of 1947-1949, even when those towns were settled with new residents. That’s true in many places, though not all. It’s also even more complicated than that. Arabic place names are often themselves versions of Hebrew names from the Bible. Many places in Israel have names in both languages. Some sites have ancient names or labels, Hebrew or Arabic or given by Christians, but the sites are near yet not quite exactly right on the biblical spots.

In Israel, bus and train and destination signs within Israel are in Hebrew, Arabic, and English all at once, coexistence encoded in multiple names. Still, so much of the conflict itself is embodies in names. The war of 1947-49 Israelis call Milchemet Hashichrur, the War of Liberation, and Palestinians call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. However you assign the responsibilities leading up to it, it is clearly both.

4. The Torah talks of digging into the ground, in search of water. I shudder over and over as I read those words this year. In Washington last Tuesday Rachel Goldberg, the mother of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, reminded us about 240 people whose lives are literally underground. #BringThemHomeNow. So much of the Gaza war is about tunnels underground.

And so much of conflict in Israel-Palestine and throughout the Middle East is about access to water.

5. As I listened to all the speeches about anti-Semitism in Washington last week, and all the historical events they referenced, I realized something about Yitzchak and the naming of the wells in Genesis that I had never paid attention to before. Some of the wells Yitzchak calls by the names his father gave. Some Yitzchak names in relation to the conflicts of his own day, or the respite from conflict, or gloriously at the end the making of a treaty.

Not all the names are the same names Avraham had given. Yitzchak carries those names, but chooses when to use them and when to name in relation to the dynamics of his day – with his current enemies, or with his current frosty-but-nonviolent neighbors, or with his current treaty-partners.

We Jews often talk about anti-Semitism today as though every act and every manifestation is the same as what happened in Shoah or the European pogroms or the Bible. It all has the same name, the name my own generation inherited from our parents and our ancestors before that. (Though those are not actually all the same, biblical and Christian and modern anti-Jewish hate.)

But we also have to know when to name things in our own way, in the context of now.

Some anti-Semitism is just like before, and some is new. Some of the dynamics are another iteration of the same history – but some of the dynamics Jews have to be able to name in relation to the people here with us now. Intertwined or nearby, in the Land of Israel or other lands. A struggle is different from an accusation; neither is good but they are not identical. Not-fighting -- giving each other space to breathe or even prosper -- is not the same as treaty-making.

To say that it’s all the same anti-Semitism over and over can trap us, prevent us from finding reconciliations, and at worst become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the same time, the unique new “struggles” and “accusations” against Jews today are frightening in their own way, and against those we Jews have much less experience to lean on, perhaps.

The chapter with the wells is the only chapter that centers Yitzchak and Rivka themselves, their own life and their own generation. It is sandwiched between two much more well-known stories in which their lives are subordinated to a conflict within the next generation, their sons Yaakov and Esav (Jacob and Esau). Even Yitzchak and the Philistines can’t help but notice in their interactions all kinds of echoes of Avraham’s and Sarah’s own interactions with the Philistines of their times.

Still Yitzchak and Rivka are trying in some way to live in their own generation. To navigate the conflicts of their region in their prime, to figure out what’s just like before and to make room for their own language about what’s happening.

So too for me, in my fifties. I live so much of my Jewish life with the people of my parents’ generation, who can remember when there had not been an Israel and who can remember 1967 and 1973 when Israel’s very survival was threatened by war. My own generation takes Israel for granted, and shared in the struggles to liberate the Jews of the U.S.S.R. and then Ethiopia after that. After me comes a generation who know only a strong Israel and a Jewish people with stature and power in the U.S.

How do we appropriately name the wells we find that were named in previous generations? When do we focus on those who tried to stop them up, and when on our accomplishment in finding life-giving water? How do we learn to give our own names, to the places and struggles our people has been in before?

6. To end on hope: The Torah can’t agree with itself on why Be’er-Sheva, the treaty city, has its name. Or which treaty it acknowledges, the one negotiated by Avraham the father or Yitzchak the son. Genesis 26 and Genesis 21 argue about it, give different accounts. Is the name because of the treaty-making oaths, or it is because of the gifts and meals that celebrated the treaty?

What a privilege it would be to have such a thing to argue about, to have too many stories of peace.

Seven Years Old, Twenty Years Old, One Hundred Years Old

This is the D'var Torah I plan to give tomorrow for Parashat Chayei Sarah 5784, November 11, 2023.

One of the weekly Divrei Torah that are always worth a look comes from Rabbi Josh Feigelson, leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This week Josh started by talking about the idea of the “multiverse”, which he first learned about from one of his kids. Josh mentions the TV show “Rick and Morty”, which his son loves, and it’s about a scientist and his grandson who can travel between alternate versions of the universe and different times in those universes and different versions of themselves.

I thought where Josh might be going was to our fantasies of an alternate universe in which, say, the Palestinians had finished negotiating a peace deal with Israel in 2000 at Camp David, or just any other version of the universe after October 7. I also thought he might go to the commentaries on the first line of our Torah reading, which describe Sarah Imeinu, our ancestor Sarah, as the ultimate human multiverse. He didn’t but he helped me to.

The Torah says (Genesis 23:1) that Sarah’s life was me’at shana v’shiv’im shana v’sheva shanim, 100 years and 20 years and 7 years. It’s a distinctive way to express 127 years, and the commentaries cluster around this thought: That Sarah at every phase of her life lived with the qualities of a 7-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 100-year-old.

The Sfat Emet explains: For most people, as you grow in life you become wiser, building on your middot, your qualities, and purifying them. Which means that for most people, the only complete moment of life is the final one, when you are the most perfect you’ve ever been. But Sarah managed to grow without having to reject any of the previous iterations of herself. Sarah’s multiverse was present with her all of the time, and she always had access to all the dimensions of it, while standing in exactly the time she was in.

To be less abstract about it -- as a child, and an adult, and an elder, Sarah always had the best qualities and capacities of each of those stages.

Even as a child, she had the wisdom that most people need long life to attain.

Even as an elder, she had the wonder and freshness of a child experiencing the world, the constant urge to discover and see if this or that might be a worthwhile interest or a worthwhile friend.

Even as a child and even as an elder, she had the purposefulness of her prime, the ability to pursue a path with capacity and with her full energy. The well-formed dreams of how the world ought to be.

In Jewish tradition, we have an opposite character who helps us understand what was so special about Sarah. Shlomo Hamelech, King Solomon, is said to have authored three of the books of the Bible. It is said that when Shlomo was young, he wrote the Song of Songs, Shir Hashirim, a book of intense love poetry. In his prime he wrote Proverbs, Mishlei, a book of advice for how to succeed and prosper. In his old age he wrote Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, a book of often bitter reflections on whether life has any meaning or whether things just circle again and again -- “there is nothing new under the sun”, ein kol chadash tachat ha-shamesh.

After October 7 we’ve felt like Shlomo Hamelech in his old age. How can we be like Sarah Imeinu?

How can we recapture freshness and energy and wisdom, all at once, even seeing and knowing everything we see and know?

Our Torah reading is framed by two funerals, Sarah’s and then Avraham’s. And yet between them is the first concrete foothold of Israel in the land, the purchase and sale agreement between Avraham and Ephron the Hittite, the translation of Divine promises into something very specific. 

Then the introduction of Rivka, the generous young woman who transcended the small-mindedness and materialism of her culture in Aram, who saw a thirsty stranger and his camels and gave them water, even before she knew the stranger was send on a mission to find the woman suitable for his master’s son Yitzchak in marriage. Rivka is the one who delivers on the promise of that our people are to be rachanim b’nai rachmanim, compassionate people descended of compassionate people.

Then we hear of Avraham’s golden years, of life after mourning, and when he dies there is a remarkable reunion of his sons, who have been estranged from their father and from each other, as Yitzchak and Yishmael come together to bury him.

These possibilities the Torah lifts up for us, in a reading framed by two burials. The promise of a homeland; chesed and rachamim, boundless compassion; even reconciliation between Yitzchak and Yishmael -- these are the multiverses that remain present. That we try at least in our minds and hearts continue to leap to, as the descendents of Sarah.

Last Motza’ei Shabbat, last Saturday night, was the annual fundraising dinner for the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. It felt very strange to go to what was after all a nice party, and I know I wasn’t the only one who felt strange as we walked in. Over the course of the evening, I saw something like twenty-seven members of our Jewish community there. The event was co-chaired by our own Mindee Greenberg, and the new executive direction of the organization is our own Jane Goodman. 

I was so proud to be part of a Jewish community that is so committed to feeding people from week to week and helping people become self-sustaining and flourish. And to be so recognizable as Jews in this wider community because fo that work. I was amazed that so many of us could find a way across the multiverse of our Jewish pain in this moment, and make that mission and the joy of being a part of it the central of our lives for an evening.

100 years old and 20 years old and 7 years old. These days we are thinking about all our 7-year-olds, the children held hostage in Gaza or who lost their parents or whose parents are at war, and the children of Gaza, and our own children who we want to shield from an awareness that this is the world still.

And we are thinking about all our 20-year-olds,those who were just joyfully celebrating with music when they were attacked, young people fighting for Israel’s defense and berated on college campuses in this country.

And we are thinking about all our 100-year-olds, our elders, some of whom too are being held captive, Holocaust survivors retraumatized, people who thought they would never have to see what we have been seeing.

As we hold all of them, all of you, in our prayers and in our Torah, we reach for the blessing of our ancestor Sarah. That we can find in ourselves, and help each other find, the best of the 7-year-old within, the 20-year-old, the 100-year-old. That we continue to live with wonder and discovery, with purpose and energy and capable compassion, with wisdom. All at once, 100 and 20 and 7. All in the same life, even now.

Shabbat Shalom.

You Are Not Alone, You Are a Blessing

This is the D'var Torah I plan to give tomorrow in services, October 28, 2023 for Parashat Lech L'cha, the opening of the saga of Sarah and Avraham, three weeks after the Hamas attacks of October 7 and as the war continues in Gaza.

Who said the Torah had to be divided into 54 roughly equal sections? Why aren’t we able to stay with Bereshit and Noach for longer -- to talk not just about the Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Flood, but Cain and Abel, the giants, the rainbow, the Tower of Babel and subsequent spreading out over the globe. If it were up to me I would stretch those out for a few weeks. We could easily catch up later and read all of Leviticus in just three weeks.

This is what I think every year. But if you’ve been tracking my Divrei Torah since we started the Torah again, a week after October 7, you’ll know how much I haven’t wanted to have Avraham and Sarah in my face, just yet. Dreading them, really. Sarah and Avraham are about a burst of spiritual excellence into the world, they are a vanguard of new consciousness and beginning to build a community around that.

I have not this week wanted to be told to look hard for those things, or to tell you to. I don’t feel ready for excellence. And so I have said two weeks ago and last week. 

And most of all, I just want in my words and my actions to help take care of us who are here -- here dealing with everything, in Israel and our own lives; here displaced from homes in Israel, here connected to what’s happening in any way.

But Torah is wise, and so too the rabbis who made this schedule and did not base it on any week’s events, so here we are. 

Our Torah reading starts (Genesis 13:1) with a call to Avram, Lech L’cha, and an implicit call to Sarai, Lechi Lach. Go, you -- go as you, from where you are to a new place I will one day show you. You will be a great nation, blessed, a blessing for all the families of the earth. And those who bless you will be blessed. Now be a blessing.

It is good to hear that again right now. I think left to ourselves we might be saying this, that we are a blessing, and so many people are hollering the opposite at us. But -- You will be a great nation, a blessing, and those who bless you will be blessed.

Well this whole Torah reading, it could be ripped from the headlines. Avram and Sarai are called and arrive in the Land of Israel. But soon there’s a famine, and immediate exile. Sarai is taken into captivity in Egypt, and then she is rescued. 

Avram and his nephew Lot, their shepherds quarrel, and they end up partitioning the land they have just come back to. Lot goes to live in the area of S'dom, and Avram stays in the central mountains.

There is a regional war, and Lot is taken captive, along with others and their property, and Avram launches a military operation to get them back. 

One of the kings, the King of Shalem which may be Jerusalem, offers to reward Avram with riches in appreciation of liberating his captives, but Avram refuses to take any more than what he needs to pay his men and their expenses.

When God appears to Avram one night, God says: Don’t be afraid. I am protecting you. But Avram says: I am walking alone. How do I know this future will actually happen. (Genesis 15:2)

And God shows him the stars of the sky and repeats the promise, and God asks Avram to arrange a sacrifice, and puts Avram into a deep sleep, and tells him that his people will endure a long difficult oppression, 400 years, and then the promises will be fulfilled.

Sarai tries to speed up the process, by offering Hagar, her servant, to have a child for them. But the two women quarrel, and Hagar is banished, until an angel comes to her and tells her that her son will be great, though she Hagar will have to return to the home and suffer in the meantime. 

God appears again to Avram and repeats the promises, about the land and their future people, gives him the covenant of circumcision, brit milah, announces the birth of child to Sarai, and changes their names, to Avraham and Sarah, bringing the soft sound of God’s own name into theirs.

Lech l’cha. Lechi lach. Go, you. Be blessed, others will be blessed by you. Those who bless you will be blessed. Now be a blessing.

Ani holech ariri. But I am walking alone. So says Avram to go, so many of us feel this week.

Lechi lach. Lech l’cha. Go, you; you are a blessing.

There are types of interpretations of the words Lech l’cha in our commentaries, and they are based on the ambiguity of a prefix, of the lamed in l’cha. One interpreation says: Go for you, and the other says: Go to you. 

Rashi says go for yourself -- go because it’s good for you, and it will bring you benefit. A lot of the chasidic writers jump off and say further -- go toward what’s good for you. Go there because there is good for you. Go and become a blessing.

This is a hard one right now. Go toward this land of Israel which is good for you? it is, fundamentally, but so much is not good in living there just right now. It’s dangerous.

And go, us, and become more of a blessing? That is so hard right now, there and here.

And yet many people are doing it. In small acts of chesed, in remaking old connections, so people will not have to say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone. By picking up something to read or a podcast to listen to, to be better grounded. I am tremendously impressed with the response of Jewish leaders and alumni around some universities, where we are replying and standing up with strong and thoughtful statements and actions, not sinking to the level of the intimidations our students feel or the extreme and sloppy statements of opposing groups. Students feeling very alone are feeling a bit less ani holech ariri.

The second interpretaion is that Lech l’cha means go to yourself. Right now one of the most important things we can realize is that a lot of the things we need are in us already. It’s not that we know everything, that we’re all political scientists, and it’s not that any of us know the future and what the fighting will mean for Israel or for Jews.

But each of us knows something enough to say a comforting word to someone. Each of us can find a feeling that is authentic, a truth that is true in our core and generous to a person who needs us. Each of us knows something about we feel blessed to be Jewish at this time in our lives and our history. It doesn’t have to be the same for all of us; far from it. And from those things you know, none of us have to say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone.

Lechi lach, lech l’cha, go to yourself because that’s what you have. Sarai and Avram, when they first got the lech l’cha call they were already on the way, they knew something about why they were going even though they didn’t know the whole thing and God wasn’t telling it all to them.

And some of what it means collective lyto go to ourselves is to go to our Torah, which is the repository of all our souls and all our stories. I read out to you what’s in the whole week’s parasha because we already have been in some of these places already. We walk with our generations. We have their experiences, their wisdom about the things recorded in the parasha. We are blessed through them -- we are not alone.

I still hope to meet Sarah and Avraham as our avatars of spiritual excellence, maybe this week while their story is still before us in the weekly parasha and for sure sometime soon, as long as we meet in this House of Sarah and Avraham, this Beit Avraham v’Sarah. 

But even this week, the call of L’chi lach, lech l’cha is emphatically for us. When we might say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone -- we are not. Go as you are now, from where you are to a new place I will one day show you. You will be a great nation, blessed, a blessing for all the families of the earth. You are a blessing. you are a blessing. And those who bless you will be blessed. It's good to hear those words again. Now be a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

Two Kinds of Darkness, Two Kinds of Light, Two Kinds of Torah

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.

*****

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.

 

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov

 

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons (5784/2023)

Read or watch/listen:

Click to read the text of the sermons:

Day 1 — Glimmers

Day 2 — Through Regret

Or watch or listen on YouTube:

 

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.