Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Recommended Links of Mine for Purim This Year

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

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

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

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

Purim: The Buddy Film! (read and video)

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

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

All the videos as one YouTube playlist

Antisemitism, Our Security and Our Souls -- Wisdom From the Book of Esther

This was Dvar Torah for Shabbat Zachor last weekend, March 8, 2025.

Last year at this time, I coined a term for a brand-new approach to wellbeing. I called it EIST, for “Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.” The big idea is that the Purim story is the best mirror in entire Tanakh, the whole Bible, for Jews like us.

Like us, the Jews of the Megillah are described as living in a vast and diverse world, all across the 127 provinces of the Persian Empire ruled by King Achasheverosh. Like us, the Jews of the Megillah were living in a world of material abundance, at least for some; and like us, the Jews of the Megillah, at least some of them, had two names, a Hebrew name and a Persian name.

Like our world, the world of the Jews in the Megillah has a random quality, where fate is a throw of lots; and the Megillah world is a morally topsy-turvy world in all kinds of ways, represented also as a tipsy world with all these drinking parties around King Achashverosh.

And like our world, inherent in the Megillah world is what we would today call antisemitism. It came to the surface easily, as ideas which could be spoken in the halls of power and converted into violence all over society.

The Megillah holds up a mirror to our world and then shows us a way out of it. That’s what Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy would be: the mirror we need to see things in and around us clearly, and the wisdom and practices to help us walk through and hopefully emerge strong and well.

The part of it I want to talk about this Shabbat is about antisemitism. This is Shabbat Zachor, and we have read in the Torah and the Haftarah about this people Amalek who are thought to be the most incorrigible enemies of the Jewish people, because they are the most ruthless people imaginable. Haman in the Megillah is their descendant. These are difficult readings, but rather than bury them it’s better for us to face them.

My question for today on Shabbat Zachor is not whether there is antisemitism around us, because there is. And it’s not whether there is more of it than a couple years ago, because there is. Or even whether it’s worse on the anti-Israel left or the white nationalist right, because both are far more active and in the open than they were ten years ago.

My question is about who we are as we perceive and experience antisemitism, directly in our lives or as we read and see film of it in our world. Will we continue to be the Jews we know we ought to be? Will we perceive hate in so many directions that we can’t look at ourselves in the mirror anymore, because we are too busy looking over our shoulders?

Every single day I get an email from the Anti-Defamation League titled “Campus Crisis Alert.” It has a little red siren icon next to the sender in my inbox, so it stands out from my other emails. It doesn’t matter what happened that day on what particular campus – I get a “Campus Crisis Alert.” It doesn’t matter if the content of the email contains mostly good news, about actions taken by Jewish students or university administrations! It’s still called “Campus Crisis Alert.”

I think the ADL is an incredibly important organization and yet I find the daily crisis alert alarming, for a different reason than they do. I have my own campus insider, my daughter at Barnard, and this week was a particularly bad one there. Talk about not knowing the difference between Blessed is Mordechai and Cursed is Haman – the material handed out at sit-ins that obstructed classes and barricaded a dean in her office is actual Hamas material. There was a crisis there this week and I’m not sure it’s resolved.

Yet even there, not every week is a crisis of antisemitism, and I know this from my insider. The hostages are a crisis. Antisemitism is a problem. There are groups invested in maintaining the crisis feeling, within the Jewish community and within our American politics. But as Jodi Rudoren, the editor-in-chief of The Forward, wrote this week -- when you’re in a crisis you can’t think straight, and when you say you’re always in a crisis you excuse yourself from ever having to think.

So what do Esther and Mordechai teach us, who were absolutely in a crisis of antisemitism? What’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we need?

The most important single moment in the Megillah is in Chapter 4, when Esther is first learning about what everyone else already knows about, the decree of genocide that Haman has persuaded King Achashverosh to issue. Esther first pleads powerlessness – I cannot go to the king, if you are not called and you go that’s sure death, and he has not called me for thirty days.

Mordechai sends a message back to her:

“If you keep silent, yes silent in this time,
spaciousness and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will disappear.
And who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.”

כִּ֣י אִם־הַחֲרֵ֣שׁ תַּחֲרִ֘ישִׁי֮ בָּעֵ֣ת הַזֹּאת֒ רֶ֣וַח וְהַצָּלָ֞ה יַעֲמ֤וֹד לַיְּהוּדִים֙ מִמָּק֣וֹם אַחֵ֔ר וְאַ֥תְּ וּבֵית־אָבִ֖יךְ תֹּאבֵ֑דוּ וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃

Obviously Mordechai is giving Esther a charge to stand up for her people, for us the Jews. But it’s a very nuanced charge.

Mordechai says to Esther: You have to speak, because right now the Jews do not know what to say about what is going on. All we are doing is wailing and crying out, or speaking without clarity. Someone needs to give better words to this moment, and someone needs to starting guiding us and giving us something constructive to do.

It needs to be you, Esther, because it needs to be someone who is powerful and not powerless. And you are actually powerful, even though you think your power is tenuous. And who knows, maybe the purpose of your power is not simply what I Mordechai originally thought when I sent you in this direction. It’s not that you have status, that you’re my insider. Your power as a Jew is important for the rest of us to see, so we will not feel as vulnerable as we currently think we are.

Mordechai says: If you do not define what this moment requires and what it means, someone else will. One way or another this Haman decree is going to be thwarted. But if you do not stand up, someone who is not you Esther with your moral voice, probably someone not even Jewish – someone else is going to come and rescue us. And then they will say we owe it all to them, to some outsider, and we will be beholden to their truth forever.

And if that happens you and the legacy you are part of will disappear; the moral heights you had in reach will mean nothing.

Mordechai says to Esther: It’s a matter of revach v’hatzala. Hatzala means rescue, so physical safety. Revach is spelled like ruach – spirit. What’s at stake, Esther, is not only our safety but our souls, our neshamas. You can help us not only survive but keep our hearts intact.

And Esther responds in remarkable ways. Last year my colleague Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed taught me that Esther starts to realize that she has all these servant-girls who revere her as queen. To them she is absolutely the queen, a person of power and stature, and she can ask them to do things for her.

Esther tells Mordechai to direct the Jews to take three days and focus and fast. Fast for me, she says, tzumu alai. She asks them to concentrate on her, to take their minds off the enemies for a time and instead put their attention on her – what she is all about, what she will do and how she will guide them. She is reminding them that even this crisis isn’t a tomorrow crisis; the edict will take months to play out. We don’t need a solution tomorrow, though we do need one. But if we don’t figure it out right this second all is not lost.

After three days she takes what seems like a risk, but it all dissolves when the king sees her. The text says that Esther has the quality of chein, that she is a catalyst for the grace and graciousness in everyone who meets her. It was there the moment the king’s servants first met her, and it’s why the king chose her even though he’s too much of a buffoon to remember until she invites herself back.

I like to think that from there, everyone sees Esther in a high profile summit with the king and Haman -- and the Jews realize that she is okay, not just safe but in control. And they are able to exhale, and think.

When the king finally takes her side and our side, the Jews of the empire absolutely had to stand up in self-defense. But Esther worries that the Jews are learning the wrong lesson – that the only answer to Haman’s violent plan is violence; that the problem isn’t just Haman and his circle but an entire empire of people who may be ready to carry out his plan. So Esther sends a letter to the Jews of the entire empire and instructs them: We will remember Haman’s plan, and we will remember what I did and how we all stood up for each other.

And as we do it, as we retell a story with violence, we will send gifts to each other, mishloach manot, and we will take care of those in need among us, matanot la’evyonim. We will be what we want the world to be at the exact moment we are remembering when the world was not.

We will tell not only about Haman – we will tell about us, on our terms. We will tell that a Jew is someone who does not bow down to any human, that a Jew is someone who looks out for the life of the king and the welfare of the kingdom.

That’s the way out. That’s what the EIST therapist would say to us.

Esther and Mordechai lived in a world something like ours, and actually in a crisis time. The antisemitism we face in the U.S. is not a crisis like that which threatens our very existence. It’s instead a problem, a real one and a big one. And part of solving problems, and being able to strategize, is to protect who you are, the best of who you are.

That includes not letting your enemies define you, or give them control over your consciousness, your rhythm, your daily life.

So in addition to advocating for ourselves and pushing back on the falsehoods, some of what we need to do right now is to refocus ourselves on mitzvot and to see ourselves, each of us, as people of mitzvot – to love our own Jewish neshamas.

We have to be good to each other even more, Jew to Jew, at a time when not everyone is good to us.

We have to be excellent friends to other groups who are also going through things now, loyal allies. We are not the only ones with problems. Esther at the end of the story was not just a Jewish heroine, but queen of the whole empire. We have to remind ourselves of our own power and to use it for good.

We have to continue to keep faith about America and its ideals, its promise, its pluralism, even when that faith seems like a leap of faith. We have to believe in an American Jewish future that is a good one. We cannot give those things away, because then our fears will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of us have to be willing to be uncomfortable. To see ourselves as strong enough to go and talk to people or in places we worry we will be attacked. It’s what I have been doing. You might be surprised by what happens in some of those places.

There are many people doing all of these things in the Jewish community now, and so many of them are the college students, especially on the campuses where it’s hardest. They are so inspiring.

As Mordechai says to Esther, Mi yode’a – who knows if this is why we are the Jews here today at this particular time, during this generation of challenge for American Jews and for Jews everywhere.

When it comes to antisemitism especially since October 7, Revach v’hatzala yaa’amod la’Yehudim – we need security and our souls, both at the same time. Esther and Mordechai showed us how we could secure ourselves and even make our souls larger in the process. That’s the Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy we have all been looking for.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.

I'm a Second Semester Freshman

Okay, it’s second semester of my first year of college in this plan I'm doing, and already I’m a week and a half behind. I will catch up this week and then do the project the way I intended, which is a day at a time.

“This semester”, I am taking first of all Introduction to Psychology with Jerome Kagan. I was trying to take some courses that would meet requirements in majors I was considering, otherwise I might have skipped to some other less intro course. I did know somehow that Professor Kagan was a major scholar, and he was a great teacher for the intro class. I can’t yet find my notes, so I may have to settle for some general memories later on, plus the one paper I do have.

I also remembering shopping a class called Psychobiology, which perhaps today we would call neuroscience. The lecture was about the corpus callosum, and what was learned from people for whom the connection between the two halves of the brain had been compromised. For some reason I decided the hard science of the course would be too demanding for me, maybe too much memorizing things I didn't think I was good at? Or maybe that I would go back and take the class if I chose psychology as a major, but only if that happened. This is the second example of a class I remembering shopping and not taking but where I remember the first lecture vividly. I’d looked at a class called Conceptions of Human Nature first term, and the first lecture talked about Freud and Marx, I remember, as dramatic contrasts in views of the basic premises of what a human is like.

I took a Government course, Political Development of Western Europe, with Professor Peter Hall. This was recommended as both a good background for and a taste of the Social Studies concentration. Professor Hall got great ratings in the student course evaluation guide. I wasn’t going to take the course because of the 300ish pages of weekly reading, but when I mentioned this to my parents my mom said, “Are you afraid of taking a class with a lot of reading?” I said, “No,” and then took the class. Thanks Mom! Also I guess I was considering majoring in Government, and maybe this would also be a way to get a requirement done, though I can't remember how much that was in my calculation.

I don’t think I was considering history as a major too seriously, but I did want to take another Jewish Studies course, and a visiting Israeli professor named Israel Bartal was offering a course on the history of Zionism. I think I knew a lot of the timeline from my Muss program in 11^th grade, and then reading Sachar’s History of Israel and a bunch of other things related to Israeli history in high school, some of them over and over. Obviously this would be a deeper, more critical dive.

I needed a Core course, and something less demanding. I ended up with a Literature and Arts C course, Empire and Art in the Medieval West I think it was called, with Professor Nora Nercessian. My neighbor Terry took it too. I guess I liked that it might touch on religion a bit, maybe, and also that it wouldn’t stray too far from history I knew something about from high school. I was always intrigued in high school by the notion of the Holy Roman Empire, for some reason. Not positive about that or what else I considered there in choosing this course, or which other options I discarded.

The first couple classes in the art class were about how the Germanic rules starting with Charlemagne claimed succession to the Roman imperial crown in some sense. Professor Nercessian reviewed some of the Roman imperial self-representations, in sculpture and a bit in architecture, focusing on Augustus, Trajan, Diocletian, and Constantine. There were nuances revealing their perceptions or backdrops of order vs. chaos in the world, dominance as an emperor, human power verging sometimes into a kind of chosenness by God. Charlemagne and successors would consciously imitate some of this, though they did not have access to the quality of materials or craftsmanship that the Roman and Byzantine emperors had.

The Grape Cluster and the Two Who Carry It: A D'var Torah for Pride

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Pride Shabbat 5781/2021, for Parashat Sh'lach L'cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41).

I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.

When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”

It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.  These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.

Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.

Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.

I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.

I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.

Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.  He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.

I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.

I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.

I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.

Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)  I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.  So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.

A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.

Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.

Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.

Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.  So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.

So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.

When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.

Chanukkah and Dreidel: A Portfolio of Hope

This is a version of a D’var Torah I've given in many variations over the past few years.

I’ve come to think about a lot of things in life in terms of “portfolio management.” People talk about investment portfolios –long-term and short- term, stocks and bonds. I think Chanukkah can teach us creating a hope portfolio. Chanukkah is a story that begins with hope – how this group of Jewish rebels somehow kept going, when they were up against an empire that wanted to squelch Judaism, and when they had to face people in their own community ready to give up and sell out or sell off.

But hope isn’t always like that – impossible odds, yet you win anyway. That’s one scenario of hope paying off. But I think Chanukkah teaches us about a whole hope portfolio that is essential to our spiritual wellbeing. I get my hope portfolio not from some expert with a technologically sophisticated algorithm, but from a very simple device: the dreidel, with its four sides, its four symbols. Each one represents a certain kind of hope, and together as a portfolio they keep us in the right balance.

The way the dreidel game works is that you’ve got a pot of M&Ms in the middle (better yet little wrapped Fair Trade chocolates) and you take turns spinning the dreidel. If it lands on Gimel you get everything. Hay, you take half. Shin, you put something in. Nun, nothing happens.

To me, these are four different kinds of hope. Gimel hope, Hay hope, Shin hope, Nun hope.

Gimel is when you get everything in the pot. Gimel stands for gadol, great or large. Gimel hope is going for broke, hoping and praying for everything, and actually getting it. Gimel hope is the final definitive cure from an illness. It’s seeing someone you love come out of a rough phase of life and seem happy again. It’s when a neighborhood in an American city or a village in the developing world that had been mostly poor is transformed, through schools and solar power and clean water.

It’s when all the hostages are released, and the fighting ends, and a vision of peace becomes a reality.

Gimel, the great miracle, doesn’t always happen. But when it does, it means that the world or life is exactly the way we dream it should be. If there weren't some Gimel in the world, we could never hope at all. It’s the Gimel every so often that keeps us going. When the world as it is suddenly crosses with the world that we know is supposed to be.

When the dreidel lands on Hay, you take half the pot. Hay hope is hope for something part-way to amazing. It's a remission in cancer. It’s a good few days during the months after a concussion. It’s when some basically good and decent people win elections, even if they don’t have a policy solution for everything. It’s when some time after a divorce, you’re with people and feel connected, feel like the new version of yourself is someone you might be happy being.

A lot of the good things that happen to us, or that we achieve, are Hay. Hoping for a Hay isn’t settling – it’s a real kind of hope. It’s looking at what is or could be, and not at what’s missing.

A third scenario in dreidel is Shin. If you get a Shin, you don’t get anything – actually you have to put something back into the pot.
That doesn’t seem like any kind of hope. It seems like the opposite of hope.

But it’s not. Shin is what you do that gives someone else hope. Shin stands for the Hebrew word sham, which means "there", somewhere else.

When we get together in prayer, we might have prayers for ourselves, things that we need or are concerned about, things we are thankful about because of what happened to me this week.

But just as important is what we do for each other. When we get to the prayer for healing, some of us will say the names of people we know who are sick. And all of us are going to hear those prayers, and acknowledge them. All of us are going to say Amen, and stand by you who are praying, and hopefully be willing to support you and the person who is not here who you are caring for in whatever way you are. That’s our Shin.

Some of the most profound hopes I have ever heard have been at funerals and shivas. People talk about how they have been transformed by someone who is no longer here. While that loss is so palpable, so is the hope that came from that person’s life. That’s Shin hope.

I’ve talked before about a congregant who was saying her mother's name for Misheberach for healing for many weeks a few years ago, until her mother died. When she and her husband came back to services the first time after returning from shiva, I had a pit in my stomach, thinking about the name we couldn't say. But then, she did something remarkable – she said someone else's name. She offered up a prayer for someone else's healing. Surely that prayer wasn't a Gimel, a hope for a certain cure. The prayer was a Shin, a response to personal loss by doing for someone else who had a need for prayer and a need for hope.

The other outcome in dreidel is Nun, where nothing happens. You don’t get anything from the pot and you don’t put anything in. Strangely, Nun in Hebrew is the first letter of nes, the word for miracle. So how can hope be connected to nothingness?

Nun is looking where others would have no hope – and having hope anyway. It’s living by your values even when you don’t get rewards or recognition. It’s believing in the goodness of the world and the goodness of people, even on the days when you don’t see any of it. It’s looking at the Chanukiyyah the moment before you light the candle, seeing the darkness and believing that a bit of light is somewhere anyway. Hope in a Nun way isn’t about optimism or predicting outcomes. It’s a way of saying that some things are true and worthwhile no matter what is actually going to happen.

This is the portfolio of hope: Nun, Gimel, Hay, Shin. Hope for the biggest things imaginable, the ones that sometimes happen. Hope for partial healing and partial justice and partial happiness. Hoping for others, and just hoping when you can't give any good reason for doing so. We don’t get or shoot for a 25-25-25-25 portfolio. But we all need some of each of the letters. Hope isn’t all or nothing; a spiritual person isn’t one who has Gimel hope all the time. A skeptic isn’t someone who refuses to hope.

We live for the Gimel and the Hay -- or so we think. But I think the Nun and the Shin are at least as profound, at least as hopeful. Hope doesn’t just come, we don’t just have it or not. It comes from somewhere else, from Shin, and it stays when there is nothing, Nun. We need all four in our portfolio.

Before the Maccabees found the cruse of oil, someone had to store it away. It took a Shin, someone to give that oil. Someone to buy the M&Ms for the game, someone to put them on the table in the first place.

That’s what’s happening here in a Jewish community all the time.

We can hope because our ancestors kept passing along the Torah – a story about a people who were so far from freedom, the farthest possible, trapped by the most powerful tyrant on earth-- but who became free. A story of a God who could reach absolutely anywhere, take the lowliest people and rescue them, make them the first people close to God and then charge them with a mission to spread into the world.

We can hope because every Shabbat there’s a gathering where we dare to say words like love, peace, justice, ahava, shalom, tzedek, over and over, to keep them real in a world where they seem not to be.

We can hope because of young people learning Torah and Jewish values, taking our Shin and experiencing it as their Gimel.

So this Chanukkah, think about that hope portfolio. And don’t put all your M&Ms, all your investments, in Gimel and Hay; it’s not only about those times when everything turns out, or when a lot goes right. Each of us needs a life of some Gimel, some Hay, some Nun and some Shin. Think what you can do to hope, when hope seems unreasonable. When our people are at war. Think about what someone has done for you when you weren’t hopeful, and how you can pay that forward and make the next person’s life more hopeful.

Chag Urim Sameach -- Happy Chanukkah!

My Magnum Opus on Teshuvah and "The Good Place"

I've put out post a Tov! podcast episode and an identical written piece, encompassing just about everything I can think of about how The Good Place on TV illustrates, elaborates, and even improves on a core teaching of Maimonides about teshuvah, the core Jewish metaphor and practice around personal change!

My Love Letter to Hebrew

I gave this as a sermon on Shabbat, April 22, 2023, preceding Israel's 75th anniversary of independence.

What I remember first about Mrs. Nussbaum’s Sunday School class is that everyone learned how to read a whole Hebrew word before I did.

I can remember coming and looking at the book and I saw nothing. I recognized individual letters; we had been learning those for a couple years. But while other kids were sounding out words I could not, I saw just overwhelming Scrabble racks on the page.

Well, the reason I was behind was that I had missed a class or two, being sick at the start of the year. And I can remember exactly how I was sitting in the JCC when suddenly it all snapped into focus. Dani b'veit haknesset, Nira b'veit haknesset... I can picture the table where I was, closer to the door than to the window looking out on St. Paul Avenue. With Dani and Nira, Mrs. Nussbaum, my friends David Glaser and Holly Brod and a few others, it was off to the races. And look at me now -- tistaklu alai achshav!

This is my love letter to the Hebrew language, and my thank you to the people who gave me Hebrew, as we get ready to celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary this week and launch a season of celebration and learning too I hope from now through our May 21 New Hampshire-wide gathering. 

Mrs. Nussbaum was our teacher at Shaare Shalom, a small group of maybe 50 families at its biggest. (She was the one who in first or second grade let me play the part of God in the paper bag puppet show about the binding of Isaac, so long as I and my bearded God would be hidden under the table.) She set us up to start in third grade at the Talmud Torah of St. Paul, which for a golden few decades from the ‘70s through the ‘90s especially was a city-wide supplementary school that all the Conservative and Reform students attended. 

Again I can remember so much specific about third grade with G'veret Vlodaver. We got right to it with basic grammar so we could read things and write things -- kotev, kotevet, kotvim, kotvot. I remember the first songs we learned with Sh’ulah and her accordion -- yadaim l’ma’alah... mi ohev et hashabbat... The songs were simple and taught us some basic vocabulary and grammar.

And for me Hebrew was always simple for some reason. I don’t have a natural ear for language generally. I think for me it was partly because I’m a nerd and the structure was appealing to me. Three letter shorashim, roots, easy to plug into a chart. I may still have the blue mimeograph sheet from 3rd or 4th grade with the past tense -- katavti, katavta, katavt, I wrote you wrote... Even the irregular verbs in Hebrew have patterns, all the verbs that start with nun or yod. We had a Ben Yehuda small Hebrew English dictionary at home and a snapshot of me in fifth grade or so would be me studying the charts of the seven verb conjugations. I learned the terminology of subject and object, direct and indirect, active and passive, long before we learned grammar terms in public school. Somehow grammar was what I really wanted to get.

My parents were of course a big factor, and I have to ask them how much intention they had in setting up our home. My dad would be the doctor for a week at Herzl Camp, and we would be with the whole camp in what they called the chadar, the dining hall -- camp has its own Hebrew with its sometimes questionable relationship to actual Hebrew -- and that’s where we heard all the Israel songs, the Zionist songs, Bashanah Ha’ba’ah, which today are standards but back then were brand new. Dad would always steal some copies of the shiron, the song book, and we’d try to replicate those camp Shabbat meals on Friday nights just the four of us. A lot from transliteration, mangling the words I am sure. Later, Mom and Dad would play Hebrew records after Shabbat dinner -- from Debbie Friedman, or the Israeli Chasidic Song festival that had rolled into St. Paul when I was about ten.

I remember in those years especially, later in grade school and junior high, this sense that the songs’ meanings were on the tip of my tongue. I knew something like half the words, and for some reason didn’t apply myself to learning the other ones, I wonder why. But that tip of my tongue kept me going.

In my early Hebrew education, there was no sense of division between modern Hebrew, the Torah, and the Siddur (prayerbook). But apart from one or two rules about verbs, we could just as easily read and translate a verse of the Torah as a poem about a nad'nedah, a see-saw at a playground, with a basic lexicon of verbs and some basic grammar and a dictionary. I mean really, in the Torah what do people do other than talk, omer or daber, or eat, ochel, or give and go, ten and lech?

The revival of Hebrew as a living and creative language, of modern society and culture, came about in the past two hundred years and it was possible because of the unique story of the Hebrew language over the past three thousand years.

We know that Hebrew was the language of the Land of Israel during biblical times, and there were other languages in the land and in surrounding lands that were related Hebrew the way that Spanish and Italian are related. We know that there were dialects and accents even in ancient Israel. The English word “shibboleth” comes from a story in the book of Judges, where a group of Jews from the Gil’ad region were fighting a group from the tribal area of Ephraim, and the Ephramites were trying to pass through after losing the battle. The Gil'adim asked each one to say the word shibolet, which means the head of a stalk of grain, but the Ephramites could only say si-bolet, and let’s just say it didn’t end well for them.

As Jews were exiled to Mesopotamia, and then restored to Eretz Yisrael under imperial rule -- Persian, Hellenistic, Roman -- Hebrew itself was transformed, it took in so many words from the imperial languages, and Hebrew became less and less the spoken language of Judea, even though it continued to be a language of writing and accounts and sacred literature. The typical Jew in Roman Judea or Palestine would not have been monolingual in Hebrew, and probably spoke more Greek or Aramaic. 

When the Temple was destroyed, Hebrew was concentrated by the early rabbis, who produced their work in a simple Hebrew style with a straightforward grammar of subject, verb, object. They took advantage of the basic patterns of Hebrew to pass along their teachings in very simplified and rhythmic Hebrew, one that could be spoken and repeated easily by students who weren’t speaking Hebrew in daily life. During the Middle Ages, some poets and composers took a kind of Rococo, almost Shakespearean path leading to some of the most complicated works in our prayerbook. But for even the typical literate person it was the simplified Hebrew of the Mishnah that they knew, with its labels for things of religious significance and mundane life. It was a slimmed down language for centuries, a kind of hibernation or preservation strategy in retrospect.

The idea of Hebrew as a primary language emerged during the Jewish Enlightenment, especially in the 1800s. First there was literature, a conscious effort to breathe life into Jews by escaping Talmudic Aramaic and shtetl Yiddish. Then came Zionism and the idea of speaking Hebrew as a primary language, as a way to be a new Jew. My favorite story about this relates to Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who was raised a traditional Jew in Belarus and made aliyah in the first modern wave in 1881 at the age of about 23. He lived in Jerusalem and dedicated himself to creating a fully functioning modern Hebrew. One day a religious Jew heard him giving instructions to his dog in Hebrew. This struck him as a sacrilige, how could you use the Lashon Hakodesh this way, the holy language of the Torah? And they killed Eliezer’s dog. But the dogs and their owners got the last word.

The Hebrew of today makes it easy to read the Hebrew of Maimonides from the Middle Ages, or the Torah itself, even as Hebrew has stretched to incorporate modern words from other languages, sometimes even into the classic three-consonant root form. I remember staring at a milk carton in Israel trying to figure about what m’hum’gan meant -- it’s "homogenized", in its exactly appropriate one of the seven verb conjugations.

For me, when I went to Camp Ramah in Wisconsin just before 9th grade, the placement test put me in the same group as kids from the Solomon Schechter Day School in suburban Chicago. I could understand everything they could learning Hebrew every day, about Maimonides’ teachings about tzedakah in the original or in our modern Hebrew class. But for the first time in my life, the sessions were ivrit b’ivrit, Hebrew learned by speaking Hebrew, and I hardly spoke a word all summer unlike the day school kids. That would be my mission eventually, to be able to speak.

Through junior high and high school the head of the Talmud Torah was Rabbi Yosi Gordon. Yosi was from Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Jewish cheese-head, and he was the one American we knew who both loved Hebrew and really knew it. He told us this story, about being a student at the Hebrew University on his year-abroad and really wanting to develop an Israeli accent. So he went to a tutor, worked on his r’esh’es and vowels, and the test was for him to go to this particular Jerusalem barber. You’d get your hair cut and talk, and the barber would try to figure out where you were from. The first time Yosi went the barber was challenged, and said he had narrowed it down to Romania or somewhere. Yosi said nothing, went back for more lessons, and eventually passed the barber test as Israeli.

Yosi was the one person in shul who davvened out loud. Even in high school, most of the right side of the Siddur was just overwhelming gibberish; I couldn’t just scan it. But I got the idea that you try maybe to recite something out loud, something you know, maybe something you don’t. At some point in high school I had that instant that had happened in Mrs. Nussbaum's classroom, where suddenly the page was phrases and sentences.

I came back from my trip to Israel the summer after eleventh grade and all I could think of was going back. I had this one cassette of songs by Naomi Shemer -- it went with me in the car everywhere, I am surprised I didn’t destroy it. Al kol eileh, etleynu bechatzer.... I had that tip of my tongue feeling that I sort of understood them, and I was in the car so couldn’t pull out my dictionary. But again it kept me motivated that one day, I’d be able to sing the songs and understand them one hundred percent.

Meanwhile for those of us who stuck it out in Hebrew High, twelve grade meant no more textbooks. We read poems by Yehuda Amichai and stories by Shai Agnon, with just our knowledge and dictionaries. I placed into third year Hebrew when I got to college, without spending a day in a day school or an ulpan. Granted, the X factor was me; not everyone in my cohort has the same story. But this is why I believe we can teach our kids read Hebrew right here where we are.

Finally I spent a whole year in Israel as a junior in college, and I made myself talk past my shyness and my uncertainty -- to get a kartisiya on the bus, a discount punch ticket; to haggle in a monit, a taxi. I developed occasionally this other persona, Israeli Jonatan, who might say things with a sharpness that Jon doesn’t usually have. I am ever grateful to the Israelis here -- to Ruti, to Sara, to Eitan, to Moshe and Etti -- who speak Hebrew slowly not just to me, and who seem to savor every word they form.

To my surprise I have come to love Hebrew not just for its system and not just for its concepts, but for its art. I love the rhythm, the same rhythm that locked down the language for safekeeping in the second century, the ah and oh-ness. Ahavah, love -- ahavah rabbah, boundless love. Glidah is so much more beautiful than ice cream. Sometimes Hebrew translations are even better than the original -- barad yarad bidrom Sfarad ba’erev -- the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!

I have come to think of each Hebrew shoresh, each root, as a kind of atomic field, with a nucleus of meaning but like any small particle in physics you can’t quite pin it down. Chesed means lovingkindness, but it also means loyalty, doing your duty, and love in the most unbounded sense.  Tzedek, tzedakah, is more than legal justice and charity, it’s giving with understanding and with a bigger picture, it’s relational and not just formal. One of my favorite ways to keep learning Hebrew is a podcast called Streetwise Hebrew, which takes what’s often a root or a word that’s familiar to you if you know some Hebrew, and shows how it’s stretched idiomatically in Israel today.

I want to celebrate Hebrew as we celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary. It unites us across everything, and it’s the key that unlocks everything from Torah to prayer to Israel. So in the weeks that come we’ll share Beth Abraham’s 75 favorite Hebrew words -- if you have one to nominate I’ll tell you how to record yourself or I’ll come and do that. If you learn just a bit of grammar and maybe 150 words, you’ll be amazed what you can read. Even if you’re not a language person, you’ll be astonished what you can internalize. And please make me speak and teach more, me and Sarit as well.

And as for me, I can’t thank enough Alice and Dalia and Yosi and Ruti and Yechiel and Earl and Sari and Aya and Anne and Roger and Jon-Jay and and and, and Mom and Dad, for bringing me the gift of Hebrew. It can be your gift, whether you’re just starting today or whether you have a story like mine which I’d love to hear. Who knows what the coming decades are bringing, to Israel, to Jewish life everywhere. Whatever it is, it will be coming in Hebrew.

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.

Inheriting America, Choosing America

This is another take on something I've written and spoken about before, how and why I chose to stay in America because of my engagement with quintessential American themes of freedom and individuality. I spoke about this last Shabbat, in anticipation of Independence Day 2022. It's published here at the Times of Israel.

In the Midst, All at Once: A Torah for Pride 5782

This was the D'var Torah I gave for Parashat B’haalotcha on June 18, 2022.

When the same passage of Torah comes at you from four different sources the same week, you have to pay attention.

I always look forward to Parashat B’haalotcha because it’s the start of the frisky Torah, the Torah of complaining. It’s the beginning of the Torah’s textbook on group dynamics once the community of Israel starts moving out from Sinai toward the promised land. It’s easy to see our groups in these next few Torah readings. That’s the lens I usually bring. But I was thinking particularly this week about Pride Month, and I had said that I’d speak related to that on this Shabbat, since I plan to be away next week. And from some Torah e-mails I subscribe to and podcasts and such, about four times I found myself face-to-face with this from the parasha:

It was the first anniversary of the Exodus and Moshe instructed the people to observe Pesach and to offer the Pesach sacrifice. Then this (Numbers 9:6-8):

וַיְהִ֣י אֲנָשִׁ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֨ר הָי֤וּ טְמֵאִים֙ לְנֶ֣פֶשׁ אָדָ֔ם 
וְלֹא־יָֽכְל֥וּ לַֽעֲשֹׂת־הַפֶּ֖סַח בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֑וּא 
וַֽיִּקְרְב֞וּ לִפְנֵ֥י מֹשֶׁ֛ה וְלִפְנֵ֥י אַֽהֲרֹ֖ן בַּיּ֥וֹם הַהֽוּא:
וַ֠יֹּֽאמְר֠וּ הָֽאֲנָשִׁ֤ים הָהֵ֨מָּה֙ אֵלָ֔יו 
אֲנַ֥חְנוּ טְמֵאִ֖ים לְנֶ֣פֶשׁ אָדָ֑ם 
לָ֣מָּה נִגָּרַ֗ע לְבִלְתִּ֨י הַקְרִ֜יב אֶת־קָרְבַּ֤ן יְיָ֙ בְּמֹ֣עֲד֔וֹ בְּת֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: 
ויֹּ֥אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֖ם מֹשֶׁ֑ה עִמְד֣וּ וְאֶשְׁמְעָ֔ה מַה־יְּצַוֶּ֥ה יְיָ֖ לָכֶֽם:

"There were people who were ta’meh [usually translated “impure” but we’ll get back to that] -- ta’meh for the human soul." And they were not able to do the Pesach on that day. So they came up close in front of Moshe and in front of Aharon on that day. And these people say to him: We are ta’meh for the human soul. Why are we held back, why are we subtracted, from bring close the close-up offering of the Divine in its time among the Children of Yisrael? And Moshe said to them: Stand, and I will hear what the Divine will command for you."

Lamah ni’gara. Why are we subtracted. Why are we not included.

We, who are in a state of tum’ah for life of a person. This requires some elaboration. At first blush this group seem to be held away from the Sanctuary because they had recently been in contact with a dead body and need to go through a purification ritual and the passage of a certain amount of time.

Tradition broadens the interpretation to all matters of tohora and tum’ah, which are usually translated as “purity” and “impurity.” Better to understand them, however, in terms of our embodied human experience and our attraction to the Divine.

Tum’ah and tohora are all about cycles and blood and child-birth and intimacy. These are intensely spiritual and we experience them through our bodies, our gender, our sexuality, our relationships. How is it, they ask Moshe, that these would take us away from Pesach. Why should we be the ones deprived of the Pesach offering -- the offering of freedom, the sacrifice whose blood is compared to the blood of the covenant. How could our embodied experience cause us to be held back from the Divine Sanctuary, the holiest place.

We aren’t complaining to you, Moshe, like the others who kvetch about the desert food or challenge your leadership. We’re not complaining about you or your religion or your rituals or your teachings. On the contrary, we want in. We want it all, b’moado b’toch b’nai Yisrael --  at its proper time, in the midst of all the community of Yisrael. Lamah ni’gara. Why should we be substracted. Why should we not be included.

I think we can see something even in their phrasing -- "we are tam’eh to the soul of a person". Move from seeing us as “impure”, toward seeing us as “the soul of a person.”

Moshe according to one commentary says to them: I am over the moon that you asked this question of me, and that you want this question asked of the Divine. And I too want to hear what the Divine has to say.

And the answer that came back at the time of our ancestors is what we call Pesach Sheni, a second Pesach. The message they understood, as recorded in the Torah written at that time, is that one month later, anyone who was ta’meh come and do the Pesach offering one month later, exactly as would have been done at its scheduled time. Not only they, but anyone who was on a journey too far away or someone who is a ger, a person within the community but who has not yet become a full citizen of the community. Each of you can do Pesach Sheni. This is how you will be included.

The Talmud says that being distant doesn’t mean just far, far away. Even someone who at the time of Pesach is just a step outside the area of the Temple where the sacrifice is done is far enough away for Pesach Sheni. If you’re not quite inside, physically. If you’re not let in, or don’t feel let in by the community, or if you’re not quite ready to come in fully -- you still are entitled to Pesach, to the celebration of the covenant.

I have been mulling over whether this Pesach Sheni is the answer to the question lama ni’gara, why are we not included. Part of me hears this as a bit of separate but equal, or as still “we” insiders who celebrate Pesach together on time and you others who will include with us.

So many of our people who are lesbian or gay or bisexual, transgender or intersex or nonbinary or queer, or any truer description that I still strain to know and understand -- so many have asked nothing more or less than to be b’toch b’nai Yisrael, to be part of the community of Israel full stop. Not to have to frame the matter in terms of lama ni’gara, why are we not included, how can we be included. To have to ask that way means we still are incomplete.

And the Torah recognizes this, because at the end of the teaching of Pesach Sheni the Torah says: chukkah achat yih’yeh lachem. One law there will be for all of you. As if to say -- Whatever you have just read, it is not one Torah for all of us yet. There is work yet to do. Keep working on it, now and in future generations.

This Pesach Sheni is a step forward, a step of inclusion, and it is not the final answer. Somehow, our Sanctuary needs to be spacious enough for all our people, for people who experience in all different ways love and intimacy and longing and connection. Who in all different ways understand ourselves as the image of God in our bodies and genders and sexualities and gender identities.  Where no one of those is the norm that others have to be compared to and have to ask to be included around, or justified in terms of.

That part of the Torah reading spoke about people coming close, toward the Sanctuary where the altar and the Ark were. A bit later in the parasha, we read how the Ark with the tablets of the covenant would go out into battle with the people, and then come to rest when battle would pause or end. 

The Talmud teaches that the biblical ark had both the broken tablets that Moshe had shattered after the Golden Calf, and the new set of whole tablets Moshe had carved on the mountain. Rabbi Yehudah ben Lakish taught that the whole tablets would stay back in the Holy of Holies, while the broken tablets would go out into battle.

It is so important for Torah to go out with us, as we battle to defend the lives of transgender youth, and all LGBTQ+ young people. As we battle for the rights and reputations of caring adults in schools who listen to them and try to be their mentors and advocates. As we battle against those trying to pit parents against teachers. It is so important for us to carry our religion into this battle, because others battle with theirs and claim to speak for God. So we have to speak in the name of our covenant as well.

It is so important as we do so to recognize that we are marching with broken tablets. That our own Judaism is not yet whole, we have not finished doing teshuvah for the ways we have not seen, for the times we have not stood by queer people of all ages and their family members. We have to carry honestly the broken hearts of our own community, the mourning over opportunities to do better and care better that we missed over the decades. When we work on matters of justice and safety and wellbeing for LGBTQ+ people in our lives, when we battle, we have to hold close the broken times, and our own brokenheartedness about times in the past we’ve each fallen short and our community and Judaism have fallen short.

It is so important to think about the ways the traditions of our past need to be creatively broken and rebuilt. The Talmud in one place praises Moshe for breaking the tablets. Because anything we have written down no matter how inspired is incomplete and could be used to shut down our vision, to say that this much progress is all we need. We need to challenge ourselves to see more like the Divine sees, to see every expression of human love and connection as an image of Divine ahavah v’chesed (love).

The broken tablets go out into battle, because it’s by fighting out of Divine love that we learn how to repair them. It’s by going out and learning from other communities that are full of love, religious and secular communities, that we find the light that helps us see better what is hidden in the crevices of the covenant we already have. It’s by going out with our tablets that we bring them and bring ourselves, who have in the past wondered if our covenant was at war with them. To them, we bring what is broken and ask to work together to refashion them and refashion ourselves together.

Our movement of Conservative Judaism has been confronting our brokenness over sexual orientation and gender identity for the past three decades. Every since possibly the lowest point our movement has ever touched in 1992, when I was a rabbinical student and watched the shameful deliberations on stage in the Seminary auditorium -- which slammed the door on lesbian and gay Jews seeking to live openly in our communities. To fifteen years ago last winter, when our Committee on Jewish Law and Standards made it possible for gay and lesbian Jews to become our rabbis, to have intimacy,to marry.

Even then, we only as a movement could talk about the G and the L. We have been trying to catch up since then, including in our shul and including myself. It’s not only ritual and rabbinical status, but relationships and love and intentionality in every realm. From changing the nomenclature on our membership forms to listening to young people we educate to changing our assumptions about people we meet of any age. I am still learning the language, carrying broken tablets, figuring out which ones to break still and refashion. I am proud, and more than that I am grateful, that we have lay leaders who have taken the intiative to make sure we have a Pride Shabbat as a matter of course, and that this year for the first time we will march and have a table at our city’s Pride Festival next weekend. What a way to carry the ark of our covenant where it needs to be seen, where its power is so needed.

I try to look at my own kids with wonder and openness, and to wait for them each to tell me I’m queer or straight, rather than make assumptions. And indeed I try to look at each of you that way too, not to assume what I don’t know.

Each of us carries Divine love, for us, and through us for others. Each of us, young and old, has our own way, spiritual and embodied all at once, to love and connect, to yearn and commit. We are all in the center. We are all part of the same covenant at the same time. We are all blessed.