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

Purim: The Buddy Film

This was my D'var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 16, 2024, Parashat Pekudei. which fell this year about a week before Purim.

It’s already after the Oscars, but I have a pitch for a new movie -- it could even be a franchise!

It’s about a pair of young friends who travel the world together. Every two years they pick a different spot. There has to be something grand about it -- imperial castles, or gaudy restaurants, or flamboyant festivals. They’re great friends who met in eighth grade and have always been just friends, nothing else going on there -- but each place they go, if anyone asks, they pass themselves off as cousins.

Before each of their travels, they do Wikipedia-level cultural research, giving themselves no more than two days to learn enough to choose new names to go by for the trip. Names that will help them blend in but are also a bit too on the nose. It’s kind of an inside joke between them. In Rome, for instance, they would be Sophia and Cesar, philosophy and empire.

You’re thinking: Entitled, alienated, bored millenials? Far from it. In fact the places they pick all have certain things in common.

They are prosperous places, but complacent. The ruling class is checked out, mildly corrupt, but mainly buffoons. There are latent tensions in society, whispers of racism and nativism, worries that it’s more. But the people who used to want to do something about it are stuck and have drifted away from each other. Nothing awful has happened there for a long time, but you never know. In each place there’s always someone who runs a boutique or a yoga studio or a food truck but used to be a young activist.

And here is the actual caper: The two friends choose these places in order to shake things up, to force the issue and help the people save themselves.

On the way, on the train, they talk through the whole night about all the big things. It’s like Before Sunrise or My Dinner With Andre. An hour before they arrive, they split up on the train so one will see they came together.

Once they arrive they head in different directions. She befriends the regional governor, who is (of course) recently single again. She takes language classes and always ends up starting an English-language book group for the other college students; they teach her colorful idioms and she brings them Shakespeare. He hangs out in the local taverns, figures out who the movers and shakers are, always buys the editor of the newspaper a drink.

For a few months, our gal and our guy don’t see much of each other. They pass in the streets and drop a note in each other’s pocket: Miss you, can’t wait to hang out. Did you catch that play, I think I’m learning enough of the language to get it. I heard the funniest joke, can’t wait to tell you. Dinner when we get back. Occasionally, someone notices these little connections between them and asks: Do you know each other or something? And they say: No -- well kinda. It’s my cousin; I can’t believe he’s here too.

After a few months, they know enough about the texture of the place to provoke the necessary crisis. You can probably fill this part in yourself: Local jerk who’s actually worse; owns a bunch of businesses; was the governor’s best friend back in the day. The jerk keeps selling the governor on changes to laws that one by one aren’t much, but together amount to a massive anti-immigrant crackdown. She gets her book group to raise their consciousness and take to the streets, and the owner of the boutique or yoga studio or food truck calls up her old friends and they group up too and show up together for the kids.

Right before the local jerk can make his final move, she invites him and the governor out to dinner at the gaudy restaurant down the path from the old imperial castle. She calls him out. The guy is run out of town.

Our guy and our gal, Sophia and Cesar or whatever they’re called this time around -- the people of the area finally put two and two together. They did know the other was here! The citizens honor them at a huge festival celebrating what they all achieved together. Speech, speech, the people demand, and you can write it: You people have welcomed us, you stood up for each other more than you ever realized you would because you’ve always loved each other, you just forgot for a time. Don’t forget anymore, tell this story, keep being good to each other. The two of us had to lose each other for most of a year -- don’t you all lose each other.

The people beg them to stay, but they have to move on. You know us as Sophia and Cesar, but that’s not who we really are. (In the film we learn her real name but never his.) Their year is done, and they’ve missed each other. They also need the friendship they saw all these people around them share, in the book group and the tavern and the streets. It’s time to find each other again. To tend to their own friendship for a year... and plan their next caper.

Do you recognize this movie?

If you think you don’t, think again, because the story I’ve told is the Megillah. Megillat Esther as: a buddy film.

I’ve taken a few liberties, of course; it’s my own fan fiction, my own midrash. But did I really? Couldn’t this be the story?  To give credit where credit is due, first of all I have to give a shout out to Paul Franks, who some of you know or remember from our community. One year around Purim at our Thursday Torah class, he said something like: The story of Esther and Mordechai is actual a heist; it’s Ocean’s Eleven. Something like that.

I’ve reimagined it instead as a buddy film, and I got the idea via Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who I quote here a lot, currently the leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. More on Rabbi Feigelson’s idea in a minute.

If the Megillah were a buddy film, wouldn’t it be great? In my pitch, Esther and Mordechai are old friends in every way. Their friendship is their company, the plays and the jokes they share, and how they want to change the world.

I’ve said before that within the Torah is absolutely one of the oldest buddy films of our culture. Moshe, Miryam, and Aharon -- they are for sure Luke, Leia, and Han Solo; they are Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. Each one in the group has a special power; it takes all of them to defeat the Empire or Voldemort; and they goof around and poke fun at each other, and grow and gather other friends too around them for all of it. Yes, I know in each case there is some kind of family dimension that’s hidden or created -- but really all of these are about friendship first.

Rabbi Feigelson says our parasha, Pekudei, has a buddy thing going too. The construction leaders for the Mishkan (the desert sanctuary) are Betzalel and Oholiav. This is me and not Rabbi Josh but it seems like this could be a classic Odd Couple dramatic situation. Betzalel means “in the shade of the Divine” -- he’s the spiritual free spirit. Oholiav has “my tent” in it -- he’s the quieter homebody. Rabbi Josh wrote this week: “It makes sense to me that the Torah would choose to highlight two friends at the center of the creation of the Mishkan, as the word for friend, chaver, is related to a word the Torah itself uses to describe putting together the Mishkan, l'chaber.”

Am I just messing around here, or does this have something to do with Purim and Shabbat?

I would love for the Megillah to be a buddy story between two people who come to Shushan calling themselves Esther and Mordechai. But regardless, Purim is a friendship chag. There is a specific mitzvah that I don’t think has a parallel anywhere else in Torah, the mitzvah of mishloach manot ish l’rei-eihu, of friends sending portions to each other. I can’t think of any other  affirmative mitzvah that is about friendship.

In the story of the defeat of Haman and the rescue of a whole people, part of the story is friends. A pair of friends, small groups of friends, even devious friends. In the aftermath of this violent self-defense, there is a charge to do something sweet for your friends. Something about friendship itself is a tikkun at this time of year, a repairing thing.  A tikkun for the large-scale brokenness of the Purim story.

As I was reimagining the Megillah as a buddy film, I was thinking about the interplay between our purposes and our friends, and all the forms that takes. I was thinking how the small joys of friendship and the big things we contemplate in life interweave, and how some friendships come out of meeting people around a collective purpose. Or sometimes it’s with our existing friends that we just find ourselves talking about the big world things on our minds and our place in their tikkun, as we drift into and out of those conversations even in the midst of a casual dinner or a gathering for fun.

In buddy movies there are all kinds of these friendships with all kinds of rhythms. From the intensity of Thelma and Louise or Butch and Sundance, to the quieter friendships, the once in a year or once in a reunion cycle reconnections. The friendships of extroverts and introverts. Maybe that’s why I imagine Esther and Mordechai as two people who pal around a lot, and also as two people who don’t see each other for a long time.

As we don’t live on bread alone, we also don’t live our dreams on ideas alone, or accomplish big things on meetings alone, or enjoy our lives on family alone.

The Purim practice of mishloach manot ish l’rei’eihu is a way to acknowlege that, to lift up the sweetness of the people we are friends with on any and all of those levels. Our tradition says a hearty treat is what we exchange, and it can be hearty food or even a hearty book!

And on Shabbat, we call the same kind of thing Shabbat dinner, or Shabbat lunch, or Kiddush at the synagogue. A day of friendship, with food made by friends and served by friends. We don’t go out on adventures, like in the buddy pics, but bring the stories of those adventures here, and as they project in the background we reconnect and talk.

There isn’t any aspect of our lives, any meaningful caper, that isn’t better as a buddy film. So on this Shabbat half an hour before Kiddush, and a week before Purim: May we send each other the blessings of Betzalel and Oholiav, of Moshe and Miryam and Aharon, of Esther and Mordechai.

Adar Conversations Continued: Esther and Responding to Anti-Semitism After October 7

Rabbi Karen G. Reiss Medwed and I recorded this conversation last night, and you can watch it on YouTube or listen as a podcast. The Megillah (the biblical Book of Esther) is a story of anti-Semitism set in the Diaspora in a multiethnic empire where Jews were living in peace. How did the Jews of the story see themselves in biblical Persia, according to the biblical text? What were the various ways they responded to being a minority and to anti-Semitism, and how did that unfold? How in particular did Esther view herself, act, adjust in real time? How should we take the end of the Megillah, the forceful and violent Jewish response described there?

All of this hits us differently after October 7. Karen and I walk through each part of the biblical story and reflect on how different parts resonate today and might answer some of the dilemmas we are facing. We recorded a week before Purim 5784/2024, and much of it reflects the year and also the particular moment during this war.

 

 

To read the biblical book of Esther (the Megillah): https://www.sefaria.org/Esther.1?ven=Tanakh:_The_Holy_Scriptures,_published_by_JPS&lang=bi

To continue this conversation with us, e-mail [email protected] and/or [email protected], and feel free to post a comment here as well.

Conversations Toward Purim: Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy for 5784 (And Beyond?)

To listen to this as a podcast recording, click here.

You can watch, or read the same thing just below the video thumbnail.

This is an introduction to a few conversations about the festival of Purim and the months of Adar in the Jewish calendar. I am releasing this on March 7, 2024, the 27th day of Adar Alef in 5784, which I mention because it’s the first Purim since October 7, 2023. I started thinking about this particular Purim even before last Chanukkah was over, in December of 2023. I have always loved Purim, and the chag, the festival, has deepened for me at every stage of my adult life, starting in college. But this winter I found myself both grasping for Purim more than ever, and wondering how we could possibly celebrate this year.

October 7 was itself a festival; it was Simchat Torah in Israel. As I am recording today the subsequent war is still going on, with thousands dead and wounded, Israelis and Palestinians, more than 130 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, and so much human suffering and ongoing trauma. On the one hand, Purim seems so on the nose right now – an attack on Jews seemingly out of nowhere, the mobilization of Jews everywhere in armed response and in advocacy to the world’s superpower, and in some cases Jews have gone back to masking themselves especially at some universities. Usually at this time of year I’d be making or sharing funny videos, like this: [insert]. But the thought of celebrating through all of this seems almost profane.

On the other hand, I have long thought that Esther is the text, and Purim is the chag, that are most true to modern Jewish experience especially in the diaspora. So maybe the Megillah and Purim are here to catch us this year. Maybe there is an Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy that will at least hold up a clear mirror for us, and perhaps even guide us or at least map our situation a bit better. I know how much I need that.

So here is a first sketch of that map, and the ways the story of Esther, the Megillah, and the festival of Purim might be what we need right now. These elements I hope to follow up in conversations with other Jewish teachers between now and Purim.

I want to start with a sort-of cryptic description of the biblical Jews of imperial Persia at the time of Esther’s story, from a midrash found in the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Shabbat page 88a. You can see it here. But you don’t have to look at it or remember it; I’ll keep going back to it and picking up its components.

The midrash starts with a quote from the story of the Israelites standing at Mt. Sinai about eight hundred years before Purim, give or take. The quote is part of a verse from Exodus 19 about the giving of the Ten Commandments, and it says:

"And they stood beneath the mountain" (Exodus 19:17).

Rabbi Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa said: This verse teaches that the Blessed Holy One inverted the mountain above them like a vat, and said to them:

If you accept the Torah, that's good, and if not, there will be your grave.

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there’s a substantial piece of knowledge that is an objection to the Torah!

Rava said: Even so, they went back and accepted it in the days of Ahashverosh, as it is written toward the end of the book of Esther (9:27): "The Jews fulfilled and accepted" (Esther 9:27) -- meaning they fulfilled what they had previously accepted.

End of Talmudic quote. It’s in kind of a code, the analogies aren’t at all obvious to today. But I want to poke and pull at this text because it’s going to be helpful. The starting point is a comparison between the Jews of Mt. Sinai and the Jews of Shushan, the Persian imperial capital at the time of Queen Esther. And in this comparison in the Talmud, it’s the Jews of Shushan who come out way higher.

That seems crazy, or at least very unexpected. There should be no comparison at all between the Jews in our most holy book and the Jews of the silliest of our holidays. Yeah, both groups are in the larger Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh – but the Jews of the Megillah are just barely in the Bible according to many of the rabbis of the Talmud, who thought of leaving the Book of Esther out entirely.

In the Torah, there are the Jews of the Mt. Sinai generation who received a direct Divine communication, who were eating every day manna, food that came to them in a direct delivery from the Divine down from the sky. The Jews at Sinai were experiencing Torah on a regular basis as a fresh and brand-new teaching full of mitzvot, full of very specific responsibilities. 

In the Megillah there are Jews, but they are so different. The only Jewish thing about them was that they called themselves Jews! Except when they didn’t because they didn’t want people to know they were Jews, and then they named themselves after Persian divinities like Ishtar and Marduk. At the start of the Megillah there aren’t even any Jews mentioned at all –  if it wasn’t in Hebrew you wouldn’t even know it’s a Jewish book. When we do first meet Mordechai, a Jew willing to identify himself publicly, the only substantive Jewish thing about him is that he wouldn’t bow down to another person. The Megillah generation of Jews don’t seem like Torah people or God-connected people at all.

So how could Rava, in this midrash in the Talmud, say that without those Jews, we couldn’t have a valid Torah?

Well for one thing, the Jews of the Megillah live in the Persian empire, a huge area of 127 provinces, each of them culturally and ethnically distinct. Jews live everywhere among all of these peoples, at a time when some Jews also live in Eretz Yisrael, in the land of Israel. The Jews at Mt. Sinai are living in a one-of-a-kind world in the wilderness, all by themselves, not in their land yet and not really anywhere. 

So score one for the Jews of the Megillah as more relevant for us Jews today than the Jews of the Torah. Rava in the Talmud might be saying that it’s easy to accept Torah when God talks to you directly and everyone around you has had that same experience. But it’s Jews like the ones in the Megillah whose commitments are more like our commitments, and until Jews like the ones in the Megillah decide what they are committed to, the Torah isn’t fully here in the world.

Then we’ve got this idea of Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa about God turning the mountain upside-down over the Jews’ head and threatening to drop it on top of them. That’s so weird. But the midrash works in metaphors, and part one of this metaphor is the Hebrew word for inverting, which is kafa, the letters כ פ ה kaf, phay, and hay. It means both to turn something upside-down and also to coerce.

And wouldn’t you know that in the Megillah, one of the key words is a word for turning something upside down. It’s got the same three letters but in reverse order – instead of kafa it’s hafach, ה פ כ hay, phay, chaf – and the way the Megillah describes things in that world is v’nahafoch hu, things got turned upside-down.

In the Megillah, one of the big themes is that everything gets turned upside down, over and over. The story starts with peace for Jews, then comes a threat from Haman (boo) and he gets the king’s support, then Esther gets the king on board on our side. At the start the king gets sick of one queen, Vashti, because she’s headstrong and might provoke a feminist movement, then he chooses a seemingly opposite queen, Esther, who seems hidden and meek, but then she turns into a very powerful feminist mastermind. The Jews are nondescript members of this huge empire, then astonished at what’s happening, and then defend themselves with force. The Jewish world turns upside down again and again.

So why does Rav Avdimi say that Mt. Sinai is the thing that’s upside-down? I think what Rav Avdimi is saying is that there is something upside-down about the way the Torah presents the world, upside-down in a way that can also be oppressive. The Torah makes the world seem very orderly and coherent. Obey these mitzvot and things will go well, or break the covenant and things will fall apart. There’s a mitzvah for every situation and every experience. Even the way the Jews live in the wild, scraggly wilderness for forty years is in a camp organized in a geometric pattern, an order imposed on nothingness.

But Rav Avdimi is saying that’s actually upside-down thinking. The world isn’t like that, and it’s oppressive to think that it is. If all you can think of is that moral behavior gets rewarded and immoral behavior gets punished, you’re going to feel completely topsy-turvy when that’s so obviously not what is happening.  Or, you’re going to feel like a huge mountain is about to collapse on top of you.

In contrast, the Jews of the Megillah know that life is not that consistent or coherent. Jewish experience is unpredictable, and it flips from terror to celebration, and back and forth many times. Morality is not always rewarded. The Divine is not clearly evident in the Esther story; if we seek the Divine, we have to be ready to perceive divinity in ways that are not revelations everyone sees.. It’s more right-side-up to understand all that and accept it, and then to decide anyway to live right because it’s the right thing to do, not because the world always makes sense. So score two for the Jews of the Megillah, who can find a way to be grounded in Torah wisdom even when they don’t know which way is up.

That’s where we are especially this year, when the shock of October 7 and the aftermath, and the shock of how people around us have reacted to it, have been dizzying for months on end.

The metaphor of the upside-down mountain has a part two, and it’s the way that Mt. Sinai is compared to a vat that is held over the Jews’ head. It’s an unusual word in the Talmud, gigit in Hebrew, and it might well refer to a vat of wine.

Why does Rav Avdimi compare Mt. Sinai to a huge open vat of wine about to be dumped out on top of us? You might have said the Torah is the most sober thing in Judaism. Serious business about laws and responsibilities and our history. The Megillah, though, starts off with a six-month drinking party in honor of King Achashverosh, and every time something significant happens in the story there’s drinking.

And in another place in the Talmud, it says that on Purim you’re supposed to get drunk or into an intoxication-like or dream-like state of mind called ad d’lo yada, “until you don’t know.” Specifically: until you don’t know the difference between Cursed is Haman (boo!) and Blessed is Mordechai, Arur Haman (boo!) and Baruch Mordechai. You’re supposed to get yourself that disoriented. 

In the midrash in the Talmud, it’s Mt. Sinai that’s being compared to a whole lot of wine, and Rav Acha bar Yaakov says: Hey, this is a big thing to know about the Torah. Knowing this is connected to not-knowing the difference between Mordechai and Haman (boo!) – it’s the same Hebrew root-word, moda’ah and lo yada. I think Rav Acha is saying that the Torah on its own without the Megillah is overpromising what you can know for sure. The Jews standing at Mt. Sinai didn’t know as much as we think they did. But the Jews in the Megillah were in a constant state of not knowing enough about their situation and even about themselves.

At a key moment in the Megillah (Esther 4:14), when Mordechai gets word to Queen Esther about the plot against the Jews, he tells her: Who knows if for a time like this you’ve become royal. Mi yode’a. He doesn’t say he knows for sure that’s why she’s queen, like it was obviously divinely ordained. Instead he just says who knows, maybe, so act like it’s true because it’s the only way to act that makes sense.

The Megillah says even when you’re not sure, act on the basis of what you can know, which is how to be there for people and for what’s right. Purim is not about getting drunk or escaping, but coming back from those states and getting clear about some things. Recognize what complete moral unclarity feels like, so we can look into our regular messy world with moral clarity. So score a third point for the Jews of the Megillah over the Jews of Mt. Sinai. We have to figure out too this year what it means to act out of solidarity, with Jews and with suffering Palestinians, when we really aren’t sure what our situation is and what our power is.

I’ll say here a quick thing about the Purim theme of masks. The Jews of the Torah were really by themselves in the desert, just them and God, so they didn’t have this issue of deciding how or whether to reveal themselves to other groups of people. The Jews of the Megillah were interwoven with the 127 other peoples of the empire, and were very much in the dance of showing themselves vs. blending in vs. wondering how dangerous it was to be in the open. That’s a fourth way that Jews of Shushan are relevant to us in a way the Jews of Mt. Sinai aren’t as much.

A fifth thing is the figure of Esther herself as a leader and rescuer, along with Mordechai, in comparison to Moshe and the other leaders of his time. I can’t even sum this theme up for this introduction, but I very much want to talk about that and expand on it in one of my upcoming conversations.

But I do want to say something here about the response to anti-Semitism, which is this year the major reason Purim is so relevant. 

For the Jews at Mt. Sinai, it was clear what to do about Pharaoh and about the nation of Amalek, who had attacked the Jews shortly before they got the Torah. Be separate, get away, fight back, trust God. I’m oversimplifying of course, and even if it was clear it wasn’t easy to do these things.

But for the Jews of the Megillah, when the threat came on the scene through Haman (boo!), himself a descendent of Amalek, it wasn’t clear at all what to do or what to think.

Especially in Shushan, the capital, the Jews at first are simply astonished and confused, and we can relate to that this year. They weren’t deciding to separate from their surroundings or to go to Eretz Yisrael, which they could have done with no one stopping them and without an army, unlike the Jews of Mt. Sinai. The Jews of the Megillah don’t say that King Achashverosh is like Pharaoh. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – under Esther’s leadership they eventually make the king their key ally.

Eventually they do defend themselves, and they go on the offensive. This year for the first time I think I understand emotionally what it means in the Megillah that the king could not just rescind his edict. It’s not that simple. In the story no one knows just how supportive all the people of the empire are to the anti-Semitic edict deep down, once it’s said out loud. The Jews certainly responded with overwhelming violent force. All of it is so familiar.

But Esther ordains that when they look back on all this afterward, they can’t just write down all the horrible things that happened, and how they gathered with other Jews and fought back. They would also give meals to their neighbors, mishlo’ach manot, and gifts to poor people, matanot la’evyonim. Somehow they would need to integrate a fierce fighting spirit with a generous one. They would use this story of anti-Semitism and topsy-turvy not to say that self-protection is the whole answer for Jews, not to say that turning inward is the only option, but to build community on the basis of love and to radiate generosity despite it all. And I think the Megillah means not just to other Jews.

Esther’s new festival of Purim would be about the threat to Jews and about Jewish power and about Jewish values. It would be actually a microcosm of the most important things about Jewish community and the ethics of Judaism – a huge threat and the best things about us rolled into one festival.

That’s Rava’s point in the Talmud about why we should see the Jews of Shushan as the ones who really got the Torah, even more than the Jews of Mt. Sinai. It’s why our tradition compares Purim to Yom Kippur, the single most morally intense day of the Jewish year. So score a sixth point for the Jews of the Megillah as relevant uniquely for us today, even more than the Jews of the Torah.

I am saying this last part, about anti-Semitism and the Megillah’s idea of how we respond, with far more certainty than I actually have. It’s what I want to believe, what I want to know. But this is the conversation I most want to open up, hopefully in another recording in this series, and with anyone who wants to talk about it more one-on-one or in a group. Drop me a note by e-mail, whether it’s Adar 5784 or anytime you find this.

***

So, that’s the map I’d like to explore between now and Purim of 5784, the Purim after October 7. These are the building blocks of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy, which is the support I know I need right now. Read the text of the Megillah yourself, the Book of Esther, with all this in mind. Maybe we can help each other figure out what kind of joyful communal celebration might be appropriate for this Purim. If such a celebration is possible, and not profane in a time like now, what kind of chag would be not just fun for the kids, but right for us – in a way that is true toward the upside-down in our lives right now and in the lives of those who are suffering most, among our Jewish people and among the Palestinians with whom we Jews are so interwoven.

I hope this introduction helps. To be continued, together.

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!

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.