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Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- A Map of Spring and Summer 2021

I've been wanting to get this down for weeks.... I’ve been very affected since March by Torah time – by how the cycle of reading the Torah in synagogue has mapped onto our experience of the pandemic since its one-year anniversary.

The first anniversary of the formal declaration of the pandemic and the massive shut-downs coincided with Jews’ reading the end of the book of Exodus and the start of the book of Leviticus. The Torah itself says that one year passed between the instructions Moshe received for the night of the Exodus, and the final assembly of the mishkan, the desert Sanctuary that would be a focal point for the Divine Presence. During that year in the Torah there had been war and thirst, a complete reorientation of the food distribution system to adjust to (i.e. manna), the new laws and covenant at Mt. Sinai, the in-fighting around the Golden Calf. Then finally a process of calming and reconciliation, and a collective project of building the “tabernacle.” Everyone gave something unique, with its own texture or color, from their life of that year – to be repurposed into a symbol of their unity. When the mishkan was finally assembled, the Divine Presence visibly infused it, with the cloud and fire that was going to lead the people ahead toward their new land and their new life.

That was what we read more or less on the first anniversary of the shut-down, as we were entering a new phase too – the ramping up of Covid-19 vaccination. I expected a turn toward dealing with the new ethical challenges of moving forward, the project of reconnecting and rebuilding a reality better than the one pre-pandemic.

But Leviticus opens with a cloud around the mishkan, and Moshe himself hesitating to approach it to hear these kinds of teachings. The cloud and fire do not in fact move forward. Something is not – was not ready.

Leviticus, the book that was the backdrop of our spring, is not actually a book of moving forward in the desert. And it’s not directly a book of society and ethical teaching, at least not for the first eighty percent or so. Leviticus does open with travel – but it does open with movement. It’s the motion of individuals coming one by one mostly, in a process the Torah calls korban or coming-closer, with offerings. People coming in closer, walking into the center, toward the cloud, with their offerings. Toward the cloudy place, with offerings occasioned by basic emotions – wellbeing, gratitude, guilt. Getting out and coming toward, to eat a sacred meal with a Kohen, to cleanse themselves of something, to burn up something completely and leave it behind.

Something got my attention in March, when I looked at the Torah and realized that it was telling me not to expect people to be ready to plunge ahead. Especially I shouldn’t expect people to be ready to engage in discussion about ethics and society fully just yet.

For a while, the Torah says n Leviticus, moving is just getting used to back and forth. It’s not one direction, from alone to together, from isolated to the Divine. It’s back and forth. Leviticus doesn’t command offerings from everyone on the same schedule. Yes, there’s some paying attention to right and wrong, sometimes you have to bring something in because of that. But mostly, we’re guided by ourselves, we know when to try moving. Closer and back out. The cloud and the fire are in the center and draw our eyes even when we’re still alone, to help us remember that there is something common even on the days we don’t bring anything. Do it like this for a while, move in your own directions, says the Torah for eighteen chapters, and then we’ll get back to ethics, and then we’ll try moving on together.

The commentaries on the opening verse of Leviticus focus on the last letter of its first word Vayikra. In the Torah scroll, the last letter alef is written as a small superscript. That alef has two dimensions. Its presence or absence changes the word from calling to happenstance. The letter alef signifies ani or anochi, “I” – which can stand for the ego in a strong sense or the Divine, “I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Leviticus opens with a cloud around the tabernacle and a spiritual teetering between calling and being just tossed around, between a sense of our own “I” and not having it. Reclaiming what “I” feel like, who “I” am, is what a lot of us were doing as the pandemic hit its first year and we contemplated the next phase ahead. We were, and surely still are, disoriented. Leviticus gives that spiritual state a name and a picture and a pacing.

That was most of Leviticus, and it turned out to be not just accurate but for me soothing.

By the time the book of Leviticus turned to its code of ethics in chapter 19, and its social vision in chapter 25, things had in fact changed around us quite profoundly. The accelerating progress of vaccination in many places led just at this time to the CDC’s revision of its mask guidelines for fully vaccinated people. It was time to open the book of Numbers – the book of the march forward, the organization of people toward the battle for the new land, and the conflicts and delays along the way. But at least it’s the book of moving together, even if together is starting and stopping, and quarreling among ourselves.

Leviticus and Numbers share the perception that not everyone is spiritually ready to move in the same direction at the same time. But at some point, there is something you could call movement of the group, catalyzed by leaders or critical mass. Numbers acknowledges that deciding to move is hardly all there is. You’ve got plenty of opportunities to grind to a halt. In the Torah, these include questioning leaders and their motivations; people getting focused on immediate ease vs. longer-term goals; issues of justice and inclusion; people defining the end of the road in different ways. This last particularly struck me when we read about the tribes of Reuven and Gad who wanted not to go all the way to the new land with the other tribes, but settle where they were. To declare the journey and the fight were over. They and Moshe had it out, and eventually figured out a way for the tribes to work on setting up the common future together, even though tribe by tribe they would separate and live differently both economically and culturally. We should be so fortunate. In Numbers, some 38 years pass and if you read the book you can’t see where they went.

That’s more or less where we got in the Torah by early/mid-July. Now it’s time for Deuteronomy. What’s coming is preparation for the new year – the Jewish new year which starts this year in early September, as does the new school year. The new Torah year starts a few weeks later. Deuteronomy is about getting to the cusp of the new land, the future. It is a book of review of the teachings, going over them for the first time in a long time. At long last, Moshe gets to focus on the ethics and laws and teachings. He gets to talk about them, and also to remind people to continue to learn and study and talk about them from the moment they enter the new land. The time for putting that off – for delaying our ethical conversations, or pushing them to the side or to a small group of interested people – we’re being asked to consider that time over. To be fully human, ready to live, is also to be accountable ethically and intellectually and spiritually. That is what the Jewish new year is all about, and the intellectual explorations in Deuteronomy coincide in the Jewish year with weeks of spiritual introspection. And since this is hard any year, and especially this year, the rabbis of our tradition long ago paired Deuteronomy with (Second) Isaiah, with words of comfort and encouragement, with a welcome of people back to the Divine, back from exile toward home and each other.

I’m waiting to see how Deuteronomy maps onto the end of the summer. But I wanted to get this spiritual journal of the Torah cycle down now, because I am so grateful I had the Torah in this way these past few months. I’ve had more than the Torah’s specific teachings, each verse or each week – I’ve had this structure. It has helped pace me, and see the moment I’m in and some weeks ahead. I have always paid attention to the seasonal flow of the Torah readings, but this year I have seen in the Torah’s pacing through the desert so much I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful, and hope I’ll be attentive to the same things in the weeks and months ahead.

Remembering Elie Wiesel As a Lens For the Week That Was

These are the words I shared this past Shabbat morning. Another version, with appropriate links and notes and credit for things I read and heard, is here.

Last Shabbat, the Jewish people and the world lost one of our generation's most important voices of conscience, Elie Wiesel.^* As the week began, I thought that this was what we should talk about on Shabbat. Everyone knows that Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the Shoah, a writer whose words awakened people around the world for the first time to what happened during the Holocaust, and an activist against genocide in today's world. So I figured we could look into some of the nuances of his work and try to learn something from him to guide us about where we are in our own society.

About forty people gathered here on Tuesday evening to remember Elie Wiesel. I said that night that it was as though we ourselves were sitting shiva. And therefore we could only each say what we were feeling in the moment, and no one could tell someone else or all of us what meaning or lesson we could apply from his life to what's been happening now. That day would come, I said, and I would try to do that on Shabbat – today.

As it happened, the day Elie Wiesel died was also the day when a white-supremacist, neo-Nazi group was given one of the biggest megaphones in America for an anti-Semitic slur it had published earlier. For several days, that was one story that dominated the political news. It seemed like we should talk about that, and where anti-Semitism fits into the picture of division by religion and race that is so alive right now in our country.

And then came the killings in Baton Rouge of Alton Sterling and in St. Paul of Philando Castile, two African-Americans shot by white policemen, and the killing by a black man of five white officers in Dallas -- Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith.

It is hard to look anywhere from the middle of grief. I was in tears last night when we davvened to ourselves the last paragraph of Aleinu:

על כן נקוה לך ה׳ אלוהינו לראות מהרה בתפארת עוזך

להעביר גילולים מן הארץ והאלילים כרות יכרתון

לתקן עולם במלכות שדי וכל בני בשר יקראו בשמך

Al ken n'kaveh l'cha, Adonai Elohaynu, lir'ot m'hayra b'tiferet uzecha

L'haavir gilulim min haaretz, v'ha-elilim karot yikaraytun

l'taken olam b'malchut Shaddai, v'chol b'nai vasar yik'r'u vish'mecha...

"Because of this we have hope toward You, Adonai our God, that soon we will see the full splendor of Your might, wiping from the earth the illusions that some are worshipping, destroying for all time their smaller gods, so the power of Your just rule can repair the world, and all people will call together through Your name."

The heart breaks when we seem so far from that, despite all we try to do to make it so.

But my friend Rabbi Josh Feigelson wrote Friday that, in light of the week that was, Shabbat itself is an act of defiance. It's where we come to remind ourselves that this Aleinu vision persists through the tears, and we are not foolish to speak it, even through our questions of why, and how long will this take. So I want to turn back to where the week began, to Elie Wiesel. Because he was not only a survivor, giving testimony to what happened. And he was not only an activist – though dayenu, it would have been enough had he been either of those things. He had something to teach about how to keep saying and enacting al ken n'kaveh, because of this we have hope, in the constant shadow of the Shoah.

So I want to pick out a couple things from his writing and speaking, with far less nuance than I had hoped to, and relate them to the challenges we are facing now.

The first thing about Elie Wiesel's writing is detail – saying things right.

In an interview with Terri Gross almost thirty years ago that was replayed yesterday on the radio, Wiesel said that he began writing Night on precisely the tenth anniversary of his liberation from Buchenwald – April 11, 1955. “I decided to wait for 10 years - not to speak about it, not to use language related to these experiences until I knew that the words were true words.”

This was one of the challenges Wiesel defined and struggled with as a writer about the Shoah. From his first writings, he identified the concentration camps as the “kingdom of night” – a parallel universe, he said at least once – and he didn't know if any of the words we use in this world could possibly say what happened in the Shoah. So he chose words carefully. He knew that each word, each rhythm, each combination has a particular effect on the reader or listener. Liliane read for us on Tuesday from an essay he wrote in French about this – how easy it is to speak in cliches, to settle for a word that is the same old story when there is in fact something unique that has to be said.

And I think that is one lesson we need today. If we're going to speak about skin color in our country, about crime and law enforcement, about Islam, we owe it to each other to know what we're talking about. We owe it especially to those who are different from us, whether we're trying to act in solidarity or, especially, when we are criticizing.

We can't just get by with generalities. The fewer people we know personally who are different – by color or religion or sexual orientation or anything – the more we have to get to know more people, or read their words, and not just words about them written by someone else. Think about it – if you met someone who only knew about the Shoah from fiction written by non-Jews, and they tried to engage you and tell you what lessons to learn, you would feel insulted and belittled, and you wouldn't even be able to speak with such a person.

We need to know what is, and what it really feels like, before we can jump to conclusions, or toward solutions.

The second thing I would pick out from Wiesel is an attitude about what it means to be Jews, to be forever the survivor people.

When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he said in his acceptance speech:

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

"Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my peoples' memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands ... But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much of a disgrace as Josef Biegun's imprisonment. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment."

The first couple times I read these words, they seemed almost bland to me, like words that could have been said by anyone, maybe by everyone. But I see how carefully Wiesel described how our attention develops: from our persecution as Jews, to the targeting of others in the same way and the same place as Jews, then widening out to the parallels for others who are not us and not in the places we are.

Because he lived this, he could say it. At the dedication of the US Holocaust Museum, Wiesel lingered over his testimony about the Jews. Then he challenged the president of the United States, sitting right there, to take action to stop the slaughter of Bosnians.

And the lesson, I have come to realize, is that we as Jews shouldn't choose between speaking out against anti-Semitism and speaking out against all other forms of bigotry and hate. There are, at times, more than one center of the universe, and this is one of those times. If this week became the week about race, it was also the week about anti-Semitism. We can't be strong in solidarity with others, if we don't keep fighting against anti-Semitism, even if when it feels at times as if we are doing that alone.

And this will in turn strengthen our ability to be partners, full engaged in all the fights against all kinds of bigotry. Wiesel's charges about Bosnia and Darfur were strengthened because of his relentless focus on the Shoah. The more we understand the Shoah, the more we will be impelled to take notice of everything on all levels of the pyramid of hate.

And if we need any more motivation, in this week when we are overwhelmed not only by this country but the world, we can look to something Wiesel said about the moment of his liberation from Buchenwald.

At the end of Night, he described eating so much that he became sick, and looking at himself in the mirror and seeing a corpse.

But he said something different in a speech one time before an audience of young people at Xavier University.^* The last question, from someone who had read Night, was this: “Can you describe how you felt when you were liberated from the concentration camp by the American army?" In the course of his answer, Wiesel mentioned that an American soldier gave him a sandwich. He asked what type of sandwich it was, and the solider told him: a ham sandwich.

Wiesel said: "Now if I would have had that offered to me in the camp, just moments before the liberation, I would have been permitted and even obligated to eat it to save my life. But now that I was free – and I had a choice – I chose not to eat the ham sandwich and wait for kosher food."

This story is not about ham versus kosher. What it says to me is this: There is a line that divides between a situation where you can do nothing – when you are essentially a corpse – and a situation where you have a choice to act or do nothing. The line can be located precisely. Elie Wiesel found it, the precise instant he was liberated from the kingdom of night. His freedom meant that moral responsibility was immediate.

No matter how paralyzed we feel at times, we all know which side of the line we are privileged and blessed to live on. We have no excuse not to speak out or act, to squander our moral possibility, whether we choose the small scale of interactions and relationships, or join in communal or political action.

Elie Wiesel wore that responsibility heavily in his life. And because of that, al ken n'kaveh – because of this we have hope that soon we will see the full splendor of God's might, wiping from the earth the illusions that some are worshipping, destroying for all time their smaller gods, so the power of God's just rule can repair the world, and all people will call together through Your name.

 

 

 

 

E-Maggid: How to Argue

Any dispute for the sake of Heaven has enduring value, and any dispute that is not for the Sake of Heaven has no enduring value.  What is an example of a dispute for the sake of Heaven?  The ongoing dispute between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai.  What is an example of a dispute that is not for the sake of Heaven?  The dispute of Korach and his associates.  (Pirkei Avot 5:20)

Parashat Korach begins with an argument.  It's presented by Korach, a Levite, along with other prominent Israelites, who question why there has been one leader for forty years.  All of the people, every one of them is holy, and God is among them -- why are you elevated over the community of Adonai? (Numbers 16:3)

 

The rabbis compare this to another dispute.  The School of Shammai and the School of Hillel were groups among the early rabbis.  They used to argue about the details of ritual -- At the end of Shabbat, what's the proper sequence for the wine, candle, and spices?  They used to argue about ethics -- Is it ever permissible to lie?  They used to argue about social policy -- Should rabbis take time to train students who are not yet spiritual and morally developed?  They used to argue about philosophy -- Would the universe have been better off if human beings had not been created?

 

What makes the arguments of the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel "for the sake of Heaven"?  According to the Talmud, it's not the substance.  It's not because they are rabbis, arguing about all the kinds of things other rabbis value.  Instead, the Talmud tells us two things.  First, the School of Shammai continued to let their children marry children of rabbis from the School of Hillel, despite their reservations about the others' practices and philosophies.

 

Second, there was one particular dispute that went on for three years, and it took a voice from Heaven to resolve it.  God's representative declared that both sides had "the words of the Living God."  But the School of Hillel should be followed -- because they pressed their arguments more calmly, they studied the other side's opinions, and they used to present the other's sides arguments before their own.

 

Isn't there something valuable about Korach's dispute?  He too has some substance, in standing up for the idea that all the Jews are equally holy.  But we can easily detect jealousy mixed in.  Some of it is family jealousy too, since Korach and Moshe are cousins.  Korach couldn't separate his personal stake from the bigger picture.  His emotions racheted up the conflict.  As a result, his dispute couldn't have enduring value.

 

Arguing and conflict are everywhere in Torah, and they are facts of life.  The substance of arguments can have enduring value, worth studying.  Sometimes, it's how we act during an argument that has the most lasting effect, and can teach us the most.

Parashat Korach: The Wrong Way to Challenge

(Last year's e-drash on Korach was pretty good, too.)

It's hard to argue with Korach's challenge to Moshe.  Moshe seems like the unelected leader-for-life, and Korach makes the case that all the people are holy.  Moshe is theocracy, Korach is for not quite democracy, but a wider shared leadership.

This is hard to rebut.  Just this week, in fact, I gave a lecture on "Jews, Utopia, and Civil Rights."  I opened by contrasting the Bible with ancient religions in Egypt and Mesopotamia.  It's a point I often make, and I owe it to one of my professors, Paul Hansen at Harvard.  The religions of the first settled civilizations linked the gods to the kings, to the powerful.  Pharaoh was a god; the Mesopotamian kings worked hand in hand with the gods.  For Israel, God was on the side of the slave, not the master.  For the Hebrew prophets, even in the Jews' own land, God was on the side of the oppressed, not the king who looked the other way.

So Korach should be right, or at least he shouldn't deserve to be swallowed up by the earth!

This bothers the midrash.  In order to make it right, the midrash imagines more of a story to the conflict between Korach and Moshe.  Korach is depicted as a student of Moshe's, who is very attentive to the teachings Moshe has been conveying hot off the press from his conversations with God.  Korach asks, "If it's a mitzvah to have a tallit with four threads of blue in the tzitzit, what about a garment that is entirely blue but has no tzitzit?"  Or, "What if a room in my house is full of scrolls of Torah -- do I need a mezuzah?"  (What's the connection?  Tzitzit is the law given right before Korach's parasha begins, and mezuzah is linked to tzitzit through the Shma.)

In these stories, Moshe answers by standing up for the laws as given.  Korach blows his top and complains that the laws are too irrational to follow, if they don't allow for his alternatives.

Again I think many Jews today nod their heads to the questions the midrash puts in Korach's mouth.  Okay, if you're not deliberating all the time about tallit and mezuzah, the questions might be about kashrut and its purposes, and whether all the details are important, and whether if kashrut is a path to ethics why not just have the ethics without the kashrut.  Or you could Korach-like questions about prayer and why it has to be a certain way.

I give credit to the rabbis of 1500-some years ago that they allowed themselves into the minds of those who asked questions about the mitzvot and challenged them.  In the midrash, Korach is not faulted for asking the questions.  He is faulted for not letting Moshe's answers sink in.  And he is faulted for accusing Moshe of being self-serving.  Korach thinks that having so many laws without good reason is how Moshe keeps control.  No one can argue with Moshe, no one can reason with him.  Korach gathers a mob, makes these accusations against Moshe, and Moshe has no choice but to stand up and defend himself, Aharon, and God's Torah as written down to the last detail.

When I read Parashat Korach, I'm less interested in vindicating Moshe than in understanding what Korach did wrong.  After all, never again do the Jews have a Moshe-like leader, who is both the religious and the national president.  We don't expect our rabbis or our Israeli prime ministers to be like Moshe.  So we can say that Korach's general point is good -- not just one person with a direct line to God, leading the rest of us.

But the Korach who cuts off discussion, who incites against a well-intentioned leader -- that doesn't work.  Korach isn't remembered for being a religious reformer or a religious philosopher.  He's remembered as a dangerous person.  

Later on, Pirkei Avot contrasts Korach's challenge with the debates of the sages.  Hillel and Shammai, who disagreed on all but a handful of matters, were peers with different personalities, but they hung in there with one another.  They left groups of students who continued to vie.  About their conflicts -- which were about everything! -- a heavenly voice once said, "Both these and these are the voice of the living God."  

Groups and philosophies, even religions, can welcome and grow from questions of the sort the commentaries attribute to Korach.  But we don't grow when we are tense, afraid, or threatened.  We freeze.  If Korach was trying to help the group grow, his manner ultimately was a setback for his own cause. 

Parashat Korach -- Docent, Cheerleader, Coach...Rabbi

Parashat Korach opens with a challenge to Moshe and Aharon, led by a Levite named Korach.  "You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the congregation of Adonai?"

On the face of it, the argument is pure politics.  It's about power and access (to God).

But in the midrash, Korach's challenge is described differently.  Korach is identified as a great sage!  But he has an interesting relationship with his own "rabbi", namely Moshe.  So for instance, Moshe teaches the community the concept of tzitzit.  On the corners of each garment, the Jews are to put fringes, and one thread is to be a particular kind of blue.  The tzitzit, Torah explains, are supposed to serve as a reminder to follow God rather than the temptations of the eyes.  (The blue thread eventually went out of practice because the dye was too expensive and it would have been out of reach of the average Jew.)

Upon learning the concept, Korach comes to Moshe and asks:  How about a tallit that is already entirely blue?  Wouldn't that be exempt from the requirement of tzitzit?  How about four threads with the special blue somewhere in the tallit?  Would that be good enough?

This gets Korach thinking.  From the last paragraph of the Shma to the first -- mezuzah.   A couple short passages from Torah at the entrance of my house.  Korach asks Moshe:  Suppose I have a house full of sacred books.  Would I really need a mezuzah on my front door?  How about if I keep a whole Torah scroll in there?  Surely that's at least as good as a little box with two little sections of Torah crammed in.

This midrash recasts the argument that begins the Torah reading.  It's about who gets to say what Torah means, what God's instructions are all about.  Does the rabbi or the religious leadership have a monopoly on that?  Doesn't the student or community member have a voice in how to apply Torah in her life?

I've been thinking about this midrash this week in light of my first anniversary next week with Temple Beth Abraham.  How should Torah be shared between a rabbi and a congregation?

I give Korach his due.  He is enthusiastic and wants to be empowered.  He goes past the level of mere obedience, toward real understanding.  He relates to the commandments in depth, in terms of their concepts and reasons.  Those are what Korach finds meaningful.  When he finds that meaning, Korach wants to go the extra mile to apply the concepts in his life.  He's ready to adapt Jewish ritual creatively if the traditions don't do it for him as received.

From this rabbi's perspective, that sounds like an ideal Jew!

According to the Torah, Moshe doesn't reject Korach's approach right away.  He falls on his face -- in awe, I would say, of Korach's commitment and the sense of holiness that he expresses.

It's true that Moshe is about halacha, the standard way of translating Jewish values into life.  But he's thinking about how to respond.

Korach reads Moshe's momentary silence differently.  As a lack of responsiveness.  So he immediately makes Moshe (and Aharon) the issue and attacks them, and it ends up being about egos rather than Torah.  Instead of creative tension -- between halacha and personal expression -- there is personal tension and conflict.  Their relationship devolves and dissolves, tragically.  To say the least -- Korach gets swallowed up by the earth.

From my reflections on this episode, I take away a few things about my role as a rabbi.

• One is to value and cheer Jewish commitment on the part of others, in any form.  My own example and choices will be traditional.  Shabbat, prayer, kashrut, holidays (not to mention Torah study and acts of chesed).  But that doesn't prevent me from being responsive when someone comes, like Korach in the midrash, with a different Jewish take on an idea or a practice.  I'm far more worried about Jewish apathy.  If someone has a different idea about prayer or Shabbat, for instance, I'm excited that they want to share it.  I'm eager to talk about how you would integrate that into your life, or how we could explore it in the shul.

• One important role I have is to be a docent of Jewish experiences and teachings.  I heard this metaphor at a conference and I love it.  Judaism has always been a vast gallery (not a museum!).  A docent makes selections.  What to present from among the infinite beauties of the collection.  So through my sermons, the courses I choose to teach, the links I post, etc. I can point you where I think there is something particularly valuable for you to think about or do.  Korach could think his thoughts about mezuzah and tzitzit because Moshe pointed those areas out, showed him where to look and find riches.

• In educational work, the phrase is "be a guide on the side, not (only) a sage on the stage."  A guide or coach is accepting, supporting, encouraging, empowering.  Also challenging and questioning, in the context of a real relationship.  Korach came with ideas, but didn't let Moshe come back with questions.  "Life coach" sounds a bit grandiose.  "Personal Jewish trainer", some call it.  I hope my teaching, on the stage or in smaller settings, is not only informative but helps you grow.

• Finally, it's not about me, it's about Torah and mitzvot.  Korach and Moshe ended up locked in a battle of egos, and no good can come of that.  In the end what I do is measured entirely by the mitzvot we collectively perform as a community.  Whatever I contribute to that, however I can, that's what matters.

As I write, I see that I have defined some guidance not only for a rabbi, but a congregant as well.  For the readers in and around Temple Beth Abraham, thank you for a good year.  May we learn and do much together in the year that's beginning.