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The Eye Inside the Eye

This was my D'var Torah for Parashat Re'eh last Shabbat, August 12, 2023.

Two friends encounter each other late at night near the town square. It’s a classic small New England town, gazebo in the center, and it’s a particularly clear night, the new moon. The one finds the other kneeling down next to a street light looking around at the sidewalk.

“Hi! What are you doing?”

“I was here earlier and I lost my ring, so I’m looking for it.”

“Where do you think you lost it?”

“I’m pretty sure over there by the gazebo,” says the first one, pointing across the street at the village green.

“So why are you looking over here?”

“Oh! Because the light is better.”

This is what it’s like for us often, when we’re looking for something we need or we’ve lost. It’s hard to get ourselves to look in certain places, hard or scary, and often it’s easier to stay where we already know how to see the things we’ve learned how to see.

Which is why the opening to our parasha is so surprising. Re’eh Look -- I am giving in front of you today a blessing and curse. Re’eh, anochi notayn lifnaychem hayom b’rachah uk’lalah.

When the Torah wants to get our attention, it almost never says Re’eh, “see” -- it says:  Sh’ma! Listen. It’s not “Look O Israel Adonai is your God...”; it’s Sh’ma Yisrael.

Seeing and hearing are two very different metaphors, and I think the metaphors are meaningful even for those of us whose physical sight or hearing is not perfect.

Seeing is the most problematic of our senses. We can only look in one direction at a time, and even those of us with good peripheral vision miss things a bit to the side. When we’re looking for something particular, we miss other things even right in front of us -- like the study where the subjects were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and count passes between players, and completely missed the gorilla walking across the court.

We have eyelids that we can deliberately close. We “see with our own lens.” We talk about “looking the other way”, in order to avoid seeing a person who needs us or a wrong we know is being done. We can use our mind to override the inputs that our eyes might want to give us. And some of the al-chets on Yom Kippur, the list of wrongs, are about our eyes -- sikkur ayin, leering at someone; aynaim ramot, looking down on someone.

And seeing is different from hearing because what we perceive through our eyes alone is always on the surface. Seeing often stands for judging a book by its cover.

Or looking in a certain direction is just hard, or painful. This week, it’s hard to look at certain places in this Sanctuary where someone is so palpably missing.

So seeing is imperfect and it’s difficult -- and it’s easier just to look in the light.

Hearing is a different metaphor. Our ears hear a voice from deep within someone trying to say something real, or a cry from the heart. We can try to plug our ears, but we can’t close them at all the way we can with our eyes. There’s no real way to turn your head in a direction so you don’t hear. 

Sounds force us to pay attention even when we try not to -- if the gorilla made a sound, you couldn’t help yourself from noticing that it’s different from the dribble of a basketball.

So it’s not surprising that in the Sh’ma itself -- the prayer that opens with “Hear O Israel”-- the Torah tells us to look at our tzitzit so our eyes have something mitzvah-centered to focus on, v’lo tatura acharei l’vavchem, v’acharei eineichem asher atem zonim achareihem -- and don’t go straying after your mind, and after your eyes which you go lusting after!

Moshe in our parasha talks about doing the right thing in the future as the opposite of the desert, where “everyone does anything that seems right in their own eyes” -- ish kol hayashar b’einav. Maybe it goes all the way back to Gan Eden, to Chava taking a look at that fruit.

Sh’ma is a spiritual paradigm for us -- for being responsive to others, letting ourselves be drawn out toward them even when we’re not prepared, getting to what’s beneath the surface in the people around us. And it’s a paradigm for responding even to our own inner voice, our own prayers and our cries. Sh’ma is all over this parasha, it’s one of the most important words in the whole book of D’varim.

So why does our parasha say: Re’eh. See this important thing I want you to have, a blessing as well as a curse to stay away from. And by the way just for good measure, Moshe messes with the people: See what I am putting in front of you today, which is that in a few weeks I’m going to show it to you on some mountains across the river which you literally can’t see from where you are now.

Rabbi Josh Feigelson teaches: Nonetheless, Moshe uses the language of Re’eh instead of Sh’ma here, because we don’t have the option to replace seeing with hearing. What we can do is to make our seeing more like our hearing.

In our parasha, human eyes are generally not a good metaphor -- but Divine eyes are. Kira Sirote points out a unique phrase in the Bible that appears once in the Torah and a couple places in the prophets, and the phrase is ayin b'ayin, literally an eye in an eye.

It’s used once in the Torah for the most famous law about the eye, an eye for an eye (and there’s a nugget about that you can ask me later how it connects). But in the prophets, Kira notes, the phrase talks about a moment when the regular human eye becomes a prophet’s eye. “How beautiful on the mountains are the legs of the one who announces redemption, making sounds of peace... Your lookouts will raise their voices because eye in eye they will see the Divine returning, ayin b’ayin yir’u b’shuv Adonai"! (Isaiah 52:7-8)

Imagine seeing something as simple as another person’s leg, just a person walking, and immediately perceiving from somewhere deeper that redemption is almost here, that peace is possible within yourself or in the world -- that reunions are possible with people, and our own souls and dreams, and even I pray with loved ones across the boundary between this world and the next.

Imagine if there was an eye inside your eye, whose default was to wonder what depth or what feeling is beneath the surface of any person you see. 

A kind of spiritual infrared, an eye that perceives more wavelengths when it sees, that almost hears when it looks.

An eye looking at tzitzit not to avoid being distracted, but to follow them out past their ends in each of the four directions because there is too much here not to miss.

An eye that closes long enough to replenish itself to see more, or to leave time to see dreams.

An eye inside your eye that saw when another person was looking over here because it’s hard for them right now to look over there.

That I believe was Chava’s eye in Gan Eden, which saw that the fruit was good and nourishing, and beautiful, and worth thinking about more, before she took it and shared it.

Two friends encounter each other, and one of them has lost something. The other asks, “Why are you looking over here,” and the first one says, “Because here the light is better.”

And the friend says, “Maybe we can look there together.” Or: “Would it help if I stayed around here while you went over there.” Or: “I’ll be here again if you want to look tomorrow.”

As we look ahead to the moonless night later this week that marks the month of Elul, that leads us to the new year -- may our seeing be as good as our hearing. May we help each other make our way to the mountains we can’t yet see where announcers are calling us; help each other see the blessings in the places that are harder to search. And may we all see each other with the eye inside our eye.

Shabbat Shalom!

My American Tale -- What's Yours? (Yaz on Masada)

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Parshiyyot Chukkat-Balak 5783, July 1, 2023.

This is a picture of me at the age of 17 on top of Masada in Israel, wearing a baseball cap that says “YAZ”. I remember asking someone to take this picture, and to get me and the Yaz cap and as much of Masada behind me in the phot as possible – hence the odd composition. I was on my end-of-11th-grade trip with the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program, and getting this picture was significant to me at the time for reasons I cannot remember.

But now, this photo stands for a whole story of who I am, which I focus on especially on the Shabbat leading into Independence Day and the first Shabbat that my daughter is in Israel for her very first time.

The Yaz hat I had for about nine months, and I wore it a lot even before Israel. I got the cap I think on the bridge between Kenmore Square and Fenway Park in probably August of 1983, when our family went to a Red Sox game during Carl Yastrzemski’s final season.  Yaz merch was everywhere. It’s a white kind-of-painter’s cap and by the first couple weeks of Israel it had become a bit discolored under the rim with sweat from our hikes. The cap came to an untimely end a week or two after Masada when our group was on a long bus ride and I was in front telling jokes on the microphone (we used to trade that off during our tiyyulum, our excursions from our base) and my friend Judy became carsick and needed to stop the bus and run off. I got out of her way, but didn’t get the last bit of the very top of my head out of the way quite in time. End of Yaz cap!

Masada is half of what’s important about the Yaz cap. Being at Fenway during Yaz’s last season is the other important part. When I was 1 to 3 years old, before I can even remember, my family lived in Rockport, Massachusetts. My father had recently completed his medical training and wanted to practice in a small town, and my mother did not want to live in a small town -- so they made a deal that they would try it for two years. Dad found a practice looking to add two young doctors in Gloucester. We lived there, but after the two years, Mom called it off.

What I do remember, for as long as I can remember anything, is that every year after the experiment ended we would make a summer trip out East -- a week in Utica with Dad’s family (Utica, a/k/a the Garden of Eden and the founding spot of all civilization, in Savett family lore), and a week on Cape Ann on the ocean down the street from where we had lived. And one of those days was always spent in Boston, often split between visiting our cousins and doing something in the city. Over the years growing up, we went to the Bunker Hill monument, the Freedom Trail, Lexington and Concord, the USS Constitution, Faneuil Hall, the North End. I grew up when Schoolhouse Rock was new on Saturday morning TV, so none of this Hamilton-The-Revolution’s-Happening-In-New-York garbage -- it was the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock and the Boston Tea Party.  I was fascinated for a time with how it wasn’t Paul Revere or William Dawes but Col. Prescott who actually rode out to announce the “British are coming!” I did not like reading Thoreau and Emerson in high school – but I did love that I had actually been to Walden Pond. The Boston history and landscape seeped into me, along with the ocean in Rockport, as a second home and as a central part of my own story and history.

So I wore the Yaz hat to connect me to my Boston, American-history roots, and I wore it on Masada as we sat as a group and debated as though we were the Zealots making our last stand against the Romans -- should we resist or flee or take our own lives. I wore it as we hollered into the canyon as Israeli soldiers do, shenit m’tzadah lo tipol, Masada will never fall again. I added a few weeks after my HSI trip ended to stay in Israel, and the moment I landed back in the U.S. I started to plan for getting back to Israel in college.

I wrote about that day on Masada for my college essays-- it was in a way both Yaz and Masada who got me back to Boston, to Harvard. I loved living there, walking the streets of our colonial founders each day with the signs of how many hundreds of years ago a particular path or road was first laid down. In the middle of that time I did fulfill my intention of going back to Israel (without the Yaz cap). Yet on the heels of a year when I was convinced I would make aliyah, I returned to Boston and found myself surprised to discover that I was deep down an American and I couldn’t give that up, and I didn’t want to.

And so, about a century after my great-grandparents came to the U.S. and Canada in flight from the czar, and had become Americans as my family had become Russian or Lithuanian or Ukrainian or Latvian some generations earlier for the very same kind of reason after living somewhere else -- I made a choice to be American.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. The Declaration begins in this passage, and in the famous passage that follows, by announcing the choice of the people of this country to become Americans and not British. And at the same time words like necessary and impel and duty suffuse the opening lines as if to say -- we choose to become who we had no choice to become. That is how it felt to me and how it feels to me, as I think about choosing to be American and feeling compelled to make that choice.

And it’s important to declare the causes of that publicly, for me and for others of us who are American Jews. And I find myself this time of year when I have a kid in Israel and so many people I know are spending time there -- I find myself feeling like a “decent respect to the opinions of Jews and Zionists” requires me to declare why here and not there. Respect to Jews and Zionists here, in this room and this community as well as in Israel. For me, living in the land of Yaz is something I can’t separate from the part of me tied to the land of Masada, and my American-ness and my Zionism are so tightly connected.

Last fall when I was in Jerusalem, I brought with me the journal I kept from my year in college there. I read to myself the statements of the me who was declaring why he couldn’t live here and had to live there, and the values I thought were at stake in becoming an Israeli Conservative Jew in the religious peace movement. I took a walk with myself and talked to myself in Hebrew about whether I could have become anything like me, with whatever strength of moral character and whatever leadership it has taken decades to develop, if I had made aliyah. Who can know.

But I think not. I have spoken to you on many Shabbatot before Independence Day about this and written about it -- you can check out the USA page on rabbijon.net so I’ll just summarize it here. I discovered, back in the fall of 1988, that I was American to the core, that American ideas and the paradigm questions and American politics were all I wanted to think about and talk about and study. And it was not only my Boston marination, but my Judaism and my Torah that were making me American.

To quote and paraphrase myself from last year and a few years before:

Jewish experience and Torah were my path to America. In my mind, this is how I think about freedom and individuality: Thomas Jefferson with his self-evident truths speaks to Moshe demanding that Pharaoh let our people go. Henry David Thoreau, who would not compromise one bit with conventional society and went off to live in the woods all on his own, who went to jail rather than pay taxes that would help fund what he thought was an unjust war – Thoreau is talking to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who in the Talmud is banished by his colleagues after he couldn’t persuade the rest of the rabbis to set the law his way, even when God sent miracles and a voice down from Heaven to back him up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote the classic essay on individualism, speaks with Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, who wrote about sh’lichut, one’s unique individual mission in the world.

I think about how freedom is the basic, precious truth we learn from the Exodus, and how much more precious that freedom is than what John Locke or Thomas Jefferson ever wrote about. How Torah freedom compels us to stop at Mt. Sinai and enter into covenant, and what that required stop teaches about the kinds of covenants free people in America are able to make or ought to make.

I think about how freedom is also the fundamental challenge to our humanity, even the most basic idol. It was free people after all who chose the make a golden calf and worship a thing made of gold. It was free people who imagined themselves trading the challenge of rising spiritually for the fleshpots back in Egypt and the thought of a life free of difficult decisions and moral agency. The Torah of freedom talks to the challenges today, of freedom that opens up to mere materialism, to unrestrained competition in the economy and social competitiveness. A freedom that can make everything a commodity, including ourselves — allowing our interests, our time, even our unique talents to be valued in our own eyes by what they are worth in the short term to others. All of which can disconnect us from the larger and longer stories we are part of, which we author and co-author.

I think about how the long Jewish practice of tzedakah as more like taxation than charity wants us to understand the blessing we say first thing in the morning, praising the Divine she’asanu b’nai chorin, who has made us free people. I think about how Jews have been stewards of both freedom and self-government for more than three thousand years, carrying the Exodus story and wearing it around our bodies in tallit and tefillin, running even our medieval communities in a principled self-government. How does the person who wakes up into freedom also wake up into responsibility? I want to know how freedom and responsibility are linked — in talmudic detail and American detail, in philosophical detail and political detail.

It’s because of America that Torah has had to speak to issues beyond our group and its wellbeing, and become a wisdom for this nation and the world. American has brought Torah to answer questions about totalitarianism, the nuclear age, technology, racism, human rights, compelling Jewish thinkers to explore the ethics of power and the limits of human potential. And because of America, Jews export that wisdom back to Israel, whether it’s to the Conservative and Reform communities, the religious Zionist movement, or many creative secular and non-governmental initiatives and communities and think tanks. There could be no democratic, modern Israel without the Jews and Judaisms of America.

Some look at the phrase “Jewish American,” or “American Jew,” and see a space between the words, a yawning gap between two aspects of consciousness. Or they see a dash like a minus sign, where one word or maybe both take something away from the other. I see rather a chemical bond. Not ionic – charged, each trying to take something from the other. But covalent. A sign of the energy that flows uniquely when two entities are bound together, and something new emerges that is different from either atom on its own.

The hyphen in “Jewish-American” is one of the most exciting things I know. The identity, and the specific moral dilemmas that come with the hyphen -- I wouldn’t trade that hyphen for anything.

That’s why I chose to be American, and why I had to make that choice, once thirty-five years ago and over and over again since.

So that’s my story, my journal of ideas and my photo albums. The picture I showed you might not look like it has anything to do with this American tale. But the photo on top of Masada of me wearing a cap of the great Carl Yastrzemski is one photo of an overall equilibrium of how Jewish history and American history flow toward me and within. We don’t share these stories and declarations enough of why we are here and why we are us, the way we share stories of Zionism and persecution. Last Rosh Hashanah I charged us to look ahead to this year and the coming two years after, and to make a Jewish leap of faith in American democracy. Whether right now the America you experience is more like the crises of leadership and national direction in our first parasha today, Chukkat. Or whether like in the second, Balak, you’re reassuring yourself that from ten thousand feet and from the outside, we are a beacon still or at least okay.

So on this July 4th, tell your story, at least to yourself. If you have chosen to be here, be proud you made that choice -- that you have chosen this place with the moral questions that come with this place and time. Baruch she-asanu b’nai chorin -- thank you, to the One who has made us all free in this place and this time.

The Torah Is Not a TED Talk

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

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

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

Are they all kind of the same?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So mah zot, what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Daughters of Tzelophechad, Less Pinchas: How to Stand Up Today

This is my D'var Torah from last Shabbat, Saturday, July 23, 2022.

“It’s not a movement if everyone’s just sitting.”

That’s a line from a conversation between then-Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her 15-year-old daughter Jane in the film On the Basis of Sex, which is partly the story of how RBG, zichrona livracha, came to win her first major court case for gender equality. Professor Ginsburg has just come back from teaching her newest law students, after walking through an anti-war demonstration to get into the building. Her own students in class are passionate and impatient, and it throws her for a loop. At home that night, RGB brings up a note with her name that Jane forged so she could skip school and attend a Gloria Steinem rally. They argue about which strategy is necessary for women’s equality -- the legal process or the rallies -- and Jane gets in her zinger: “It’s not a movement if everyone’s just sitting. That’s a support group.”

I think about this argument when I read the story of the five daughters of Tzelophechad in the Torah portion Pinchas. Machlah, Choglah, Milkah, Noah and Tirtzah are sisters who are absolutely the spiritual ancestors of Justice Ginsburg. She a modern icon of equality and the exemplar of a certain approach to change, and the five Torah sisters also icons especially in our age -- but there is a lot of arguing these days against the approach they have in common. So I want to explore how the Torah and the midrash understand the daughters, the B’not Tzelophechad, and to argue why we need more of their approach even though there is truth within Jane Ginsburg’s critique.

The story of B’not Tzelophechad (Numbers 27) is that their father had died in the desert, before the assignment of future land holdings in the Land of Israel to every family. They have no brothers, and according to the law communicated so far, their immediate family will not have any holding of land when the arrive shortly. So the sisters approach Moshe, El’azar the high priest and all the tribal leaders, in front of the whole community.

Vatikrav’na Bnot Tzelophechad -- they “came close.” Which I think we can understand this way: their strategy was to shrink the distance between themselves, and the judges and the men of the community. The best way to read the story in the Torah might be to have in mind the first cases that RGB pressed as a lawyer. Such as the one at the climax of the film, Moritz vs. Commissioner, argued in federal appeals court. There she challenged the constitutionality of a law that denied an unmarried man a tax deduction for the expenses related to care of his mother, even though a woman would have qualified.

So too when the sisters speak, they center not themselves as women but their father. They say avinu, “our father”, three times. Only at the end of their speech do they say give us, t’nu lanu achuza, give us something to hold among our father’s brothers. They mention that their father was not like the other men who had in fact been enemies of Moshe and El’azar’s father Aharon, part of the insurrection against them led by Korach. Those men deserved to be punished by not getting a holding in the land -- but not avinu, our father.

That’s exactly how Attorney Ginsburg started building a set of precedents striking down laws on the basis of sex discrimination: with a series of cases centering men. B’not Tzelophechad, like RBG, did not call into question the whole patriarchical system of property and inheritance. They found a place where the authorities might agree on their own terms to a ruling that benefits women.

And indeed, the five sisters win their case when Moshe takes it to his court of appeals, to God -- and the law is taught that in a case where there is no son then daughters shall inherit. We might say dayenu just at the fact that God seems to respond to this argument from women. That’s suprising all by itself, no? And not only that, but the first words of God’s response put B’not Tzelophechad in the center, and repeat their request as a court order -- naton titen lahem, “give, yes give to them” -- and “their father” isn’t mentioned until last part of that sentence.

But the midrash goes even further in explaining the process of legal response that happens here.

When God hears the sisters’ case, God’s first words to Moshe are: Ken B’not Tzelophechad dovrot. “The daughters are speaking right.” Also ken means “thus”, as in: the daughters of Tzelophechad are speaking the exact words I God have been instruction you Moshe to say already.

In this interpretation, God is saying: Moshe, you have been teaching the people the law of inheritance but you have left a gap. I have told you about it, but you have had a blind spot. Not me, not I the Divine -- but you are not seeing it. Even I haven’t been able to teach you yet how a law about families without sons is necessary. So now here are five real people -- do you see them? Do you get now the situation I’ve been telling you about?

So according to the midrash, God’s law isn’t being changed at all. It’s just being unblocked. Moshe finally is able to teach this part of the law to the people. And this is what makes him realize that it’s time to get to planning better for his retirement and succession. The rest of the chapter is Moshe saying to God: Let’s find a new leader who can lead around these matters better than I have been doing.

It is a compelling case of influencing leadership from the grassroots for social change. Ken B’not Tzelophechad dovrot.They speak ken -- they speak honesty, with integrity, with respect. They say ken to the men in charge -- ken means “yes.” Yes to the basic framework of Torah. The sisters have a better understanding of what God wants than even Moshe does.

That’s famously how RBG did it, particularly at the start of her career. She won more than one case on behalf of men, and got male judges to say that legal equality between the sexes was not new but had been in the Constitution all along.  Justice Ginsburg spoke again and again about what we might call the vatik’rav’na principle, shrinking the distance, and the ken principle, not losing your integrity in the process. And as for what her daughter Jane said in the film, the Torah describes B’not Tzelophechad as va’taamod’na, they stood up. They absolutely did, and this is how they did it.

I hope so far I’ve made a good case for B’not Tzelophechad. But Jane Ginsberg age 15 and plenty of adult critics still have what to say back. Of course a group of male rabbis in the Talmud 1500-plus years ago are going to approve of this soft-spoken, gradual approach from women. And what did B’not Tzelophechad really achieve -- one fix for one specific case. If they had been five sisters with one brother, they would have gotten nothing. If only Miryam had been alive still, maybe she would have spoken more fundamentally about the bias in the whole system. We need an approach based on wider questioning and more pressure and more discomfort.

Well our own Torah reading presents a version of that approach a couple chapters earlier. It’s Pinchas the son of El’azar the high priest, who was faced in real time with a terrible social injustice -- an insurrection against God in the form of a pagan orgy in concert with the people of Moav. People were about to start dying in the conflict, or some say people were already dying. (I would make the case, though this is a whole other talk, that this particular pagan orgy is offensive to the Torah partly because of how degrading idolatry and its rituals were to women.)

Pinchas sees what is happening, the threat to lives and I will say to women. He sees a particular man and woman together and he skewers them through with a sword, killing them -- and the whole thing stops and the dying stops. And the Torah says that God rewards Pinchas and his descendents that they will be the major lineage for the kohanim (priests) from now on.

This is passion. The Torah has God say: Pinchas is passionate for the things I am passionate for. It’s something like what Professor RBG is afraid of according to the film. If a door is opened to violence as a response to social ills, who knows what happens after and who will be its victims down the road, as bystanders or targets. RGB was afraid that people who meet the violence of the current reality with mass protests that are too broad and too agressive, they might stop a plague but also unleash one.

And that’s why the tradition is skeptical about Pinchas, even though the Torah says he is devoted to the right things and he is rewarded. The midrash trends toward a real concern about him. So one interpretation is that Pinchas was allowed only one of these violent acts in his life. And that’s why the Torah labels his reward brit shalom, a covenant of peace. From now on, Pinchas has to include peacemaking in all of his future work and all of his future activism. Otherwise he will be too dangerous an actor, even for God, even against this kind of pagan insurrection that is a clear affront to the Ten Commandments.

(It’s clear to me that the story of B’not Tzelophechad is told the way it is intentionally as a contrast with Pinchas, through wordplay. Pinchas has passion, kin’ah, but B’not Tzelophechad have integrity and honesty, ken. The sisters draw close, vatikravna, in a twist on the root word karav that labels the offerings so associated with priests like Pinchas, the korbanot. Pinchas is unusually for the Torah introduced as not just son, but also grandson. B’not Tzelophechad are given three more generations of lineage than that. Pinchas jumps up -- vayakom -- but B’not Tzelophechad stand and stand together, vata’amod’na.)

In the past, I might have said that the Torah is giving us two models of activism in B’not Tzelophechad and Pinchas, and we need them at different times or they suit different people. A time for passionate and force and absolutism, and a time for up close engagement and gradualism. A time for Gloria Steinem and a time for RBG.

But today I say: Enough with adding more Pinchas. There is too much of it among the bad folks and even the good folks. Our spiritual and political air is choked with aggressive speech, metaphors of force and fight and violence in our speech and writing, zingers far worse than Jane Ginsburg’s to her mother. Not to mention actual violence.

It can feel so good to tell off, to mock and insult. Enough people do that, in direct speech and on social media. They’re on the wrong side but they’re on your side too. It’s more than covered, the aggressive, the Pinchas. It’s not just masculine either. It’s probaby not possible to change all the Pinchas-style behavior once it’s begun.

But we need more people to learn the ways of Bnot Tzelophechad. I don’t mean to be content with only one change. Or to decenter the people who should be at the center. Jane Ginsburg and the other critics are so right about that. But I don’t think the most important thing about Bnot Tzelophechad, or RBG, was the gradualism, the strategy. It’s believing that there is power that comes with ken dovrot, with speaking correctly and out of integrity, with figuring how to communicate what is eternally true and you know it when that’s still new to someone else. There is power in vatikrav’na, to coming toward someone else’s perspective -- it challenges them but not in a threatening way. It challenges in a charged but still inviting way. There is power in believing that the changes that are needed are ken -- they are already here in the Divine image of the world, they are already more eternal and more permanent than anything else, they just haven’t been seen or spoken aloud enough.

These are powerful moves -- they just might not look as forceful from the outside and they sure are not violent. But powerful are B’not Tzelophechad whenever they appear in our world. Enduring change doesn’t come only from force or only from keen strategy. It comes from affecting how people see alternate leaders, the effect of their integrity. Respect for them transforms enough opponents and enough bystanders. It need not transform them all.

People acting like the five sisters might be a support group, and that isn’t a bad thing. But they are not sitting -- they are standing up together. Without them, without us acting like them, there can never be any movement at all.

The Moral, the Political, and the Partisan

This was the D'var Torah I gave for Parashat Behar on May 21, 2022.

Whenever people suggest that Judaism could be separate from politics, I think about this week’s parasha. The Shabbaton and the Yovel (the sabbatical and the jubilee) – these mitzvot are not just personal and spiritual teachings, about what you eat and what you share. They are about the whole system of property and ownership and power, and about our relationship to the land and the ecosystem that provides our food.

Every seven years, it doesn’t matter who owns a field and who has stored up food from the year before. Everyone has access to all of it, and everyone comes side by side to get food from the land and from private storehouses, and maybe they even eat together. Every fifty years, it doesn’t matter who has bought or sold a piece of land and who lives where. All families go back to the land holdings originally given to them in the time of Yehoshua when the people first came into the promised land. Wealthy families give back what they have bought legitimately; poor families are restored to what they needed to sell.

None of this happens individually or one at a time. Both the Shabbaton and the Yovel happen to everyone at the same time, in every region of the land. It is a social experience around property and wealth and power that is shared all at once, by society as a whole.

It occurred to me this week that Shabbaton and Yovel are far more radical than even the Exodus itself, the overturning of Pharaoh, which I have taught often and recently was unlike anything ancient people had ever thought previously about the value of human beings and about power. The Exodus was unprecedented – but it was in response to a situation of actual group suffering, imposed by a specific oppressor. Shabbaton and Yovel are not in response to any specific instance like that. They are pre-programmed responses to the regular things that happen in a society where people work the land and trade food and labor and exchange property. They are for a society that also has good ideas of tzedakah (giving) and chesed (caring acts), which individuals are responsible to carry out.

Without the need for painful suffering on a massive scale, or mobilizing against a tyrant, the Torah in Leviticus 25 mandates the overturning of our relations in the economy and society, making it all change visibly in the open every seven years and every fifty years.

Maybe the end of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is the real bookend to the beginning of the Exodus. Exodus begins with our ancestors as slaves building cities for Pharaoh’s regime, and it ends with them building the opposite -- the Mishkan, a spiritual central for the regime of Hashem. “Let them make me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among them,” says Exodus. But now, nearly at the end of Leviticus, people imagine building a system for recalibrating their society on the go, making sure no one can permanently accumulate Pharaoh-like wealth and power over the others. “For to Me the Children of Israel are servants,” says the end of Leviticus – and the Talmudic rabbis explain: For to Me they are servants and not servants to other servants, not slaves to each other. Shabbaton and Yovel are the social and political inoculation against more Pharaohs, even a Pharoah among the Israelites themselves.

Political this is – and yet, it’s not. I’m using the word politics a bit fast and loose, because Parashat Behar does not show us politics in action. We know the sabbatical year was implemented in ancient times and still is today, and in Roman times and modern times there has been politics around it. We have no idea whether the jubilee really ever happened exactly the way the Torah stipulates. Our parasha describes an ideal society, and we can think about the moral and spiritual principles the parasha teaches. But the actual outcome could only be ensured through political activity.

Saying the Torah has social visions doesn’t itself prove that there is a Torah of politics and political action. I love to bask in Shabbaton and Yovel, any excuse to do that is dayenu – but I want to say more about the Torah of political action, which in a way only begins with things our parasha.

I want to use a distinction proposed by Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, though I will take it in a slightly different direction. You may be starting to recognize the Hartman name and Yehuda’s name in particular from many of my d’rashot. For the past few years Yehuda has been teaching around the idea that American Jews ought to distinguish in our civic activity between the moral, the political, and the partisan. Briefly, Yehuda defines the moral as our core social principles; the political as our collaborative strategy and work in society; and the partisan as the activity we do typically within either of the two teams, the Democrats and the Republicans. Yehuda argues that it is bad for America and particularly bad for Jews when we don’t distinguish between the moral, the political, and the partisan.

The moral refers to the principles and values we hold, which generate our ideas about the good society, and the actions we actually perform toward other people and in groups of people we know. The moral is also about working on ourselves as people in society. It’s about being honest about our own individual gifts and our own individual limits. It’s about asking ourselves why we care about this more than that, looking at our own inconsistencies and hypocrisies. The moral is where we make judgments, often about others though it should also be toward ourselves. The moral is about how we do teshuvah around our action and inaction in society -- how we hold ourselves accountable and recalibrate ourselves, as well as the smaller groups within which we talk about politics or we organize. The moral dimension is very spiritual and obviously very Jewish.

The political – I want to use the word in its Aristotelian sense. Not “yeech, politics”, but the elevating work of defining and creating the polis, the best society that is both aligned with our moral values and also cultivates those values at the same time. We are only real in society, and political activity enlarges us and elevates us and completes us. The political brings people together in purposeful work, helps us each discover our gifts and how they fit together, and shows us new things to admire about each other.

The political magnifies our power to achieve visions, on a scale not possible just by small group projects or even by giving tzedakah. The political is how we find the power to bring a society into alignment with the ideals of Shabbaton and Yovel.

The political is also the level where groups ought to try to understand themselves, and look at their own strengths and weaknesses and hypocrisies. Groups need to do teshuvah as well. This is spiritual work and Jewish work, and indeed the Torah presents the Jewish people as a group trying to learn the detailed social covenant from Mt. Sinai, to internalize it and build a society based on it in the promised land.

Finally, the partisan is working for the party and candidates we believe right now can bring our moral and political visions into being. It’s mobilizing behind the specific leaders and groups we believe can do that. When we use the word “politics”, Yehuda points out, what we usually mean is the partisan – picking sides, zero sum, experiencing outrage and supporting one group and being angry at the other.

The moral, the political, the partisan.

Yehuda argues that we have too often collapsed the distinction between the moral, the political, and the partisan. If all we let ourselves look at is the partisan, that becomes our good and evil and our daily religion. We will lose important parts of our moral compass to the extent that most of what we can think about or desire is that our group or favored leader wins. We need the moral as something separate, Yehuda says – and I would add (in my name if not his) that we need the political as distinct from the partisan as well.

People who object to having politics in Judaism say: Stick to the moral. But the moral alone is too general. Saying Tzelem Elohim (the image of God) does not tell us why we should care about Ukraine in this way and Afghanistan in the same way or perhaps a different way. Talking about Shabbaton and Yovel does not tell us what the tax rates should be on income or wealth. Moral principles frame the questions and suggest directions but don’t give us answers. From the moral we need those directions, and we need to circle back to the moral principles when we are doing political thinking and political work.

We need also all the processes of teshuvah – assessing ourselves and what we are bringing to political action, checking our hypocrisy and self-righteousness, making sure we are rooted more in love for those we responsible for or allies for, and less rooted just in hate of those we are against.

Too much of religious politics is the partisan alone, and that is bad for religion generally and terrible for Jews. The partisan is where work is done and things are accomplished. But it is a realm of constant fighting; it cultivates hate and anger and fear. It discourages nuance and punishes ambiguity, and it asks us to hold up as absolutely true things that are only partially true. When we equate all politics with the partisan, the losses that come inevitably in the partisan make all political work angry and fearful and dispiriting and draining, even when we have won something for the time being.

Yehuda says we rent out our moral sense too often to the partisan; and since the partisan is win-lose, our moral judgments become binary as well. Our fellow citizens are good or evil. Our fellow Jews. Yehuda quotes a Pew study that says as much bias as there is, explicit and implicit, against people of other backgrounds, whether religious or ethnic or racial or educational or economic, the most widespread hate in America is toward people of different partisan affiliation.

The moral is crucial; the partisan is where the rubber hits the road. But neither the moral that supplies our core principles, nor the partisan where we accomplish our goals or we lose -- neither of these should be the center. At the center should be the political. At the center should be the political for each of us spiritually, and for us as a Jewish community learning and acting and reflecting.

The political is where we ask how our principles translate, where we ask it again and again, even while we are strategizing and even as we are executing our strategies. We ask whether we are being true to our principles or just think we are.

The political is where we take time from the practical battles to appreciate and admire others: the leaders who motivate us, the teachers and writers who educate us, the people who bring the signs and the food and crunch the numbers. It’s where we see ourselves in a good light as part of such an organism.

The political is where we try to understand those we are fighting against -- for the principles they might have, for the people they are loving and standing up for. These are aspects of our opponents we might learn from or at least learn to answer, if only to make our own moral arguments stronger.

The political isn’t something you do by yourself. It’s not sermons and it’s not Facebook posts, unless they invite conversation. The political is together, and sometimes it even can be done together by partisans opposing each other. It’s what I hope tomorrow’s panel on reproductive rights will model. It’s what groups a lot of you have been involved in doing in your own political work in the local community.

It's not enough for the synagogue to do the moral, and of course we should not be doing the partisan. It’s not good for religion to stay in a corner, or to make itself indistinguishable from a political party. But the political yes, sometimes all together as us and sometimes when we lift up one issue or sometimes when we’re in a learning posture about ourselves as people engaged in the political. That is very much what a religious group should do, and what Jews should do together.

And in that sense, maybe Shabbaton and Yovel are political. Apart from the practical sharing and resetting around food and property, they were ways to get people talking about the world of years 1-6 and years 1-49, and maybe even working on that politically. Or so I fantasize. Our next half year in this country is going to be intensely partisan, and that will be hard. Let’s do our part to elevate the time, by making it more political as well.

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.

Learning From Leviticus Again

This is the D'var Torah I gave in the synagogue on Saturday morning, March 12, for Parashat Vayikra.

Most years I trot out the T-shirt about the Jewish calendar and the baseball calendar in March. You know it’s a kind of new year when spring training begins for major league baseball, usually around Purim, and it’s fortuitous that this was the week that the owners and players resolved their labor dispute and opened spring training! This Shabbat marks an actual new year in the Jewish calendar too. In Torah time, the start of the book of Vayikra picks up where Shmot left off, on the first of Nissan in the year after the Exodus. And as it happens, Parashat Vayikra was our first pandemic parasha two years ago, the first Shabbat when it was just me and the Sefer Torah on the bimah and everyone else on a screen.

I looked back on what I said two years ago on that Shabbat, and one year ago when this parasha came around, the first parasha of the second year when the vaccines were rolling out gradually and before Delta and Omicron. Vayikra is not an easy parasha or an easy book (i.e. Leviticus as a whole), but it has opened to me in new ways these past two years.

I have been struck by the wide, blank space in the scroll between the end of Sefer Shmot (Exodus) and the start of Sefer Vayikra (Leviticus). I’ve been struck by the cloud that engulfs the mishkan, the sanctuary -- which last week looked like the certain presence of the Divine Shechinah, the palpable close presence, and this week Moshe doesn’t quite know. I’ve been struck by the tiny letter alef at the end of the first word of the book, and by the offerings the Torah describes, the korbanot, which are translated as sacrifices but come from the word for closeness and coming close.

A blank space, a cloud, a small quite letter, a list of types of closeness-offerings.

The blank is a pause between a year of revolution and tumult and reconstituting, and recovering and repurposing things to make something sacred in the center -- and the next year.

The cloud around the mishkan is somehow both a good sign and a question mark. Last year I called it "cloudy with a chance of Torah." Is there some more Torah to guide us right now? Are we ready to go get it and hear it and use it?

The small letter alef, silent by itself but the letter that could unleash the flow of all the letters, all the names of the Divine and all the good words that can flow out into the world. The alef is the first letter of Anochi, I -- the I of I am Yah your God who brought you out of slavery, the sound of that voice speaking specially to each of us in the way we need;  the I of I, of each of us as agents in the world, fully capable of being active builders and fixers, mirroring the Divine Anochi.

What if that letter is too small, what I am teetering on disappearing, what if the Divine voice is. The small alef yearns to be reinflated and reconstituted -- and it is as the book of Vayikra unfolds.

How does that happen? Not all at once. It happens through the korbanot, the closeness-offerings.

In the entire book of Leviticus, the people move not an inch forward toward the promised land, after they moved so far out of Mitzrayim (Egypt) in the book of Shmot (Exodus). That drives me a crazy, I said a year ago. Come on, if there were ever a need to see a promised land and get to a new place it’s now. If there were ever a need to take this Torah out for a spin, it’s now!

But although the people don’t move forward, they do move. They move by means of the specific korbanot. They move toward the center, and back to their tents. They move toward their leaders, and away, and toward each other, and toward those giving birth or those who have died. They reconstitute the alef and reinflate it by moving in specific ways.

The offerings we learn about are the olah, the completely burnt offering -- reflecting the feeling of burnout or the frustration toward things we wish we could destroy completely. The todah, the gratitude offering. The shlamim, the offering of wellbeing and wholeness. The chattat, the offering in response to falling short, to guilt and shame -- one person, a leader, a whole community.

These are the basic emotions of the start of the new year both in the Torah and for us, after a year of tumult and revolution and making new things out of our things

Vayikra says you can’t get to the promised land without perceiving these emotional responses, and moving in response to them. You have to use them as occasions to learn how not just to go somewhere new, but to get closer to each other and close to the center that holds us together. To make the cloud less cloudy and more Torah.

So I come close today to you and to this sanctuary with my own olah offering, reflecting on the ways I have been burnt out for a time during this past year and two years. I come close today with my todah, my gratitude offering, close to you and to this sanctuary of many sanctuaries. I am thankful for you who have come, today or many times, to hear my prayers and acknowledge them even when we’re not in the same room, to sing with me even when I can’t hear you or hardly can. Thankful to my family, for staying together and being good to each other -- and to the Divine for the chen, the unearned grace of having that in in my life. Thankful to everyone who has kept this community going, creatively and with whatever gift you could use to build a sacred place in a new way and specifically by your chesed, your caring for someone. Thankful to colleagues and lay leaders in the Temple, and the six clergy people in town I’ve come to rely on and have become closer to, who have helped me grow in my voice; thankful to rabbis and other colleagues around the country willing to become new partners.

I come close today, to you and to this sanctuary of many sanctuaries, with my shlamim, my offering of wellbeing, because I am overall well, and strong and energetic about my own life at age 55 and my sense of purpose.

And I do come today, close to you and to this sanctuary, with my chattat, with my offering of guilt and shame, for missing the mark and falling short. For not keeping connecting with enough of you who are here and others I don’t see. For not growing our chesed (compassionate work) from responding to needs in the moment to more people knowing who needs more connection. For not taking enough opportunities to teach the Torah of pikkuach nefesh, of what life and death decisions require of us. For not doing enough to bring the Torah I know to you, that would have made us feel more empowered in a topsy-turvy world, because Torah has always made people strong and capable when the world seems out of control. For not starting every meeting, no matter the topic, with how are you, and has anybody spoken to so-and-so lately. For trying these things but not sticking with them when others questioned their value. Those are my chattat offerings.

Each of us has an olah, a todah, a shlamim, and a chattat to bring close -- an offering around burned out, so thankful, wholeness, and guilt. We need to take a beat and articulate these, and bring them close to someone else or to this community. Bring them as you pray in Musaf, the part of the service that recalls and substitutes for the ancient korbanot (Temple offerings). That’s what we need so we can start reenlarging the alef, the I, and reconstituting our center, and removing the cloud that obscures the voice that wants to help us move toward our next promised land.

On this second pandemic anniversary, we begin a new cycle of Torah with Parashat Vayikra and this introduction to korban, to closeness. Which is what we crave. Not just a physical closeness but a real closeness, a communal closeness, more even than we had before. Two years ago at this time, the charge came in these words from Rabbi Yosef Kanevsky, which are as wise and important now as they ever were:

"...the very last thing we need right now is a mindset of mutual distancing. We actually need to be thinking in the exact opposite way. Every hand that we don't shake must become a phone call that we place. Every embrace that we avoid must become a verbal expression of warmth and concern. Every inch and every foot that we physically place between ourselves and another, must become a thought as to how we might be of help to that other, should the need arise..... Let's stay safe. And let's draw one another closer in a way that we've never done before.”

Shabbat Shalom.

 

How to Start Another Pandemic Year: Learning from Leviticus

This is the D'var Torah I gave a year ago in our Torah reading cycle, March 20, 2021. It was by the Torah reading calendar the first reading of the second year of pandemic restrictions. I read it now and so much of how I'm reflecting is the same.

When we last checked in at the mishkan (the portable desert sanctuary), it was one year to the day after the first instructions had been given, way back in Egypt, for the meal of the night before the day of leaving. The last night of slavery, the night of the last and deadliest plague. Now one year later, next to Mt. Sinai, the people saw all these things they had brought in, repurposed and shown off in a new light. Colors and textures, gold and silver and wood, fabrics and skins – all this raw material, they saw what all of it had been fashioned into, and they watched as Moshe brought every piece into the center of the camp and assembled them into a whole. Something from all of them, their unity and their individualities represented by their gifts, in one place in one structure.

And then, on that one year anniversary, there was a moment. It was more than an instant – look in the Torah scroll, there is a wide white space to the end of the line, right after the Torah says Moshe finished the work. Just like the words from God’s first finishing, the pause between the end of Creation and the start of Shabbat, looking at the whole thing and saying tov m’od, very good.

And after that pause, who knows how long, a cloud suddenly engulfed the mishkan. It was a cloud of Shechinah, of God’s intense presence, the most-present, right-there presence of the Divine. And it was a cloud. And no one could see into the cloud. Not even Moshe. Not even when the Torah says the cloud encompassed the mishkan every day and a pillar of fire by night to lead the people ahead in their travels. Cloudy, with a chance of Torah. That was the first anniversary.

And again the Torah leaves a space. This time it’s a white space a few lines wide, between the end of Exodus and the start of Leviticus. Time to take a breath, maybe, after months of shlepping? A restful Shabbat? Who after all could wrap their head around such a year as they had had?

Now this week. There’s the mishkan, still there, brand new, and the cloud of guiding is still wrapped around this thing made up of the contributions of all of us, in the center drawing everyone’s attention, and it’s still obscure through a cloud – but now there’s a voice calling out, trying to be heard. What is it saying?

What do you think it would be saying, at the start of the thirteenth month in the midbar (wildnerness)? I have to tell you that the Torah this week has been pushing me around, pushing back on me, because a week ago I had an idea about what I wanted to say today. I told you I’d be talking about some of what I see ahead of us, in the time after the first year of the pandemic. But the Torah has been saying to me: You realize it’s still cloudy, even around this mishkan that is supposed to be guiding us ahead.

The Torah has been pinning me to the first word of the parasha, specifically the letter at the end of the first word. Vayikra means “God called”, but the last letter, the alef, is written small, like a superscript. It’s both higher than the other letters, calling attention to itself, and also smaller, like -- is it really there? Alef is the first letter of the alphabet, of course, and it’s the first letter and the first sound of the Ten Commandments, it’s the alef of Anochi – I am.

One year later, in the desert, the Anochi, the I am, is not completely there, and it wants to be there, and also it’s all that is there. “I am not completely there, I’m not myself” – that’s something we could all be saying today. “I am all that’s here, I’ve been here for a year with no one but myself” – that’s also something we could all be saying. The capital-Alef Anochi, the Divine – also not always seeming like it’s here, and also realizing that we might not believe it’s been here the whole time. That is why the letter is small but also hanging down from the direction of heaven.

The commentaries say that even Moshe wasn’t sure what was calling out of the cloud that he knew from experience was the place where Divine instructions come from. Even Moshe wasn’t fully ready to be an Alef, an Anochi – to be an I, an agent, a divine emissary. Even Moshe didn’t believe that the midbar, the desert, could be a place of calling and guidance. Eventually he did – the midrashim notice that the same Hebrew letters spell midbar and m’dabber, desert and speaking – only when someone realizes they are as exposed as the desert can they hear the Torah, the guiding they need.

What I wanted the Torah to do in this parasha is to tell me that God gave Moshe one Shabbat off, and then helped him to see through the cloud into the mishkan, so God and Moshe could pick up where they had left off, which was God teaching Moshe the ins and outs of the Ten Commandments in more detail. That’s what I think I want to be talking about nowadays: what are the ethical challenges ahead of us in the coming months, while we are in this midbar that is definitely not the promised land, but is on the way there, and is an interesting and revealing place for us to live for a while.

But no, strangely there are no ethics for chapters and chapters in the Torah, and no travel either.  It’s 18 chapters and six more weekly parashiyot until we get to ethics. There’s no travel, but there is movement. It’s the motion of korban – of 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.

Why is that how the Torah starts year two after Egypt? And I, the rabbi and teacher, push back and says maybe they could learn the ethics first, so they’ll know what it means to be whole and to be wrong or right. Let God talk about the offerings to bring in response to that.

And the Torah says back: Maybe no Jon? How about first we work on enlarging the alef – on helping people come back into themselves, to becoming an I, an agent, who understand ourselves acting and not just buffeted by the forces beyond them. The midrash says this about the alef in the word Vayikra: if it gets so small that it disappears, you’re left with the word vayikker, which means not “God called” but “it just happened”. The only reality is being blown around by the desert winds. I get that. In some sense we’re just starting to feel like we’re wrestling back some control of our lives, and we’re looking toward a time when not everything will be defined by the pandemic or in terms of it. A time still in the midbar, but on the move.

We’ll get to know ourselves again, the Torah says to me, by experiencing fire and gratitude, and guilt and wellbeing, experience them as our own, as mine, as Anochi. And when you have one of those primary emotions, come closer to someone or to some thing. Wonder if that can lead you toward something or someone, even if it’s just out for a walk toward whatever seems sacred or special, whatever makes you feel like a mensch again, and walk back to your personal place. And do that again for a while. We’re not going to be moving forward in the same direction all together just yet.

In year one, the Torah says we built the mishkan out of inanimate objects, representing ourselves through static things, frozen things. In year two, what we see in the middle of the camp is different. We bring on our own schedules, and we bring what’s alive – the offerings were meat and flour, animals and growing grain – representing ourselves through living things, things that move, as we are beginning to move.

For a while, the Torah says here in 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. Vayikra 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.

I accept this as half the truth. I’m impatient for us to become Anochi again – to feel like people, to feel like the ones who hear divine teachings and respond and act them out.

This wasn’t the D’var Torah I was expecting to give today. Torah’s like that; it’s learning to be not just Anochi=who I think I am, but what I think the Divine might be telling me to say when that’s different from where I started.

There is a mishkan, calling out teachings as the second year starts. It knows that it’s in a cloud but it knows we will eventually make out its sounds. And we are here, alefs -- feeling some days small and silent, some days larger and more divine. We are here, moving not forward together just yet, but every day each of us back and forth with korbanot (closeness-offerings), experimenting in our own ways with closeness, to one thing at a time, to one another -- and eventually closer to the Torah of this new year in the desert.

Two Very Different Takes on Ki Tisa -- Olympics and Ideas

Here are a couple of things I published through my Times of Israel blog, that jump off from Parashat Ki Tisa, the story of the Golden Calf and the breaking/remaking of the tablets of the Ten Commandments:

"Give Ideas a Chance" -- exploring what it means to be serious about ideas as guides for life

"Wholeness, Not Brokenness: What Simone Biles Actually Taught Us" -- wrote this last summer but it comes back to me this week thinking about the Olympics in general and maybe skier Mikaela Shiffrin in particular

 

Na'aseh V'Nishma Meets Yes-And

This was my D'var Torah on Shabbat morning, Saturday, January 29, on Parashat Mishpatim.

When I was trying to decide whether to apply to rabbinical school, as a senior in college, I gave myself an ultimatum: I would not apply until I was putting on tefillin every day. Tefilllin are basically mezuzas but for the body -- leather boxes with small scrolls of Torah text inside, attached to straps, that we place and wrap around one arm and the forehead in the morning when it’s not Shabbat.

Tefillin is a practice that is distinctively Jewish, and distinct even among Jewish practices. If mezuzas are uniquely Jewish, tefillin is even beyond that. It’s unusual and not a lot of Jews do it outside of Orthodox environments. It just felt weird to me, and I was having trouble making it a regular personal practice. Even after a full year in Israel at the Seminary, going to minyan regularly in the morning for the first time in my life, putting on tefillin there -- still, doing it on my own, I couldn’t get there.

And I had made that my test for myself about my identity as a Jew obligated to halacha, to traditional Jewish law as a duty. I was already quite strict about Shabbat; for some reason that was no problem. But tefillin became for me a litmus test of my self-image and my right to present myself as a future Conservative rabbi. I wonder what your thing is, the Jewish practice or ritual or words that seems like you’re supposed to buy but it’s hard for you?

It’s not that I didn’t appreciate tefillin and the symbolism and ideas behind it -- still it remained at arm’s length, hard to wrap on my actual arm. But I really wanted to go to JTS (well, I really wanted to be finished going to JTS), so it was quite the cognitive and spiritual dissonance. I called the dean’s office to schedule my preliminary interview with one of the team, and something about just that interaction spooked me. I found some excuse to cancel so I could reschedule with the dean himself, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, whom I had met a few times. I thought if I talked to him and told him where I was, he’d respond in the right way, whatever that would be.

There is a phrase in the parasha this morning that comes to mind about this, and it’s a favorite when it comes to questions of Jewish observance. We quote: na’aseh v’nishma. We will do and we will hear. It’s usually explained as first you commit to a mitzvah, then you learn more about what you’re doing. You might think the other way makes more sense, study something before you commit to it -- but no, na’aseh v’nishma. Take a leap of faith first. The midrash praises B’nai Yisrael for taking that leap of faith at Mt. Sinai, saying na’aseh v’nishma knowing that compared to everything else they knew before, Torah would be weird to them a lot of the time. It would be like tefillin everywhere.

With a lot of other things in my Jewish path, like Shabbat and kashrut, I did a lot of na’aseh v’nishma that way. But it didn’t work for me with tefillin. I’ll pick up the tefillin story in Rabbi Tucker’s office -- but first we need to reexamine na’aseh v’nishma.

Here’s the context for the phrase. Before the Ten Commandments, Moshe brings God’s offer of a covenant in a general sense, and all the people say: What God has said so far about that, we will do. Na’aseh. Then they hear the Ten Commandments directly from God, and Moshe gets all of the mishpatim, the first big set of very detailed laws, and he tells them the law out loud, and the people say: All the words that Adonai has spoken we will do. Na’aseh.

Then after that Moshe sets up a big sacrificial meal and a ritual with blood, and Moshe reads the laws again to them out of the Book of the Covenant, as though to say: Do you really mean it? And they say: Everything that Adonai has spoken, we will do and we will hear -- na’aseh v’nishma. Then Moshe sprinkles blood over all of them, just to make sure, and says: All right, this is really a covenant now.

That’s where na’aseh v’nishma is in the Torah. So, a couple of things. First, tefillin seems a little less weird in comparison to sprinkling blood on absolutely everyone. Second, it’s clear that na’aseh v’nishma was not a right-off-the-bat leap of faith, like sure we’ll do this and we can talk about it more as we go along. It took three tries just to get to na’aseh v’nishma. A lot of repeating of the people’s commitment, and of course forty days later it didn’t matter anyway, because -- Golden Calf.

So I want to offer a slightly different way of looking at na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and then we will listen. I want to look at this through a lens from a modern rav named Tina Fey, master teacher of comedy improvisation. Na’aseh v’nishma: Meet the Rule of Yes-And.

In improv, you’ve got two or more people creating a scene together, and one person starts. Maybe that person -- call them Moshe if you want -- makes up a premise in their head or maybe it comes from the audience.

Tina Fey writes [in her book Bossypants]: The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES... This means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You [insert word I can’t say in shul]!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun. 

Rabbi Jon’s commentary: This first back-and-forth agreement, preliminary and not completely formed, is Na’aseh. We’re going to be in this scene together and create from here together.

Back to Tina: The second rule of improvisation is YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you just say, “Yeah...” we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “Yes, this can’t be good for the wax figures”, or “I told you we shouldn’t have crawled into this dog’s mouth,” now we’re getting somewhere.

[Still Tina:] To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute... [and] MAKE STATEMENTS; Don’t ask questions all the time. ...Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on “hamster wheel” duty because I’m “too much of a loose cannon” in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents...I mean, look at the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup...

Thanks Tina. I say that the ideas of YES-AND, and THERE ARE NO MISTAKES ONLY OPPORTUNITIES, that’s v’nishma. I’ll agree to what you start with, and then we will agree on a next thing, and we will each keep listening, accepting what the other person brings and then building on that.

The “Yes-and” dynamic is a covenant. It begins and deepens a bond between two people that generates and solidifies the obligations between them around something specific they both are invested in up to a point. Both parties are the do-er, the listener, the responder -- and hopefully the scene keeps going.

So let’s apply this back to me and my tefillin, and then to Beth Abraham.

I flew down to New York for my preliminary interview and told Rabbi Tucker the truth about me and tefillin. He didn’t say no, you can’t be a rabbi. He didn’t even do the first kind of na’aseh v’nishma -- Well, Jon, what about just putting on tefillin for a few weeks, seeing how it affects you, and call me back after that? Instead he did this other version of na’aseh v’nishma. Yes-and. He accepted where I was. He didn’t argue with me. I remember him saying: What about thinking about it this way. Have you thought about it that way. How about it’s not an external commandment. It’s not for God, it’s for you, because it helps you think about your day ahead or the actions from your arm or your head. He made a number of suggestions, and then he left the ball in my court, to continue to apply if I wanted to.

Obviously I did. My final interview was kind of improv-y in a crazy way; that’s a whole other story. But tefillin became part of a much longer and wider yes-and for me about prayer and spirituality,  and part of a process of finding a theology very different from the one I thought I needed. I gave up the idea of God and me divided by certain laws standing on two sides of an unbridgeable river. I became a rabbi who wasn’t putting on tefillin regularly, and maybe five years ago or so, only then, did I begin putting on tefillin nearly every day. Though it might well not have turned out that way. Part of that same story is that I’ve become part of Laura’s meditation groups, and believe me that was even more unlikely for me than putting on tefillin. Now I’m working on b’rachot over the food I eat; that’s a next part of this particular scene.

I’m grateful for Rabbi Tucker, who had no idea what our first yes-and would set in motion between the two of us and also beyond the Seminary. My own practice of laying tefillin is very much this other na’aseh v’nishma --  the way of yes-and, patient agreement, moving from deficiency in my own eyes to spiritual opportunity. 

And that is every bit a covenant. And I think for many, many things, Beth Abraham should strive for covenant among ourselves in that kind of na’aseh v’nishma spirit, the yes-and-spirit.

People might come to us with a Jewish statement – a desire, an idea, an act. A way to approach a ritual or Shabbat or a Bat or Bar Mitzvah that might strike us as out of left field at first. Because of not knowing Hebrew, or not accepting traditional God-language, or feeling out of place in a traditional service, or being steeped in something exciting and spiritual from the outside.  Our job would be to respond “Yes, and…” Acceptance -- but not just yes-full-stop, and the scene ends awkwardly. Out of yes comes yes-and. Out of acceptance and curiosity we would contribute the next idea, another step, an offer to explore together. I, we, the traditions we have, are part of the scene. Not whatever you say we can do, but let’s see what we can say together. Something to interpret, ask questions about, and respond to. We build a covenant, and then we enrich it and deepen it. 

Sometimes the traditional na’aseh v’nishma is the right approach-- try this and see where it leads. But for me, this new frame of na’aseh-v’nishma-meets-yes-and helps show the Jewish world here as a place full of opportunities, not a place of Jewish deficiency. I want to flesh this out with you and all our leadership as a fundamental approach and an attitude of positivity and curiosity toward everyone in our community.

No is a powerful thing to say. Yes can be surprisingly powerful, and welcoming. But yes-and is even more powerful -- it’s acceptance and trust, and curiosity. It’s eagerness to go into the unknown and create something Jewish together. That is the leap of faith we need these days. Not just one person’s leap toward something the shul has defined previously, but a leap together. A leap toward each other, and together toward something purposeful and joyful. Na’aseh v’nishma, let’s leap together to do something Jewish, and keep listening for what we can do together next.