Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

A Year Later, Back to Moshe's Final Words of Blessing -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 1

 

On Simchat Torah morning, after we parade with the Torah scrolls, we gather around to read the very last words of Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. The man who could hardly speak departs with an original song – his words, not God’s. And his last sentence in life begins: Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha. Happy are you, O Israel. Fortunate are You, O Jewish people. Who is like you. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Ashreicha Yisrael. You might recognize the word Ashrei. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people. What must it have been like for Moshe to make those his final words. Moshe, who was born at a time and place when it was against the law for him to live. Whose first recorded words were “Why are you beating your neighbor?” Who faced down Pharaoh, led his people into freedom, brought them to Mt. Sinai. All the desert crises of food and faith Moshe had gone through with them. After all that, Moshe sees his people endure, finally get their act together, and now, they are sitting still one last time. Knowing that what’s just ahead for them is a future and a fight – Moshe sings: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. Mi chamocha – there is no people quite like you.

Last Simchat Torah, October 8, knowing what we knew, we had to decide how we would sing those words. Should we just hurry through and get out of here? And what about our children? Most years our kid-friendly Simchat Torah is a quick early evening on a school day. But last year it was a Sunday morning, with no rush, so we had bigger plans. Would parents even bring their kids here on October 8, knowing what we knew?

We decided to stick to our plan. With our broken hearts, and overwhelmed, we would dance with the Torah for our kids, and for Israelis who already were begging us not to let anyone reach across the ocean and take this too away. Amazingly, parents brought their kids. And after dancing, right down there in this aisle we rolled out the Torah on a table all the way to the back. As the kids were gathered next to the Torah, I got to the chanting of Moshe’s final sentence: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. I so wanted to sing it; to promise it to our kids as Moshe promised the generation he was about to launch. I was overcome with tears, and only thanks to the kids could I sing the words at all.

As hard as it was to sing Ashreicha Yisrael, Moshe’s final sentence has more words. I don’t emphasize them generally because they are not as inspirational. Am nosha b’Adonai, magen ezrecha asher cherev ga’avatecha… ”Fortunate are you, O Israel, who is like you, a nation saved by the Divine, your helping shield, whose sword is your pride. Your enemies shall recant themselves to you, and you on their high places will tread.”

But as I croaked out those words too, I had this terrible thought: not a single part of this Torah verse was true. Not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. An enemy far from recanting, far from going back on its essence -- and who was treading on whom that day.

Was the Torah itself being kidnapped and used to mock us? How could we go just minutes later and begin the Torah again, and with rockets in the sky declare that God created the heavens, and that in the deepest darkness God said “Let there be light”?

Yet, with all the unrelenting loss and pain of the past exhausting year – and even with the escalations of the war this past week and the attack from Iran these past days – I say to you that the critical spiritual thing for us in this new year is to get back Moshe’s final words: Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people, who is like you. We need to believe that this is as true as ever, and true even as never before. Our future here depends on it.

Obviously atrocities and war are in no way fortunate. And I do not mean it is easy to be Jewish just this moment. Only that we are profoundly fortunate to be the Jews of this moment, of this era in Jewish history.

Now believe me, part of me wonders if I’m crazy to say this today. I really just want to reach out and envelop you all in a hug, and allow us to cry together among people who know the many layers of our weeping. Our congregation has many Israelis, and we are closely connected to several families who have lost people on or after October 7, and to at least five people who were taken hostage. Last fall two Beth Abraham families had their Israeli kids here in town taking refuge. We have college students too. My own daughter is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University, so we know painfully what it’s like for a child to live within an institution and a community ripped apart over the past year. Some of our tears are for the loss of dreams of peace, delayed at least for now.

Yet I keep coming back to this thought: we need Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate we are to be this unique Jewish generation, the Jews of America of this era. 

We need to say those words to ourselves. We need to carry ourselves that way outwardly in the world. I thought about talking today about any of particular things on people’s minds right now: the immediate war itself, or questions about our relations with other people here in America and anti-Semitism around us, or concerns about the ethics of the military actions we are connected to, or about Israeli policy toward Palestinians. But before we can talk about or work on any of these, we have to think first about seeing ourselves once again in the light of Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. 

Look what we have built so far. In less than 150 years, Jews have gone from a tiny presence in the United States, having gotten here in flight just like from every other place we have been in exile, to a flourishing community. Here we have not just carved out a corner for ourselves for a while. We have been essential to making our host country into a home, for us and for everyone. From Justice Brandeis to Justice Kagan, American law has been infused with our commitment to law and justice. From Philip Roth to Dara Horn, American literature has been infused with our creativity and our concerns. Healing, science. Comedy. The equality and freedom of people is infused with our ideas and achieved partly with our legwork. The best of America’s story and the best of the American Jewish story are completely intertwined. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute said this summer that even though we have always been a small percentage of the population, the bigness of America drew out the bigness of Judaism. 

In this year’s election, the candidates are a former president whose daughter is a committed Jew, and a sitting vice-president whose husband is a committed Jew. There has never been a diaspora Jewish community like this in all of Jewish history. 

That litany used to be my Ashreicha Yisrael. But in March, Franklin Foer wrote an article in The Atlantic called “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” His main evidence is the year at many universities, the turning against many Jews as well as against all these aspects of America that Jews have helped build, by many people who will be tomorrow’s American leaders. Foer argues that the conditions that made us happy and fortunate here seem to be going away.

Well he is right that the conditions are not the same. But that is not the determining story. In the past, in other places, it might have been. But there are new seeds of new strengths we have, and they too have been uniquely visible actually in this past year. I’m just going to talk about a couple.

Many of us experienced the year through the words and leadership of the Goldberg-Polins in Jerusalem, Rachel and Jon, parents of Hersh, zichrono livracha. Hersh was kidnapped from the Nova music festival after saving some lives in the attack, and his parents have urged us to advocate for their son and all the hostages every single day in every way possible. His murder a month ago along with five others was crushing.

But how Jon and Rachel have advocated is so dramatically different from what Jews like us have been used to. They hardly talk about Hamas – even in their eulogies for Hersh, they didn’t name the group. They talk about us, and what it means to value and rejoice in human life. 

In July, the Goldberg-Polins and their close circle decided that alongside their political advocacy, it was important to spend a week saturating the world with Torah and mitzvot.

So they organized a study of the whole Hebrew Bible around the clock and around the world, and a concluding international study event. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They organized an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona, a hip outdoor venue in Jerusalem. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages in Jerusalem, and if you weren’t nearby to post on their web page acts of chesed you would be doing all week anywhere. Right away you could see some 200 things, from challah making to opening up one’s swimming pool, to cultivating patience, to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel. It was like they were forcing the World to Come onto this world, and forcing us all to force it.

The Goldberg-Polins speak and act in this personal and international crisis as though the primary center of our destiny is in our own hands, and in the hands of any Jew with power. Of course there is a context. But for Jon and Rachel even hard-core advocacy for the hostages is about what is inside us, no matter the context. 

All year every day they have used the language of this season –  teshuvah, accountability, and forgiveness. At Hersh’s funeral they begged his forgiveness for what they did not do to save his life, though what more could they possibly have done. They have asked us directly as they have asked themselves over and over: What have you not done yet. Who are you, they have asked world leaders and Israeli leaders, and all of us Jews and all Americans.

They described Hersh at his graveside as someone who forced them to open their eyes and their hearts wider than they had known how to. 

In the past, even in the Golden Age, at difficult times we would mainly point our fingers outward. The Goldberg-Polins have showed us that we as Jews are strong enough to make ourselves the moral center of any story, even the most difficult story, even one where other people are also wrong and wronging us.

To have leaders and teachers like this in the Jewish crisis of a generation – Ashreicha Yisrael, how fortunate we are. That we have become a Jewish people strong enough at a time like this to respond to Jon and Rachel, to ground ourselves in both advocacy and mitzvah at the same time, to ask something both from the world and from ourselves – Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. This is what Zionism was supposed to do – in the era of Jewish self-determination, we take responsibility on ourselves as makers of history, even though we are small.

It’s only in this generation that we are starting to learn how to do that. For the first time, our bigger Jewish response has been much more than Never Again.

Some would say like Franklin Foer that this year the strains between Jews and our allies finally broke. But I saw something different up close here in Southern New Hampshire, specifically with my colleagues in the clergy.

My mission for sixteen years in the Nashua Area Interfaith Council has been to press beyond the simple sentiment of “there are many roads to God.” So that when push comes to shove, we’ll know whether we are really there for each other. This year was a big test. 

In October when I heard from almost none of my cherished colleagues, I began to write to them, to tell them what it was like to be a Jew now and also my worries about what would happen to Judaism if they gave us reason to close in on ourselves. Each one of them responded. I have been president of that group for almost a third of my time in Nashua and I was disoriented for a while. At first I just asked them to listen to me, and to pray for us, for the people we’re connected to, as they were praying for the Palestinian people their churches are connected to. They all said yes, of course.

I said at a meeting in the fall that I think the biggest difference between me and most of them is not Jesus but Zionism. A few days later, one of my colleagues reached out to ask me what I meant, and this opened up an amazing conversation about our seminaries and what we each know about the Holy Land. 

I bought about 25 copies of Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which includes Palestinian responses back and I have given it to many colleagues. They have read it; some have shared it in their congregations. Some have opened up to me about their reflections about the role the Christian world has played in pitting Jews and Muslims against each other. Most of our Christian friends have brought more nuance to their words and their discussions in church about Israel-Palestine.

I have done this work not from supplication but from strength, from a foundation many of you have built over decades in Nashua, and immodestly I will say I myself have built. Ashreicha Yisrael – it is fortunate right now to be a Jew in the interfaith community of Greater Nashua. 

And it is good for us to be in the middle of the difficult moral conversations that serious people are having. Because I pushed to see if my colleagues and I could talk this way, I could open my ears more too. So I also can and must say that we here are connected to at least one Palestinian family in New Hampshire who lost many people in Gaza very early in the war. 

It’s not easy, at all. But we can handle it; we are maturing as a Jewish community within America. Our friendships, alliances and our power are still robust, even though the conditions don’t make it as easy. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi chamocha – we are a unique generation.

And part of Ashreicha Yisrael is simply us here now. Doing what we do. Here sustaining one another, singing and thinking and crying together. Gathering as a moral community. Not because we have to, not because it’s as joyful as other years, but because this is who we are.

So Simchat Torah this year will be different, no question. We will have to honor what happened last year. But at some point we will dance and we will finally arrive again at Moshe’s last sentence.

And we will have a choice. All of us, whether what grips you most right now is anger or sadness or fear about the fighting, or the broader future of Jews and anti-Semitism, or the ethics of the conflicts. We are all like Moshe, looking out at a future that has both purpose and war.

We can say that things for Jews in America are going to be like they have been everywhere else for us in exile. And then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or we can say Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. We are fortunate to be the Jews of this era. Whose future is not determined; who have the possibility through our choices and efforts to define who we are. And rise to the occasion like no other generation of Jews has ever before.

When Moshe composed his final words, he reached back to the first song he taught the people along with his sister Miryam. You might know the words Mi Chamocha from the prayers, and it got there from the Torah’s Song of the Crossing of the Sea (Exodus 15:11). Back then, Miryam and Moshe asked us to look to the heavens and say: Mi chamocha ba’elim, Adonai? Who is like you among the powerful, O God? Now in his final words, Moshe looks up at us and says: Who is like you, O Jewish people. You are powerful, finally, among all the powerful. You are blessed and a blessing. 

In this time of war and heartbreak, may we find a way to hold each other up and see all of our power and all of our blessing. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha – how fortunate are you, O Jewish people, there is no one like you.

Shana Tova.

Patience and Impatience -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 2

The number of stop signs between my home and the synagogue has more than doubled in the past ten years. And I know why the new ones were put there: because of me.

I don’t mean that in an I’m-the-problem-it’s-me way. I have never caused an accident on Pine Hill Road or Courtland Street, tfft tfft.  I am sure at City Hall there is some traffic data or some record of citizen input behind the decisions, but I know that four stop signs were placed in Nashua as a spiritual opportunity, perhaps even a test, for me.

You see, as my kids would point out even before they got their licenses, I can be a major practitioner of the rolling stop. It goes with something else Laurie says to me often, which is that at home, when I ask her or the kids something, I often don’t give them even a second to respond, before I’m prodding them more or repeating the question. 

So ten years ago on Rosh Hashanah I decided to speak about impatience. And as I was writing I decided that one way I would cultivate my own patience was to come to full stops at all stop signs, since there were at the time three close to where I work. I would be able to notice my heart rate increase as I slow the car down extra, as I feel the small kick back of the car as it halts, then I could stop, take a breath, slow my heart rate and settle down. Once, twice, three times, at Manchester, Webster, and Concord Streets.

Apparently, the universe regarded this as a vow on my part, and not one that could be annulled on Erev Yom Kippur. And so, on cue, up went two more stop signs on Courtland Street, and two on Pine Hill Road as well. As a challenge to my spiritual discipline.

You’ll have to ask Laurie and my kids how I am doing with this, though for most of my drives here the only witnesses are myself and God. I know I stop more than I used to. And I am much better about waiting an extra beat or more after I ask someone at home a question. But still I struggle with patience and impatience.

The world is impatient, maybe more and more. Take something like reading, which you’d think would be made for a patient approach. Articles online often tell you at the top how long they will take to read. That’s a new invention of the past ten years, and it seems to have originated with the website Medium. Which is according to itself “a place to read, write, and deepen your understanding” – but a couple engineers at Medium had become frustrated that when they would open up something to read or deepen your understanding, they had no idea how much time they might be getting themselves into. So they came up with this idea and algorithm.

And we often default to expecting others to be impatient with us. A lot of times I call someone and they pick up to tell me they can’t talk, and ask if we could talk later. As though if I got their voicemail I would be impatient with them for not being at my beckon call. Even my own parents did this the other day and I reassured them I could handle their being occupied with something other than me.

What’s this all about? In Hebrew one of the words for patience is savlanut. It is from a root that means “suffering.” To be patient is to be able in the moment to accept some suffering. But is it really suffering to give someone a few seconds to digest what you said to them, and is it really suffering to make a full stop at a stop sign?

So I think the word savlanut points at something else, what we really might be suffering when we feel impatient in daily life. It’s being out of rhythm with the person we’re with. You’re all set to hop in the car so we can go get together with friends, but I’m still putting on my jacket or finding my jacket, or deciding if I even need a jacket. That’s frustrating. And maybe it’s not about the five minutes late to a social engagement. It’s maybe a little piece of a bigger longing we all have to know what it’s like to be in sync with someone else, that our lives become that elusive waltz in perfect time together.

Being human is always moving in and out of sync with other people, which is why we need patience, savlanut, in our day to day lives. Patience is a virtue, and in Judaism it’s one of the most important Divine virtues. It’s one of the thirteen qualities associated with Divine compassion, the shlosh esreh middot we chant on Yom Kippur over and over and have already chanted today. Adonai Adonai El rachum v’chanun, erech apayim (Exodus 34:6). Erech apayim means “slow to anger.” That’s a physical metaphor in Hebrew. Apayim are the nostrils, the place we feel our breathing change and speed up when we are impatient. Being angry in biblical Hebrew is called charon af, “hot nose.” Like a fire-breathing dragon.

Erech apayim means disrupting that circuit, keeping the breathing slow, not getting hot. As Alan Morinis puts it, keeping the match away from the fuse. Patience means putting time between something that frustrates us and reacting to it.

In Pirkei Avot (5:2), the Talmud’s compilation of ethical maxims, it’s taught that the reason the Torah takes ten generations to get from Noach to Avraham, from the flood to monotheism, is to show us how much God is erech apayim, how much God is patient.

The world takes a long time to get where it’s in sync with the Divine, yes. Then again, you’d think: how hard is it to be patient when you are God and have all the time in the world?

One the most haunting midrashim I’ve ever seen wonders if God can actually get carried away and be too patient. Dr. Aviva Zornberg in her book on Exodus teaches a midrash that imagines God watching the slavery of the Jews in Mitzrayim, and the angels are pressing God: Aren’t you going to do something? How can you leave them there like this? And God says: You remember, I told Avraham that they would be in Mitzrayim for 400 years, and it’s been almost 400 years. Don’t worry, soon they will be freed. One of the angels goes down to earth and grabs a brick that a slave is making, and in that brick is trapped a baby. The angel flies up to heaven, shows the brick to God, and says: This is the result of your patience! And then God snaps into action, and the story of the redemption begins.

This is what Rev. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” There are times when patience is not a virtue. When a kind of impatience is warranted. A higher impatience. A holy impatience.

Our prayers have so many words to express this impatience, some we’ve used this morning: b’karov b’yameinu, bim’heira, hash’ta ba’agala uviz’man kariv. Not just Hebrew, but Aramaic!

The hardest impatience is when we care about someone, and we feel that they aren't living right now as well as they could be.

We might be impatient with someone who is struggling to find a direction in life.

We might be impatient about someone who is just not well – not impatient with them, but for them. Impatient with their caregivers, for not being attentive enough or responsive enough or clever enough or miraculous enough.

We are impatient with the world right now. We want an end to war in and around Israel, we want our hostages home now. We want other wars to end, we want the paralyzing polarization of our country to be gone. 

We are, perhaps, impatient with God for all the suffering that isn't going away fast enough.

We might be impatient, most of all, with ourselves. If we’re not well, we blame ourselves unreasonably for not getting better faster. Maybe we’re not as caring as we know we should be. Maybe as we think back on what we resolved here one year ago, we can just be frustrated at our own slow pace of teshuvah. 

I wonder if somewhere also deep down impatience comes from a sense that time is precious and fleeting for each of us. It’s Naomi Shemer’s song Od Lo Ahavti Dai – “I Have Not Loved Enough.” She begins: With these two hands of mine, I’ve not yet built a town/In the middle of the desert, the water I’ve not found/I haven’t drawn a flower, nor quite discovered how/the way is going lead me, or where I’m going now. And the refrain: I have not loved enough, the wind and the sun are on my face; I have not said enough, and if not, if not now, when.

A lot of our impatience at what’s out there, with others, might really come from within our own soul.

Even our little impatience about getting out of the door might have something of this higher impatience. You want to be on time, out of respect for someone who is being generous by making time for us. We want to make the most of our time together; there are never enough moments with our friends or our potential friends, to get beyond chit-chat and really talk.

So if patience is a virtue, and if there is also a holy impatience, how do we get it right?

There is another biblical phrase that’s a twist on erech apayim, the hot nose or breathing nostril metaphor. The prophet Micah (7:18) describes God’s patience as lo hechezik la’ad apo. Who does not hold onto anger forever. Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, a medieval teacher of Kabbalah, says that unlike the metaphor of erech apayim, which is about not letting frustration begin and spiral, lo hechezik la’ad apo recognizes that impatience is a real thing. Even God has impatience, metaphorically speaking, because for all of God’s infinite time, God does not really have infinite power to change us or the world. So lo hechezik la’ad apo – the suffering, the anger, you can’t stop them from appearing. The key is to hold onto impatience long enough to understand it, and to understand ourselves, but only that long, and then to decide what to do with it, and release it.

So the momentary impatiences, like getting stuck in lines or traffic, those we have to let go of quickly. But even then the impatient feeling is a reminder to open our eyes to what is actually around, because even when you’re delayed somewhere that’s not all that’s happening. Rabbi Zelig Pliskin says that when you’re stuck in the waiting room at the doctor, look around at who else is there. Perhaps there is someone who needs help with something, whether it’s filling out a form, or walking when they are called. Or perhaps there is someone in the room who needs consoling or who seems alone.

What about when our impatience is about the sufferings of someone we care about, or the sufferings and injustices in the world?

We have to be aware of that impatience. If it just exists as anger, we know that makes it harder to act, and that cycle leads to resignation, to despair, to disconnecting from the person or the cause we actually care about.

And sometimes we try to relieve this type of impatience by rushing toward unrealistic expectations or simplistic solutions. I think this is the impatience of our country right now. Too many of us think that being impatient about the right things is the whole story. So vibes and feels attract all the energy, and we go in circles if not backward, and we have neither solutions nor an end to the impatience.

Sometimes we need to turn from impatience just to presence, to be with the person or the people whose suffering matters to us.

Sometimes what we need is not so much patience as perseverance. There is a Jewish word for this too – netzach. It means both endurance and triumph, because for the things that matter one triumph is never the last. 

Netzach, perseverance, is figuring out what you can actually do. When it comes to the big things in the world, it’s deciding when to be the doer and when to be the donor. It’s noticing when people are actually working on something, with the care and skill its complexity deserves, even when it’s taking time. It’s offering yourself to the people who are leading, knowing how to encourage them and get them what they need. This is one of the best antidotes to the impatience we experience when the wider world seems out of sync.

When we are impatient with ourselves, it helps to find someone to talk it out with – to help us balance expectations of ourselves with grace.

Impatience on its own is not a virtue. But it is not just patience we should learn from the Divine example. It’s lo hechezik la’ad apo – it’s reading our impatience. Impatience teaches us who are, reminds us what we value and who we love. 

So in this new year, we should definitely come to a full stop at stop signs, no matter how many there are. We should let the phone ring when we can’t talk, and trust the other person to trust that we’ll call them later when we can really talk.

And then we’ll have room for holy impatience. Instead of fiery vapors, over and over, our breath will be long shofar blasts, ever more in sync, turning from brokenness into wholeness and redemption.

Shana Tova.

My Rosh Hashanah Sermons (5784/2023)

Read or watch/listen:

Click to read the text of the sermons:

Day 1 — Glimmers

Day 2 — Through Regret

Or watch or listen on YouTube:

 

My Magnum Opus on Teshuvah and "The Good Place"

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

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 Rosh Hashanah Sermons From Last Week

Here are my sermons from Rosh Hashanah 5783:

First day:
Help Me Talk About What I've Been Through and Who I Am

Second day:
Right-ology: How to Be Right Better in the New Year

Wishing everyone a Shana Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet new year!

Best of My Past High Holy Day Sermons

These are to me the best of my Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sermons from years past. I'm collecting them here because you find them useful to read and think about in Elul. They aren't in chronological or any particular order.

Hope In An Uncertain World (5777/2016)
What the Chanukkah dreidel can teach us about four kinds of hope.

Who Knows? (5780/2019)
How the story of Esther even more than the Torah can guide us to live in a world of mortal dangers.

How Good Do I Have to Be? (5777/2016)
With assists from the Green Monster, Pesky's Pole, Naomi Shemer and Reb Simcha Bunem.

Still Small Voices (5778/2017)
We are a community where many people have prayers they don't reveal out loud about the difficult things happening in our lives and families. How to be there even when we don't reveal or don't know what those prayers are.

Finding Purpose and Direction (5773/2012)
Figuring out your purpose, especially in up in the air times, or transitions in life or work.

Lost and Found (5779/2018)
When the pieces of life's puzzle aren't gone, but someone else has yours to give you back, or vice versa.

V.O.R. -- Vision-Opinion Ratio (5779/2018)
Fewer superficial reactions to public things, more visions -- how to find and speak about the things you are truly committed to, and quieting down about the rest.

Holy Impatience (5775/2014)
Some impatience is selfish, unfair expectations. Holy impatience is rooted in love, a concern for someone else who doesn't have the life or peace they deserve.

Helping Someone Else Change (5771/2010)
No one can change someone else -- but sometimes we can support other people in their changes. Starring a mitzvah in Leviticus and some social psychology research.

Busy (5776/2015)
Why "Busy" has become the answer to "How are you?" and what we can do about it.

Moral Adventure (5776/2015)
Adventure isn't just for heroes and myths. Our own lives are different when we recognize them as moral adventures, and the people we go through life with as our fellow students and sidekicks.

Long Tables, Shabbat Meals (5772/2011)
Why long tables are better than round, long meals are magical, and Shabbat creates relationships different from friendship but no less powerful.

Back to Better Than Normal (5782/2021)
As we transition from the Covid-19 pandemic, the old normal is certainly not what what we want to go back to.

Being Present in a Digital Age (5774/2013)
How to make people and not devices more central to our daily lives.

Look Up (5780/2019)
In a cynical age, we need to focus more on looking up to people -- the everyday people in our lives, the people who need us, the best leaders we know.

Body Talk (5779/2018)
How to show others we really believe they are the image of God.

Getting From Here to High Holy Days, Starting With a Party!

This is based on what I said on Shabbat morning, August 27, 2022 at the start of the month of Elul. It was the day of a Bar Mitzvah and an aufruf (blessing to a couple about to get married)!

Usually I think of Elul as a time of introspection before we get together in a big way on Rosh Hashanah. But the past few years I’ve been thinking that it would be great to start the month leading to the ten particularly intense days with a dance party, a disco party! First we should celebrate that we’ve gotten here -- we should look at each other and who’s in this together with us and going to help us look back and look ahead. And wow, this past year having been what it’s been and the year before that, we ABSOLUTELY should start it with a party. And my dream came true and I didn’t even realize it when we scheduled Jonah’s Bar Mitzvah celebration and when Rachel and Joel told me the date of their wedding. So this is how it should be. A new month, that little sliver of moonlight that says to the shade: You are going away, we’re going to make our own energy here and we’re going to gather our powers together so we can make a new year.

It's been quite a year, and we need more than the three days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to do our reflecting and our redirecting and our rebooting – our teshuvah, our returning. The spiritual recalculating on the GPS of our hearts. I don’t even know if a month is enough.

The point isn’t to come to services on the holidays. The point is to figure out what we each need from the next 40 days (really it’s more like 52!) – and what of the many offerings of spirituality and learning can support each of us:

• What do we need from parties like this when services are like a party
• What do we need from the retreats we might do in services around other people
• What do we need from the time ourselves thinking and writing and talking with loved ones and friends and mentors and therapists
• What do we need from the things we’re going to read or the music and the silence

I’ll send you daily e-mails with thoughts and ways to gather for conversation or learning or spiritual practice. But the point isn’t to read the e-mails! It’s to use them. It’s really simple: Use this month and the next for you, for the better life you’ve been thinking about having or creating. Use it to figure out your piece of making the world better -- boy do we need that.

Say thank you as many times as possible, in a world that doesn’t do that enough and where there’s plenty you’re not happy about. You don’t have to decide if the world is more bad than good, or maybe you have decided there is more bad now -- but just find gratitude every day and express it, out loud, to someone or to your own ears. That will ripple out. No one can change only out of sadness and anger. Not unless you can connect it to someone you love whose suffering is what powers your anger, your sadness. Not unless you can find a lighthouse ahead for hope, powered by someone you deeply appreciate.

This time of year is serious, but it doesn’t have to be solemn. That’s why it needs a party today, and at the end of the season on Simchat Torah we have another one! I am so happy we’re together, and thank you for listening to my prayers this first hour and saying Amen, even if you don’t know what all my prayers were. Thank you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you were doing.

So I hope you’ll tap into the energy of today, not just the energy of joy but of words of Torah in many forms, to help you launch into Elul and a month of individual reflection that’s good for you and good for us all when you do it.

Media From Me for Elul -- Tov! Podcast, Maimonides YouTubes

We're deep into Season 3 of Tov!, my podcast about The Good Place and Jewish ideas related to teshuvah. You can find all the most recent episodes here, or type "Tov!" into your favorite podcast app.

Also, I have been logging in at 12:36pm Eastern time each weekday this Elul to teach and talk about some classic teaching about teshuvah, mostly Maimonides but other things maybe too. You can join here, or you can listen to the ones I've taped:

Your Unorthodox Theology Won't Break Judaism

My D’var Torah from July 30, 2022 * 2 Av 5782

One of my favorite anecdotes about morning davvening (praying) comes from the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Chanina went to shul one day. This was some 1700 years ago, give or take, and at the time there were no siddurim (written prayerbooks). People who led knew the outline of the service, and the theme for each short section and the specific language of the blessing to end each section – Creator of lights, Yotzer hame’orot; Redeemer of Israel, Ga’al Yisrael, etc. A few prayers had been written and were well-known but the leader, the shliach tzibbur, could compose or make up his own prayer on the section’s theme to get to the very few fixed words.

So Rabbi Chanina is in shul and this guy stands up to recite the Amidah, and he starts chanting: Ha’el ha’gadol ha’gibbor v’hanora, v’ha’adir v’ha’izuz v’ha’yarui he-chazak v’ha’amitz v’ha’vadai v’hanichbad. Now you don’t need to know what all the words mean to know that what this prayer leader is doing is adding on top of the familiar prayer more praise adjectives for God. Strong, and courageous, and certain, and honored, and and and….

Anyway, the leader finishes the Amidah and Rabbi Chanina says to him: “Nu, did you get them all? I mean did you use enough words to describe the Divine, you know, better than Moshe Rabbeinu did? Because we’re using Moshe’s own words when we say Ha’el ha’gadol etc. , and some words that other prophetic figures did, and if it weren’t for these ancestors we couldn’t use any words at all to talk about the Divine. But you, you kept on going, but what did you really do? It’s like if there were a king who was known for having so much gold, and a person praised him for how much silver he had.”

So first of all I love that in shul in the Babylonian Talmud, everyone’s a critic and everyone has an evaluation of services while they’re still happening.

But I think about this teaching anytime we get into discussions like last week’s Kiddush program about theology and the Divine. It was really wonderful and thoughtful, and I appreciated everyone’s honesty in the questions you have and the views you expressed. And it did not go unnoticed by your rabbi that the ways our siddur talks about God really do not land for the vast majority of you who were there – the big metaphors of “King” and “Lord”, the importance of praising the Divine as though this was needed on high somewhere.

I just want to say a few things to open this crack more, because a lot of the ideas that you reject about the Divine and that I do not hold either — we feel like we’re breaking something when we say it out loud. And I am really working ahead about the High Holy Days, to make sure that the metaphors we are using to aid us are indeed helpful and true in the moments we need them, and I am concerned that the liturgy as it is will not help us at all unless we do some pre-thinking about it before the holy days. I’m going to say a few things today, and I have started reaching out to the people in our congregation who have been our spiritual teachers because I think we should hear many voices the coming weeks — different voices about what the Divine means to us, what it means to stand in the presence of the Divine with kavvanah, with purpose. There are people here who teach this better and more clear than I do, and you should have a chance to learn from them on Shabbat and other times. If we just walk into Rosh Hashanah without thinking about them, the words of the machzor (prayerbook) will not have depth and will not open a door for us.

So for me, one of the biggest things is maybe a paradox. I do not think of the Divine as a being in some one place, a personality of some kind whom I can address who is completely separate from myself or from us. And at the same time, I find the experience of imagining myself in the presence of a power I had no say in choosing to be very important. Visualizing that, which I do not literally believe, does something important that I won’t give up.

So to the first part of that: I wonder a bit how all of this got started and created, but not knowing doesn’t really affect my day. I take now as a given; we are here and so is the universe. It is permeated with Divinity, and just as every atom and every charge in the universe is affected somehow by every other, so too every spiritual atom and spiritual electron is linked. The totality of it is the Divine; each part of it is; and also each thing made up of it – me and you, the tent and the concrete, the trees and the engines in our cars. We are all spiritual receivers and transmitters. We have that capacity whether we use it or not, and the invisible Divinity is everywhere just as much as the gravitational force we don’t see or the radio waves that are hitting us and going through us whether we choose to tune to them or not, to produce or amplify or play for someone else. That’s my operating picture. That’s where God is for me. And in a way I can’t tell you very well I think that these Divine sparks – atoms and charges – they carry goodness and wisdom and Torah. Like a circuit that can be completed or broken by us, we can tap this goodness, which is a renewable energy and is never consumed, like the burning bush. I and we didn’t create it, but it doesn’t travel unless we extend or complete the circuit.

So I don’t think God sends floods or plagues, or heals from cancer or doesn’t, or decides on 400 years of slavery in Egypt and then its end. I don’t think God is judging or decreeing. There isn’t someone else out there doing those things. Some of the evil and suffering that happens is the fault of humans, and some just a product of nature. That’s the world as created.

Part 2 is that for me it’s good to focus on a particular cluster or manifestation of that everywhere-Divinity, on a regular basis. The metaphor of malchut, of melech or “king”, is made up for me of power and lawgiving and a selection I had no part it. And I need a reminder that there are things outside of me and that won’t disappear when I can’t hold them up, with my incomplete goodness or my incomplete spiritual focus.

Sometimes I look up at the top of the Aron Kodesh (ark) or I look up toward the Ner Tamid (eternal light) or the open sky, because I want to feel smaller than I usually do, humbler, but still present, and aware that this small person is still at the center of my horizons.

Sometimes I talk intimately to the Divine I imagine gathered up that way, atoms and charges concentrated palpably in front of me, and I like to say exactly the words in the book, and to find myself in them. To connect to the thoughts of the many, many people who put them together and sounded them out initially, and the ones who have said them before for important reasons and occasions. I like to say their words, to run them through me, because just as the Divine was not made by me — I had no say in that but I am made up of Divine stuff — so too these words change and recreate me. They make me able to say certain things and they make me into the person who can make those words more real.

I never experience my words as praise of a God “out there”, watching from afar to see what I am saying. I experience my words helping to connect the circuit, making the universe worthy of these praises, reminding me that my intentions help make the words in the siddur true when they don’t seem true in the daily news. Sometimes I’m consciously reconnecting myself to the grid, completing the circuit running through me. Sometimes I’m just noticing that there is more spiritual energy flowing than I remembered since yesterday. Sometimes it’s just cathartic to ask for things, in a chant out loud, speaking directly to the “king” who graces me with an interview. Sometimes it’s good to hear myself say the hopes and yearnings and thank-you’s out loud that I don’t otherwise say to people (but ought to more). Sometimes it’s helpful to let myself ask for things — for help for me, for a better world for you.

It helps me to approach my praying this way, with this kind of cinematography. It doesn’t bother me that I don’t believe my picture is actually there. At least, I do not anymore experience it as any contradiction. In the Kabbalah, the idea of “king” is split in two. If you look at the diagram of the ten sefirot, the ten phase-states of divine energy flowing toward our spiritual consciousness, the farthest away is called Keter, the crown; and the closest is called Malchut or royalty, sovereignty, and is identified with us, with the people of Israel. I like that the Kabbalists are messing with the king metaphor, to make it both so far away and so close by simultaneously.

That’s where I will leave it today. We are in the period leading toward Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two ancient Temples, and then toward Yom Kippur which recalls when we all were united with each other and the Divine name at the Temple in its glory. This is a time of year to experience the breaking of the circuit, the incompleteness of the Divine name, the breaking of ideas that have led us to inner destructions – the Jewish calendar wants us to do that, to see what’s not whole in our theology and to break what needs to be broken. As Rabbi Chanina reminded us in the Talmud, we don’t have to use words about God that don’t do the job, just to look good to others.

If the teachings you think you have heard from Judaism about the Divine cannot hold, let them break. Break them yourself. You will not hurt God; you will not hurt the shul or me, and you will not destroy Judaism or the world. Some of our old names and ideas for God, they are like building materials that are obsolete, or wires frayed from a lot of good use. But we have better stuff with which to understand and imagine and connect to the Divine. Some of it is brand new and some of it has been in spiritual storage for whatever reason. I’m grateful for the many teachers in our community who will help us find it all and take it out and learn how to use it, so we can build sturdy and electric for the new year.