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A Lot of Tov! Podcasts to Share

I've gotten so behind on posting each new Tov! podcast here!

So here's a way to find all the ones you haven't heard yet. The most recent one features two college students, Sadie Meltzer and Lela Spira-Savett!

 

Yitzchak's Wells: Digging and Re-Digging Today

Genesis 26:17-18, from the Torah reading for the past week:
“Yitzchak (Isaac) went from there and encamped in Nachal Gerar and lived there. And Yitzchak went back and dug all the wells of water that they had dug in the days of Avraham his father, and the Philistines had stopped them up after Avraham’s death, and he called them names just like the names that his father had called them.”

A nachal or wadi is a river bed that flows in the rainy season and is dry in the summer. In the verses that follow in Genesis 26, Yitzchak’s people don’t just re-dig old wells but also dig new ones, and they quarrel about them with the Philistines. Quarreling is probably not just verbal. Yitzchak names two wells after the quarrelling itself – “Struggle” and “Accusation”. Then he moves a bit away and digs a well and there is no quarrel, so he names that one something like “Breadths”, “for the Divine has given us enough space for us to be fruitful in the land.” Soon after the Philistine king, along with one advisor and his military chief, approaches Yitzchak and he is surprised, believing they hate him. Instead they say they have seen that the Divine has blessed Yitzchak. So they propose a treaty, and each sides swears to it. Another well is found, and Yitzchak names it after the treaty-making.

1. This whole episode takes place in the area from the Gaza Strip to Be’er-Sheva (Beersheba). In biblical times, this is a border region for the Israelites and the Philistines. Part of the scenes take place in what today is a part of Israel called Otef ‘Aza or the “Gaza Envelope”, the communities just outside the Gaza Strip which were attacked savagely by Hamas on October 7.

2. Rabbi Matt Berkowitz of The Schechter Institutes in Israel wrote last week about Zionism something like this: Through centuries of exile Jews kept connected with the places of their ancestors in the Land of Israel and the names of those places. When they returned, they reclaimed the old wells, came to live in the places and restore their ancient names.

3. Palestinians have the same dream about the villages the lost in 1948. They say that Israel has filled in the wells, erased the ancestral names of the villages they abandoned or were forced out of in the war of 1947-1949, even when those towns were settled with new residents. That’s true in many places, though not all. It’s also even more complicated than that. Arabic place names are often themselves versions of Hebrew names from the Bible. Many places in Israel have names in both languages. Some sites have ancient names or labels, Hebrew or Arabic or given by Christians, but the sites are near yet not quite exactly right on the biblical spots.

In Israel, bus and train and destination signs within Israel are in Hebrew, Arabic, and English all at once, coexistence encoded in multiple names. Still, so much of the conflict itself is embodies in names. The war of 1947-49 Israelis call Milchemet Hashichrur, the War of Liberation, and Palestinians call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. However you assign the responsibilities leading up to it, it is clearly both.

4. The Torah talks of digging into the ground, in search of water. I shudder over and over as I read those words this year. In Washington last Tuesday Rachel Goldberg, the mother of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, reminded us about 240 people whose lives are literally underground. #BringThemHomeNow. So much of the Gaza war is about tunnels underground.

And so much of conflict in Israel-Palestine and throughout the Middle East is about access to water.

5. As I listened to all the speeches about anti-Semitism in Washington last week, and all the historical events they referenced, I realized something about Yitzchak and the naming of the wells in Genesis that I had never paid attention to before. Some of the wells Yitzchak calls by the names his father gave. Some Yitzchak names in relation to the conflicts of his own day, or the respite from conflict, or gloriously at the end the making of a treaty.

Not all the names are the same names Avraham had given. Yitzchak carries those names, but chooses when to use them and when to name in relation to the dynamics of his day – with his current enemies, or with his current frosty-but-nonviolent neighbors, or with his current treaty-partners.

We Jews often talk about anti-Semitism today as though every act and every manifestation is the same as what happened in Shoah or the European pogroms or the Bible. It all has the same name, the name my own generation inherited from our parents and our ancestors before that. (Though those are not actually all the same, biblical and Christian and modern anti-Jewish hate.)

But we also have to know when to name things in our own way, in the context of now.

Some anti-Semitism is just like before, and some is new. Some of the dynamics are another iteration of the same history – but some of the dynamics Jews have to be able to name in relation to the people here with us now. Intertwined or nearby, in the Land of Israel or other lands. A struggle is different from an accusation; neither is good but they are not identical. Not-fighting -- giving each other space to breathe or even prosper -- is not the same as treaty-making.

To say that it’s all the same anti-Semitism over and over can trap us, prevent us from finding reconciliations, and at worst become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the same time, the unique new “struggles” and “accusations” against Jews today are frightening in their own way, and against those we Jews have much less experience to lean on, perhaps.

The chapter with the wells is the only chapter that centers Yitzchak and Rivka themselves, their own life and their own generation. It is sandwiched between two much more well-known stories in which their lives are subordinated to a conflict within the next generation, their sons Yaakov and Esav (Jacob and Esau). Even Yitzchak and the Philistines can’t help but notice in their interactions all kinds of echoes of Avraham’s and Sarah’s own interactions with the Philistines of their times.

Still Yitzchak and Rivka are trying in some way to live in their own generation. To navigate the conflicts of their region in their prime, to figure out what’s just like before and to make room for their own language about what’s happening.

So too for me, in my fifties. I live so much of my Jewish life with the people of my parents’ generation, who can remember when there had not been an Israel and who can remember 1967 and 1973 when Israel’s very survival was threatened by war. My own generation takes Israel for granted, and shared in the struggles to liberate the Jews of the U.S.S.R. and then Ethiopia after that. After me comes a generation who know only a strong Israel and a Jewish people with stature and power in the U.S.

How do we appropriately name the wells we find that were named in previous generations? When do we focus on those who tried to stop them up, and when on our accomplishment in finding life-giving water? How do we learn to give our own names, to the places and struggles our people has been in before?

6. To end on hope: The Torah can’t agree with itself on why Be’er-Sheva, the treaty city, has its name. Or which treaty it acknowledges, the one negotiated by Avraham the father or Yitzchak the son. Genesis 26 and Genesis 21 argue about it, give different accounts. Is the name because of the treaty-making oaths, or it is because of the gifts and meals that celebrated the treaty?

What a privilege it would be to have such a thing to argue about, to have too many stories of peace.

Seven Years Old, Twenty Years Old, One Hundred Years Old

This is the D'var Torah I plan to give tomorrow for Parashat Chayei Sarah 5784, November 11, 2023.

One of the weekly Divrei Torah that are always worth a look comes from Rabbi Josh Feigelson, leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This week Josh started by talking about the idea of the “multiverse”, which he first learned about from one of his kids. Josh mentions the TV show “Rick and Morty”, which his son loves, and it’s about a scientist and his grandson who can travel between alternate versions of the universe and different times in those universes and different versions of themselves.

I thought where Josh might be going was to our fantasies of an alternate universe in which, say, the Palestinians had finished negotiating a peace deal with Israel in 2000 at Camp David, or just any other version of the universe after October 7. I also thought he might go to the commentaries on the first line of our Torah reading, which describe Sarah Imeinu, our ancestor Sarah, as the ultimate human multiverse. He didn’t but he helped me to.

The Torah says (Genesis 23:1) that Sarah’s life was me’at shana v’shiv’im shana v’sheva shanim, 100 years and 20 years and 7 years. It’s a distinctive way to express 127 years, and the commentaries cluster around this thought: That Sarah at every phase of her life lived with the qualities of a 7-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 100-year-old.

The Sfat Emet explains: For most people, as you grow in life you become wiser, building on your middot, your qualities, and purifying them. Which means that for most people, the only complete moment of life is the final one, when you are the most perfect you’ve ever been. But Sarah managed to grow without having to reject any of the previous iterations of herself. Sarah’s multiverse was present with her all of the time, and she always had access to all the dimensions of it, while standing in exactly the time she was in.

To be less abstract about it -- as a child, and an adult, and an elder, Sarah always had the best qualities and capacities of each of those stages.

Even as a child, she had the wisdom that most people need long life to attain.

Even as an elder, she had the wonder and freshness of a child experiencing the world, the constant urge to discover and see if this or that might be a worthwhile interest or a worthwhile friend.

Even as a child and even as an elder, she had the purposefulness of her prime, the ability to pursue a path with capacity and with her full energy. The well-formed dreams of how the world ought to be.

In Jewish tradition, we have an opposite character who helps us understand what was so special about Sarah. Shlomo Hamelech, King Solomon, is said to have authored three of the books of the Bible. It is said that when Shlomo was young, he wrote the Song of Songs, Shir Hashirim, a book of intense love poetry. In his prime he wrote Proverbs, Mishlei, a book of advice for how to succeed and prosper. In his old age he wrote Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, a book of often bitter reflections on whether life has any meaning or whether things just circle again and again -- “there is nothing new under the sun”, ein kol chadash tachat ha-shamesh.

After October 7 we’ve felt like Shlomo Hamelech in his old age. How can we be like Sarah Imeinu?

How can we recapture freshness and energy and wisdom, all at once, even seeing and knowing everything we see and know?

Our Torah reading is framed by two funerals, Sarah’s and then Avraham’s. And yet between them is the first concrete foothold of Israel in the land, the purchase and sale agreement between Avraham and Ephron the Hittite, the translation of Divine promises into something very specific. 

Then the introduction of Rivka, the generous young woman who transcended the small-mindedness and materialism of her culture in Aram, who saw a thirsty stranger and his camels and gave them water, even before she knew the stranger was send on a mission to find the woman suitable for his master’s son Yitzchak in marriage. Rivka is the one who delivers on the promise of that our people are to be rachanim b’nai rachmanim, compassionate people descended of compassionate people.

Then we hear of Avraham’s golden years, of life after mourning, and when he dies there is a remarkable reunion of his sons, who have been estranged from their father and from each other, as Yitzchak and Yishmael come together to bury him.

These possibilities the Torah lifts up for us, in a reading framed by two burials. The promise of a homeland; chesed and rachamim, boundless compassion; even reconciliation between Yitzchak and Yishmael -- these are the multiverses that remain present. That we try at least in our minds and hearts continue to leap to, as the descendents of Sarah.

Last Motza’ei Shabbat, last Saturday night, was the annual fundraising dinner for the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. It felt very strange to go to what was after all a nice party, and I know I wasn’t the only one who felt strange as we walked in. Over the course of the evening, I saw something like twenty-seven members of our Jewish community there. The event was co-chaired by our own Mindee Greenberg, and the new executive direction of the organization is our own Jane Goodman. 

I was so proud to be part of a Jewish community that is so committed to feeding people from week to week and helping people become self-sustaining and flourish. And to be so recognizable as Jews in this wider community because fo that work. I was amazed that so many of us could find a way across the multiverse of our Jewish pain in this moment, and make that mission and the joy of being a part of it the central of our lives for an evening.

100 years old and 20 years old and 7 years old. These days we are thinking about all our 7-year-olds, the children held hostage in Gaza or who lost their parents or whose parents are at war, and the children of Gaza, and our own children who we want to shield from an awareness that this is the world still.

And we are thinking about all our 20-year-olds,those who were just joyfully celebrating with music when they were attacked, young people fighting for Israel’s defense and berated on college campuses in this country.

And we are thinking about all our 100-year-olds, our elders, some of whom too are being held captive, Holocaust survivors retraumatized, people who thought they would never have to see what we have been seeing.

As we hold all of them, all of you, in our prayers and in our Torah, we reach for the blessing of our ancestor Sarah. That we can find in ourselves, and help each other find, the best of the 7-year-old within, the 20-year-old, the 100-year-old. That we continue to live with wonder and discovery, with purpose and energy and capable compassion, with wisdom. All at once, 100 and 20 and 7. All in the same life, even now.

Shabbat Shalom.

You Are Not Alone, You Are a Blessing

This is the D'var Torah I plan to give tomorrow in services, October 28, 2023 for Parashat Lech L'cha, the opening of the saga of Sarah and Avraham, three weeks after the Hamas attacks of October 7 and as the war continues in Gaza.

Who said the Torah had to be divided into 54 roughly equal sections? Why aren’t we able to stay with Bereshit and Noach for longer -- to talk not just about the Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Flood, but Cain and Abel, the giants, the rainbow, the Tower of Babel and subsequent spreading out over the globe. If it were up to me I would stretch those out for a few weeks. We could easily catch up later and read all of Leviticus in just three weeks.

This is what I think every year. But if you’ve been tracking my Divrei Torah since we started the Torah again, a week after October 7, you’ll know how much I haven’t wanted to have Avraham and Sarah in my face, just yet. Dreading them, really. Sarah and Avraham are about a burst of spiritual excellence into the world, they are a vanguard of new consciousness and beginning to build a community around that.

I have not this week wanted to be told to look hard for those things, or to tell you to. I don’t feel ready for excellence. And so I have said two weeks ago and last week. 

And most of all, I just want in my words and my actions to help take care of us who are here -- here dealing with everything, in Israel and our own lives; here displaced from homes in Israel, here connected to what’s happening in any way.

But Torah is wise, and so too the rabbis who made this schedule and did not base it on any week’s events, so here we are. 

Our Torah reading starts (Genesis 13:1) with a call to Avram, Lech L’cha, and an implicit call to Sarai, Lechi Lach. Go, you -- go as you, from where you are to a new place I will one day show you. You will be a great nation, blessed, a blessing for all the families of the earth. And those who bless you will be blessed. Now be a blessing.

It is good to hear that again right now. I think left to ourselves we might be saying this, that we are a blessing, and so many people are hollering the opposite at us. But -- You will be a great nation, a blessing, and those who bless you will be blessed.

Well this whole Torah reading, it could be ripped from the headlines. Avram and Sarai are called and arrive in the Land of Israel. But soon there’s a famine, and immediate exile. Sarai is taken into captivity in Egypt, and then she is rescued. 

Avram and his nephew Lot, their shepherds quarrel, and they end up partitioning the land they have just come back to. Lot goes to live in the area of S'dom, and Avram stays in the central mountains.

There is a regional war, and Lot is taken captive, along with others and their property, and Avram launches a military operation to get them back. 

One of the kings, the King of Shalem which may be Jerusalem, offers to reward Avram with riches in appreciation of liberating his captives, but Avram refuses to take any more than what he needs to pay his men and their expenses.

When God appears to Avram one night, God says: Don’t be afraid. I am protecting you. But Avram says: I am walking alone. How do I know this future will actually happen. (Genesis 15:2)

And God shows him the stars of the sky and repeats the promise, and God asks Avram to arrange a sacrifice, and puts Avram into a deep sleep, and tells him that his people will endure a long difficult oppression, 400 years, and then the promises will be fulfilled.

Sarai tries to speed up the process, by offering Hagar, her servant, to have a child for them. But the two women quarrel, and Hagar is banished, until an angel comes to her and tells her that her son will be great, though she Hagar will have to return to the home and suffer in the meantime. 

God appears again to Avram and repeats the promises, about the land and their future people, gives him the covenant of circumcision, brit milah, announces the birth of child to Sarai, and changes their names, to Avraham and Sarah, bringing the soft sound of God’s own name into theirs.

Lech l’cha. Lechi lach. Go, you. Be blessed, others will be blessed by you. Those who bless you will be blessed. Now be a blessing.

Ani holech ariri. But I am walking alone. So says Avram to go, so many of us feel this week.

Lechi lach. Lech l’cha. Go, you; you are a blessing.

There are types of interpretations of the words Lech l’cha in our commentaries, and they are based on the ambiguity of a prefix, of the lamed in l’cha. One interpreation says: Go for you, and the other says: Go to you. 

Rashi says go for yourself -- go because it’s good for you, and it will bring you benefit. A lot of the chasidic writers jump off and say further -- go toward what’s good for you. Go there because there is good for you. Go and become a blessing.

This is a hard one right now. Go toward this land of Israel which is good for you? it is, fundamentally, but so much is not good in living there just right now. It’s dangerous.

And go, us, and become more of a blessing? That is so hard right now, there and here.

And yet many people are doing it. In small acts of chesed, in remaking old connections, so people will not have to say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone. By picking up something to read or a podcast to listen to, to be better grounded. I am tremendously impressed with the response of Jewish leaders and alumni around some universities, where we are replying and standing up with strong and thoughtful statements and actions, not sinking to the level of the intimidations our students feel or the extreme and sloppy statements of opposing groups. Students feeling very alone are feeling a bit less ani holech ariri.

The second interpretaion is that Lech l’cha means go to yourself. Right now one of the most important things we can realize is that a lot of the things we need are in us already. It’s not that we know everything, that we’re all political scientists, and it’s not that any of us know the future and what the fighting will mean for Israel or for Jews.

But each of us knows something enough to say a comforting word to someone. Each of us can find a feeling that is authentic, a truth that is true in our core and generous to a person who needs us. Each of us knows something about we feel blessed to be Jewish at this time in our lives and our history. It doesn’t have to be the same for all of us; far from it. And from those things you know, none of us have to say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone.

Lechi lach, lech l’cha, go to yourself because that’s what you have. Sarai and Avram, when they first got the lech l’cha call they were already on the way, they knew something about why they were going even though they didn’t know the whole thing and God wasn’t telling it all to them.

And some of what it means collective lyto go to ourselves is to go to our Torah, which is the repository of all our souls and all our stories. I read out to you what’s in the whole week’s parasha because we already have been in some of these places already. We walk with our generations. We have their experiences, their wisdom about the things recorded in the parasha. We are blessed through them -- we are not alone.

I still hope to meet Sarah and Avraham as our avatars of spiritual excellence, maybe this week while their story is still before us in the weekly parasha and for sure sometime soon, as long as we meet in this House of Sarah and Avraham, this Beit Avraham v’Sarah. 

But even this week, the call of L’chi lach, lech l’cha is emphatically for us. When we might say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone -- we are not. Go as you are now, from where you are to a new place I will one day show you. You will be a great nation, blessed, a blessing for all the families of the earth. You are a blessing. you are a blessing. And those who bless you will be blessed. It's good to hear those words again. Now be a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is my D'var Torah for October 21, 2023, Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in binational democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To figure out how to fight an asymmetric war both successfully and ethically, and not fight until we've figured it out. Or else to decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did, who would do it again, because somehow the alternative is worse.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Re'im, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is what I think will be my words in the synagogue tomorrow, October 21, 2023, for Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in multiethnic democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did because we might not do it right, or to figure out how to fight a war where innocents on the other side are almost never killed and not fight at all until we’ve figured out how to do that.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Be'eri, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

Two Kinds of Darkness, Two Kinds of Light, Two Kinds of Torah

This is (I think) the D'var Torah I have for services this Shabbat tomorrow. The Torah reading begins with the very beginning of the Torah. It's one week since the Hamas atrocities began. Thank you to Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal and Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for helping me unlock this, though if anything is off it's on me and not them.

*****

Last week on Simchat Torah, as we tried our hardest to celebrate especially for our youngest kids, knowing what we already knew, there was a verse I was chanting in the Torah that just gutted me even more. It’s the very last line attributed to Moshe in the Torah, his last words. The final line of Moshe’s blessing to the people said:

 

Happy are you, fortunate are you, people 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.

 

Ashrecha Yisrael, mi chamocha, am nosha b’Adonai

magen ezrecha, asher cherev ga’avatecha

v’yika-chashu oyvecha lach,

v’atah al bamoteimo tidroch

 

And I thought in that moment, is it possible that not a single word or phrase of that Torah is true?

 

Not happy, not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. No Mi chamoacha, no callback to the moment of escape from Egypt, from danger into freedom, An enemy far from recanting, from going back on its essence -- and who is treading on whom today.

 

Was even our own Torah going to be turned on us, to mock us, and on our holy day no less and in the presence of our sweet little ones. Or was this some kind of invitation toward even more faith, a faith that Torah can be as powerful as the weapons and mutated imaginations that define our reality right now.

 

And with those wonderings ringing in my soul we turned on Simchat Torah to the very first verses of the Torah, the first words of our parasha today, and they too seemed unreal: the creation of light in a reality hitherto dark and formless all the way down.

 

This is the week we are starting the Torah again. Against the backdrop of murder and kidnapping and mobilizing and bomb shelters, mourning and fearing for our loved ones and our people, this is the week we start again fresh. Each year when we get to Parashat Bereshit we’re supposed to have become better prepared by the chagim (fall holy days) for a new year of Torah, to be more receptive to it than ever before. Yet we know ahead of us is for certain a week of more death, and certainly weeks and who knows how much of 5784. What kind of strength will Torah have, this week and beyond, and what kind of strength and wisdom can it give us?

 

Parashat Bereshit begins with perfection, everything in its orderly place, and humans created in the Divine image, b’tzelem Elohim, and the first humans, placed in a perfect garden -- with closeness to the Divine, the end of loneliness, and a charge simply to work and to protect their beautiful place.

 

Everything about the opening chapter was a revolution in human consciousness in its time, and I usually say in our time as well. But so quickly it all falls apart, and the parasha descends into exile, violence between brothers, and then violence enveloping the world. Until the parasha ends with only a single glimpse of hope, the birth of Noach: -- zeh v’nachameinu, this one will comfort us, will turn us around, mi-ma-aseinu ume-itzvon yadeinu, from our actions and the sadness our hands have wrought, min ha-adadmah asher erera Adonai, what we’ve made out of this earth that the Divine has cursed.

 

This is not an easy parasha to begin with, a parasha about new beginnings and immediate troubles. I thought about going to other Torah this Shabbat for the comforting we all need. But maybe it is the parasha we need nonetheless.

 

On the first day, darkness hovers over the face of the deep seas and chasms, and God says let there be light, y’hi or -- and there is. Vayehi or, light was, all of a sudden. And God saw the light, that it was good, ki tov, and immediately God separated the light from the darkness.

 

God wants light. And then God makes a decision to name the darkness. In the ancient world prior to the Torah, even in parts of the Bible composed earlier than the first chapter of Genesis, the creations stories would tell of realms beyond the reach of the gods, symbolized by deep and vanquishing waters and by endless darkness. But in our Torah God stakes a claim even to darkness. Gives it a name: laila.

 

Why would God want in on that? Especially if the light of the first verses is considered not physical light but Torah. Why would God want there to be something that is so profoundly opposite to Torah, as one of the first things in creation?

 

I can only think that there are two kinds of darkness. There is a darkness that says there is nothing in the world but violence, and even seeming goodness is just self-interest, or huddling together for safety and nothing more. Darkness is believing that is all there is, not just from time to time as we all do, but fundamentally all the time.

 

The Torah claims, I think, that darkness is something else. Some of it and maybe all of the moral darkness is made out of imagination and language and even out of connection, out of the capacity for organization and sustained effort -- twisted for sure, and encased in the hardest and thickest klippot, cases of iron and hatred.

This kind of darkness is made of the same things as its opposite -- as goodness, as light, as Torah. So God has no choice but to claim this darkness. And our hearts, connected as they are to all hearts with their roots in the Divine Heart, have no choice but to acknowledge it too.

 

And God is ambitious, and ambitious for the power of Torah against this darkness. Even knowing that it’s only through us, Divine image that we are but earthy nonetheless, that Torah will show its energy in the world.

 

So we have been taugh each day to say this blessing precisely when it’s actually light outside: Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohaynu Melech Ha-Olam, Yotzer Or u’Voray Choshech, Oseh Shalom u’Voray et Hakol. We thank God for fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating everything.

 

On the fourth day, God comes back to work more on light, and God creates the sun and the moon. According to the midrash -- and thank you to my friend and colleague Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal for pointing me to this Torah this week -- the sun and the moon were originally made the same brightness, and both were charged to shine all the time. The moon approached God and said: Is it possible for two kings to serve with only one crown? And God said: Then go and make yourself smaller. The moon said: I raised a valid point, so why should I shrink myself? And God said: Go and share the day with the sun, and also rule the night by yourself. The moon said: What good am I that way, as a candle during the day that no one sees? And God said: Then go and let Israel count its days and years by you. And let people see that sometimes you are small, and sometimes you disappear, and sometimes there is no other light but yours.

 

As there are two kinds of darkness, there are two kinds of light. A bright and certain light, so obviously guiding and warming the world, at times of peaceful unity and justice -- yes that is the light of the sun. But there is also moonlight, and Rabbi Rosenthal quotes a teaching from Rabbi Sharon Brous: That we Jews are moon people. “[T]he moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. ... the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.” We Jews have had long experience exercising that muscle, and now we need to build it even more.

 

Sometimes Torah is a light powerful like the sun. Twelve years ago, the week of this parasha, Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it had held captive for more than five years. It was among other things a testimony to the idea from our parasha that what Tzelem Elohim means is that we are accountable for the life of even a single individual, and the State of Israel did not break that faith with Gilad Shalit. That’s actually the Torah I taught for Parashat Bereshit right here on Shabbat twelve years ago.

 

Today, the light of Torah we need is more like the light of the moon. To continue to believe that the sanctity of human life is a powerful and guiding Torah, even during the weeks we are seeing more and more pictures of those who are captive and those being buried and more bombs. There is no Torah we can learn and go out and fix this with right now, even if we brought it to every minister and general and world leader. There is no Torah as that absolute a light. Still there is a Torah like the crescent moon that will help us locate ourselves, as I am trying to do right now with this Torah I am teaching, and Torah that will help us take a few steps in the right direction, even in the dark time we’re in.

 

In a few minutes we will bench Rosh Chodesh. We will anticipate the day this week when the moon disappears entirely and a new month commences, and we will beg God to give us a new month of blessing for us and for all the people Israel. How hard that prayer will be.

 

The name of the new month is Marcheshvan, which means “the eighth moon.” Eight is a special number. Marcheshvan is the only month of the Jewish year with no holy day at all beyong the new moon itself and Shabbat-- no celebrations, major or minor, not even a minor fast. Tradition says this particular new moon coming this week, the sky left only with stars, will some year launch the month when the Mashiach comes, when the messianic era begins. The month is beyond saved for the biggest festival that could ever be, the light that doesn’t ever end.

 

It won’t be this month. I pray that with as much darkness as already grips our souls, with as much fear as we have, that we will help each other perceive the light of the moon, even as a sliver, and not lose all hope even as we acknowledge the power of the darkness, the darkness still claimed by God. I pray that we will find a Torah of moonlight to guide us, and remain committed to finding it. May our loved ones be safe, may our mitzvot be powerful in the days ahead, for ourselves and for them.

 

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov

 

Affordable Housing: A Sukkot Reflection and Charge

This is my D'var Torah for the first day of Sukkot 5784 and Shabbat, September 30, 2023.

 

Sukkot is actually the third part of the High Holy Days. It’s not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Sukkot is the zany but nuanced third festival of our kickoff month of Tishrei.

And Sukkot is specifically a continuation of Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur we go hyperspiritual, in the sense that we put away most of our material existence – eating, physical pleasures and adornments, even our homes as we spend more time in the synagogue than any other day. Then on Sukkot it seems like the opposite – we get hypermaterial, very earthy. Outdoors, building the hut, waving the Four Species, and in contrast to Yom Kippur the essential mitzvah in the Sukkah is to eat.

What we are actually doing is bringing our spiritually-realigned selves from Yom Kippur into a stylized version of our material life. A simple house, a week of meals, getting hands-on with four types of plants that represent four basic ways we interact with the physical world of things that grow and the water cycle. It’s like moving into a prototype of the materialist world, getting the basics straight before we step out into a more complex actual world of commerce and tangible things. On Sukkot we try to align our material selves on the basis of our reoriented spiritual selves.

So in the Talmud the Sukkah is connected to the Holy of Holies, which the High Priest used to enter on Yom Kippur. That’s where the ark was with the tablets, which means the Sukkah itself is a covenantal place. It’s a design statement meant to guide our relationship to material things and to people with whom we share meals, and to people in our neighborhood. And all through Sukkot we’re reminded that our relationships with people and food are connected directly to nature. We’re always eating in the shade of the s’chach on top of the Sukkah, the shadows that remind us of the divine protection that covers us even when we’re not paying attention, a spiritual mist made up of very earthy material.

So I want to talk about one way we can prototype our material world in the coming year, so it becomes more aligned spiritually and covenantally. I am part of a group of about ten clergy in the area who call ourselves the Greater Nashua Interfaith Housing Justice Group. We have been together for about six years but we’ve been working very publicly on issues of housing for more than four years. I want to tell you some of the what and more of the why, and invite you to engage in that work with us as members of the Jewish community and the faith community more broadly. Many of us are speaking in our congregations this week on this topic. Some of you were here four years ago when we did the same.

A Sukkah is defined in the Talmud as dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling. On a Torah level this is about bringing us back to the desert, where the Jewish people lived in a series of temporary places while we got our Torah and our training. In Egypt, even as slaves we lived in houses, as we know from the night of the Exodus with the blood on our doorposts. In the promised land we would again have homes, to live in and buy and sell. Sukkot is about the experience in between. In the desert every one of us knew a vulnerability about food and shelter survival, and it was the same whether you were Moshe or Miryam or a tribal elder, or anyone else. 

In our community, dirat ara’i for some people means not having any place to call home from day to day. All of our local shelters are full all the time. Thanks to the vision of many local leaders and the generosity of many including members of our shul, a new shelter on Spring Street in Nashua was opened recently by the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. Having a stable place to come back to each day, to rest and eat a meal and do homework, is a basic prerequisite for physical health, and mental health, and doing your job well or staying consistent in school. Too many kids have to couch-surf, which means moving also from school to school, and you can imagine the impact on educational progress and social development.

Because so many of our local nonprofits work so well on homelessness, our clergy group has picked up the next level from that, which has never had enough public advocates. So we work on affordable housing, which in practice turns out be primarily for renters – another kind of dirat ara’i, temporary dwelling.

In the city of Nashua, an increasing number of people rent as opposed to owning the place where they live. As a result, rents in the city are skyrocketing, outpacing inflation by about double in the past decade. In our part of the state, even beyond the city, about half of renters pay more than they can afford on housing, meaning more than 30% of income. If you work in health care, education, or retail, it’s almost impossible to find a place to rent in Nashua that’s affordable on your salary, and certainly that’s the case for people in lower paying jobs.

As a result, just the City of Nashua needs to add around 4,500 more units of housing by 2030 to stabilize our overall housing market, and of that at least another 1,800 units that would have to be affordable to people making far less than the area median income. Even this wouldn’t quite meet the needs of all the families emerging from transitional housing programs or everyone working as a nurse, a police officer, or a public school teacher who wants to live in the community where they work. It would still be a dramatic bite in the shortage.

Our municipal leaders and our state leaders have been paying more attention to this over the past five years. In Nashua, there have been some welcome achievements and our interfaith housing justice group has been part of a couple of them, as has the Granite State Organizing Project in these and others. Nashua created an affordable housing trust fund with $10 million from the American Rescue Plan, one of the Covid-19 relief programs passed by Congress. This money will increase the incentives for private builders to create affordable housing. Rentals are financed on the expectation of an income stream down the road, and when the apartment is going to be rented for less than the market rate, there’s a shortfall there that makes the project unprofitable – or in the non-theological lingo we’ve learned, “it doesn’t pencil.” To make it sensible for a developer to rent at a rate that someone could afford who is a teacher or a nurse or getting back on their feet with a new job, each unit requires an extra $25-80,000 of upfront financing. That’s what this fund will provide. This $10 million can help us bite off some 10-20% of the need we have. We’ll need more in the fund to hit our goal by 2030. As an example, a real-estate transaction surcharge on the order of a penny on every $1,000 of a sale could fund our need in Nashua in perpetuity. 

We have a new inclusionary zoning ordinance that passed our Board of Aldermen with not a single dissent, which requires new buildings of certain sizes to have a certain number of units of affordable housing within them, or else the developer has to pay per unit built into the housing trust fund.

Many of you have seen the redevelopment and expansion of public housing downtown on Central Street off the south end of the new parkway, formerly the Bronstein Apartments and now Monahan Manor.

All of these are an acceleration of the pace of creating new affordable housing, but we are still behind where we need to be for 2030. So we need to advocate for more funding from the state and other sources, as the Covid-related stimulus funding comes to an end.

If it were just about numbers, I don’t know that we would be involved specifically as people of faith. How we create housing matters. 

The Sukkah is about covenantal design. It’s about how housing links us together or divides us. When the Talmud discusses the construction requirements for the Sukkah, it connects the Sukkah to a chuppah, the marriage canopy, and to a mavoy, a neighborhood allyway where people often decide to collaborate in carry things around or share food on Shabbat. I’ve been thinking about the most bizarre design teaching about Sukkah, which is the booth has to be big enough for your entire head, a table, and most of your body but not all of it. Obviously this wouldn’t be a comfortable Sukkah, nor is it ideal to have a Sukkah where you can’t eat with other people. I think what it means is that you have to experience a full Sukkah mind yourself, but your eating has to keep you connected to what’s outside.

How we create housing is as important as the raw number of apartments. American public housing programs created clusters of high-rise buildings that concentrated poverty and had the effect of segregating many cities by race. The newest thinking even about publicly financed construction is that it makes a difference when attention is paid to how a building helps people connect with their neighbors, with local business and public space. Open space and common space matter, incentives to connect with other people in the building as opposed to fearing them. It makes a difference when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures live in the same building – so much informal networking happens, so much social trust can be built across difference, the outcomes are proven better for children. 

It makes a difference when the people who live in a building or a neighborhood that will be rebuilt to increase its capacity for housing have a voice, in the design and in what happens to them while they are displaced.

Our interfaith housing groups call this covenantal thinking. It’s what we hope for and are already lobbying to happen around the next big projects in Nashua: redeveloping the Elm Street Middle School when the new school opens, recreating the public housing on Major Drive, what will happen next now where the asphalt plant was proposed down the hill from here, and how to repurpose Daniel Webster College as proposed in the new city master plan.

Covenant thinking might lead any one project to have fewer units, which on its own seems like a missed opportunity. But as the lens widens, new people might see themselves as partners for affordable housing, and new projects can emerge that the existing stakeholders might never have thought of.

The Spring Street Shelter has some of this covenantal thinking in it. There are community rooms, rooms for education, and former director Michael Reinke’s vision was for community groups beyond NSKS to share a life in the building. Not just to see residents are people who need things from “the rest of us” like clothing, or even skills training. But a place where community groups could offer interesting cultural and educational programming for anyone, resident or not, in a location central in our city right downtown.

The last time a group of us preached on housing we were leading into a public event, which generated momentum and new relationships with city officials and led to some of the progress to date. We’ve been able to collaborate and to critique. So too this coming Monday the community is invited to a forum with candidates for mayor and the Board of Aldermen in Nashua. We will hear stories about the housing crisis from community members, and then ask the candidates for their policy priorities around equitable, affordable housing. The forum is at the Unitarian Universalist Church near here at 7:30, and you’ll have plenty of time to make it after our Sukkah dinner and event here that night. 

Whether or not you live in Nashua, you can advance the goals of more affordable housing created in a covenantal fashion in many ways. Attend the event on Monday. Sign up for our e-mail list, so we can keep you posted on public meetings of local planning boards and other bodies debating policies and budgets. We need people who are not the usual faces to come and be YIMBYs, Yes in My Backyard advocates, because almost every project is opposed by an organized group. Ask any candidate for office if they will accept a pledge toward 2,000 new units of affordable housing this decade if you live in Nashua. But things are happening all the time in the other towns too, and next year, the gubernatorial and legislative elections will have a big impact, because Gov. Sununu and the legislature the past few years have added tens of millions of new dollars statewide into affordable housing finance. The new governor and legislators should continue in that path and add even more.

And if you or someone you know has expertise in any area related to real estate or finance or construction, or philanthropy, help us connect. One of the things about our congregations is that we have so many different talents and resources among us, and it’s not just the same players as are around other tables who discuss and decide these matters.

Sukkot is a good time to reflect on the physical structures we live in and how they are connected as neighborhoods and as towns. On Sukkot we move out of our settled homes into dirat ara’i, temporary structures, which help us get our bearings as we relaunch into a year of commerce and consumption, neighborliness, political debate about how we marshall and share our collective resources. On this Sukkot, let’s complete the High Holy Day season by restoring our material lives to their spiritual roots, their covenantal roots, for the new year.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!

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:

 

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!

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.