Earlier this month, a group of us spent a magical Shabbat with the mountain gorillas of Bwindi National Park. We began the previous week with 19, praying and singing with Abayudaya, the Jewish community of Uganda. By the following weekend, 11 had returned home to Baltimore and 8 of us continued on to the Buhoma Community Rest Camp in Bwindi, on the edge of the Impenetrable Forest. It was like a dream: a verdant façade confronted us across the valley, a vertical Tolkienian landscape of ferns and twisted vines, Ceiba and Cecropia, towering old growth mahogany.

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We settled in to our rooms, then circled up for Kabbalat Shabbat, candle lighting and a homecooked meal of pumpkin soup, tilapia, chickpeas in a curry sauce, and boiled potatoes. Saturday morning, we walked into the bush and ascended one thousand meters (over three thousand feet). Aside from our tour company owner, guides, and porters, at 49, I was the youngest of our Beth Am delegation. The oldest was 81. With varying degrees of assistance, we all made the climb.

The heavy rains came around hour 3.5. We scrambled to pull ponchos over our heads, stepped over streams of fire ants, squatted on logs under the vast tree canopy—a quick Shabbat lunch while Fiona, the local ranger, went ahead to coordinate with our trackers. Finding gorillas is common, but not a given. They are wild and travel where they will. We were Shabbat guests in their home.

But find them we did. Around hour 5 we lowered our voices and donned surgical masks, a jarring reminder of the recent pandemic and also that we share over 98% of our DNA with the largest of the great apes, making disease transmission a danger to both species. For a full hour, we stood silently, surrounded by some fifteen gorillas. We observed mothers nurse their babies, a one-year-old noodge his older brother as the latter laughingly attempted to beat his chest, all while the majestic silver-back sat silently on a rise, arms crossed, watching over his family.

Some members of our group were shabbat observant. Others took photographs. For me, personally, as someone who throughout the previous week had sought the perfect shot—of elephants, giraffes, hippos, pied kingfishers, lions, leopards, and ubiquitous antelope—the experience of unmediated appreciation was surprisingly liberating. I’m grateful for our guide Paul Tamwenya who, not Jewish, captured many wonderful images that Shabbat. And, believing as I do in Jewish pluralism, I appreciate that for some of our group, taking photographs of the mountain gorillas did not diminish their Shabbat experience, and may even have accentuated it. But for me, the chance to observe them without capturing their likeness reminded me of Shabbat’s role as a counterpoint to everyday living.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote the Sabbath is for turning from “the results of creation to the mystery of creation.” Jewish tradition calls traditional Shabbat practice sh’mirat shabbat, literally to “guard” or “observe” the Sabbath. Rather than a litany of restrictions, the point of abstaining from certain labors is to better appreciate our place within, not above, the created universe. It’s when we can make, unmake, or capture things—and don’t—that we cultivate a sense of beingness attuned to the ultimate and singular Beingness we call God. And God, we feel, is best experienced in community; it’s why we require a minyan for prayer. Seeing those majestic gorillas in the wild alone would have been special, no doubt, but in Judaism, shared holiness is holiest.

Even more than this, collective Shabbat observance fuels our worthy collective labors the other six days of the week. The next day, we drove six hours to Lake Mburo National Park where we embarked on our final game drive, observing more of God’s wonders beneath the raised roofs of our safari vehicles. Our lodge that night was at the end of a muddy narrow road flanked by deep ditches. Dodging a stranded flatbed truck and minibus carrying Belgian bike tourists, our Toyota Land Cruiser slid from the road and tipped sideways into the embankment. Almost immediately, the Ugandan culture of collective responsibility kicked into gear. Observing one another in distress, drivers and passengers alike worked together to free the vehicles. Afterward, against the setting sun, handshakes were exchanged and weary travelers sought rest just up the road.

On those last two days of our Beth Am Uganda Adventure, I was reminded how collective achievement is a biproduct of shared observance. But being Shabbat observant is not simply about ritual, it’s about really observing, with meditative awareness, our remarkable world. Jewish observance extends well beyond Shabbat to places of work, recreation, and—yes—ditches along muddy African roads. Observance is a branch of observation. Observation is the key to collective thriving.

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A version of this article will appear in the March/April issue of Jmore.

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There are “wait and see” people in this world, and there are “jump right in” people. Our community lost two of the latter recently. In November we said goodbye to Stuart Stainman. On New Years Day, Juanita Thompson Garrison left us as well. Each person was connected deeply with Beth Am and Reservoir Hill. Stuart was a longtime member of the shul, quietly and firmly advocating for accessibility and environmental justice. Stuart was an amateur historian, docent, and serial volunteer. He could often be found digging holes in front of the shul and around the neighborhood – in order to plant new trees.

Of Stuart, his godson Samuel Abrams wrote: “American life is filled with extraordinary men whose names never appear in newspapers, whose achievements are never posted on social media, and whose virtues are visible only to the families and communities shaped by their quiet constancy…. Last week, one such man died suddenly…. He was not famous. He did not seek attention. He lived without pretense. And in that ordinariness, he was exceptional.”

Abrams describes just how rare and special it is for a person to eschew attention while painstakingly giving their own attention to others. “At a moment when American institutions feel brittle—when men are withdrawing from work, community life, family formation, and civic and religious institutions—Stuart’s life is a reminder that a society depends on millions like him. Ordinary men who wake each day and choose to care. Men who love their children without hesitation. Men who sustain synagogues, coach teams, tend parks, and keep neighborliness from disappearing. Men who save quietly so they can give quietly. Men who see service not as sacrifice but identity.”

Juanita Thompson Garrison, like Stuart Stainman, also led a life of service – to family, community, and God. For years, until her last, she sported a money piece hair dye, a little pizazz resting above her forehead, drawing attention to her beautiful eyes and broad smile. “Hey baby,” Ms. Juanita would say as she sauntered over with her little black dog pepper. She was, in the words of Rabbi Matia ben Harash, “the first to extend greetings.” But she often bemoaned this fact. She wanted others to get better at saying “hello,” especially some Beth Am congregants who might drive into the community, park, and walk to the synagogue without doing so. One year, IFO, Beth Am’s sister non-profit of whose board Ms. Juanita was a founding member, created a “just say hello” campaign.

Juanita, like Stuart, was devoted to the essentials without any expectation of reward. Beth Am’er and friend Dianne Schwartz called her a “live life to the fullest lady.” They would volunteer together, registering returning citizens to vote, go for walks together, “gab” together. “In all her story telling,” Dianne said of Juanita, “I kept looking for someone who might be angry about how the city of Baltimore went through terrible times and how the Black community was horribly marginalized over the course of many decades throughout her life. but she would get mad when I tried to ask about things race related. She would yell that we all just need to care about our neighbors and our family and our friends and take care of one another. And learn how to be polite and respectful.”

Of Stuart, Samuel Abrams wrote, “What makes his death so painful is what makes his life so important: There is no flashy story, no viral moment, nothing that fits our culture’s thirst for spectacle. Only steadiness, devotion, reliability, sacrifice, curiosity, and love.” The same could be said of Juanita. Rabbi Matia ben Harash, who like Ms. Juanita, reminds us to “say hello,” also advises: “Be a tail unto lions and not a head unto foxes.” Leaders sometimes lead from the front and other times from behind. These beloved people did some of both. But each was acutely aware of the need to serve with pride (pun intended) and not deceit. The old saying goes, “we’re only as good as the people we surround ourselves with.” But when you care about your neighborhood, your synagogue, your church, and your family, you don’t always have that luxury. Instead, taught Stuart and Juanita, you just take the people around you and make them better.

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A version of this post will appear in the February issue of Jmore

The beginning of this week’s parasha hints at a happy ending:

וַיִּשְׁלַ֤ח פַּרְעֹה֙ וַיִּקְרָ֣א אֶת־יוֹסֵ֔ף

Joseph is freed from jail and elevated in Mitzrayim. But Miketz itself does not have a happy ending; in fact, it doesn’t have an ending at all. Two years ago, in the midst of the Israel-Hamas War, I gave a sermon on this parasha titled, “A Lament from the Messy Middle,” reminding us that The Empire Strikes Back is, definitively the best Star Wars movie because (in contradistinction to Shawshank) it presents the heart of an ongoing saga. Miketz insists on two paradoxical truths: First, that the messy, painful middle will end, that we won’t be

here forever. How? Because we know that next week Judah will stand up for his brother Benjamin, that Joseph will reveal himself, that the brothers, long estranged, will reconcile at last. And the second truth is that any ending of this chapter of our story is but a beginning of the next. Here’s a bit of what I said a couple years ago:

We meet our protagonist rotting in prison, until Pharaoh has unsettling dreams that no one can interpret… Pharaoh’s dreams and Joseph’s ability to interpret changes everything. He’s cleaned up, given a shave and a haircut and thrust before the king…. he is elevated to vizier and placed in charge of agricultural policy for all of Egypt. And that’s how he comes to encounter his brothers once more…. Joseph spends the remainder of the parasha toying with his brothers. And since this is the messy middle, the portion doesn’t offer resolution….

Our parasha, I said, ends similarly to “Empire” leaving us to wonder: has Joseph become the enemy of the story, adopting a Pharaoh’s malevolence? Has he succumbed to the dark side? Will the brothers repeat their sins, leaving Benjamin for dead and probably destroying their father Jacob for good? Will the old Judah show up, the one who suggested they sell Joseph, who called for his daughter-in-law’s execution? Or will there be a nechemta, a reproachment, a truce, a reckoning, a stable and lasting peace?

That was then, in December 2023, and I was very focused on that Shabbat (throughout that entire year really) on the trauma of Oct. 7, on the horror of rising antisemitism, on the suffering of our living hostages, on the seeming intractability of the War. Since then, some things have changed, some have not.

But though Israel’s plight continues to tug at my heart daily, though I was privileged to spend Chanukah this week at the Embassy in DC as Ran Gvili’s sister lit the chanukiah, today I come not to talk about Israel. I got thinking about happy endings this week for another reason: because of Rob Reiner. My God, folks, what is happening in this country?! In this world?! The beaches of Sydney, Australia, soaked with the blood of our people. Ten-year-old Matilda. 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Marika. Murders at Brown and MIT.

There’s more, and I don’t mean for one moment to minimize any of these, but I got thinking about Rob Reiner and happy endings because of the utterly tragic and so very unhappy end he and his wife Michele met this past week. To me, it was such a counterpoint to so many of Reiner’s own wonderful films. A Few Good Men, The American President, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…. The American President ends with Michael Douglas (nice Jewish boy) growing a conscience and getting the girl. The Princess Bride famously concludes with Peter Falk (another nice Jewish boy) describing the perfect final kiss between Wesley and Buttercup to his grandson played by Fred Savage (yet another nice Jewish boy). Misery ends with the author’s escape. Sally, of course, falls for Harry in the end. Even A Few Good Men has its own version of a happy ending with Jack Nicholson (possibly but probably not of any Jewish ancestry) getting his just desserts from Tom Cruise (definitely not a Jew).

But truth be told, as I began to reflect on the film legacy of Rob Reiner, I began to realize there’s a better way to think about the endings. Some are happy. Some are less so, like Stand by Me, based on the Stephen King story “The Body,” which ends with the group of boys encountering the horror of death for the first time. Yet, I’ve always loved the final line from that film: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Who delivered that line? Richard Dreyfuss. Yup, Jewish. And what I realize about the endings of great and memorable movies, Reiner’s and so many others, is that whether they’re happy, bitter-sweet, or incredibly sad. They’re satisfying. They feel right.

The next couple weeks of our Torah cycle finds our ancestors gathering in Egypt. Joseph’s story comes to an end, and his end is satisfying if not entirely happy. It’s the beginning, after all, of a terrible story of hundreds of years of slavery, of trauma, and suffering. But it’s the right ending because it sets us up for the theophany, the revelation at Sinai and the continuing and revelatory relationship between our people and God through engagement with our most cherished book. It’s satisfying because of the iterative redemption that comes with yetziat mitzrayim, our arrival to Eretz Yisrael, the thriving of Jewish life across the globe over millennia, the upbuilding of Medinat Yisrael in our ancestral homeland.

Torah and our Jewish interpretative tradition offer a constantly unfolding Jewish story. One of my favorite lines from Pirkei Avot (5:22) is Ben Bag Bag’s comment,

הֲפֹךְ בָּהּ וַהֲפֹךְ בָּהּ, דְּכֹלָּא בָהּ.

Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein.

וּבָהּ תֶּחֱזֵי, וְסִיב וּבְלֵה בָהּ, וּמִנַּהּ לֹא תָזוּעַ,

Look into it; And become gray and old therein; And do not move away from it,

שֶׁאֵין לְךָ מִדָּה טוֹבָה הֵימֶנָּה:

for you have no better portion than it.

The paradox of Torah is it is both circular and linear. We read this parasha last year and two years ago. Our people have read it over thousands of years. Our descendants will continue to do so. We literally roll Torah back to the beginning as we stand on the banks of the Jordan. We begin again and again and again, learning, growing, hopefully progressing in each subsequent generation through our encounter with those first generations of our people.

But our history within and beyond Torah, within and beyond Tana’kh is decidedly more linear. In fact we Jews more or less invented the concept of linear time, not only that our own people has an origin story and a destiny, but that history moves inexorably forward from a starting point toward some distant future, that unlike the Greek gods or those of the Sumerians and others before them, lords of the ever-turning Wheel of Time, our God is a God of history and of justice.

Thomas Cahill wrote about this in his 1998 book The Gifts of the Jews. “All evidence points to there having been, in the earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was profoundly cyclical. The assumptions that early man made about the world were, in all their essentials, little different from the assumptions that later and more sophisticated societies, like Greece and India, would make in a more elaborate manner….. Jews saw time differently,” says Cahill. “It isn’t an endless circle; it’s linear moving towards a triumphant destiny. And every generation – every person – is contributing to writing and shaping the story…. Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible, and an individual life can have value…. “The Jews, he says, “were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world.”

This is true. So yes, I’m a sucker for a happy ending, but too often, I think, we get suckered by happy endings. We focus so much on the conclusion we yearn to see, we forget that endings, themselves, are iterative and additive. There’s a quote I like often misattributed to John Lennon: “It will all by ok in the end. If it’s not, it’s not the end.” The line’s true source seems to be Fernando Sabino’s 1988 Brazilian Portuguese book The Checkerboard. My point though is that Parashat Miketz reminds us that to be a Jew is to contend with a world in which we are open to endings to come. Joseph’s satisfying ending becomes our people’s sojourn and then suffering. Our suffering gives way to salvation and revelation. Our wanderings bring us from the wilderness to the Promised Land. Our exiles from there in 586 BCE, in 70 CE are not permanent either. And our current struggles in the world and within Israel will yield new endings – may they be redemptive and restorative.

I’ll close with this. Recently, I had the opportunity to stay in a Best Western. It had been some time, and I was reminded of a wonderful song by the singer-songwriter Richard Shindell. This week, having rediscovered it, I found myself playing it on repeat. It’s the tale of a hapless trucker who flips to a Christian radio station in the middle of the night on I-80 East. While the preacher gives a fire and brimstone sermon, the truck driver struggles both with his ebbing faith and his own weariness at 4 am. Nevertheless, he offers a modest prayer: to make it safely to his destination – by way of the next motel, one leg on a continuing journey across a vast network of highways. I’ll sing you the middle verse and the chorus:

Did he who made the lamb
Put the tremble in the hand
That reaches out to take my quarter?
I look him in the eye
But there isn’t any time
Just time enough to pass the tender.
The highway takes its toll
The green light flashes go
And it’s welcome to Ohio.

Whoever watches over all these truckers
Show a little mercy for a weary sinner
And deliver me, Lord, deliver me
Deliver me to the next Best Western

Joseph in jail might have sung something similar. Our ancestors in bondage too. And our people under the thumb of one repressive regime after another. Today, in the messy middle of Parashat Miketz, amidst the interlocking circular and linear journeys of our people, Jewish faith means we know that despite false starts, flat tires, or wrong turns, there will be rest and restoration for us weary travelers, a satisfying ending just over the horizon. Or just beyond the next bend in the road.

On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi regime in Germany carried out its infamous November Pogrom, Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass. 400 Jews were murdered or driven to suicide. More than 1400 synagogues and 7500 Jewish businesses and homes were destroyed. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. In the days that followed, 30,000 Jewish men were transported to concentration camps.

Did this pogrom materialize out of thin air? Of course not. Antisemitism was nothing new to Germany nor to Europe. And most of the 1930’s saw marginalizing of Jews, stripping them of rights, and subjecting them to violence. According to the Jewish Museum of Berlin, “For years already, the Nazi regime had been pursuing a plan of forcibly expropriating Jews and, in particular, “Aryanizing” Jewish businesses to finance Germany’s re-armament process.”

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And then, of course, there was a spark that lit the fuse, a pretext to justify attacks on Jews in the minds of those itching to punish them for their crime of simply existing in Germany. The scapegoating came in the form of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan who, on 7 November 1938, shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, who died of his injuries two days later. The Jewish Museum’s website writes the following: “The assassination provided a welcome pretext to strike out against the Jewish population with unprecedented brutality. Nazi propaganda portrayed the violence as an outbreak of ‘spontaneous national rage.’” Of course, as we know, it was exactly the opposite, an orchestrated attack by Hitler and Goebbels, by the SA and SS, with popular support from a willing public.

I share the story of Kristallnacht, because for me it was the beginning of my own paternal family’s immigration story, the day my grandfather’s home was ransacked and he escaped, eventually joining his sister in Chicago. He was accepted to this country as a refugee, fleeing oppression and seeking to build a better life in America. The US did not make it easy. There was rampant antisemitism in the State Department that blocked so many Jews from escaping in the years when that was still possible. But he did come and I’m here because of it.

I want to touch on the theme of immigration today, and truth be told, I hesitated to share this story at all. First, because drawing Holocaust analogies is really almost never a good idea. In considering our American response to the recent and inexcusable DC shooting of Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe and murder of Spec. Sarah Beckstrom, there will be some who want to claim some sort of parity between these acts or types of acts, that these two young men and their actions, nearly 90 years apart, were equally culpable of taking lives or equally innocent because of the geo-political context in which they came to their violent acts. I want to caution us against drawing these types of comparisons between Hershel Grynszpan or Rahmanullah Lakanwal. They are different people. The national and historical contexts are far from identical. The sociological question of what societal conditions help to breed violence or when or against whom violence might be justified is in interesting one, but not one I feel prepared to address at this time.

No, I share the story of Kristallnacht because I’m interested in how societies relate to outsiders, how they can weaponize racist tropes against foreigners, including when those so-called foreigners are legal residents, citizens even. I’m not going to restate today my specific concerns about Ernst Fraenkel’s “normative” and “prerogative” states and I how I fear his framework is increasingly relevant to life in America today. That sermon from Yom Kippur is online if you wish to review it.

What I want to consider today is what we might do when faced with the erosion of basic democratic norms and civil legal protections, when minority populations are subject to leaders or citizens from the majority making blanket claims about their own insecurity while asserting blanket condemnations of entire populations that they consider to be, well, “garbage.” Beyond important and necessary legal challenges, beyond OpEds and protests, what are some non-violent tools available to us to push back against the scapegoating of migrants, of racist and xenophobic rhetoric condemning the cultures of entire countries and their millions upon millions of inhabitants and expatriates?

Years ago, at the height of the #MeToo Era, I gave a sermon on Parashat Vayishlach, this week’s parsha, about the rape of Dinah. I spoke of a Tarbut Ra’ah, the Talmud’s term to describe a culture of pervasive tolerance, even permissiveness surrounding bad behavior. I suggested then that Jacob’s silence on the rape of his daughter may have been reflective of that culture, the tendency to blame women for sexual violence or undervalue considerations of consent.

Here we are, now eight years later, and Stephen Miller is claiming the tarbut ra’ah, the irredeemably wicked culture, is that of Afghanistan, of Sudan and Somalia. “You are not just importing individuals,” Miller tweeted (on Thanksgiving, for God’s sake). “You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

To be clear, I don’t disagree that these are, in many ways, failed societies. The brutality in Sudan is horrific. The Taliban’s totalitarian oppression of women and dissidents is terrifying, which is why our Afghan neighbors selling their wares at our Boutique last Sunday are here, in the United States! But how Miller justifies his own family’s immigration story and American success after his great-grandparents fled Czarist pogroms, I have no idea. Does he honestly think the Nazi Germany from which my grandfather escaped was anything other than a “failed state?” By such logic, am I and my children somehow tainted by the tarbut ra’ah, the societal rot that forced Grandpa Montrose to flee, that caused the extermination of two-thirds of European Jewry? Orwell himself would be hard-pressed to imagine a more Orwellian inversion.

I am deeply concerned about global terror and how it affects Jewish communities around the world, but I would submit that if there is a tarbut ra’ah, a pervasively dangerous culture that threatens America urgently at this moment, it is in fact the increasing normalization of nativism, of white nationalism, of antisemitism and anti-Israeli-ism, of racism, sexism, islamophobia, and more. In Parashat Noah, there’s a famous debate about Noah. Was he truly “blameless?” Was he a hero for having been a good man against the backdrop of his failed society? Or was he only “blameless” in comparison to them? No matter the answer, the implication of such a debate though is that it is quite difficult to buck a trend, to be good when bad behavior surrounds us. That’s the danger of a tarbut ra’ah, and it’s one the characters of our parasha contend with as well.

Not long after the Rape of Dinah narrative, and just before Rachel tragically dies in childbirth while delivering her son Benjamin, the Torah offers an enigmatic passage:

וַתָּ֤מׇת דְּבֹרָה֙ מֵינֶ֣קֶת רִבְקָ֔ה

Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died,

וַתִּקָּבֵ֛ר מִתַּ֥חַת לְבֵֽית־אֵ֖ל תַּ֣חַת הָֽאַלּ֑וֹן

and was buried under the oak below Beth-El;

וַיִּקְרָ֥א שְׁמ֖וֹ אַלּ֥וֹן בָּכֽוּת׃

so it was named Allon-bacuth.

Who was this Deborah? In a text where we infrequently hear details of women’s lives, let alone the particulars of their deaths, why would the Torah take time to tell us about Rebekah’s nurse? The thirteenth century Catalonian sage Ramban suggests the verse is not really about Deborah at all. Drawing from Bereishit Rabbah (81:8) he writes, “for the weeping and anguish could not have been such for the passing of the old nurse that the place would have been named on account of it. Instead, Jacob wept and mourned for his righteous mother who had loved him and sent him to Paddan-aram and who was not privileged to see him when he returned.”

But Rashi in Troyes two centuries earlier thinks different. He reminds us that decades earlier, after Jacob bargained for Esau’s birthright and stole his brother’s blessing, Esau wanted to kill him. So, Jacob fled to Haran, to the house of her Rebekah’s brother Lavan. וְשָׁלַחְתִּ֖י וּלְקַחְתִּ֣יךָ מִשָּׁ֑ם, she says. “I will send and fetch you from there” once your brother’s anger dies down. Jacob, of course, stays a long time, twenty years, and the question is, does Rebekah actually send for him? According to Rashi in the name of his teacher Moshe HaDarshan, she does in the form of her maid Deborah.

But the real question is why does it take so long to leave? What is happening in Haran that keeps Jacob there? We know his uncle Lavan is manipulative, that he switches his daughters under the chuppah, that he compels Jacob to work for him for fourteen years, but the midrash suggests something even more sinister was going on. That the household of Lavan and his father Bethuel before him was a tarbut ra’ah, a depraved culture. One midrash argues that the reason they try to hold Rebekah (Gen. 24:55) for ten days before allowing her to depart with Abraham’s servant is related to the reason Lavan, a generation later, delays Jacob’s departure. This was a household that abused women.

In Rebekah’s case, the midrash in Yalkut Shimoni (Gen. 109), suggests that Bethuel, king of Haran, had introduced jus primae noctis, a custom granting lords the so-called “right of the first night” with a virgin bride before she is given to her husband. Bethuel and then his son Lavan after him were about to exercise that “right” before God intervenes and Rebekah is able to flee to Canaan with Abraham’s servant and her own nurse by her side.

This midrashic tradition is probably what Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, the twentieth century leader of Yeshiva University, has in mind when he posits an intriguing theory about Deborah, the maid who Rashi says goes back home to fetch Jacob, who spends decades with him, and who is honored with a burial in today’s Torah reading. “Apparently,” he writes, “Deborah played a major role in shaping the history and destiny of the Jewish people.” How? “Deborah was the leader of a moral underground movement.”

The Rav’s argument hinges on Rebekah’s quality of chesed. Much like the ancient debate about Noah in his time, he asks how someone who is raised in such an abusive household could be so kind? He writes, “Rebecca was brought up in the house of Bethuel and Lavan, in a pagan orgiastic society – how did she exhibit such great humility and chesed?... Why was she not influenced by her family and society? There must have been an ‘underground community’ in Haran, preaching Abraham’s morality. Rebecca was part of this underground movement. She studied and absorbed Abraham’s philosophy and adopted his weltanschauung (his worldview) – living by his principles of justice and righteousness.” Deborah, as Rebekah’s nurse, he argues must have been the conveyor of these values. That’s why she merits to be named in our parsha. That’s why she is buried at Alon Bachut, the so-called “weeping oak.” She was the jedi master, a subversive teacher of kindness against the backdrop of her tarbut ra’ah.

Hevre, I don’t know the extent to which our current circumstances call for an underground movement. As I said, we should be careful to honor distinctions between this political moment in this country and others that might serve as a cautionary tale. And yet, this era is, on its face, a dangerous one for many who dwell in this land, most of whom are responsible, hardworking, and fully deserving of the opportunities afforded my family, Stephen Miller’s and just about all of yours. I do believe there are things, both public and private we can be doing to support immigrants, including of course, the many who arrived here lawfully, many of whom have protected status, and some of whom are friends of this congregation.

For those who are getting up to speed or could use a reminder of the administration’s actions following the shooting of Wolfe and Beckstrom, the US Customs and Immigration Service issued a new policy memo this past Tuesday reiterating actions that the agency has been instructed to take. These are:

· Placing a hold on all affirmative asylum case decisions

· Placing a hold on all pending applications for immigration benefits including applications for work authorizations and green cards) from nationals of the 19 travel ban countries

· Conducting a re-review of all approved immigration benefits requests from nationals of the 19 travel ban countries

Given these circumstances, here are a few specific things we might do at the national level (with thanks to Evan Serpick for helping compile these resources).

· HIAS, the century-old Jewish organization which advocates on behalf of immigrants and refugees suggests going to Refuge Council USA (rcusa.org) and follow their action alerts. You can also go to congress.gov to contact your elected officials and insist they resist isolationist and/or racist policies.

· Contact the ACLU who are mobilizing legal and political advocacy responses.

In our Reservoir Hill neighborhood:

· Support and/or volunteer at Beth Am’s weekly produce distribution on Tuesdays or Byron McKenney-Powell Free Market on Thursdays, which support about 100 Afghan migrants living in the neighborhood as well as other neighbors in need.

· Support and/or volunteer at the Reservoir Hill House of Peace, 2401 Eutaw Pl., which provides stipends, housing, and community for asylum seekers, fill out the contact form here and/or contact Ruth Clemens, 410-935-1862, ruthkclemens@gmail.com

· Support and/or volunteer with ERICA, which is looking for volunteers to co-teach English classes for Afghan women in Reservoir Hill on Tuesdays from 9:30-11:00 (contact Daniel Jacoby, 443-756-7377, djacoby@erica-baltimore.org).

Baltimore Citywide:

· CASA is the largest and most organized local organization providing direct support to migrants under threat, including emergency legal support, family support, and legislative advocacy.

· Our partners at JUFJ work closely with CASA to advocate for local immigrants. They are currently asking people to urge Baltimore County officials not to require law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.

· The Esperanza Center offers English as a Second Language (ESL) education, healthcare, and low-cost immigration legal services.

Friends, let me end with this. I know many of us feel paralyzed by the volume and range of things coming our way these days. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Start small. Pick something you can dedicate some time to. Think about what is the best use of your time as well as the most effective. And remember, a Jewish commitment to the stranger, the foreigner, is both a reflection of our own historical experience as a people who have been shut out (or worse) from so very many societies and nations.

It’s also at the core of our Torah text which reminds us again and again to notice and respond to the ger, the resident alien in our midst. It will take moral communities, above ground and perhaps underground, to continually remind our country and fellow countrymen who we ought to be. We Jews know what it is to be scapegoated, which I believe means we have an obligation to speak out when we see it happening to others. How we do that effectively is always a critical question. If only we could ask Deborah of our parsha, of Soloveitchik’s imagination, the underground warrior-nurse. I’m sure she would have some ideas for us as well. Meanwhile, we’ll do our utmost to do some good in her stead.

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This year, our 1895 Baltimore rowhome turned 130 years old. We live on Eutaw Place near Beth Am and, beginning in the early twentieth century, a succession of Jewish families purchased and lived in the home. Sometimes I consider our deep wooden windowsills and wonder how many previous menorahs shone there in the decades when Reservoir Hill was at the heart of the Jewish community. For many years when the kids were younger, we placed our family hanukiyot in those windows so that passersby could see them from the street. (We did so again in 2023 after Oct. 7 as a reminder we need not and would not be afraid to identify ours as a Jewish home). In most recent years, though, they’ve lived on our dining room mantel and radiator, still by a window, but where we can admire their glow while eating our latkes.

Jews have a longstanding tradition of placing the Hanukkah menorah in a publicly visible place:

“It is a mitzvah to place the Hanukkah lamp at the outside of one’s house within the handbreadth closest to [the edge of] the entrance, so that the mezuzah will be to the right and the Hanukkah lamp to the left. And if he was living in an attic [or second story apartment], he should place it in the window that is closest to the public domain. One who has placed the Hanukkah lamp above twenty cubits has not done anything, because it is not recognizable.”

— Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Megillah v’Hanukkah 4:7

Maimonides’ rationale, based on the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 23b), is pirsumei nisa, publicizing the miracle of Hanukkah. This may not be a given. Hanukkah memorializes an era, not entirely unlike our own, in which Jews endured great pressure to assimilate. Some were Hellenizers. Others were observant Jews insistent on maintaining their traditions despite societal pressure (and imperial decree) to do otherwise.

This value of pirsumei nisa was so important that if an impoverished family had funds sufficient for either kiddush wine or a Hanukkah lamp but not both, the priority was the Hanukkah lamp because that would enable the family to proclaim their Jewishness publicly and proudly.

What exactly is the miracle we are meant to publicize? One possibility is that it is the unlikely victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Greeks. The more common story justifies Hanukkah’s timeframe, suggesting one small cruse of oil was sufficient to keep the menorah burning for eight days. Modern thinker Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg writes about the Jewish spirit implicated in such a legend: “Pessimists and assimilationists have more than once informed Jews that there is no more oil left to burn. As long as Hanukkah is studied and remembered, Jews will not surrender to the night. The proper response, as Hanukkah teaches, is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle” (The Jewish Way, P. 282).

A Talmudic tale imagines an unlikely origin story for the festival of Hanukkah. Adam, the first human, was created on day six, but crucially not long after Rosh Hashanah, in a season when the days get shorter and darker earlier. When he noticed this he said, “Woe is me; perhaps because I sinned the world is becoming dark around me and will return to chaos and disorder…. He arose and spent eight days in fasting and in prayer” (Avodah Zarah 8a). While the Gemara references pagan festivals Kalenda and Saturnalia, it’s hard not to notice a nod toward Sukkot, the eight day fall holiday that follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

We know from the book of Maccabees that there is a connection between Sukkot and Hanukkah, each an eight-day holiday, one around the fall equinox and the other frequently soon after the winter solstice. The connection is downplayed by the tale of the oil, but the legend from the Talmud offers some reprieve for Adam. The world wasn’t growing darker because he sinned, it was growing darker because winter was coming. Once Adam crossed the threshold of the winter solstice, however, things changed and the days began to get longer. Adam observed another eight days, this time feasting and expressing gratitude simply for the “order of the world” One interpretation of this fantastic tale is that Adam invents both Sukkot and Hanukkah, seasonal festivals that would be appropriated by pagans before, one day, becoming Jewish expressions of joy and light.

This month brings us Hanukkah, our Jewish festival of illumination, a celebration filled with candles in the darkness. In a darkening world, where a litany of evils swell and rise, where antisemitism threatens to force our people into hiding once more, our tradition insists we increase our light. Isaiah proclaims we are to be an “or lagoyim,” a light unto the nations (42:6).

A miracle of this Hanukkah is that 130 years after our house was built, we can still place our hanukiyot in the window, that we survive to tell these tales thousands of years after the Greeks became the latest (but unfortunately not the last) empire to try (and fail) to stamp us out. In Adam’s time, the miracle of this season was that the world began getting a little brighter. In our time, it’s the miracle of Jewish hutzpah, our insistence on lighting candles rather than cursing the darkness.

A version of this post appears in the December issue of Jmore.

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American Buddhist author Tara Brach teaches Mindfulness Meditation around the world. She often shares the joke in her classes while exploring identity and masking. We all wear masks. How do we know when someone is being authentic? “The word ‘person’” she reminds us, “is derived from the ancient Greek term persona, which referred to the masks actors wore to represent certain humans, animals, or gods. In our daily lives, we habitually put on our own personas to suit particular situations.”

Think about your own lives. What masks do we wear? Who sees when we’re angry, disappointed, excited, curious? How often and in what contexts do we reveal the real us? How much energy do we exert hiding? In our parasha it’s none other than God who grapples with how much to reveal to Abraham. The KBH is planning on destroy S’dom and Amora. And the verse tells us: “Now the LORD had said,

הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ מֵֽאַבְרָהָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֲנִ֥י עֹשֶֽׂה “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”

The Holy One takes Abraham into His confidence (as it were). God asks and then answers the question: “…Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him? For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is just and right צְדָקָ֖ה וּמִשְׁפָּ֑ט…” (Gen 18:17-19). In other words, God reveals the divine plans for Sodom and Gemorrah because to charge Abraham to be a man of justice is to demonstrate that the Source of justice is, in fact, just. When Abraham cries out:

הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כׇּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?”

It is because God has shown God’s hand. Abraham understands that God isn’t just dressed up as a god. Hashem is the real God. In so much of history, according to our Sages, God is hester panim, hiding the divine face. But here the Holy One says,

“?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙, shall I hide? No. Let’s be real with one another.”

?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ It’s hard to chew on this question, “shall I hide?” without considering the inverse, “shall we seek?” Relationships, whether egalitarian or hierarchical, turn on this push and pull, this negotiating the boundaries of other and self. Another interesting question here is not simply, “why does God remove the mask?” but “how surprised do we think Abraham is when God does?” How much of that confession is information Abraham already assumes about God? – that God seeks justice, that God welcomes dialogue and debate, that God wishes to be a teacher with curious and motivated students?

The question of whether to seek is, at its core, a question of how much we believe we already know about another. So often we simply assume we understand and appreciate the person sitting across from us – what she’s thinking, what they care about, whether his still waters are shallow or if they run deep? This is important, because relationships demand obligation. We’re accountable to our partners, our parents, our children, our colleagues, our fellow congregants, our rabbis – and they to us. The nature and contours of those obligations grow out of these connections.

My teacher Elana Stein Hain, Rosh Beit Midrash of the Shalom Hartman Institute, considers the nature of obligation in an essay from last year’s spring edition of the journal Sources. “My second model of obligation,” she writes, “comes from thinking about the very possibility of maintaining a relationship with God or with another human being or community.” She references sociologist Adam Seligman who makes a distinction between the “sincere self” and the “ritual self” (“Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, no. 4, 2009, 1082–83). “The sincere self,” says Hain “is what I subjectively think or feel at any given time: it is the self that is sometimes tired, sometimes happy, angry, in love, bored, etc. We can ask this self: how are you feeling about this? The ritual self, on the other hand, is found in what am I doing: I might be dancing or eating or reading or sleeping, etc.”

Considering this framework, I would suggest that if you are someone who craves sincerity, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, if you are the type of person who when asking yourself, ?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ Shall I hide? your inclination is “no,” than you are probably disappointed with (and maybe surprised by) people whose performative “ritual” selves are misaligned with their “sincere selves.” To you they’re just dressing up. On the other hand, if you are someone who is skeptical, maybe even cynical, about most people’s ability or inclination to harmonize these selves, if you yourself are not what our Sages call tocho k’varo, if you personally feel disinclined to reveal your more authentic self to others, then you likely have fewer expectations that others would do so.

Seligman, though, offers a different perspective on this question of obligation, suggesting that healthy relationships actually require us to create space for both selves, that it is a fools errand to strive for absolute harmony, that performing, even with our most intimate partners is a necessary investment in deep connections we wish to maintain and further develop.

Consider the words, “I love you.” Seligman writes, “We can in the end distinguish two forms of the words ‘I love you.’ The emotionally wrought confession by the star-struck young man appeals to the sincere mode…. On the other hand, we also have the ritual ‘I love you,’ whose performative aspect is more important than its denotative function.” Dr. Hain explains it this way: “[While] there is a sincere form of ‘I love you’ that means ‘I am feeling love for you right now,’ there is also a ritual ‘I love you’ that is said as a means of maintaining relationship: ‘I am in this loving relationship with you.’ It is tempting to value the former and to disregard the latter, but Seligman argues that the sincere self and the ritual self are both necessary forms of the self. Both are not only legitimate but needed when we want to be connected with others.”

But there’s a final layer to explore here, because the assumptions we make about others, whether and how they are masking, suggests we can know not just who someone is, but who they will become. I do think intuition and curiosity, real engagement, go a long way toward understanding and appreciating someone, but who among us is a finished product? The very nature of existence is formation, evolution. We are learning, adapting, and growing all the time. We are beings, becoming. The trap we so often fall into is to believe we ourselves are capable of growth, but others are trapped by their own past, their preconceptions, some algorithm that shapes their future.

There’s a midrash that considers the future of an important character in this week’s parasha. Sarah and Abraham have just exiled Hagar and her young child Ishmael, a child Abraham loves and had hoped would become his heir. Wandering the desert near Be’er Sheva, their skin of water having run dry, Hagar leaves Ishmael alone under a bush and bursts into tears. She cannot bear to watch him die. The Torah tells us:

יִּשְׁמַ֣ע אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־ק֣וֹל הַנַּ֒עַר֒

“God heard the cry of the boy,” which is already interesting because the text said Hagar was the one who cried. And the verse continues, “an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is.”

“Where he is,” בַּאֲשֶׁ֥ר הוּא־שָֽׁם, three words that seem unnecessary. Most commentators assume the verse means God responds to Ishmael in the place where his mother had left him, out of earshot from her, under the bush. But the midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 53:11) implies the text is not concerned with where he is but when he is – and who he will become someday.

The ministering angels rose to accuse Ishmael. They said, “Lord of the Universe, here is someone who will one day slay Your children with thirst. Will You now provide him with a well?” God said to them, “What is he now, righteous or wicked?” They said, “righteous.” God responds:

אֵינִי דָן אֶת הָאָדָם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁעָתוֹ.

I judge people only as they are in this moment.

What an extraordinary statement! God knows that Ishmael would become an enemy of Isaac’s descendants, of the Israelites. God knows that Ishmaelites would one day sell Joseph into servitude in Egypt. The prophecy in last week’s parashah even stated he would be a “wild ass of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (Gen 16:12). He will not simply dress up as a clown. He will become that clown. But here, right now, he is none of those things. He has no descendants. He has done nothing wrong. He is a dying child, and God insists that means his life ought to be spared.

While in Israeli custody, three years before he was released along with 1,026 other prisoners in the Gilad Shalit deal, Yahyah Sinwar had a terminal brain tumor. Israeli doctors operated and saved his life. Fifteen years later, Sinwar planned and executed a terrorist rampage that saw the worst violence done to the Jewish people since the Shoah through which he also further advanced his reign of terror against Palestinian civilians. Were those doctors wrong to perform that surgery? With the benefit of hindsight, we might say “yes.” My point here is not to argue that Sinwar should or should not have been saved given what the Israeli government knew about him at the time. That’s a different conversation. My point is that the vast majority of people are not Sinwar, they are not irredeemably monstrous. They’re decent, flawed people, stumbling through life like the rest of us. And who can say with any certainty who any of us will be in the future?

The fundamental problem with how too many of us think about others is that we make a thousand calculations as to whether we should act in one way or another toward someone and expend much less energy meeting them where they’re at.

אֵינִי דָן אֶת הָאָדָם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁעָתוֹ.

I judge people only as they are in this moment.

What would it be like if we committed right now to judge our fellow human beings not as we fear they might be but ba’asher hu sham, as they are? People are not personas, they are people, created in God’s image. Some portion of us lose or never had the ability to access that divine goodness. But most of us do. We are beings, becoming. Who are we to rob someone of that possible future by insisting we know better what it might behold?

“Shall I hide?” It’s a personal choice and a situational one. The ritual and sincere selves each have value in our relationships. “Shall we seek?” My hope is that, if nothing else, more of us will do a bit more of that.

Prelude:

This coming Tuesday is the 30^th Anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Monday is his yahrzeit. It’s hard to believe it’s been three decades. It’s even harder to wrap my head around how much has changed – and how much has stayed the same since then. Rabin was killed on November 4, 1995, by a Jewish extremist who wished to upend the Oslo Peace Process. It came on the heels of several Hamas run terrorist attacks. In summer of ‘96, I arrived in Israel for Ulpan and a year of study at Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus. On kibbutz in the Galil, I met Janis Coulter, also a student, who would be murdered years later by Hamas at Hebrew U during the 2^nd Intifada, in a cafeteria we once frequented. In November of ‘96, though, Janis and I joined several friends and traveled to Tel Aviv for a peace rally and memorial marking one year since Rabin’s assassination.

In the months that followed, I found myself processing a cascade of feelings and experiences during a dizzying time. On one hand, I was having an amazing year, making friends, learning and exploring my Judaism in Yerushalayim, traveling around the country at a time when peace still seemed possible. I had an internship at the WF Albright Institute in East Jerusalem. I would walk down from Har Hatzofim, stop at my favorite Palestinian falafel stand, spend a few hours labeling pottery sherds and then enter the Old City through the Damascus Gate, occasionally stopping to get a treat at the Arab suk.

On the other hand, Netanyahu had just been elected Prime Minister for the first time. He and Arafat both would prove disinterested in making real concessions or pursuing lasting solutions. Months after Rabin’s murder, just after Ramadan, and a few months before I arrived to Israel, Hamas has done its own very substantial damage to the peace process when it planned and executed four terrorist attacks in nine days, killing 61 and injuring over 200. The last of these took place at Dizengoff Center, in the heart of Tel Aviv, on Purim, as children milled about in their costumes. The bomb, laced with nails and screws, wounded 130 Israelis and killed one soldier and twelve civilians, including five who were thirteen years old or younger.

In early ’97, still living on Mt. Scopus, I wrote a song called “Jerusalem 5756,” reflecting on the year including and following Rabin’s assassination, the year that concluded with my Rosh Hashanah on kibbutz. I’d like to play it for you today. The song is a chronicle of a young man’s heartbreak and confusion, trying to discern my own place among the Jewish people, confronting the ferocity of anti-Jewish hatred, yearning for peace. The tune concludes with the narrator, present at once in the newly renamed Rabin Square and also on Mount Herzl where the slain leader is buried, reflecting on Rabin’s final moments, chuckling at his awkward smile and his tone-deaf singing of “Shir L’Shalom,” wondering what would become of this country with which I had fallen deeply in love. Here’s my love song, my tribute, to an embattled ancient city and a resilient ancient people. This is “Jerusalem 5756.”

The sun was going down as we drove into town on the bus coming from Tel Aviv. As we rounded the turn I could feel my heart yearn for the city I’d so longed to see. But my eyes found instead the roadblock ahead, and a soldier stepped out of the booth. And we all heard him say, “there were more killed today,” as he cautiously waved us on through.

At the close of the day I found my way to the heart of the city of gold. Then at last the sun fell, and the siren, it welcomed the bride to her city of old. And as the men gathered round I drank in the sound of their prayers rising up from the wall. But when they turned around I just stared at the ground like a child lost in the dark.

And I feel so helpless again as I wander at night through the streets. And I cry for Jerusalem for the 3,000 years she has seen.

When the month reached its end I cried again as my vision had vanished in flames. From their prayer they had turned to an anger that burned and a vengeance which could not be tamed. Four times the Earth trembled in fear and in hell as countless were lost without need. And I closed my eyes tried to block out the cries of the children who’d died in the streets.

And I feel so helpless again as I wander at night through the streets. Tell me why my Jerusalem do you suffer for all that you’ve seen?

Remembering one year ago when the candles burned slowly to rhythms and visions of peace. Then he sang the last song as the cheers lingered on and we laughed at the smile on his face. But when he left our sight, three shots in the night. And “why” was all we could say. And I looked around, took a stone from the ground, and I placed it on top of his grave.

And I feel so helpless again as I wander at night through the streets. And I cry for Jerusalem for her struggle at last to be free. Yes, I feel so helpless and then in the night I cry out from the streets. Still you try my... Will it end? Oh... Close your eyes my Jerusalem. Close your eyes for perhaps in the dark, we can dream.

©1997 by Daniel Burg

Postlude:

“Amar Rabbi Yochanan, Rabbi Yochanan said: In your eyes there is a white part, through which you are not able to see, and a dark part in the middle of the eye, by means of which one does see. In other words, one can [only] see out of the dark part of the eye….” 29 years ago, I prayed for dreams of a better tomorrow to emerge from the darkness. We dream with our eyes closed, but we see, through darkness, with our eyes wide open. This week, on this 30^th yahrzeit, we remember a man, battle scarred, who dared to dream, whose very life was bound up in service of Medinat Yisrael, who knew well the darkness of war, who died skeptical, clear-eyed yet hopeful, al kiddush Hashem, a grudging martyr, for an unlikely peace. Yehi zichro baruch, may his memory be for a blessing. And may his hope against hope ultimately prove not to have been in vain” (Midrash Tanchuma Tetzaveh 6).

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Potential

by Daniel Cotzin Burg

I hear they found a grenade at Be’eri

two years after the kibbutz attack when 101 farmers and writers and foreign workers and mothers, fathers, children were slaughtered.

And 32 kidnapped to Gaza.

Two years ago this month I stood in the remains of a community, helmet and flak jacket, trembling in the freshness of it. Gingerly I stepped across the rubble looking for anything dangerous underfoot. The army had cleared it of the bodies

and munitions.

But burnt out, crumbling buildings, soiled bedrooms, knives, reddish-brown shadows of the dead (still tacky), the smell

lingered. And one undiscovered grenade hidden until yesterday.

I’m told the hostages are coming home. They’re saying the fighting will stop and Gaza will be rebuilt. And peace may yet break out.

The Hebrew word for grenade is rimon, pomegranate, the fruit we eat at the New Year because it’s full of seeds. The blood-red juice is tart, and it stains.

They’re rebuilding the kibbutz. A construction worker found the device at Be’eri.

unexploded.

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Nearly two years on, grenade used in October 7 attack found on Kibbutz Be’eri

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Oh no! In the story, the Ziz is a bit of a shlemiel, but usually he’s able to fix his clumsy mistakes. This time, sadly, he cannot. The children use the vegetables to decorate their sukkah each year. There is simply no way, even for a mythological beast, to repair the damage he’s caused. Feeling guilty and bereft, the Ziz flies off to Mt. Sinai to ask God what he should do? God instructs the Ziz to search the whole earth and bring back “the hardest word.” After bringing back scores of words – “goodnight” from a child who doesn’t want to sleep, “spaghetti,” from another who can’t pronounce it, “rock, rhinoceros, Rumpelstiltskin!” – the Ziz eventually learns that “sorry” is, in fact, the hardest word.

This is a children’s story, so we might think that while saying “I’m sorry” is really hard for kids, adults (being more mature) would be much better at it. Guess what? We’re not. It seems simple, doesn’t it? Who of the parents among us has not said plainly to our children, “if you do something wrong, say sorry.” Why, then, is it so very hard for grownups to follow our own advice? Part of the problem is that we don’t always know which situations call for an apology.

In Ezra Klein’s interview of Salman Rushdie last year, Rushdie was reflecting on the journey he went through in the immediate aftermath of Khomeini’s fatwa, long before he survived the near-fatal knifing at Chautauqua in 2022. “About a year or a year and a half into the story, when I was very, very depressed and didn’t see how it would ever end,” he said, “I thought maybe what I had to do was to reach out to the Muslim community and try and apologize. And I did, and it rebounded very hard in my face. And actually, my sister, whom I love and is closer to me than anybody else in the world, called me when she heard me making these apologias. She said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?’ And I thought, you know, ‘Yes, I have.’” Of course, Rushdie didn’t have anything to apologize for – certainly not any more than Toni Morison, George Orwell, or Margaret Atwood owe an apology to Moms for Liberty.

The truth is, apologizing when we shouldn’t have to or apologizing when we’re not really sorry can make a situation worse. Think of times in your life when you said “no” to invitations, dates, or other social engagements. Maybe you tried to let people down easy: “I’m so sorry, but I just can’t make it next Tuesday.” “Sorry, but I’m just not looking for a relationship right now.” A UT-Austin/Dartmouth study (“The Impact of Apologies on Social Rejections,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2017) found that when social rejections are accompanied by apologies, the rejected party often ends up feeling worse, not better. This is probably because saying “I’m sorry,” before saying no to a hang out, date, or group collaboration, compounds feelings of rejection with guilt for the rebuffed party. It’s sort of like saying, “it’s not you, it’s me.” Most people know intuitively that if someone says, “it’s not you, it’s me,” it’s most definitely you!

A bigger problem, though, is that many of us don’t know how to apologize. Authors Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy suggest six steps to a good apology. (Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies, p. 28):

1. Use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” (“Regret” is not apology!)

2. Say specifically what you’re sorry FOR.

3. Show you understand why the thing you said or did was BAD.

4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses.

5. Describe the actions you’re taking to ensure this won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it, which is to say, try to make a repair.

Notice that saying “sorry” is a component in our greater pursuit of accountability or teshuvah. Don’t worry if you can’t remember all the steps. You can find them on the authors’ website: sorrywatch.com. But, on this Yom Kippur, I think we need to consider something deeper at work. It’s not only that many people don’t know how to apologize. What I’m most concerned about is that our society seems to be moving away from apology as an agreed-upon norm. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody to good,” says the old proverb. At least in the public discourse, apologizing is becoming decidedly uncool.

Part of the problem is that to the extent Americans enjoyed a social contract honoring apologies and encouraging forgiveness, that contract has frayed and many people are now reluctant to apologize. There are two countervailing trends at work. The first comes out of justice and accountability movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter which instigated a culture of public calling out and very public, online apologies. Many of these apologies were necessary, but the public and permanent nature of social media also taught observers that admitting an error means your acknowledgement of that error will exist forever in cyberspace, incentivizing some against taking responsibility. The Viddui is punctuated again and again with s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement – after apologizing and doing real teshuvah, the sinner is meant to attain a clean slate. But if some aging tik-tok video or facebook post becomes a demerit for every future relationship or job interview, why bother to apologize?

But we also live in a time when leaders, put simply, behave badly, and there’s plenty of evidence that children and adults alike take cues from our leaders. Leaders behaving badly is, of course, nothing new. One model Jewish leader, King David, had many flaws as you know. And yet, when Nathan the prophet confronts him about his sin with Uriah and Batsheva, David admits responsibility, a key component to any worthy apology:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר דָּוִד֙ אֶל־נָתָ֔ן חָטָ֖אתִי לַ֑ה’

David said to Nathan, “I stand guilty before the LORD!” And Nathan replied to David, “The LORD has remitted your sin; you shall not die.”

As you know, this is my final High Holy Day cycle at Beth Am. My very first Rosh Hashanah, fifteen years ago, I shared a teaching in the name of Rav Yosef Be’er Soloveitchik who observed that both King Saul and King David committed great sins in their lives. Why then was Saul rejected, and David hailed as progenitor of the messianic line? Soloveitchik explains that it was simply David’s ability to acknowledge his mistake and ask forgiveness. “A great nation is like a great man,” said Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, “when he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.”

Failed leaders like King Saul abound, and politicians were modeling stubbornness and sometimes shamelessness long before this political moment. In 1988, Vice President Bush declared, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are” (p. 177). President Clinton did apologize for the Tuskegee experiments, but never directly to Monica Lewinsky. It’s been 850 years since King Henry II of England donned sackcloth and walked three miles to publicly confess his guilt in the death of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket. Henry allowed himself to be beaten with rods by bishops and eighty monks before spending the night in vigil at Becket’s tomb. Can you imagine the leader of our country doing that? Me neither.

In fact, when Trump was running for president the first time, he was interviewed by Jimmy Fallon (I’ll try not to dwell on the irony of him talking to a late-night comedian). Fallon asked him back in 2015, “Have you ever apologized, ever, in your life?” Trump answered, “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong…. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.” As we well know, much less than taking responsibility for his sins, Donald Trump consistently wields his unapologetic nature as a cudgel against anyone who he perceives has slighted him, from Jimmy Kimmel to Jim Comey. Trump, of course, was an acolyte of Roy Cohn, the McCarthyite thug, perpetrator of the 1950’s Lavender Scare, whose philosophy was: never apologize, that every punch, deserved or not, was to be met with a harder counterpunch.

This attitude of the President’s was on full display during Charlie Kirk’s funeral last week. The penultimate speaker was Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk who somehow found it in her heart to forgive her husband’s murderer. While I hesitate to cast judgment on a grieving widow’s impressive capacity for grace, from a Jewish perspective, it’s hard to argue that Tyler Robinson, thus far unapologetic, is deserving of such forgiveness. But Trump, who spoke last, didn’t seem to care much about the young man who pulled the trigger. He was too busy declaring war on the “radical left.” And then, he apologized. Charlie Kirk, said the President, “did not hate his opponents…. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” said Trump, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want what’s best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry Erika.”

We live in a time when leaders have been supplanted by influencers, an “attention economy” in which indignation and grievance feed the algorithm, which demands (and monetizes) greater outrage. But apologies, write Ingall and McCarthy, “are evidence of a society that cares about itself, a society that honors other people’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings as precious. In tiny ways and larger ones, apologies move us toward justice.” But it has become en vogue to mock apology as weakness or blusterfully eschew accountability. Salman Rushdie calls shamelessness “the weapon of our time.” If so, how do we fight back? Jewish tradition, this season of teshuvah, of accountability, provides our answer. Don’t give up on apology. Do it more and do it better.

Hevre, we are a society in crisis. The prevailing winds, those “ill winds,” have been blowing us in the wrong direction for some time. But, as mid-19^th Century spiritualist Cora L. V. Hatch said, “…you could not direct the wind, but you could trim your sail so as to propel your vessel as you pleased.” How many of you know how to sail? I’m no expert, but I learned to sail as a kid at Jewish summer camp in Oconomowoc, WI. And many a July I can be found skippering a 22 ft. Ensign or a single-handed Laser on Lake Walloon in Northern Michigan. What’s interesting about sailing is that you can travel in just about any direction. This is called your “point of sail.” For example, if you’re traveling with the wind, you’re in a run or broad reach. But you can also sail against the wind. This is called a beat or a close haul. There is actually one direction in which you absolutely cannot sail. Any idea? You can’t sail directly into the wind. If you turn your craft into the wind without enough momentum, your sails luff and you’re in irons. You’re stuck.

Now I share this, not to show off my knowledge of sailing terminology. (Ok, a little bit to show off). But mostly I share this because I think it’s a great metaphor for the art of apologizing. Contrary to the prevailing winds, blowhard politicians, or braggarts in the Manosphere, apologies are not weak. Apologizing is, in fact, one of the most courageous things we can do. Sorry is, after all, the hardest word, and hard things are what brave people do. Here’s the thing about sailing though: The point of sail called a run, in which your boat is traveling completely with the wind, is boring. Yes, it’s the most efficient. You’re moving quickly. In a race or trans-Atlantic voyage, you want the wind at your back. But, sort of like being in a hot air balloon, you don’t really feel the movement. The most exciting point of sail is a beat, a close haul, when you push a boat whose sails have a high aspect ratio at closer and closer angles to the wind. This is called “pointing higher.”

Pointing higher in a strong wind is when sailing gets really fun, leaning off the port hull, over the water, feet tucked under the hiking strap, one hand on the tiller, the other firmly gripping the sheet off the winch, the cool spray catching your back as the craft heels against your weight, your body and the mast forming a “v” with the starboard hull almost kissing the surface of the deep. Pointing higher. It’s one of the most liberating experiences I’ve had.

You know when else I feel that kind of liberation? When I’ve done something wrong, and I finally figure out I blew it, and I ask for and receive forgiveness. The weight of sin can be imperceptible until we unburden ourselves of it. And the reason I think it’s so liberating is that the practice of apology, if done right, brings us closer to one another and to God. One of my favorite teachings (Tanya Igerret HaTeshuvah) imagines we, each of us, are connected to God with a thick cord. When we sin, the cord is severed. When we do teshuvah, the angel Gabriel comes and ties a knot. On Yom Kippur, we’re reminded that sinning is a lifelong enterprise, but so is repair. And the beautiful thing is that each one of our cords, riddled with a lifetime of knots, is necessarily shorter, meaning that we are closer to God

מקום שבעלי תשובה עומדין, צדיקים גמורים אינם עומדין

“Where those doing teshuvah stand, not even the totally righteous can stand” (Berakhot 34b). Those who sin and make amends are closer to heaven, they point higher.

What’s the relationship between apologizing and teshuvah? The first is a component of the second. The relationship between apology and atonement is not unique to Jewish tradition, but in every framework, the goal is to point higher. Writer and disability justice advocate Mia Mingus suggests there are four steps to accountability: self-reflection, apologizing, repair, and finally changed behavior. The Ho’oponopono Prayer also has four components: I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank You. I love you. I wish I could tell you I learned this from Miriam who, as usual, is in Hawaii right now. But I didn’t. I got it from watching “The Pitt.”

Within the Jewish tradition, we look to Maimonides who delineates eight steps to Teshuvah.

1. Recognize your harmful behavior and actions

2. Feel remorse

3. Stop the harmful behavior and distance yourself from it

4. Undertake the work necessary to transform yourself

5. Verbally confess the harm you caused (and be specific)

6. Make amends or restitution

7. Apologize and ask forgiveness from those you’ve harmed

8. Resolve to do better. Make better choices.

The interesting thing about the Rambam’s framework is that apology comes not first but actually toward the end of the process. You might wonder why? In a study called “Better Late Than Early” (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2004), Oberlin psychologist Cynthia Franz found “study participants had the most positive feelings about the apology they received after having a chance to express their annoyance and irritation…. It was important to them that they felt heard” (Sorry, Sorry, Sorry. P. 21). The harmed party feeling harmed is exactly why we should focus much less on public social media apologies and more on the interpersonal. For most of us, most of the time, it’s about picking up the phone, sending a note, sometimes sending a text or DM, or just sitting down face to face over coffee and saying, “I’m sorry.”

Which method is best is situational (and to some extent generational). But if I were to leave you with one final thought on this Yom Kippur, it’s this: Don’t let the perfect apology be the enemy of the good one. Sorry is the hardest word for a reason. The inertia of inattention, lack of introspection, anxiety about getting it right can go a long way toward keeping us from doing better in the coming year. The goal isn’t perfection. Point higher. The wind can be shifty. Keep pointing higher. Influencers may try to convince you that saying you’re sorry is weak. Ignore them and still point higher. Remember, apologizing, like sailing, is a process. As Rabbi Alan Lew z”l writes, “Transformation does not have a beginning, a middle, or an end. We never reach the end of Teshuvah. It is always going on. We are awake for a moment, and then we are asleep again. Teshuvah seems to proceed in a circular motion. Every step away is also a step toward home” (This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. P. 154). Or put differently, the wind may push us this way and that. But if we can set our sails, grab the tiller, and point just a bit higher, we’ll make it back to shore.

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But it was Sneakers that made me fall in love with Robert Redford. I was a Junior in High School and Redford was already 56 by the time I settled in to watch the movie about aging fugitive computer hackers and the dangers of government surveillance. The movie featured an all-star cast including Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd and Sidney Poitier. The scene that sticks with me all these years later is from the end of the film where, in exchange for their silence, our heroes secure a bunch of absurd payoffs from NSA Operations Director Bernard Abbott (Abbott having been played by none other than James Earl Jones, who also tragically left us just one year ago September). Redford gets his name cleared. Poitier and his wife get a trip to Tahiti. Aykroyd gets a Winnebago. But when it’s Whistler’s turn (the blind character played by David Straithairn), he demands “peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” Abbott in Jones’ resonant baritone is indignant: “We are the United States Government! We don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Rabbi Hanina Sagan ha-kohanim said: pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, every man would swallow his neighbor alive” (Avot 3:2). According to the Shulkhan Arukh, Rabbi Hanina, second in line to the High Priest, was executed by the Roman Empire (O.H. 580). Our Sages understood something important about power and authority. Governments are necessary, societies need structure and laws to protect citizens from outside forces and from one another. But Chazal also understood governments can become corrupt and dangerous. Sometimes they are the ones not protecting but scapegoating the stranger, disappearing the dissident, swallowing people alive.

“We are the United States Government! We don’t do that sort of thing.” It all seems a bit wistful now, doesn’t it? I wonder if our high schoolers in the room today even get the joke which hinges on movie-goers’ believing, on some level, our government’s job is to make the world a better place. Redford, of course, cared deeply about the planet. But he’s gone and we are here this Yom Kippur, a day on which we yearn, from the vantage of our unredeemed world, for the possibilities of a better tomorrow. U’v’khen/and so…

וּצְמִיחַת קֶֽרֶן לְדָוִד עַבְדֶּֽךָ, וַעֲרִיכַת נֵר לְבֶן־יִשַׁי מְשִׁיחֶֽךָ, בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵֽינוּ

“May the light of David, Your servant…be kindled speedily in our day.”

Yom Kippur is also a day of liminality and transition, the culmination of the past year as we fully step into the next. In that spirit, it’s not lost on me that this will be my last Yom Kippur here at Beth Am, and my final opportunity to address you, on the High Holy Days, from this bima. I’m not leaving just yet. I have a bunch more torah to teach before I do. There’s a weekend coming up in June for us to say farewell, and I suspect I’ll have some parting thoughts for you then. The dates are in the program, and I hope you’ll mark your calendars! Nevertheless, I have been thinking a great deal about what I’d like to say to you today, given this is my last Yom Kippur sermon.

You may not remember this, and many of you are new since then, but when I came to interview back in February 2010, I began my remarks by confessing I didn’t quite know what to say to you, because we were strangers. But that was over fifteen years ago. We are no longer strangers. We’ve learned, laughed, prayed, protested, traveled, mourned, and grown together. Back then I was concerned about overstepping, making assumptions about what you needed to hear from some young rabbi out of Chicago. Today, I’m less young… and I find myself pondering precisely the opposite. I ask myself, should I say what I think I must?

Truth is, the sermon I feel I must give, is not the sermon I want to. I want to talk about happy things. (Can you talk about happy things on Yom Kippur?) Or Kashrut, whatever! I want to give a “reflective” sermon, or a “looking forward” sermon, or a “what I’ve learned from you crazy people” sermon. But those will have to wait because our country, our very democracy, is teetering, and I cannot pretend that it’s not. To be clear, this is not about party. It’s not about whether I disagree with every single thing this Administration has done. I don’t. This is, quite simply, about the future of our republic. Rabbi Tarfon says, וּבַעַל הַבַּיִת דּוֹחֵק “the Master of the House is knocking” (Avot 2:15). There is a Master of a house greater than the one on Pennsylvania Avenue. Some knocks must be answered. Some doors must be opened.

What I’ve learned from 20 years in the rabbinate, and from my friend and teacher Rheda Becker, is that what we say from this bima is part of sacred ongoing conversation between teachers and students. What I owe you, each time I preach a sermon, is to teach the most authentic torah I can muster, right here and now. Heschel taught, “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, A Soul, and a Moment. And the three are always here” (1961 White House Conference on Aging). On a different Yom Kippur or in another community, I might have had something else to say. But this is where we are. This moment. My soul. Your Soul. And the Holy One knocking.

On Yom Kippur 2017, I mentioned Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, his 1935 dystopian novel about the rise of American Fascism. The book features an elected populist leader, playing on white nationalism, expressing disdain for Black folks, scapegoating Jews. The novel begs a question, I said. Can it happen here? My answer then was, unfortunately, yes. As long as people in power can find a good scapegoat, I said, “there is always a chance that the grand and fledgling experiment of American democracy will give way to a more sinister and ancient form of governance.” And I shared that a dear congregant had said to me soon after Trump’s first inauguration: “The elasticity of our democracy is about to be tested.” That congregant was none other than Efrem Potts z”l, our first Beth Am president and my mentor. When Efrem said that in 2017, it was indeed being tested. In January ‘21, it nearly succumbed to an assault on our capitol. Since January of this year, American democracy is being stretched as never before. Even the most elastic things, subject to prolonged and extreme pressure, will break. I shudder to think what Efrem would say now.

When Rabbi Hanina Sagan ha-kohanim said: “pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, every man would swallow his neighbor alive,” he assumed an iron-fisted authoritarian regime. That’s because he was living under such a regime, a regime that would come to brutally execute him and other venerated Jewish leaders. The great Rabbi Akiva, too, was put to death by the Roman authorities. For what crime? For the crime of learning and practicing Judaism.

The Talmud relates (Berakhot 61b):

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: פַּעַם אַחַת גָּזְרָה מַלְכוּת הָרְשָׁעָה שֶׁלֹּא יַעַסְקוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל בַּתּוֹרָה.

The Sages taught: One time, the evil empire decreed that Israel may not engage in the study and practice of Torah. Pappos ben Yehuda came and found Rabbi Akiva, who was [nevertheless] convening assemblies in public and engaging in Torah study. He said to him: Akiva, are you not afraid of the empire? Rabbi Akiva answered him: I will relate a parable. To what can this be compared? It is like a fox walking along a riverbank when he sees fish gathering and fleeing from place to place. The fox said to them: From what are you fleeing? They said to him: We are fleeing from the nets that people cast upon us. He said to them: Do you wish to come up onto dry land, and we will reside together…? The fish said to him: You are the one of whom they say, he is the cleverest of animals? You are not clever; you are a fool. If we are afraid in our natural habitat which gives us life, then in a habitat that causes our death, all the more so.

Rabbi Akiva goes on to explain the moral of his story: Torah is to Jews as water is to fish and as air is to foxes (and humans). If we give up our habitat, the very thing that sustains our life, even when our very existence is threatened, what does that mean for our survival? And then, the Talmud describes Rabbi Akiva’s savage execution.

What does it look like for a government to slide from republic to מַלְכוּת הָרְשָׁעָה, an evil empire? How to identify the fishermen’s nets? The foxes? Three years after Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here and seven weeks before the Nazis ransacked my grandfather’s home in Idir-Oberstein, shattering my great-grandmother’s porcelain dishware on Kristallnacht, a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel fled his home in Berlin. Two years later, he completed his manuscript and published it as The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. In it, Fraenkel recounts how the Nazi regime maintained a “normative” state which operated under set rules and regulations and a “prerogative” state which exercised “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” (p. 17). This allowed the authorities to maintain, for most citizens, a veneer of normality, while increasingly restricting the rights of a targeted and maligned minority. “The trick,” according to University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq who studies Fraenkel, “was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”

Huq argues in The Atlantic that “we are witnessing the birth of a new Dual State.” I am worried that he’s right. While most Americans enjoy the trappings of our normative republic and the legal protections afforded us by the Constitution, the growing prerogative state celebrates insurrectionary violence, intimidates law firms and judges, extorts media conglomerates, prosecutes political adversaries on flimsy charges, cynically disappears immigrants and asylum seekers to countries they have never visited, all while enriching the Executive and his family. It’s important that we talk about this, because it’s real and it’s happening. Here. “Building a dual state need not end in genocide,” writes Huq. “Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression.”

I would caution us against our playing in the suppression Olympics, this weird debate over who is really in danger: Jews, immigrants, women and girls, Muslims, Black folks, brown folks, Queer folks. All these folks and more are in danger, all of us are in danger, because America is in danger. Yes, each person and each group experiences that danger differently in character and degree. Yes, I worry about antisemitism in this country. It’s real and it’s expressed in a range of forms across the political spectrum. I’m just waiting for the conspiracy theory that says the Jews shul down the government for Yom Kippur! And being concerned about the reality of antisemitism on campus, for example, does not mean turning a blind eye to its use as a blunt instrument to withhold critical research dollars, or deport people for Constitutionally protected speech.

Meanwhile, as historian and author Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) reminds us, “anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.” I’m concerned, as a recent survey showed, that many Jewish students here and around the world, increasingly feel the need to hide their Jewish identities, to curb their own speech and expression for social acceptance or faculty approval. That’s why I encourage us to wear our kippot, Star of David necklaces, or hostage pins with conviction and pride. Beware of self-censorship. Too often, the first ghetto is one of the mind, the one we enter willingly.

I’m reminded of an old story: Mendy goes to the tailor to try on his new custom suit. The first thing he notices is that the sleeves are too long. The tailor says, “no problem just bend your arms a bit at the elbow and hold them out in front of you. See now the length is perfect.” “But the collar is too high.” “Nonsense, just hunch your back a little. A little more that’s it. Nice!” “But I’m stepping on the pant cuffs.” “Oh, but you have to bend your knees a little.” “There, now look in the mirror. The suit fits perfect! Like a custom suit should.” Knotted like a pretzel, Mendy shuffles out into the street. Two ladies walking by take notice. “Look at that poor man. I wonder if he was born that way?” “Who knows? But thank God he found a suit that fits.”

Hevre, aspiring authoritarian governments excel at intimidation. They get us to question one another and doubt ourselves, contorting ourselves, our words, our views, until we’re convinced our twisted posture is the just way we’ve always been. Rabbi Akiva understood, even at the risk of his own life, the necessity of swimming in a sea of Torah. What is the torah of modern America? It is the First Amendment – not just cherry-picked clauses; the whole damned thing! Free speech, free expression, free press, freedom to assemble and petition, freedom to believe and practice, freedom from being told what to practice and believe.

As Jews, we need not choose between our own parochial concerns and those of this country. To be an or lagoyim, a light in this nation and unto others, is to use what power, influence, education, and resources we have to uplift the normative and resist normalizing the prerogative. And our experience as a religious minority can be helpful. As Matt Taylor from the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies here in Baltimore has shown, much of this chilling of speech is bound up with rising Chistian Nationalism, the alignment of America’s majority religion with its power structures: the Justice Department, the FCC, the military. Consider the Secretary of Defense (or is it War?), who recalls hundreds of top generals from their strategic global positions to fat shame them and, with the President, charge them to use American cities as “training grounds” in a “war from within.” It is no accident that in May, Hegseth began a weekly Christian prayer service at the Pentagon during which his longtime pastor said, “Lord, may this become a place where Christians come together to do just this, and we see you move in power, not just through the Pentagon, but through our nation’s capital and down throughout this great nation.” Legal scholars immediately flagged it as a First Amendment violation.

But contrast this with President John Tyler’s 1843 correspondence with prominent Jewish Baltimorean Joseph Simpson. Simpson had expressed concern that General Winfield Scott, Commanding General of the US Armed Forces planned to address a missionary conference. Tyler’s response was clear: “If he attends, it will not and cannot be in his character of general in chief of the army. He will, necessarily for the time being, lay aside his sword and epaulets and appear… in no other light than as a citizen….” And then President Tyler reminded us of the cruciality of free speech and expression. “The United States have ventured upon a great and Noble experiment,” he writes to Simpson, “which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent – that of total separation of church and state.” After stipulating religious freedom for Muslims, Hindus and others, he continues, “The Hebrew, persecuted and downtrodden in other regions, takes up his abode among us with none to make him afraid… He may evermore turn his eye to Judea, resting with confidence in the promise that is made him of his restoration to that holy land, that he may worship the God of his fathers after the manner that that worship was conducted by Aaron and his successor in the priesthood, and the aegis of the government is over him to defend and protect him. (College of William and Mary Quarterly, July, 1904).

What has become of us? What to do? I wish I had easy answers. There are people in this room, though, who are doing incredible work, in law, in medicine, in education, in journalism, in and out of government. I’m proud of you. We salute you. It will take all of us, together, to reclaim a more righteous path for our republic. Keep it up.

My goal today is simply this: to remind us that our government works for us, all of us, no matter how or whether we voted. It serves at the pleasure of a nation whose citizens hold it accountable to certain agreed-upon principles: L’État, ce n’est pas moi, the state and the Executive are not the same. The military and the state are not the same. Congress is its own branch of government. As are the courts. We the People have a voice. We, each of us, has a voice.

I stand before you today as one man with a voice, who believes the lifting up of that voice is a sacred act, a sacred duty as an American, as a Rabbi, as a Jew. You, too, have a voice. Use it. Use it wisely and thoughtfully, with compassion whenever you can, with resolve when you must. Don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t or, God forbid, that you can’t.

In just a little while, we’ll daven Musaf, including a 3^rd Century poetic addition to the Amidah which occurs in the Kedushah on Yom Kippur. Three times we’ll say u’v’khein/and so.

U’v’khen/and so, “we know true sovereignty is Yours.” Which is to say, we put our trust in you and not in any king of flesh and blood.

U’v’khen/and so, “Bestow honor to your people, Ad’nai.”

U’v’khen/and so: “the righteous will rejoice… evil will be silenced, and all wickedness will disappear like smoke.”

When will that be?

כִּי תַעֲבִיר מֶמְשֶֽׁלֶת זָדוֹן מִן הָאָֽרֶץ

“When You remove the tyranny of arrogance from the land.”

When You remove the tyranny of arrogance from the land. Peace on earth may be a stretch right now. But as Elijah Cummings used to say, “We’re better than this.”

I still believe it. If you do too, keep swinging for the fences.

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What’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist? The Jewish pessimist says, “things just can’t get any worse.” The Jewish optimist says, “oh yes, they can.”

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This past May I celebrated twenty years in the rabbinate. The last ten, like the first ten, have been immensely rewarding. But they have also been quite hard. Yes, for rabbis, but also for Jews, for Americans, for African Americans, for Israelis, for Palestinians, for women, for LGBTQ folks, for Latinos, for immigrants, for city-dwellers who love their cities, for humans, and other humans, and more humans. For those who believe in the principles of democracy, in the rule of law, in science, in medicine, in journalism, in political discourse without political violence, in higher education, in public education, in expertise, in Truth. I could go on.

I will go on (because I’m an optimist). Fred Rogers, the first person to teach me about the importance of neighborhoods, liked to quote historian Will Durant who once described civilization as “a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record – while, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks” (The World According to Mr. Rogers, P. 161). Historians, Durant felt, focus too much on the story of the stream and not enough on its banks. But what to do when we find ourselves in the midst of a bloody river, when the goings on of our civilizations are not fragments of history, passionless on the page, but swirling eddies, gushing rapids threatening to drown anything that floats? What to do when the killing, stealing, and shouting, bursts through dams, overflows the banks, laps against homes and threatens the lives of the people who raise those children, sing those songs, write that poetry? When the cautionary tales of history become our lived experience, how can we simply come to shul and proclaim L’shana tova!

In fact, I think we must. I think the only authentic Jewish response to chaos and cruelty is not the naivete of “it can’t get worse.” Nor the cynicism and fatalism of “oh, yes it can.” No, to be a Jew in this moment is to channel the spirit of this day. Rosh Hashanah positions us on a threshold between past and future. It calls us to retrospection and repair of past harms even as our gaze is fixed on the new year. It is Yom HaZikaron, day of remembrance, Yom HaDin, day of judgment, and Yom Teruah, day of proclamatory blasts. Rosh Hashanah is a “yes, and” holiday. Yes, new year. Yes, last year. Yes, start over. Yes, still work to do before Yom Kippur. Yes, new foods and new experiences. Yes, promise. Yes, pain. Yes…and….

Raise your hand if you’ve done improv comedy? How about attended an improv show? Years ago, Kelley Gludt brought an improv instructor to one of our synagogue Shabbatonim. What I most remember, aside from the laughter and fun, was the approach. A pillar of improvisational comedy is the rule of “yes, and.” In a 2016 interview from The Atlantic, Julie Brister, longtime instructor at Upright Citizens Brigade, one the country’s most well-known improv groups, had this to say about the virtue of “yes.” “In improv,” she said, “you’re supposed to accept and embrace another person’s idea. Not necessarily their point of view, but their idea—you’re supposed to say ‘yes’ to that….”

It’s often silly, sometimes hilarious, sometimes just fantastical. But in contrast to blocking an idea with “no,” the approach invites your partner into a collaborative and additive conversation. But here’s the thing, here’s what I want to suggest in considering the “yes, and” of Rosh Hashanah and of our civilizational moment. The word “no” isn’t really the problem. Disagreement happens all the time. “No” in the right context creates necessary boundaries. The real problem I want to address today is the tendency to say “yes…but.” This move has become so prevalent, the phenomenon even has a name: whataboutism.

“Hey Honey, you forgot to take out the trash.”

“Thanks Hon, but what about the dishes you left in the sink?”

Or…

“The slaying of Charlie Kirk was appalling. Political violence is a scourge and should never be condoned.

“Yes, but Charlie Kirk made vile comments and had repugnant views.

Or… [Positioning Israeli Flag in Center of Bima]

Person 1: “October 7 was devasting for the Jewish people. To think that 1200 women, men, and children were violated, brutalized, and slaughtered like animals! That 251 people, including children, a 9-mo-old baby and the elderly, were stolen from their homes and held in the tunnels. That scores were starved and killed, including that baby. That dozens remain 718 days later. It’s just unimaginable!”

Person 2: “Yes, but what about children in Gaza killed by Israeli bombs?

Or reverse it

Person 1: “Can you believe the extent of the suffering in Gaza? Tens of thousands dead? Palestinians starving? Lack of electricity or clean water. The sheer level of destruction!”

Person 2: “Yes, but what about Hamas? Israel didn’t start this war. Hamas did. They brought this on themselves!”

“Yes, but.” “Yes, and.” “Yes, but” minimizes the statement that came first. “Yes, and” honors it. Julie Brister, the improv teacher, says “yes, and” thinking has benefits well beyond the stage: “Listening… is the number one thing…, listening and hearing what the other person is saying. Then building off of that rather than waiting for someone to stop talking so you can say your thing. That’s the hardest thing to learn as an improviser — it’s to listen. And I think that’s one of the hardest things to do as a person. Listen, and use what’s being said rather than “oh are you done yet?” let me say what I’m going to say.”

I know Jews, as I know non-Jews, who are not so good at this, who think a conversation has two parts: talking and waiting. But the Jewish people and our textual heritage have a deep appreciation for the “and.” We have always stood for the virtues of complexity, nuance, illuminating binaries. We are ancient and modern, of the shtetl and of the city, rooted in our history and forward thinking, facing Jerusalem when we pray from Haifa and Baltimore. This embrace of complexity, even paradox, is captured in a passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Eruvin 13b):

“Rabbi Abba said that Shmuel said: For three years Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel disagreed. These said: The halakha is in accordance with our opinion, and these said: The halakha is in accordance with our opinion. Ultimately, a Divine Voice emerged and proclaimed: Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim Hayim, these and those are the words of the living God.” Even so, the practical ruling does go to the House of Hillel, but not necessarily because they were right on the merits. Why? Because they cited the opinions of Bet Shammai even before their own! Two contradictory things can be right. Even when we choose a victor, we need not diminish or disparage the other. Not every position is worthy of “yes, and” of course, but in many, many cases, even God is capacious enough for this and that.

Now, this in no way means Jewish tradition is averse to debate and disagreement. Mahloket L’Shem Shamayim, arguing for the sake of heaven, is a core principle. One fierce debate here within the American Jewish community with regard to Israel turns on what it means for Jews to exercise authority and power over others.

So, let’s start with our own perceptions. Take a look at this object. Really look at it. If it were not yuntif, I’d have you write this down, but for now just take a minute to react. What emotions does this object, this flag, bring up for you? Pride? Safety? Anger? Horror? Confusion? Fear? Sadness? Love? If you’re angry, at whom? If you’re afraid, of what? If you’re sad, why? So, now consider, what does this flag represent? If you were to give it a word, what would it be? Maybe it starts with a “Z”?

So, here’s what I want to say: This does not stand for Zionism. In 1898, when it was unveiled at the 2^nd Zionist Congress, it stood for Zionism. Today, 77 years after 1948, it stands for the State of Israel, and the State of Israel stands for many things, some of them contradictory, some of them exquisitely beautiful, some of them quite ugly. But of all the things Israel is, it is not an idea. It is a country, a nation-state, a place with people, laws, cultures, food, historic and modern sites, beaches and mountains and wineries, VC startups, and top tier research universities. Its ground contains much of the history of our people, and the history of other religions: Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, Druze.

The story of Israel is the story of an ancient relationship between a people and a land. It’s the story of a man, a woman, a family who left the fertile crescent 4,000 years ago, beckoned by God to their new home. It’s the tale of a nation oppressed, enslaved, who loosed their bonds, returned to their land, and formed a kingdom. The State of Israel is rooted in an idea, an idea whispered on the lips of peasants and poets, doctors and dairymen, in homes and synagogues over millennia of exile. The 19^th century’s rise of nationalism, and the 20^th century’s very near extermination of European Jewry on the heels of centuries of discrimination, pogroms, rape, forced conscriptions, and murder, created space for this idea of Zionism to be realized in our ancestral homeland.

An idea helped give birth to the State of Israel, but the State of Israel is not an idea. And its flag, its stripes inspired by a tallit, its color the blue of the firmament, of the techelet on the tzitzit, is not an idea. It is a piece of cloth. We keep it on our bima to remind us of our land, our history, the promise of what it means for the Jewish people to control some small corner of this planet. And it stands for Israel’s responsibility, as with all nation-states, to wield its power for good, to respect its citizenry and all its inhabitants and protect them to the best of its ability. This flag is a symbol, but we keep it on the periphery, as we do with that other flag, because our gaze, our worship, is never to an object but toward a place, Jerusalem, our ancient capital, the same direction our people have been praying toward for thousands of years.

Since Oct. 7, the world and many of our own people have increasingly fallen into a debate over an idea called Zionism. If the State of Israel is behaving badly, if its government has abrogated the responsibilities delineated in its own Declaration of Independence, let’s talk about that. Arguing about Zionism, in my view, is a distraction.

Deep breath. I know. I’ve heard you. Surely not all of you, but some of you are struggling to fully access your love for Israel. I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I see you. The affection you have felt, the experiences you have had on previous trips, the memories of miracles of technology, of Israel’s survival and thriving, the food, culture, spiritual uplift you felt upon seeing the Kotel for the first time or climbing Masada or that first bite of a freshly made falafel at the shuk – these may be harder to call to mind when feeling enraged by images of rubble and starvation. Or perhaps your rage at Israel’s Prime Minister is because our hostages languish in captivity, and his motivations in this war are, at best, deeply suspect. Some of you are so angry or so embarrassed, you may even be struggling to access the grief we all felt at the horror of Oct. 7!

But my friends, please hear me when I say to be in relationship with Israel and the 7million of our people who live there, is to make a distinction between the founding ideology and the place. To love Israel is not to love Zionism, an idea, a word. I don’t love the idea of Miriam. If I were to sit with a couple and they said they were in love with the idea of each other, I would refer them to a therapist. Ideas matter of course. But debating ideas of ontology (whether Israel should exist) is a waste of time. Debate the epistemology (what do we know and how can we shape our understanding of it?) Or better yet, the axiology (what do Jewish ethics demand of a Jewish and democratic state and those who care about it?)

As Sarah Hurwitz, former speech writer for Barack Obama and lead speech writer for Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, writes (p. 204-5), “…Israelis have no desire to dissolve their state [and] it’s unlikely anyone can force them to do so. Yet, anti-Zionists make us spend countless hours on this pointless debate about whether or not Israel should be eliminated rather than how to address the actual conflict faced by actual people.”

These words appear in her provocative and compelling new book, As a Jew. Hurwitz worries, as I worry, that “whether” Israel not “how” Israel is beginning to dominate the discourse. And this thinking plays directly into the hands of those who wish for us and our interlocutors to ignore thousands of years of Jewish history and trauma, rootlessness through Christian hegemony, subordination to Islamic supremacy, the Jews who always lived in and the many more who prayed for return to Eretz Yisrael. Providing necessary context can be done without falling into the whataboutist trap. Do you know how many civilians died in WWII? Somewhere between 40 and 50 million. Civilian deaths are always tragic and, in many cases, can and should be avoided. And to speak of Israeli wars, including this one, without any context, argues Hurwitz, “would be like denouncing America for fighting in World War II…without ever mentioning Hitler or Pearl Harbor. There are legitimate critiques to be made of the Allies’ conduct in that war,” she says, “but ‘they killed millions of people for no reason whatsoever’ is not one of them.”

And there’s a more sinister subtext to much of the discourse about Zionism as an idea. The zero-sum argument of denying Jewish self-determination to enable Palestinian sovereignty can pretty easily slip into what Hurwitz (P. 199-200) and philosopher Bernard Harrison call “political antisemitism.” “Social antisemitism” views Jews as disgusting, inferior or untrustworthy. But political antisemitism, writes Harrison, “places the organized Jewish community causally at the heart of world affairs.” This kind of antisemitism, writes Hurwitz, relates to some grand moral project that “if completed, will result in the creation of an ideal society. But there is just one thing stopping this utopian project from succeeding: the Jews.” Here are some examples she sites: “We, early Christians are engaged in the grand moral project of Christianizing the Roman Empire… but those Jews refuse to convert. We, the communists, are working to bring about the brotherhood of man…but those capitalist Jews are stymying the revolution. We, the Germans, are trying to create a glorious Aryan nation… but those race-polluting Jews are out to destroy us. We, patriotic Americans, are trying to preserve our country’s heritage as a white, Christian nation… but those globalist Jews are replacing white people with Black and Brown immigrants. We, those who care about social justice, are trying to rid our world of racism and colonialism… but those Zionists insist on maintain their racist, colonialist country. If we could just defeat those Zionist Jews, then we could finally create the world as it should be.”

What word, what conjunction, appears again and again in the Hurwitz examples above? “But.” Antisemitism is the ultimate in “yes, but,” whataboutist thinking. Hevre, being Jewish and caring about Israel means avoiding the reductive and uplifting the generative. It means channeling our Jewish superpower – the gift of “yes, and” thinking. Israel is a democracy and Yariv Levine’s assault on its independent judiciary is deeply distressing. Israel must defend its borders against diabolical enemies like Hamas as would any country and its government is also partially to blame for the carnage of Oct. 7. How so? Israel’s intelligence failures, its payoffs to Hamas and Qatar, its sacrifice of peaceniks on kibbutzim in favor of protecting settlement expansion in the West Bank. And Hamas’s malevolent violence is, crucially, what carried out Oct. 7.

Yardena Schwartz’s illuminating and sobering Ghosts of a Holy War details the legacy of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from his instigation of the Hevron massacre of 1929 through his complicity with the Nazi regime, how he and his followers poisoned the well against Jews and Israelis for millions of Arabs and Palestinians, for generations to come. And she, like Hurwitz, also points out the ascendency of the Israeli Religious Right and its deleterious impact on those living under Israeli occupation. Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Katz – these people are dangerous and cruel, and elections are coming (Insha’Allah). And at some point, Palestinians will have to demonstrate through their own leadership, educational materials, and prioritization of investment dollars, they are prepared to live side-by-side, in peace, with the Jewish State of Israel.

Hevre, we must shore up the banks, not get swept away by the currents. Israel, the Jewish people, the Palestinians, these are not served by debating Jewish depravity, Jewish perfidy, who gets to claim the mantel of the “good Jews.” Inflammatory language like genocide and settler colonialism are not only factually wrong, they are also a distraction from important conversations we must be having about the future of Israel/Palestine. And while some people of good faith, including some in this very room, are having debates centered around these words and, I understand, doing so from a place of great pain and moral striving, make no mistake, these are the debates Hamas, Iran, the Houthis, Al Jazeera, Majorie Taylor Greene, want us to be having. Let’s not let haters of Jews and Judaism define us; let’s not allow those who willfully and vociferously deny our history or plot our destruction to dictate the rules for our discourse. Sometimes we need to say not “yes, and” but just “no.” And, naming the things we ought not say “yes” to will help focus us on the broad range of things we can and should.

To my knowledge, the word “but” doesn’t actually appear in Biblical Hebrew. “V” can imply “but.” Ach can imply “so”. But the thrust of the Tanakh’s language is additive not subtractive. The Rabbis did have language for the word “but,” but they were channeling foundational Jewish thought when they proclaimed: Eilu v’eilu, these and those, not these instead of those.

My friends, “Z” may stand for Zionism, but this flag stands for Israel. Did you know that “z” didn’t used to the end of the English alphabet? Kathryn Schultz, in her exquisite memoir Lost & Found, explains that for a long time, the final character of the English alphabet was not the letter “z” but the word “and” written as an ampersand. Its former status, she explains, is a covert acknowledgment of how easy we learn it and how much we need it. “Dozens of other words serve as conjunctions,” she writes, “but these words, among them yet, for, nor, after, although, unless, since, they qualify the relationship between two things being joined. Cause and effect…contrast or exception…contingency…. ‘And,’ she explains, does none of these things. It is a connection made of nothing but connection.”

So, this year, go make connections. Be curious. Try to say “and” more than “but” or “what about.” To the best of your ability, criticize people and policies and rhetoric for love of Israel. Donate to good causes. Fight for justice and inclusivity. Look for people who are engaged in serious conversations about plausible futures. Join those conversations. Visit Israel! These are truly the most optimistic things we can do when faced with our dire and distressing reality and the best way to channel all the “yeses” of Rosh Hashanah.

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אַתֶּ֨ם נִצָּבִ֤ים הַיּוֹם֙ כֻּלְּכֶ֔ם

“You stand today,” he says to them, “all of you, before the LORD your God” (Deu. 29:9). Rashi in 11^th Century France explains we know it was his last day on earth because it says hayom, this day. This seems right, because a few chapters later, after Moshe has concluded his remarks, after charging the people to “choose life,” after bringing Yehoshua ben Nun before the people and charging him as their new leader, chazak v’ematz be strong and resolute, after drafting a poem we know as Ha’azinu – after a jam-packed final day – Torah tells us,

וַיְדַבֵּ֤ר ה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה בְּעֶ֛צֶם הַיּ֥וֹם הַזֶּ֖ה לֵאמֹֽר׃

“That very day the LORD spoke to Moses: “Ascend these heights of Avarim to Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moav facing Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving the Israelites as their holding. You shall die on the mountain that you are about to ascend and shall be gathered to your kin…” (32:48-50).

It’s a bracing moment, the conclusion of an extraordinary life of service. The 16^th Century Italian commentator Sforno adds that the reason our verse at the beginning of Nitzavim says not only hayom but also “lifnei Hashem Eloheichem, before the Lord your God,” is that Hashem’s presence is invoked to make clear that the people’s relationship with God will endure beyond their relationship with God through Moshe.

Here’s the rest of the passage Jon Hornstein leyned earlier: “You stand this day, all of you, before the LORD your God—your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to water drawer— to enter into the covenant of the LORD your God…as God promised you and swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob….

Notice how egalitarian this moment is! Everyone participates in the brit– leaders and followers, men, women, children, resident aliens, people of every trade. And then:

“I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the LORD our God

וְאֵ֨ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵינֶ֛נּוּ פֹּ֖ה עִמָּ֥נוּ הַיּֽוֹם

and with those who are not with us here this day” (Deu. 29:9-14).

Numerous commentators, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Ramban among them, suggest this last line is clear. It means that the covenant extends to future generations – to us.

Today, I would like to consider this moment and what it portends, both for those future generations, but more importantly what sort of model it establishes for Jewish communal gathering. Jews get together for lots of good reasons, of course, some overtly Jewish, some just because we like being together. We eat, we pray (yes, we love), but also, we tell jokes, watch football, organize for justice and go duckpin bowling. Aside from these and a million other good reasons to get together, I’m interested in what our sacred texts say is the optimal type of Jewish gathering.

When, chronologically speaking, is the next convocation similar to this moment in our parasha, when the whole community stands together in this way? We might look at II Kings (22:3) when, in the late 7^th Century BCE, King Josiah sends for Hilkiah the Kohen Gadol to arrange for payment of laborers who are working on the Temple. It’s in this moment Hilkiah finds something extraordinary.

וַ֠יֹּ֠אמֶר חִלְקִיָּ֜הוּ הַכֹּהֵ֤ן הַגָּדוֹל֙ עַל־שָׁפָ֣ן הַסֹּפֵ֔ר סֵ֧פֶר הַתּוֹרָ֛ה מָצָ֖אתִי בְּבֵ֣ית ה …

“Then the high priest Hilkiah said to the scribe Shaphan, ‘I have found a scroll of the Teaching (sefer torah) in the House of the LORD.’ And Hilkiah gave the scroll to Shaphan, who read it.”

Josiah is completely distraught, concerned the community has, in its ignorance, been in violation of Torah law. In a memorable moment, it’s Huldah, the female prophetess, who reassures King Josiah that his sincere and humble supplications are accepted in heaven. Then, to rectify the Judean’s communal lack of knowledge, he assembles the community:

“At the king’s summons, all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem assembled before him.

The king went up to the House of the LORD, together with all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests and prophets—all the people, young and old. And he read to them the entire text of the covenant scroll (sefer habrit) which had been found in the House of the LORD” (II Kings 23:1-2). And then (v. 3): “All the people entered into the covenant.”

וַיַּעֲמֹ֥ד כׇּל־הָעָ֖ם בַּבְּרִֽית

Literally, they “stood” in the brit. Sort of like, “Atem nitzavim,” today you stand.”

So, we have another communal Torah moment, one marked by inclusion of the entire community, standing, and the language of covenant.

Two additional moments of note occur centuries later during the Persian Empire. One stands a bit outside of time. We don’t really know if the Purim story occurred in the way it’s described. Scholars think probably not. But the Rabbis view Megillat Esther as a window into the assimilating diasporic community of Shushan. That story, powerfully, becomes the model for communal acceptance of Torah.

Rabbi Avdimi bar Hama in the Bavli (Shabbat 88a) identifies a problem, not with Deuteronomy, not with King Josiah, but with the original moment of revelation, one could argue the very first Jewish communal gathering. Think way back to Parashat Yitro. The scene is pretty similar.

יּוֹצֵ֨א מֹשֶׁ֧ה אֶת־הָעָ֛ם לִקְרַ֥את הָֽאֱלֹהִ֖ים מִן־הַֽמַּחֲנֶ֑ה וַיִּֽתְיַצְּב֖וּ בְּתַחְתִּ֥ית הָהָֽר׃

Moses led the people out of the camp toward God, and they took their places at the foot of the mountain. Notice the word וַיִּֽתְיַצְּב֖וּ, same root as nitzavim. On the other hand, we don’t have an extensive list of attendees here. The original moment of revelation is not a model of inclusion, of women and men, of water drawers and wood choppers. In fact, the men are told to “distance” themselves from their wives. And it seems that the community can’t handle such a direct encounter with God, so they send Moshe up in their stead.

The Talmud goes even further, suggesting the people may not have been fully bought in to this project at all! “…And they stood at the lowermost part of the mount” (b’tachtit hahar) (Exodus 19:17). Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: the Jewish people actually stood beneath the mountain, and the verse teaches that the Holy One overturned the mountain above the Jews like a vault and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, here will be your burial! Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there is a substantial caveat to Torah.

Could the covenant have been entered into under duress? That would be a problem, because if the Jewish people’s relationship with God is to be bi-directional and lasting, we must have agency in the decision. Even the “yoke of heaven” must be accepted willingly.

In classic Talmudic fashion, though, the Gemara solves its own problem. When do the Jewish people, as a people, finally accept Torah? Purim! “Rava said: Even so, they again accepted it willingly in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written: “The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” (Esther 9:27)

קִיְּמ֣וּ (וקבל) [וְקִבְּל֣וּ] הַיְּהוּדִים֩ ׀ עֲלֵיהֶ֨ם ׀ וְעַל־זַרְעָ֜ם

The Jews undertook and irrevocably obligated themselves and their descendants…

A less ahistorical version of Jewish communal gathering under the Persians comes from the book of Nechemiah. Nechemiah was cupbearer to King Artaxerxes. In the year 444 BCE, having learned about Jerusalem’s disrepair, he gets himself appointed governor of Judea and returns to Eretz Yisrael after about 13 years after Ezra the scribe.

Having rebuilt the walls and gates of Yerushalayim, Nehemia and Ezra gather for a renewal of the covenant (Neh. 8:1-3).

וַיֵּאָסְפ֤וּ כׇל־הָעָם֙ כְּאִ֣ישׁ אֶחָ֔ד

“The entire people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the scroll of the Teaching of Moses with which the LORD had charged Israel.”

לְהָבִ֗יא אֶת־סֵ֙פֶר֙ תּוֹרַ֣ת מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֥ה ה אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

On what date does this occur? Rosh Hashanah!

“On the first day of the seventh month [remember the seventh month in Tanakh is Tishrei], Ezra the priest brought the Teaching before the congregation, men and women and all who could listen with understanding. [Again, an inclusive gathering]. He read from it, facing the square before the Water Gate, from the first light until midday, to the men and the women and those who could understand; the ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the Teaching.”

To give you a sense of just how inclusive the approach was to learning, Sefer Nehemiah (8:8) explains there were instructors circulating to ensure competency: “They read from the scroll of the Teaching [sefer torah] of God, translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading.”

That was in the 5^th Century BCE. Our parashah takes place 700 years earlier, but the assurances given in that moment on the other side of the Jordan make possible that moment and each of the other moments of sacred communal gathering: “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the LORD our God and with those who are not with us here this day” (Deu. 29:9-14).

I asked at the beginning if there was some great unifying theory of Jewish gathering? Inclusivity seems key, which is saying something in such a decidedly striated society. But why gather? What’s the agenda? Sorry to say, it’s not lox and bagel, nor necessarily prayer or volunteerism. It’s not watching television (though if you’re not yet watching Long Story Short on Netflix, you definitely should!). What links all these incidents is, of course, Torah learning, the public recitation of our holiest text Torah is the thing that holds Jews together. So, it has always been. So, may it continue to be so.

This year is our 50^th Anniversary – in case you haven’t heard. It's not an accident we are celebrating by inaugurating a new sefer torah this Simchas Torah. It’s also not an accident that the last two mitzvot in the sefer torah are about the centrality of… Torah! From where do we learn the commandment for public torah reading? “Gather the people—men, women, children, and the strangers in your communities—that they may hear and so learn to revere the LORD your God and to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching” (Deu. 31:14) That’s next week’s portion, sometimes read as a double parashah with Nitzavim. The inclusivity of the entire community should sound familiar to you by now. And the final mitzvah, the 613^th commandment, is to do what? To write a sefer Torah! (That mitzvah comes just five verses later, 31:19).

So, Hevre, let me leave you with this. On this Shabbat, the 27^th of Elul, three days before Rosh Hashanah, in a shul which prides itself on its inclusive approach. (Dare I say it is part and parcel of Beth Am’s commitment to other principles, like diversity and… some other value I can’t recall, but I think it rhymes with “shmequity”). Anyway, if you distill our five core values down, this is a place that cares principally about two things: our machaneh (our broad and inclusive camp) and limmud, the centrality of Torah learning. So, how wonderful to discover that our tradition has always seen these two values as intrinsic to one another. This is at the core of the Brit. Torah is only worth giving to the entire nation, from the wood chopper to the water drawer, young and old, citizen and stranger. And the inverse is also true – an expansive community is best served by exposing the community to rich. deep, and relevant Torah learning.

Moses, our greatest teacher, on his last day of life, saw fit to commit the Jewish people to these principles. I don’t know about you, but they feel to me like worthy things to which we should recommit ourselves in the coming year.

Rabbi David Jaffe muses: “Rabbi Chaim Tchernowitz (d. 1949) relates in his autobiography how the synagogues of his youth in Russia were divided by profession. There was the shoemakers’ shul, the hatmakers’ shul, the carpenters’ shul, and the horse thieves’ shul. Jaffe declares this is clear “evidence of a breakdown in Jewish moral behavior.” The same people who presumably stood reverently in synagogue three times a year for the recitation of the Ten Commandments (including the Eighth one: “Do not steal”) had organized their institutional prayer around their common identification as thieves! I have no justification for this behavior. I’m sure there are circumstances in which it might be morally defensible to steal of horse (To escape a forest fire? To rush a sick child to the hospital?) but horse thievery clearly ought not be a point of pride for observant (or non-observant) Jews.

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The ancient Rabbis explore this concern about alignment of values and practice with regard to the major festival we celebrate next month. In Mishnah (Sukkah 3:1, 5), the great 2^nd Century compilation of Jewish law and legend, they proclaim that a stolen lulav and etrog is unfit for use. The reason is stated in the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 30a): It is…a commandment that is fulfilled through a transgression (mitzvah haba’ah b’aveirah). As it says, "And you have brought the stolen [animal], the lame [animal], and the ill [animal as offerings] (Malachi 1:13)." [Meaning] a stolen offering is similar to a lame one; Just as a lame animal is not permissible for sacrifice, the same is true for a stolen animal.”

Our rituals are not meant to be hollow expressions of faith. If we are to serve God “with all our heart…soul…and might” (Deu. 6:5), we must strive to be fully integrated as Jews and as human beings. Stolen animals, even without blemish, may not be offered as atonement for sins, just as stolen ritual objects may not be used to express our devotion. The objects themselves are neutral. We make them holy when we infuse them with holy intention – so long as we have not misused them or received them through ill-gotten gain.

But we could ask, what about objects that have nothing explicitly to do with Judaism? Can these be tools of holiness and of justice? There’s a tendency these days to ascribe moral weight to technology, the internet, AI, etc. This has certainly been true around conversations about security and especially surveillance which some would say are immoral, not amoral. There is a long and troubling history of surveillance in communities of color, which is one reason I signed an amicus brief to the ACLU’s challenge to the Baltimore spy plane a few years back. We’ve also been deliberative and clear about expectations of our security guards at Beth Am. They are certainly not there to racially profile in our majority Black neighborhood. Their charge is to keep everyone safe within our campus – equally true for Jews who come to pray with us on Shabbat, neighbors who gather for a concert or ice cream social, and Queer young dance enthusiasts voguing Ballroom in our social hall weekday evenings.

Cameras installed through previous years’ security grants have been helpful as well. Mostly, they are there to monitor for potential vandalism and (God forbid) those who would seek to do harm as well as serve as a deterrent against such things. But occasionally, our footage has been directly helpful for our neighbors. For example, earlier this summer, a neighbor was picked up in East Baltimore for dealing drugs. His mother came by my home franticly worried. She was convinced he was no drug dealer and wondered if our video footage could help exonerate her son. In fact, it did. At precisely the time he was accused of committing a crime in East Baltimore, the time signature showed him unceremoniously walking his dog in front of Beth Am.

There are objects in this world that are fundamentally dangerous, designed for creating maximal harm, like high-capacity magazines for assault rifles. But most of our material world is relatively neutral. There are reasons to question certain technologies; I do wonder whether the benefits of social media outweigh the harm. But we can also learn from what Jewish tradition has to say about stolen animals, lulavim, and etrogim. Justice demands we pay attention to how we make use of our possessions. The difference between a tool and a weapon can sometimes come down to two simple questions: Who is using it and how?

A version of this post will appear in the October issue of Jmore.

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August 30, 2025 ~ 5 Elul 5785

“O God, if You would only slay the wicked—
you murderers, away from me! — who invoke You for intrigue,
Your enemies who swear by You falsely.”

These words come from Psalm 139 (v. 19-20), the Psalm which was recited at the beginning of Mass at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis this Wednesday morning. Some 200 children and adults attended the service marking the beginning of the school year. As the prayer reached its conclusion and just before parishioners were to proclaim “Alleluia,” bullets rained in through the windows. Two children, 10-yr-old Harper Moyski and 8-yr-old Fletcher Merkel were murdered. Fifteen other children ages 6-15 and three adults in their 80’s were injured. My heart breaks for the Catholic community, for our friends at St. Ignatius and other parishes, for Minnesotans, for America once again to confront yet another massacre of children.

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There are some horrifying but heartening tales. School buddies shielding one another including at least one who took a shotgun blast to his back while covering another child. Staff members scrambling to get young children under the pews, sometimes lying on top of them to protect them. Kids who didn’t understand what was happening at first, who thought for a moment flying shards of stained glass were confetti to celebrate the first week of school.

In a 2012 message titled “Gun Worship is blasphemy,” Rabbi Eric Yoffie the President of the Union for Reform Judaism wrote: “If this massacre of innocents in Newtown will not rouse the nation's conscience, then nothing will. Therefore, this is the moment to mobilize the idealism, energy and anger of the American people.” That was thirteen years ago, 6 days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre in which 20 children and 6 adults were slain.

“Gun worship is blasphemy.”

I’ve given sermons before about the proliferation of guns in America, about how hundreds of people are shot every day, about how many of the weapons now permitted are deadlier, allowing violent people to kill more innocent people, more rapidly. These things remain true, of course, but I’ve been thinking more lately about the why. Why do so many Americans buy so many guns? And why do some Americans buy an absurd number of guns – half the guns in the US are held by a fraction of our population.

I think the answer has to do with at least two of the three cardinal sins in Jewish tradition, maybe all three. Did you know we have cardinal sins? We do, sort of. As you know life is sacred in our tradition, so should you be given the choice between, say, eating crab cakes and dying, you should eat crab cakes. If you’re from Boston, it might be clam chowder, Chicago, baby back ribs. Hawaii? I guess it would be ham and pineapple pizza – which truth be told I’d probably die before eating that. The point is that whether it’s kashrut, Shabbat observance, even serious interpersonal crimes like theft, if someone or life’s vicissitudes forces you to choose between violating the mitzvot and your own life – you do what you need to survive.

But there are three sins that according to Jewish law, are:

,יֵהָרֵג וְאַל יַעֲבֹר

that we must not violate under any circumstances, even if (God forbid) there is a gun to our heads. And they are: murder, sexual immorality and idolatry (Sanhedrin 74a, MT Yesodei Torah 5:7). The first is obvious: If life is sacred, one may not take a life even to save our own. Now to be clear, Jewish law doesn’t prohibit killing, but to murder is strictly forbidden, so much so that we must do מסירת נפש, that is give up our own soul rather than take another. Similar logic can be applied to immoral sexual behavior like rape where the crime is the degradation of another tzelem, another manifestation of the Divine image. But the third example may be a bit less clear.

The sin of avodah zarah, idol worship, shows up in our parasha (Deu. 17:2-6):

כִּֽי־יִמָּצֵ֤א בְקִרְבְּךָ֙ בְּאַחַ֣ד שְׁעָרֶ֔יךָ

If there is found among you…a man or woman who has affronted the LORD your God and transgressed God’s covenant… turning to the worship of other gods and bowing down to them, to the sun or the moon or any of the heavenly host, something I never commanded…you shall stone them, man or woman, to death.

The burden of proof is high for capital punishment – they have to have been warned, there need to be witnesses – but the point here is that idolatry is a very serious aveirah, and one that according to our tradition we should be yehareg v’al ya’avor, give up our own life before submitting to it.

Why is that? Because idolatry properly understood, like murder, like rape, is about the subordination of God and the degradation of our humanity. Which brings me to our American gun problem. I would suggest to you that our problem of guns is a problem of idolatry. Why are there so many guns, more guns than people in this country? Because too many Americans worship them. Sometimes there is a literal alignment of religion and guns. The memeification of guns within Christian nationalist rhetoric is an obvious example. Google “guns” and “Jesus” and click on images and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

But for many Americans there seems to be a degree of worship for the guns themselves. One of many books and essays suggesting this is a recent piece in the Cambridge Press journal Politics and Religion titled “The sacred gun: the religious and magical elements of America's gun culture.” The authors (Froese, Li, and Menchen) argue that while nearly all gun owners feel their weapons provide them a sense of security, a “distinct and crucial sub-set of owners express an additional and strong attachment to their weapons.” They call this “gun sanctity.” Borrowing from Emile Durkheim’s conceptual categories of “sacred” and “profane,” they write that while many gun owners are also religious Christians, “In the case of gun culture, the concrete object of the gun provides the owner with feelings of moral goodness, social value, and control without reference to or need of the divine.”

This kind of magical thinking seems to have been at play in the mind of 23-year-old Robin Westman, who emptied 116 rifle rounds and three shotgun shells into twenty human beings, most of them children. The shooter’s weapons were covered with references to other mass slayings and their perpetrators, not to mention an almost equal opportunity hatred for just about any group you could imagine. A YouTube manifesto described the planned attack as the shooter’s “masterpiece” and “art,” and said Westman “couldn’t stop thinking about” the anticipated “shock on their faces.” The attack would be “the perfect way to say goodbye... By the time it happens, I won’t care about anything else anymore.” The cruelty, the violence – and the instruments of that violence – were the point. I’m reminded of the Malbim’s teaching about Amalek. Why is Amalek the quintessential enemy of the Jewish people? Because, among other things, they are described as:

לֹ֥א יָרֵ֖א אֱלֹהִֽים׃ (25:18)

Amalek isn’t interested in violence on behalf of some god. Amalek has no fear of God. The randomness, the caprice is the point. And this problem, the sacrifice of human life in obeisance to indiscriminate violence and weapons is the very essence of idolatry.

What does our tradition offer here? While we have no guns in ancient rabbinic literature (obviously), the rabbis were circumspect about weapons and their place in society. Mishnah Shabbat (6:4), the tractate we’ve been reviewing in our Rise & Learn sessions, asks whether one may carry a weapon on the Sabbath. The answer is no, but the reasoning may be surprising.

“A man may not go out with a sword, bow, shield, club, or spear, and if he does go out, he incurs a sin-offering.” You may know that it’s impermissible to carry objects on Shabbat and to transfer them from one domain to another. But we might think these items are just accessories, or just like any other objects. Indeed, the very next Mishnah does say that women may go out with ribbons made of animal hair and frontlets or head-bangles. And, in fact, Rabbi Eliezer says תַּכְשִׁיטִין הֵן לוֹ, the weapons are merely ornaments for men who carry them. But the Sages disagree saying, “They are nothing but a disgrace, as it is said, ‘And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: lo yisa goy el goy cherev…, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore’” (Isaiah 2:4).

Chaz”al were not pacifists. They understood the need for weapons in certain contexts, namely for self-defense. But they also understood them to be a necessary evil, a compromise for an unredeemed world. Shabbat, you see, is meant to be me’ein olam habah, a “taste of the world to come.” Weapons, swords, bows, clubs, and certainly AR-15’s are inconsonant with a day meant to elevate existence.

There’s a similar notion with regard to knives at a meal. The Shulchan Arukh (16^th century code of Jewish law) describes the custom of covering knives before Birkat Hamazon. The Taz (Rabbi David Halevi Segal) explains that knives are reminiscent of swords and swords represent warfare and the shortening of life. The table, conversely, represents the altar, a symbol of peace and the extension of life – especially when we offer the Grace after Meals. Benching is peppered with prayers for peace – Oseh Shalom Bimromav… A’nai yevarech et amo vaShalom. There’s no b’racha for a sword, and there’s no b’racha with a sword (or a gun) in view.

The altar, like the dinner table, is a place where the focus of our attention is not on weapons but on one another and on God. This is why the Torah tells us the altar was made from unhewn stone, so that iron implements, similar to weapons of war, were not utilized to fashion an object of peace. In fact, there’s a legend which suggests there was a magical creature who cut the stone so that iron tools were unnecessary. That creature was called the Shamir. Paradoxically, the same passage in Shulchan Aruch says one need not cover knives on Shabbat on Yom Tov, but this seems to be because the atmosphere of those days is so infused with a sense of shalom, that we would not be inclined to confuse butter knives (or even steak knives) with weapons.

Too many Americans worship their guns, but our Jewish tradition has no interest in this sort of idolatry. We bless objects that uplift human endeavors. We say a b’racha and shake the lulav. We say a b’racha and sound the shofar. We don’t bless swords or spears or guns. We don’t celebrate violence, even when it’s called for, and Jews who do so deserve our condemnation. In fact, our parasha grants an honorable discharge for warriors who haven’t yet enjoyed a new home or vineyard or consummated a marriage. Life takes precedence, even in war.

The words of a Jewish b’racha over an object are not about the object. They understand the object as a vehicle for holiness (asher kiddeshanu b’mitzvotav, who sanctifies us with mitzvot…). I don’t know if Robin Westman uttered a blessing before opening fire, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The calamity of gun worship is worse than simply worshipping objects as if they’re gods. Westman’s true sin, as is the case with all murder (or rape for that matter), is that the actions of the perpetrators reduce their victims to something less than human. Objects, guns, become gods. People become objects. There’s no b’racha for a gun. But children are a blessing. We must solve our gun problem, but we cannot do so unless we confront our idolatry problem.

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Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells the following story in his book Invisible Lines of Connection:

“A light snow was falling and the streets were crowded with people. It was Munich in Nazi Germany. One of my rabbinic students… told me her great-aunt, Sussie, had been riding a city bus home from work when SS storm troopers suddenly stopped the coach and began examining the identification papers of the passengers. Most were annoyed, but a few were terrified. Jews were being told to leave the bus and get into a truck around the corner. My student’s great-aunt,” writes Kushner, “watched from her seat in the rear as the soldiers systematically worked their way down the aisle. She began to tremble, tears streaming down her face. When the man next to her noticed that she was crying, he politely asked her why. ‘I don’t have the papers you have. I am a Jew. They’re going to take me.’ The man exploded with disgust. He began to curse and scream at her. ‘You stupid bitch,’ he roared. ‘I can’t stand being near you.’ The SS men asked what all the yelling was about. ‘Damn her,’ the man shouted angrily. ‘My wife has forgotten her papers again! I’m so fed up. She always does this!’ The soldiers laughed and moved on. Rabbi Kushner says his student’s great-aunt never saw the man again. She never even knew his name.”

The Chofetz Chaim teaches: שכל הכופר בגמילות חסד כאילו כופר בעיקר, “Anyone who denies the importance of hesed (lovingkindness), it is as if they deny God’s very existence.”

In the Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 14a) we’re told that “Rabbi Samlai taught: With regard to the Torah, its beginning is an act of kindness and its end is an act of kindness…. As it is written: “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). And, it is written: “And God buried him in the valley in the land of Moab” (Deuteronomy 34:6).” God clothes the very first humans and in the final verses of Torah, buries (with divine hands) our greatest prophet.

One final text on hesed: “How do we know the significance of gemilut hasadim, acts of hesed? As the Prophet Hosea said: "For I desire hesed, and not sacrifice." The world began only with hesed, as it says in Psalms: "olam hesed yibaneh, the world is built with hesed….” One time it happened that Rabban Yohannan ben Zakkai was leaving Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yehoshua was walking after him. He saw the ruins of Solomon's Temple. Rabbi Yehoshua said: "Oy! What a devastation for us that the place where Israel atoned for our sins has been destroyed." Rabban Yohannan replied: "My son, do not fear. We have another form of atonement that is just as effective." What is it? Gemilut hasadim. This is what the verse from Hosea means when it says: "For I desire hesed, and not sacrifice" (Avot D'Rabbi Natan 4:7).

As you might have guessed, today I want to talk about hesed which seems to be a precious and rare commodity these days. Some of this is perception, the algorithm’s amplification of bad behavior. As Nico and Devon Hase say in their book, How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Survival Guide for Modern Life, “most people most of the time actually treat each other pretty okay” (p. 60). But there is a problem, and at the heart of the problem, I think, is that there is a growing obsession with loyalty that is masking our capacity for kindness. The most extreme examples are of people like Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steven Miller, and troll du jour Laura Loomer who confessed to an Atlantic writer this week she desires for her loyalty purges to help “make McCarthy great again.” All these characters, in their own ways, insist on loyalty – above all else – to President Trump. And Trump, of course, attracts characters like this because he, too, insists on loyalty to himself.

But you might ask, doesn’t our Jewish tradition demand loyalty? Check out chapter 15 (v.7-8) of our parasha which is often cited as evidence of our compassion for those in need.

כִּֽי־יִהְיֶה֩ בְךָ֨ אֶבְי֜וֹן

If there is a needy person.

תִּפְתַּ֛ח אֶת־יָדְךָ֖ ל֑וֹ

You must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs. And that’s beautiful, except the middle part of the verse is:

כִּֽי־יִהְיֶה֩ בְךָ֨ אֶבְי֜וֹן מֵאַחַ֤ד אַחֶ֙יךָ֙

If, however, there is a needy person among you, one of your kinsmen in any of your settlements in the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman.

The context is the shemitah/sabbatical year when you are permitted to press non-Jews on their debts but must forgive the debts of your kinsmen. And you must release your Israelite indentured servants but not necessarily your foreign slaves. To be clear, slavery is now forbidden. Period. And a fuller picture of Jewish tradition most definitely obligates us to others in need. But the parochialism is real. Which is probably why Jewish communities tend to have a strong internal social safety net, why we have a mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim to redeem our captives, why Rashi says (quoting Talmud) ani’ei ircha kodmim, the poor of your city first.

There’s something powerful in looking after our own, but then of course there are limits. Im ein ani li mi li? Asks Hillel the Elder, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But the second phrase is also important: u’k’sheani l’atzmi mah ani? If I am only for myself, what am I? Loyalty has its limits, sometimes because we need to have enough empathy in our hearts for the many other human beings our foundational text insists are also created in God’s image. And sometimes because certain particular Jews are unworthy of our loyalty.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Adam Sandler might say: “not a Jew.” But what about Steven Miller or Laura Loomer? Do we owe them our loyalty because they are Jewish? Does Steve Bannon get partial credit because he invested in Seinfeld? No, I think I can say categorically these folks do not have my allegiance. Would I count Miller or Loomer in a minyan? Tough call. If pressed, I’d probably say “yes.” But I wouldn’t go out of my way to offer them an aliyah. And I don’t feel especially loyal to Mr. Roizman who used to own the Emersonian, Esplanade, and Temple Gardens and neglected our neighbors within. Nor Ms. Kaplan who ran Madison Park North into the ground – making way for Reservoir Square. And, if I ever made aliyah, guess who I would not be voting for?

The problem with loyalty tests, of course, whether to certain people over others or to ideals over human beings, is that they are both important in certain contexts and incredibly dangerous in others. Which is why, I think, our tradition is so insistent on hesed, on kindness. Hesed is our check against our quick tongues, the self-righteousness we all feel sometimes. It’s the breath before we speak, write, publish or post words that may hurt.

But here’s the thing. These, hesed and loyalty, aren’t necessarily different. The Rabbis tend to use the word hesed to mean lovingkindness or compassion, and it does mean those things. But it’s original meaning, it’s biblical meaning is (believe it or not) loyalty! Hesed is the love, the compassion, the consideration which grows out of a covenantal relationship. I have hesed for Miriam because she’s my wife, because we made a commitment to one another that is meant to amplify the joy and withstand the strains of living.

One way successful couples or people in all kinds of relationships do that is by insisting on the possibilities of goodness, even when life is challenging. Seeing holy possibility is an excellent bulwark again disloyalty, better than fear-mongering and threats. In the early 2000’s, psychologists at the University of Maryland conducted an experiment. They had a group of students solve a maze puzzle. Students were divided into two groups. Each group had a simple task which they could complete in about two minutes: help a cartoon mouse get safely to its mouse hole by tracing a pencil through the maze to the end. But while one group’s maze had a delicious looking piece of cheese near the mouse hole at the end, the other group had no cheese. Instead they confronted an image of an owl poised to swoop and capture the mouse in its claws at any moment. Just after completing the maze, all participants were asked to do a different, apparently unrelated test that measured creativity, the capacity to see new possibilities. What’s fascinating is that the students who had to avoid the owl did 50% worse on this second piece than the students who chased the delicious cheese.

Loyalty is achieved in two ways: through lack and fear or through love and the possibility of greater abundance. Hesed is that second kind of loyalty. The Magid of Mezerich, prime student of the Ba’al Shem Tov teaches this about a verse from Psalm 32 (v. 10):

וְהַבּוֹטֵ֥חַ בַּֽהֹ חֶ֝֗סֶד יְסוֹבְבֶֽנּוּ׃

“The one who trusts in YHVH will be enveloped in lovingkindness.”

And when it’s the opposite,” says the Maggid, “when we are constantly afraid of the attribute of din (judgment) and punishment, we cleave to severity…. For whatever place we think about becomes the place we cleave to. If we think severe thoughts we cleave to severity. And when we trust in loving-kindness (hesed) our soul will then cleave to that place and loving-kindness will envelop us. Therefore, we must always insulate ourselves in the blessed One.

Hesed is covenant loyalty, and it grows out of the foundational covenant, the brit we share in triangular fashion with one another and with God. Do I believe we should grant loyalty to our fellow Jews above all, under any circumstances? Of course not! But I get what our parasha means when it says we should be careful not to squeeze each other too hard or marginalize each other too much. Truth is, I’m not a great fan of calling out Jews as Jews when we think they are behaving badly. When occasionally I have, I’ve tried to be very careful not to claim my own moral superiority but, instead, to spotlight the gap between their behavior and our shared responsibility for hesed, our covenantal call to kindness.

This modern tendency to cry “not in my name” has its costs. We can be critical of someone whom we feel is not living up to Torah values, but to do so publicly, to call someone who is Jewish out for being not only a shmegegge but an inadequate Jew, or to minimize the experience of fellow Jews to amplify our own, risks compounding tropes or narratives that undermine our shared destiny. Kol yisrael aravim zeh bazeh, says the Talmud (Shevuot 39a), “all Jews are bound up together.” We are an ancient people, chosen for righteous living by a loving God. Let’s be each other’s cheese and not each other’s owls! Getting through the maze is only half the battle. We want to be better on the other side.

רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃

“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse,” our parasha begins. The curse comes when we turn away from God and treat one another with indifference or sometimes cruelty. It’s easy to the do that when everyone else is doing it. It’s even surprisingly easy to disregard the feelings of the people we are closest to, who may be sitting right next to us, who may share a classroom with our kids, or stand next to us in line at kiddush. The beracha, the blessing, hesed, is the choice to do otherwise, to listen, to try to understand. God desires not sacrifice, but hesed. As the Chofetz Chaim taught, to deny the importance of hesed is to turn our backs to God. If the stranger in Rabbi Kushner’s story could risk his own safety, in the midst of the Shoah, for a Jew he’d never met, can we not give just a bit more to one another, to our fellow Jews? After all, complicated though we are, we’ve been a people, a family, for a really long time. And I think that counts for a lot.

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In late July, I had the honor of offering remarks at the renaming of a West Baltimore Post Office branch in memory of the Congressman Elijah Cummings. The event knitted together two aspects of my own life. I proudly serve on the Elijah Cummings Youth Program board of trustees, interviewing candidates for this life-changing leadership program each year. While living, the Congressman would sit in for each of those interviews and was personally invested in the growth of each young person in the program. Today, my fellow trustees and work to further the legacy of a storied Baltimore and national leader (and my own congressman). I am also the descendant of a US Postal worker. My maternal grandfather, Harry Malk, worked nights for decades sorting mail in Chicago’s Main Post Office downtown. When he retired at 72-years-old, the floor sagged from the sheer weight of all that mail.

The July event was joyous, attended by Rep. Mfume, Mayor Scott and other elected officials, ECYP fellows, and Cummings family members. It was a celebration of Baltimore past, present, and future. One person who appears disinclined to celebrate American cities is President Donald Trump who, two weeks later, announced he was deploying federal troops to Washington, D.C. to “reestablish law, order, and public safety.” The President also had some choice words of Baltimore, calling our city “so far gone.” But crime is substantially down in both the District and Baltimore where data-driven and community-based public safety efforts have succeeded in driving the murder rate lower than it has been in a decade. You might wonder: what is the real goal of deploying US troops in American Cities?

All this reminded me of the late Congressman who, from his perch as House Oversight Committee Chairman in 2019, vehemently challenged the first Trump administration’s immigration and border policies. For his trouble, the Congressman was scolded by Trump when he called Cumming’s district (where I lived then and as I do now) a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” I’ll be the first to admit that there are rats in Baltimore, big ones. But of course, that wasn’t his point. This President has a long history of contempt for cities and neighborhoods he doesn’t like, a disdain expressed in thinly veiled racist language. January 6^th rioters who imperiled law, order, safety and human lives in an attempted coup, on the other hand, seem to elicit more compassion.

Trump’s approach to cities echoes a failed public safety strategy based on a theory called “broken windows” which attempts to connect violent crime with disorder. Policies derived from this flawed theory saw thousands and thousands of innocent people (often young Black men) stopped, frisked, and sometimes brutalized or even killed. When the uprising began in April 2015, it was a response to the arrest, mortal injury, and then death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man was chased, arrested and then shackled in the back of a ban without a seatbelt. What was Gray’s presumed crime? He made eye contact with police – and then ran. Author and public intellectual Malcom Gladwell helped popularize Broken Windows and Stop-and-Frisk policies in his 2000 book The Tipping Point. This past year, Gladwell reexamined his previous assumption and offered a mea culpa. “I was wrong,” he said.

In my own writing, I have highlighted some similarities between the Jewish tikkun olam paradigm and broken windows theory. While I hardly think typical proponents of tikkun olam are likely to support these public safety solutions, both frameworks suggest brokenness and repair as a lens through which we might view the world in its challenges. It’s my contention that improvement, growth, and fulfillment of our divine calling are better ways to foster necessary societal change. I call this takhlit olam, an alternative model based on the Genesis narrative from Torah.

Elijah Cummings was famous for saying, “Our children are the living messengers we send to a future we will never see.” The late Congressman understood that to believe things can get better is not simply to look to our next generation. Instead, he understood that working for justice is insisting (with chutzpah) the future not only can but will be better than our current circumstances. "If you have built castles in the air,” said Thoreau, “your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them,"

Trump is declaring war on cities like Washington and Baltimore, actions which may unmake much of the progress since broken windows was debunked. What can we do in response? Maybe we channel Elijah Cummings, vociferously challenging injustice and unfairness when we see it – while asserting with equal passion the very real possibilities of tomorrow.

A version of this essay will appear in the September issue of Jmore.

This morning, I went for a run around Druid Lake, the reservoir across the street from my neighborhood and for which Reservoir Hill was named. It was just before the heat really set in, and a number of people were out walking, running, or biking the newly re-opened pedestrian loop, enjoying the Juneteenth holiday. The lake project has dragged on for years; local resident and park enthusiasts alike have been frustrated both at the pace of construction and the lack of clear and consistent messaging from leadership as Baltimore looks to transform this important amenity in the coming years.

The full project, should it come to fruition, is terribly exciting. Back in 2021, I wrote a piece suggesting the City of Baltimore daylight the ghost stream which once fed the Jones Falls river valley. Daylighting part of that stream is indeed a component of the City’s bold vision plan, a plan that also features of fishing pier, swimming and boating areas, wetlands, a café, and a pedestrian bridge spanning the lake.

Druid Hill Park is the central park of our city, an Olmsted Firm designed historic oasis with a rich but also complicated history of segregation. And it’s a key touchpoint in the story of Baltimore Jewry, as detailed in Barry Kessler’s well-researched 2009 Jewish history of the Park. For many years Beth Am Synagogue, half a block from the Reservoir, has held Kabbalat Shabbat services and other activities in the park, and the recently renovated Third Space at Shaarei Tfiloh is the newest example of revivified Jewish communal presence on the park’s periphery.

This history and my own congregation’s growth and thriving in our park-adjacent location are reasons I was excited to run the pedestrian loop once more. So, when a recent Baltimore Banner Article covered the path reopening, I read it eagerly searching for any new details. Then I came to the last few lines:

“For Kim Brown, a visit to the walking loop was enough to come back after at least five years away. Brown on Monday arrived with her two grandsons and walked the reopened loop while playing music from a speaker dangling from her waist. The park has changed since she was a kid, she said, and she’d like to see renovations fulfill more than recreational wish lists. ‘I hope they keep the crime rate down,’ she said.”

I don’t know Ms. Brown, and I certainly don’t fault her for sharing her concerns about public safety. What matters is that The Banner saw fit to conclude its reporting about this positive development with an implicit warning, one completely divorced from any relevant historic or narrative context. Did Kim Brown have a bad experience by Druid Lake five years ago? The article doesn’t say. Was there a significant crime rate near the lake path that might make Ms. Brown or others reluctant to walk there with their grandchildren? Not that I know of, and I’ve spent 15 years enjoying the park, with and without my wife and children, and at all hours of the day. “You must not carry false rumors” says Exodus 23:1.

Years ago, I followed Druid Park Lake Drive across the 28th Street Bridge and saw an older gentleman laboriously painting the cracking concrete walls of the overpass, covering with pearly white paint years of weather-worn graffiti and rust-orange chain link run-off. I remember thinking: “What a thankless job, earning a day's wage toiling in the heat of the day to make Baltimore just a little nicer!” A couple weeks later, I was driving that same overpass when I saw fresh black graffiti scrawled across the white surface: "THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS." I don't know who sprayed the graffiti, but soon after I discovered a local artist selling postcards with the image.

I have never felt that Baltimoreans need to hide from the truth. At times and in certain areas, Baltimore has and continues to experience crime. But most crime, including violent crime, has been decreasing for years now, and it has not been a significant problem in Druid Hill Park for a very long time. Journalists have a responsibility to report the truth, but they also must be careful to avoid an instinct to sensationalize. There are frustrations with the park. Construction delays, cost overruns, noise and dust kicked up over seven years are all issues. But none of us who live around here are concerned about running or walking in the park in the middle of a beautiful day, and most of us would comfortably do so from early in the morning until late in the evening.

Any news publication that punctuates a story about real Baltimore progress with a baseless warning about crime is doing the equivalent of scrawling “This is why we can’t have nice things” on a freshly painted wall. With The Sun’s current ownership, The Banner is an important asset for our city. It must do better!

A Version of this post will appear as the July/August Baltimore Justice column in Jmore.

Post-Script: I share this post on Juneteenth, the newest federal holiday, and one which has, thus far, survived the administration’s assault on DEI. While the story is not directly about America’s history of slavery and liberation, the subtext most certainly is. Liberation is iterative. June 19, 1865, concluded one dark period of American history, but there were of course many moments of darkness and light to come. We must not shy away from telling honest stories about the darkness, but a vital green and blue space at the center of our city is a beacon of light. Let’s tell that story honestly too!

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