Impressions: A Rabbi's Commentary and Contemplation

This has been a year of tremendous trauma. I have come to believe that Sukkot is the PTSD holiday. In several ways it is designed to address the trauma of our lives:

1. The Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, is associated with narrowness, “tzar.” After the constriction of slavery and the inability to escape, comes Sukkot. In the desert, there is space. The sukkah is un-claustrophobic by its nature. Since there is no covering on the roof, you can see the outside. You are not hemmed in, which is one of the triggers of trauma. This is what we pray for our hostages to experience again, and soon.
2. The Rabbis say “sukkah” refers to the sukkah of clouds that God provided for the Israelites as they walked through the desert. Being taken care of, a gentle shade over your life, is calming after the brutality of Egypt. Fear is soothed by caretaking.
3. The sukkah reminds us that we are not alone. Not only do we invite other people into the sukkah, but traditionally we also bring in the ushpizin – historic figures from the Jewish past who share our history and gave us their dreams. The vision of the stars above is a further reminder of God’s presence. As Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo: “I feel a tremendous need for religion, so I go outside at night to paint the stars.”
4. Like a mikveh, the sukkah is done with one’s entire body. As we have learned – particularly in the classic work on trauma The Body Keeps the Score – trauma is stored in the body. Also on sukkot we build something. Creating helps heal.
5. Sukkot is the only holiday whose name is an emotion – Z’man Simhatenu, the time of our joy. Trauma robs joy. Sukkot encourages us to feel joy, reminding us that it is good and healthy to be happy. This holiday that returns us to nature, to greenery and the elements, lifts our spirits. It has been an awful year. Sukkot can help bring us back to wholeness.

Jewish tradition pairs the holiday of Yom Kippur and the costuming holiday of Purim. It seems a strange pairing, but in fact the biblical name Yom Kippurim can be translated as “A day like Purim.” There are many explanations of the connection; Rabbi Jack Riemer explains that on Purim we put masks on and on Yom Kippur, we take our masks off.

We all wear masks, professional and personal. Yom Kippur is the day when we explore ourselves and our own souls. It is a time to be ruthless in self-examination: To ask ourselves, what bitterness do we harbor in our own hearts? Especially in this past year, we have been so busy combatting the ugliness in the world we do not always have time to turn inward.

Yom Kippur arrives at a very fraught and painful time this year. But as we beat our chests, a kind of spiritual defibrillator, all of us are seeking to awaken our hearts to balance resolution with compassion, anger with understanding. There is a line of the poet Yeats that I have often thought of since last Oct. 7: “Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.” We have seen a great deal of sacrifice this year, but we will not let it make our hearts harden. Judaism asks just the opposite, in fact: it is no coincidence that some of the greatest warriors of Jewish history – King David in the Bible and in the Samuel ibn Naghrillah in the Middle Ages (d. 1056) – were also poets.

Yom Kippur reminds us that the task of life is not only to make the world better but to make ourselves better. What mitzvot, acts of connection to people and to God, can we undertake this year? When have we lacked clarity, decency, courage? On this day we have a moment to breathe and to reflect.

The Kotzker Rebbe once screamed at his disciples: “Masks! Where are your faces?” Yom Kippur is a day to see one another panim el panim – face to face. It is a time to deepen relationships, repent of wrongdoing and look up to what is greater than ourselves. There is a great deal of work to be done in the world. In the year to come we will confront enormous challenges and combat deep seated hatreds. Let us take this day to open our hearts, reveal ourselves, and elevate our souls. May we be inscribed in the book of life.

In recent years a movement has arisen entitled “effective altruism.” It is an approach to charity that has won a number of adherents, but its central principle is not only old, it is found in today’s Torah portion.

Effective altruism argues that we owe a debt to the unborn that is in many ways no less than the debt we owe to those standing next to us. This is something we already recognize in many of our actions: policies involving research for example, that are intended to pay benefits in the future, even if we don’t live to see it.

In the parashah today Moses tells the people that the covenant is not only made with those who stand there on that day, “but also with those who are not here with us (Deut. 29:14).” Moses is saying to the people that future generations down through the ages are part of the covenant as well.

Judaism has always embraced the ideal of charity toward the future. Famously, the old man in the Talmud Ta’anit 23a who is planting a carob tree he will never eat from, explains that it was done by his ancestors for him. Moses, like Herzl, leads people to a land he will not himself inhabit. Jeremiah buys land in Israel as the people are being exiled in the hope of future return. Generations of Jews learned to see themselves not only as inheritors but as ancestors. We hold in sacred trust for those who follow.

When in our day we confront the evils that arise, proclaim the values we cherish and embrace the allies we esteem, it is not only so things will be better today, or tomorrow. Our efforts to fight for what is right, so painful in this year of anguish and loss, are also pointed toward the future, sometimes even the far future, when those we shall never know will eat the fruits we plant today. Do not despair, Moses is teaching the Israelites. You may see difficulties and trials despite being part of the covenant, despite all your efforts, in contradiction to your hopes. But the effort you make is not only for those who stand today but those who are not yet here. Yes, it has been a dispiriting year. Yet when the labor appears thankless, remember that our struggles are not only for ourselves but for both Jews and non-Jews who will be blessed by everything we managed to accomplish, just as we have been by those who stood at the mountain thousands of years ago.

Sixty-three years ago, President John Kennedy famously proclaimed, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Recently I visited West Point to speak at “Warriors Weekend” – which gathered Jewish cadets from all the armed services of the United States. Filled with young people who were asking that very question, we gathered in the chapel. The small building features a Torah saved from the Holocaust and the names of people who heroically served, and together we talked about Judaism, about life and about commitment.

As I spoke to the men and women in uniform I recalled the beginning of this week’s parasha: Ch. 26:1,2: “When you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, take some of the first fruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land the Lord your God is giving you and put them in a basket.” In other words, when you inherit the land the first thing you must do is give something in gratitude for what you have inherited.

American law is built around rights. Jewish law is built around obligations. Each has its place and worth. Yet when either becomes the only criteria, society falls apart. Throughout the history of Jewish law there has always been consideration for what rights the person has and what freedoms under the law obtain. For too many Americans however, the concept of “what I am free to do” has become almost the sole way they understand their relationship to America.

For a variety of reasons, volunteering in America has dropped steadily over the last several years, and charitable giving has also declined. Yet many of us are still called, as the Torah instructs, to help in myriad ways. Standing before those cadets, I felt a renewed sense of the inspiration in their commitment to a cause.

Those of us who are engaged in the fight against prejudice and hatred understand that to engage in this campaign requires deep commitment to the same ideals as those young people. We ask – what can we do for our nation and for our people? The answer? As the prophet explained it three thousand years ago, we seek a world in which “Everyone may sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4).

How does the prophet respond when the people are suffering? Isaiah says, speaking in God’s name: “For a moment I hid My face from you, and with everlasting kindness will I have compassion on you (Isaiah 54:8).” Our hearts remain burdened with grief for the hostages who were murdered and one of the places we turn for understanding is to our ancestors, who again and again endured the pain of persecution and loss.

So how did the sages who came before us, who also suffered unimaginable losses, understand this verse? I looked at the commentaries and found a recurrent theme. In every generation, from rabbinic times until today, commentators acknowledge the pain expressed by the first half of the verse. For a moment, God is – or at least feels – absent, and in that dark void the most terrible things befall us. Where was God in the camps or in the tunnels? There is no fully adequate response. Sometimes we ask these questions not to elicit answers, but to express anguish.

Yet those same commentators turn to the second half of the verse and affirm it as well. Yes, the pain is real, but so is the promise. We will always feel the loss. That loss will also permit us to understand things that move us forward: As Rabbi Johanan points out in the midrash, our eye has a light part and a dark part, but we can only see through the dark part (Midrash Tanchuma, Tetzaveh 6:6). In failure, loss and grief, in God’s hiding, we often see more clearly; we glimpse our deepest concerns and most fervent loves.

The Jewish world is in mourning. We are mourning for Carmel, Eden, Hersh, Alexander, Almog and Uri. We are in mourning for all of those killed and wounded and their families and for the devastation in the aftermath of Oct. 7. There are no words that can make the pain disappear. No reassurances will shake the feeling that, for a moment again, God’s face was hidden and darkness grips the world.

This passage from Isaiah is called the “Fifth Haftorah of Consolation” – the fifth in a series of seven between Tisha B’av and Yom Kippur. The prophet recalls us to the challenges and afflictions our people have known in the past. He shares in the reality and depth of our pain. And he offers the consolation that this pain may be consuming right now, but the pain itself proves our compassion, and turns us toward the hope of God’s promise that endures.

May the memory of those we have lost be a blessing and give us the strength to be God’s partner in the sacred task of combating hatred and bringing light to the world.

There is no obligation to have a favorite biblical verse. In the Talmud a couple of Rabbis identify favorite verses but most do not. If I had to choose, I would select a verse from this week’s parasha, Deut. 4:9 – “Guard your soul carefully.”

This verse has grown in importance in our own day, although it was always a crucial reminder given the snares and distractions of life. I’d like to suggest three ways we need to learn to guard our souls better in this world.

1. The overemphasis on bodies. Culturally we are worshippers of the physical. We are bombarded by diet advertising and advice, exercise regimes and health regimens, and then shamed if we do not conform to this or that standard. If it were all in service of health, it would at least be understandable. But we idealize certain body types and foist them through social media on our children. We have become so focused on physicality that the soul languishes. Seemingly all that matters is how your picture plays on social media. You cannot put your soul on Instagram.
2. The desire to win at all costs is a snare to the soul. We will not admit mistakes or regret, because it disappoints our own “team” and gives aid and comfort to the “enemy.” Polarization is not about the integrity of the soul but the triumph of the ego. Each lie and omission and evasion corrodes our souls.
3. Finally silence. In the months since October 7th the Jewish community has been often disappointed by the silence of those for whom we raised our own voices in the past. Even some Jews have shied away from proudly proclaiming both their tradition and their solidarity with Israel. Each time you are cowed by the mob and refuse to speak what you know to be true, you are betraying the promptings of your own soul.

The Torah is a guide for life. No teaching, however wise, can guard your soul without your own care and effort. We were given but one soul as we move through this life – guard it carefully.

Before Israel enters the land, Moses recounts their history. He discusses the wandering, the gathering at Sinai, the episode of the scouts and much more.

This parashah of the Torah, devarim, is always read before the commemoration of destruction on Tisha B’av. The Shabbat, because of the haftorah reading from Isaiah, is known as Shabbat Chazon, the Sabbath of a vision. The title is taken from the first words of the book in which the prophet’s vision is introduced.

In one Shabbat we read of a look back and a vision of the future. What has all of this to do with Tisha B’av which is arriving this week, and the parlous state of Israel and the world today?

For a modern parallel, look to Israel’s declaration of independence. Before enunciating the vision of the new state, it recounts the ancient attachment of the people to the land, and the travails that kept Israel from its birthplace. In other words, when building the modern state, our people chose the ancient example: recount the past and then offer the vision.

The vision arises in part from the pain of the past. For ancient Israel, wandering in the desert drove their desire for the land. In modern Israel, the centuries of exile strengthened the resolution to fight for our homeland.

There is a tradition that the Messiah will be born on Tisha B’av, the saddest day of the Jewish year. For the sorrows of the past are a prelude. From the moment we stood on the second bank of the Jordan, Jews have believed that from sadness will spring joy. We recount the story of the past because it is the past that impels us to seek the redemption of what can be in the future.

Right now the pall of Oct. 7 and all that followed still hangs heavily over Israel and indeed over the world. Our task is to recount those events, but also to offer a vision of how the pain of the past can yield to the promise of the future. The history of Moses leads to the vision of Isaiah; the destruction of the Temple presages the birth of the Messiah; the years of diaspora lead to the declaration of Independence; and we pray and work to ensure that the agonies of Oct 7 and the war will impel us to a new vision of a strong and safe Israel and Jewish people, in a more peaceful world.

After the final campaign east of the Jordan river, the nation is ready to advance into Israel and enter the Promised Land.

But there are two, eventually two-and-a-half, tribes that want to stay in the land they have recently conquered. They recognize the delicacy of the request. Israel is the Promised Land and they are willingly absenting themselves. What follows is a subtle but beautiful example of what it is to ask, and what it means to listen.

The Gadites and Reubenites approach Moses, Eliezer the priest and the chieftains of the community (Numbers 32:2). We are told, “and they said.” This is followed by a recounting of the names of the lands they have conquered and the information that this land is “cattle country and your servants have cattle.”

The next word (ibid. 32:5) is “Vayomru” – and they said. The text continues, “It would be a favor to us if this land were given to us....” Why is “and they said” repeated twice in the same speech?

Ibn Ezra (d. 1167) says repetition is to remind us that they are still talking. But other speeches in the Torah do not repeat “and they said.” It also fails to explain a significant feature of the text – the letter samech in the Hebrew separates the two phrases. Why should there be a break here in the middle of a speech?

Abravanel (d. 1508), who served in the government of Ferdinand and Isabella and was doubtless involved in many negotiations, offers a deep explanation that reflects his experience.

Abravanel notes that the opening of the speech is a sort of veiled request. They are saying – you know, we have a lot of cattle, and this land is perfect cattle land. Then they fall silent. The tribes are hoping that Moses will himself come up with the idea – why, then you should just stay here! They are trying to escape the responsibility of their own decision.

The samech, says Abravanel, represents Moses’s silence. “And they said” is added again because after the silence they resume speaking and this time make the request explicit.

Moses then reminds the tribes of the struggles of the past. They promise to fight until all of Israel is secure before they return across the Jordan. Under those conditions, they are allowed to keep the land.

Moses demonstrates how to listen and demand responsibility of the questioner. But more important, the exchange emphasizes that we who remain outside the land must work to ensure the safety of those who dwell there.

After Oct. 7, we understand Moses’ silence in a new way. We too passionately promise to aid our sisters and brothers in Eretz Yisrael, as our ancestors did on the plains of Moab.

Tuesday is the 17th day of the month of Tammuz. For many Jews this date holds no significance, but in Jewish history and observance it matters a lot. And I recently had two experiences that reminded me anew why this day is so significant.

Five calamities are said to have occurred on that date, the most important being the Romans breaching the outer walls of the Jerusalem. Three weeks later the Temple was destroyed, a catastrophe commemorated by Tisha B’av. The 17th of Tammuz is a minor fast day. Why should we fast for the beginning of the end of sovereignty two thousand years ago?

On a recent visit to Israel, I toured the soon to be opened National Campus of for the Archeology of Israel. This remarkable new building will hold and display some of the most important archeological treasures in Israel and indeed in the world. Recently uncovered were intact Roman swords, unique in the world, with scabbard from wood and handle of leather and blades still strong. Found in a cave in the Judean hills, they were taken by Jewish rebels from Roman soldiers and hidden for the revolt; and you can see them before your eyes.

Later that day I flew up to the Technion, Israel’s premier institute of science and technology. There I met with several remarkable students, all in their twenties. Each of them has lost months from study to serve on the front lines in Gaza and the North. They have buried their friends and seen them injured. One, who lived with his family in a border kibbutz, barely escaped on Oct. 7 with his family.

These brilliant young men and women, who dream of innovating in computer science and cancer research and aerospace engineering, are spending their time carrying rifles, the modern equivalent of swords, into battle to protect the land they love. If you ask why the ADL fights against hate, we do it in part for them.

Rebels trying to take back their land from the Romans two thousand years ago; students trying to protect their land from terrorists today. The line of Jewish love for the land is unbroken as is the willingness of our people to sacrifice for safety and sovereignty.

As I flew back from Haifa along the coast and saw Roman ample theaters and crusader ruins, I thought about the 17th of Tammuz. And about October 7th. This Tuesday, whether you fast or not, spare a thought and a prayer for those who fought thousands of years ago and those who fight today.

Am Yisrael Chai.

The Israelites have been wandering for a long time. Why does the rebellion of Korach occur now in the biblical story?

Rabbi Baruch Epstein, the author of Torah Temimah, in his commentary Tosefet Bracha, explains: There were always dissatisfactions, but the people held them in check for they had a great expectation. They were about to enter the land. In last week’s Torah portion, however, the spies returned with their evil report. God’s wrath was inflamed and God spoke through Moses. “In this very desert shall your carcasses fall. Of all you who were recorded in your various lists from age 20 and above, you who have muttered against Me, not one shall enter the land that I swore to you, save Caleb son of Jephuneh and Joshua son of Nun” (Numbers 14:29-30). They will not enter the land as they had hoped.

Hope deferred, Proverbs teaches, makes the heart sick (Proverbs 13:12). The disappointment led the Israelites to push against the leadership of Moses.

In his famous poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asks what happens to a dream deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
– And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
– Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

The dream of going into the land was not only deferred but denied for the Israelites. And as the poet teaches, it explodes. This linkage also helps explain, writes R. Epstein, the answer to Rashi’s question. Rashi asks why the Torah places the story of the spies and the story of the rebellion back to back, since it is a scriptural principle not to juxtapose two catastrophes. Rabbi Epstein’s answer is that one essentially caused the other.

Part of the heartbreak of the current war is to see the hope of peace snatched repeatedly throughout Israel’s history. So often we had thought peace might be within reach, only to see it violently denied. But like the Israelites who did eventually enter the land we have to renew hope, despite discouragement, and work anew toward peace.

Rabbi Abraham Twerski recounts how his parents used to discipline him. They would not say “You are not good.” They would not even say, “What you did is not good.” Rather, explains Rabbi Twerski, they would say, “What you did is not worthy of you.”

This is the Jewish way. First you affirm the essential dignity of the human being and only then may one criticize. The Torah is filled with the misdeeds and depredations of Israel and the surrounding nations. But what is the first statement about human beings? That we are all in the image of God. Dignity first.

When in this week’s Torah portion the spies enter the land of Israel, ten of them return believing that the land is beyond their grasp. They have been so beaten down by the experience of slavery and the difficulties of the wilderness that they forget their own worthiness. Only two of the spies, Caleb and Joshua, remember the lesson of Sinai: a people that merited standing before God need not cower or believe themselves unfit. Joshua was originally called Hoshea and his name was changed from Hoshea to Y’hoshua. The addition of a yud, which represents God’s name, was added to the man who would become leader of Israel after Moses. Therefore Joshua only had to recall his own name to recognize that he was in God’s image.

The Rabbis teach us something beautiful and poignant about that “yud.” Where did it come from? Sarah was originally Sarai. God took the yud from her name and replaced it with a heh, which is also a reminder of God. Then God gave the now extra yud to Joshua. This beautiful midrash also has a serious message: it reminds us that knowledge of the image of God is transferable. Parents can teach it to their children, and we can teach it to one another. Our essential endowment remains, even when we do not recognize it ourselves.

When we do remember it, however, we diminish hate and make the world a better place. Every human being is in the image of God. Dignity first.

The title word of the book Bamidbar (In the Wilderness) is connected by rabbinic tradition with dibur (speech). The book and the word intertwine; portable cultures rely on words.

The desert brings a range of speech: First there is the speech of complaint, the ancient kvetch. The Israelites are unhappy with the manna and demand meat. According to the Rabbis, the manna could taste like whatever one wished, so why would they complain? An acute suggestion from R. Jonathan Eybeschutz explains that everyone collected the manna equally. Therefore, no one could be better than his or her neighbors. They claimed to be upset about food, but what really bothered them, even in the desert, was social status.

The other instance of social status masquerading as complaint in the parasha is the gossip of Aaron and Miriam about Moses’s wife. For right after the complaint about his wife (12:1) they said, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us as well?” Behind it sound echoes of: “Mother always liked you best.”

This illustrates a reality about gossip. People rarely gossip about those they consider their social inferiors. Employers do not gossip about employees, but employees do about employers. Part of gossip is reducing the status, moral or social, of the one derided. Once again, as with the manna, negative speech is about social status.

Then there is the unelaborated but important speech of Eldad and Medad, two men who are prophesying in the camp.

In response, Joshua complains that the two are offering prophecies. Moses gives a famous answer wishing that all God’s children would be prophets. This is the speech of humility.

We just celebrated Shavuot, when we rejoice in the giving of God’s words. The words of human beings can also change the world.

Now that Israel has received the words of God at Sinai, their education will be in the use of words to uplift, not to destroy. We cannot achieve prophecy, but we can aspire to decency. We can speak words of kindness and love, not of hate.  For life and death, as Proverbs teaches us, is in the power of the tongue.

The Israelites stood at Sinai. There was thunder and lightning and the sense that something epochal in history was unfolding. To this very day what is called the revelation at Sinai is central to Jewish tradition and the ten commandments are central to the world. What precisely was revealed that made so much of a difference?

There are many ways to answer this question but let me suggest one: In the ancient world, as we see when we read Homer or other myths, how the gods felt about you depended upon how you treated them. Give them what they want and you will be favored.

The first part of the ten commandments seem to follow the same pattern – there is one God, do not make other images of God and so forth. But suddenly it shifts to how one treats parents, how we treat those we love, how we treat our neighbor. The great revelation becomes clear: God does not only care about our attitude toward God; God cares how we treat one another.

The ten commandments were given in the desert, and not in Israel, teach our sages, because they are for everyone to hear, not only for Jews. The great principle that is born at Sinai has become so fundamental we barely realize that it had to be born into an unwilling world: all people are in God’s image and honoring that in one another is the most important way to honor God.

Shavuot is not a holiday with the same kind of memorable signs that characterize Passover or Sukkot. We do not have a Seder or a Sukkah. The primary custom associated with Sukkot is to stay up late and study. If Passover is about freedom and Sukkot about appreciation, then we might say Shavuot is about understanding. Into a world of savagery and indifference, where human beings were exploitable commodities, Judaism taught a new understanding, born at Sinai. Our efforts to combat hate in the modern world are an advancement of this understanding: “You should love your neighbor as yourself for I am the Lord (Lev 19:18).” So revolutionary an idea takes thousands of years to fully grasp, and we are still trying. On this Shavuot we commit ourselves to understand anew and to struggle for the recognition that kindness to human beings is a reflection of our gratitude to the One who created us. Chag Sameach.

Anti-Memoirs, the autobiography of the French writer, adventurer, and critic André Malraux, begins with a very pointed story. During the war, Malraux once escaped the Germans in the company of a parish priest. When the two cross paths years later, Malraux asks his former companion what he has learned about human nature from a decade and more of hearing personal confessions. Two things, the priest replies. First, that people are much unhappier than one would think; second, “there is no such thing as a grownup.”

The first verse of the book of Numbers is: “The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.” In giving the book its Hebrew name, Bamidbar (in the wilderness), this opening sentence reminds us that the Torah is a tale of the wilderness.

The setting conveys the first lesson of Malraux’s priest, that the world is itself often a place of unhappiness. Judaism is a tradition to be lived and observed amid all of life’s difficulties and harshness. Even when the Israelites enter the land, they won’t find a perfect, blissful environment.

They must be prepared.

Why do we need so rich and wise a tradition?  Here we come to the second lesson of Malraux’s priest: there are no grownups.

The language of Scripture testifies to this message by consistently calling the people “the children of Israel.” That is true in a literal sense: they are the descendants of Jacob, who is also called Israel.

Also, they act like children: rebelling, refusing, ungrateful, self-centered, often immature—and thus constantly in need of education and moral guidance.

In focusing on the infancy of Israel’s collective history, the Torah tells us that all human beings are children of the wilderness. Seen in this light, the book of Numbers is a story of moral education, and one whose lessons can be applied to anyone’s quest for self-betterment.

From the moment humanity steps out of Eden, the Torah makes clear its unremitting realism about our condition, telling us time and again that pain is inevitable and that growth is at once demanding and essential. In the book of Numbers we are also shown the conditions that make the journey bearable and sacred: the existence of a map through the wilderness that we call the Torah and a Guide, our Creator, to point the way.

Mark Twain, whose manuscripts are nearly illegible due to all the changes and revisions, once wrote, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter, ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

For a word to be lightning it does not need to be long. In this week’s Torah portion the 19th century sage, Mei Hashiloah, Rabbi Mordecai Yosef of Izhbitza, focuses on two letters, the word “if,” which begins the portion: “If you walk in my ways.” (Leviticus 26:3) He explains that “if” signals the uncertainty of one who seeks to follow God’s ways, for “the will of God is very deep.”

The more we explore “if” the more lightning we find in the word. “If” in Hebrew is (אמ) im and contains all possibility in it. “If this had happened.” “If that had not happened.” “If I had said this.” “If I had not said that.” But the word im contains an even greater power in Jewish history.

“Im” is spelled aleph mem. The Mincha Belulah (16th century) teaches that in liberation, there was an im – an if. The name Aaron begins with an aleph and Moses with a mem. So too with Purim: Esther begins with an aleph and Mordecai with a mem. Finally, Eliyahu, the herald of the end times, begins with an aleph and Moshiach, the Messiah, begins with a mem. The aleph and mem of im carry within them past and future redemption.

“If” contains all of life’s regrets. But even more, im is a word of possibility. God says, “IF you walk in My ways.” We hold the im in our own hands.

One of the best loved poems in the English language was written by Rudyard Kipling for his son. It is called “If.” It’s worth reading the whole poem – here is a part:

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too…
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son!”

“If” is in your power – you can change your life. God gives us the power – and the choice.

In Leviticus, Aaron is ordained as the High Priest. This week we are told (Leviticus 9:1): “On the eighth day, Moses called Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel.” Why was the eighth day chosen?

Eight is a time for renewal. Seven represents fullness, completeness. There are seven days to creation, seven days to a week. Then comes the eighth.

When a male is born in Judaism, after a week the brit milah signifies a new beginning as one ushered into the covenant of Israel. Conversely, when someone passes away, the mourners sit shiva, literally seven, before they begin a new phase of life, one without the physical presence of the one whom they loved who has died. Each, the onset and the end of life, envision the eighth day as a starting point.

The holiday of Sukkot concludes with Shemini Atzeret, the eighth day of gathering. It concludes with Simchat Torah, the reading of the Torah – the new beginning, Genesis.

Before the bride and groom come under the huppah, it is traditional to have the bride circle the groom seven times (in these days, sometimes three, three and one). That is completion, and now they are ready to take the eight step toward a new beginning.

Aaron begins on the eighth day because he must begin again. He failed with the golden calf and will know tragedy with the death of his sons. Rashi explains that the public announcement is so that people know God has chosen Aaron despite the golden calf.

He begins again. Moses too has known multiple frustrations, disappointments, and failures. He and Aaron will nonetheless renew themselves to continue to lead Israel’s march through the desert. Eight is the promise that shortcomings are not the final word.

We celebrate new beginnings. Yet the power not of beginning, but of beginning again, is a secret to survival. The community of Safed created vibrancy from the ashes of the Inquisition, American Jewry from those who fled Europe before the wars, and countless events in the history of the Jewish people down to our own day and the founding of the State of Israel.

Many peoples in history have lived their term and disappeared; they could not exceed seven. We seek to be the people of the eight. Beginning anew is the way of spirit.

Anyone familiar with a Jewish wedding has to be shocked by the reading from this week’s haftorah. The prophet Jeremiah declares bleakly to the people in God’s name: “Then will I silence, in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the bride: for the land shall be desolate (7:34).”

Jeremiah’s words made sense in his time. He lived in a tumultuous age when the Assyrian empire declined and the Babylonians arose. Israel was defeated by the Babylonians and went weeping into exile. There was no joy in the streets of Jerusalem. It was a time of loss and deep despair.

So it is very strange that we quote the prophet at a wedding! What do we sing as we chant the sheva brachot, the seven blessings? “Again will be heard in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the bride.”

We take the despair of the prophet and with a phrase, turn it to hope. There is an even more famous example of this reversal in Ezekiel. In chapter 37, the famous vision of the dry bones, Ezekiel pronounces “avdah Tikvateinu” – we have lost our hope. That phrase may sound familiar. The second verse of Hatikva, the national anthem, begins “od lo avdah tikvateinu” – we have still not lost our hope. Once more, the words of the prophet are turned from anguish to inspiration. We know that better days will come and we refuse to be dispirited.

In these difficult days when we fight a rising tide of hate there is an impulse to believe that our efforts are in vain and our future bleak. But every time we sing at a wedding, each time we rise for Hatikvah – indeed each time we seek to transform enmity to acceptance and hatred to love – we are practicing the wisdom of our tradition. As the Psalmist taught us thousands of years ago, “in the evening there will be weeping, but joy will come in the morning (Ps. 30:5).” Take heart – there shall be joy in Judah and laughter on the streets of Jerusalem.

Purim is a holiday of masks. A mask doesn’t fully change you, but it obscures identity, distorting who you are. The boy who dresses as Mordechai can act old and wise, but everyone recognizes him as a boy playing a role; the girl who dresses as Esther can play at being bold, heroic and a queen, but everyone knows she is still a little girl.

There are many reasons why Purim is associated with masks, but surely a deep meaning is that it is a diaspora holiday. Purim takes place in ancient Shoushan, Persia. The plot revolves around Haman, who hates the Jews. The reason given is that Mordechai, a Jew, will not bow down to him, but the story implies that Haman’s rage is what we have come to know as classic antisemitism – a hatred in search of a rationale.

In the diaspora, Jews were forced to wear masks all of the time. In Muslim lands we were dhimmi, second class citizens subject to a vast range of indignities and periodic persecutions. Since we were powerless to change it, we wore the mask of acceptance and accommodation. In Christian Europe, Jews were regularly exiled, oppressed, targeted for conversion and sometimes killed. But in country after country we donned the mask of the willing subject, because rebellion only made it worse. The few who did not wear a mask, the Mordechais who did not bow down, paid a terrible price.

Even in the United States, for a long time Jews were afraid. During World War II many Jewish leaders were reluctant to challenge the government’s indifference to the massacres in Europe for fear of stoking antisemitism here at home.

With the founding of the state of Israel, Jews finally took their masks off. This is who we are, we declared to the world, a free people who can practice our own tradition. Part of the rise of antisemitism today is the resentment of those who are angry at unmasked Jews. But we have worn masks long enough. This Purim we will put on temporary, celebratory masks but as the holiday ends, we will take them off – because the Jewish people need never wear masks again.

At the very end of the book of Exodus we read that a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night led the Israelites “in all their encampments.” The word for “encampments” is Masa, which refers to travel as well. Rashi, the great medieval commentator, says that an encampment is also a journey. In that profound observation we learn something about Jewish history and about life.

Jewish history demonstrates that every stop along the way before the land of Israel is temporary. Since the destruction of the Temple and the exile thousands of years ago, Jews have prayed for rain according to the season in Israel, not in the lands of their residence. We would ourselves toward Jerusalem in prayer, and dream of the return to Zion. Rashi, in France in the 11th century, understood that the Jewish encampment was one step along the journey, whose culmination would be a return to the land.

The second message is that we stop in order to renew our efforts, not to cease from striving. This past week at the #NeverIsNow conference, we saw people gather in one place to talk about the work of the ADL in combatting hate and building bridges. But the conference was not an end in itself. It was an encampment, a stop on the journey. From the meetings and discussions people gathered hizzuk, encouragement and strength, in order to renew the efforts to combat hate in our world. We all left stronger, more resolute and more able to face the challenges ahead.

In Pekuday we see that the Israelites need to pause in their journey across the wilderness to gather their strength. But they know they are heading somewhere; that each rest is also a renewal for the path ahead. Along with the ancient Israelites, we too travel in the wilderness. For us as well, our tradition and our vision serve as a fire by night that allow us to see the way forward. So together, as pilgrims of the soul have always done, we journey toward a better world in which antisemitism and other forms of hate will be a memory, and in Israel and around the world humanity will live in peace.

In our parasha for the very first time, Moses calls the people together. He does not do so in the face of Amalek or another enemy. War is not Moses’s method of unity. Rather he calls upon all of Israel and starts to tell them of Shabbat and of donating to the Tabernacle.

The ideal of gathering in Judaism is to do it for joy – to celebrate, to worship or simply to feel the glow of another’s presence. But over the centuries Jews have also gathered for solidarity. In an often hostile world, rather than dissipating and leaving one another alone, we have found strength in coming together both with other Jews and friends of goodwill who stand beside us.

This week at ADL’s major conference, “Never Is Now,” we have seen thousands of hopeful, resolute and passionate Jews and non-Jews join one another in New York to insist on the vitality of our tradition and the resolution to fight hate.

Here we brought together speakers from across the range of cultural and political trends in the U.S. We opened ourselves to listen and to engage. We were here to sharpen our skills in the unending practice of confronting antisemitism and other forms of hate that plague our society. By being present we pledged to be both witnesses and catalysts for change.

In Vayakhel, the Israelites build the Tabernacle. The Torah highlights Bezalel, the artist whose skill was essential to the sacred task. It reminds us that creativity, artistry and care must be taken in the great tasks of life. The way we design our discussions with one another should be a product of creativity as well as kindness.

As Vayakhel reminds us, we have gathered since ancient times – conferences are nothing new on the Jewish calendar! All of us need to feel our community, our closeness, our common cause – to move forward together. It was not easy in the time of Moses and it has not grown easier in our own day. But we are still responsible for one another, and we still have to hold hands on our way through the wilderness.

Coming down from Sinai with the carved tablets from God, we can understand Moses’s anguish at witnessing the Israelites worship the golden calf. Still, it is hard to understand why Moses then takes the tablets and smashes them on the ground.

One explanation among many offered, is that it was pure rage. Once he saw the Israelites dancing about an idol, Moses could no longer contain himself.

But this seems inadequate. Would Moses really allow anger alone to lead him to destroy the work of God, the most valuable single item in the history of the world? Was he that incapable of self-control? Better to have marched back up the mountain to deposit the tablets somewhere safe.

Arnold Ehrlich, author of Mikra Kipshuto, has a provocative and interesting answer. He notes that the Rabbis relate that God said to Moses: “Yishar kohacha (i.e., good for you!) that you broke them!” (Shabbat 87a). God apparently approved of Moses’s action. This signals that more than anger was at stake.

Ehrlich believes that Moses saw the calf and thought: If the Israelites worship this calf, which they created with their own hands, what will they do when they see the tablets carved by God? Surely, they will turn these tablets, which are so much more precious than the calf, into an idol! If I don’t destroy the tablets, they will commit the ultimate desecration.

By smashing the tablets, Moses was making a declaration to all of Israel: Even the handiwork of God, which you might think of as inviolable, is nonetheless just another material object. It is not a God – it is a physical artifact. I am destroying it to return you to the greater truth, which is that you were not delivered from Egypt by a thing, but by an intangible, unfathomable God, no more embodied in the tablets than in the calf.

We live in a world that venerates the accumulation of things. Idolatry is a persistent temptation – to worship at the shrine of stuff. Moses is reminding us that the ultimate reality, the greatest reality, is not material. Even in God’s world that which we most value – goodness, justice, love – are intangibles. We feel them, we enact them but they are not material. Like the tablets of the covenant, long after the item has crumbled to dust, the meaning, and the Creator, endure.

Prophets are dramatic. Everyone loves a prophet (so long as the prophet is not angry at them). The prophetic voice is rich with indignation, laced with scorn and elevated by righteousness.

By contrast, no one loves a bureaucrat. The person who files papers, insists on the correct manner of filling out forms, the one who draws lines and limits – it seems to bespeak a timidity of soul. Prophets are lone figures thundering from mountaintops. Bureaucrats are paper pushers who write bullet-pointed emails from the office.

Of course this is a caricature. This week, however, we turn in the Torah from the world of Moses to the world of Aaron, from the prophet to the Priest. And the Priest may be said to be, with some exaggeration, a kind of sacred bureaucrat. The Priest was there to follow procedures, to do things correctly, to maintain the institution of the tabernacle and the Temple.

In our world we see that institutions are not valued as they once were. From the courts to the universities to the halls of congress, people distrust the institutions that for so long stood as pillars of American life. For Jews, the synagogue was the central institution of Jewish life, but that too has come under pressure in an anti-institutional age.

Yet the Torah reminds us that institutions are critical to the health and survival of a community. They take time and care to build and are all too easy to destroy. Everything from the clothing of the Priest to the exact procedures matter; they are not trivial details but essential accoutrements of a properly functioning system.

We don’t note often enough that sacred work happens in synagogue committees. Over the coffee and stale bagels congregants and lay leaders in all sorts of organizations are doing something holy, but the day-to-day arrangements are essential to seed the ground for spiritual growth. In a beautiful parable, our sages speak of two men carrying large stones. An observer asks them what they are doing. “I’m carrying a heavy stone” says the first. The second answers, “I’m building the Temple of Solomon.”

Earlier, I commented glibly about no one loving a bureaucrat. Yet Aaron was dearly loved by the people, and not only because he was a pursuer of peace. I believe Israel understood that institutions are essential and those who care for them are shepherds of our welfare.

A rabbi once told me of teaching young children about the Jewish idea of God. He told them that God was everywhere. One boy reached out his hands, clapped them together and said, “Got Him!”

We are spatially oriented creatures. Although love, justice, mathematics and other accompaniments of life exist apart from physicality, God remains difficult to separate in our thoughts from notions of place. The rabbis explain that God is indeed called makom (place) because God is the place of the world, although the world is not God’s place. In other words, God encompasses this world but is also greater than it. Yet in our thoughts we locate God spatially, imagining God dwelling in the heavens or being more present in synagogues than in sewers.

Terumah, with its detailed creation of the mishkan, the tabernacle, reminds us that human beings need sacred space. “Make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them (Exodus 25:8).” God dwells not in the sanctuary but among the people. You will feel God’s presence if there is a space to do so.

We realize, at least intellectually, that God is not in fact ‘more present’ inside the sanctuary than out on the street. The building of the mishkan did not entice the divine presence to dwell where it would otherwise be absent. Rather, the human demonstration of devotion evokes God’s spirit. God’s presence awaits our willingness. God is, as the Kotzker Rebbe famously said, wherever we let God in.

With all its specifications, the mishkan is intended to produce an effect on human beings, not on God. There is a beautiful story told of the great Seer of Lublin when he was a boy. He used to visit the forest and when his father asked him why, the boy explained, “I go there to find God.” When his father smiled and said, “but my child, don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?” the future hassidic master answered, “God is, but I’m not.”

The building of the mishkan did not change God, but it changed Israel. It taught us to both seek out and create spaces where we can feel God’s presence. God may be the same everywhere, but we are not.

The Torah reads “Six days shall you do your work, but on the seventh day you shall cease from labor” (Ex 23:12). But last week we read, “Remember the seventh day and keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do all your work…” (Ex 20:8-9).

Why is the Sabbath mentioned first in one and last in another verse? The Izbitzer Rebbe, the Mei Hashiloah interprets this difference referring to the Gemara that asks: what happens if one is in the desert and has lost track of time and does not know when to observe Shabbat? (Shabbat 69b):

One Rabbi says to count six days from the day one loses track of time. Another says observe Shabbat first and then the following six days. What is the difference?

For some people, says the Mei Hashiloah, it is required that you do the work before you can get to Shabbat. First, the six days: In other words, you must cultivate good habits before you can consummate the week with holiness.

But, he says, there are times when you have a sudden, remarkable moment, when “Shabbat comes first,” and one can do something sacred and powerful without preparation.

The great violinist Isaac Stern was once approached by a fan after a concert who said, “Mr. Stern, I would do anything to play like you.”

“Really?” answered the virtuoso. “Would you practice 10 hours a day for 20 years? Because that’s what I did.”

That is usually the way – constant, intense effort. But there are blessed moments: Esther risks her life and saves the Jewish people. An obscure shepherd named David is anointed King. The Talmud teaches that some earn eternal life through many years of effort and others in an instant (Avoda Zara 18a).

Last week we read about the ineffable moment of Sinai. This week, Mishpatim, is about the daily rules, the effort, the rungs on the ladder to a good life. Much accomplishment is due to daily effort, but we also cherish instants of inspiration when the apple falls, the penny drops, and our vision shifts. If we are blessed we will merit both.

Psychologically we are predisposed to pay close attention to beginnings and endings.

Origin stories are seen as the keys to people’s lives. And psychological research has often shown that how something ends – whether an ordeal or a joyous occasion – has a greater impact than other features of the experience.

What begins and concludes the most significant event in the history of Israel?

God begins the Ten Commandments with “Anochi,” “I am.” There is a discussion among the commentators as to whether this constitutes a declaration or a commandment. Abarbanel, the great Spanish sage, declares that it is a preamble, making clear to the Israelites Who was speaking to them. Rambam, however, insists that it is a commandment, a mitzvah, the mitzvah of belief in one God.

The Israelites had seen God’s wonders enacted in Egypt, but they had not “met” God. Now the voice comes from the sky and creates the frame for everything that will follow. The “I” of God is the opening of the Ten Commandments.

How does the revelation conclude? The last commandment concerns coveting. The final words are “that belong to your neighbor.” Therefore, the first word is “I am,” and the final word is “neighbor.”

The motion from God to neighbor is the movement from the greatest generality to the most particular specific – like a movie shot that opens far above the earth and lands in someone’s kitchen. We thought we were dwelling in the empyrean only to find ourselves at the dinner table.

These laws are woven into the fabric of the universe. They are the will of the Creator, not the arbitrary decision of a jurist or the law of social cohesion. You can violate them, but you cannot change them.

Socially observed standards do change, sometimes radically, in the course of history. We abhor things today – slavery, child labor – that were once considered normative. Some therefore conclude, mistakenly, that there is no standard. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” as Hamlet forlornly declares. The revelation at Sinai makes clear: there is a right and a wrong.

How we treat each other matters, and not only to one another, but also to the One who created us, for we are all children of God.

There is an old joke about a rich man who dies and stands before God. God asks, “I made you so wealthy, why did you give nothing to charity?” The man answers, “I will, I have many assets on earth, just let me give now!” The response from God thunders, “Up here, we only accept receipts.”

It is axiomatic that you cannot take anything with you when you die. But the reverse is not true – you can take the dead with you when you are alive. This finds both literal and metaphorical expression in this week’s Torah portion when Moses locates and carries the bones of Joseph with him as the Israelites leave Egypt. The verse says Moses took the bones “with him” and the Kli Yakar comments that Joseph stayed with him, for while gold and silver passes away, the merit of this act endures.

Centuries before, at the end of Genesis, Joseph entreats his brothers to swear that when God remembers them to bring them to the Promised Land, “You shall carry my bones from here” (Gen. 50:25). In Ex. 13:19, we read that Joseph “exacted an oath,” which in Hebrew is two words, hashbe’a hishbia. What does the doubling mean? Joseph knew that his brothers would not live to see the redemption. He was exacting an intergenerational promise: throughout the servitude and oppression of Egypt, the Israelites would remember that the bones of Joseph waited for liberation as well.

We are all born into networks of responsibility. We feel the tug of family, community, country. When Judaism enjoins us to teach our children, it reminds us that to be Jewish is both a command and an honor, and part of it is to ensure that the next generation remembers the sacrifices and celebrations of those who came before. The simultaneity of Jewish life means we live in the past and the present at once. We stood at Sinai and we stand here.

All of us carry a great deal through life – memories, aspirations, relationships, burdens, natural gifts. Some focus on carrying material possessions. To carry the bones of Joseph is the Torah’s way of telling us that Moses bore the past of our people with him as they began the journey to Israel.

What do you carry?

There is an obvious question about the plague of darkness that arises with no other plague – why didn’t the Egyptians just stop it?

When locusts are swarming in the sky, or hail is pelting the ground, human beings are helpless. You cannot trap every frog that infests the land. But we all know how to counter darkness – light a candle.

A deep answer comes from a famed Sephardi commentator and kabbalist. The Or Hahayim says the darkness was not in the atmosphere; it was in the Egyptians. The Egyptians could not truly see those who were not like themselves.

In 1915 the philosopher William James wrote an essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” The essay concerns “the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”

The Rabbis comment that the blindness was the “thickness of a gold dinar” – that is, a gold coin. (The Torah Temima says this was like a cataract over the eyes of the Egyptians, keeping faith with the idea of darkness being an attribute of the Egyptians, not the atmosphere.)

This reminds us how easily wealth can blind us to the plight of another. Several years ago I wrote about this phenomenon: In studies, people in big cars are more likely to ignore pedestrians, and the wealthy give a smaller percentage of their money to the poor than those with far less.

This is not because rich people are bad, since you can create this bias artificially with monopoly money in a board game. Rather, wealth insulates people from need and from dependence. The fortunate must battle against the tendency to allow the gold dinar to blot out the suffering of others. That is part of the mitzvah of tzedakah.

Wealth is not the only cause of indifference, of course. One’s own narcissism can prevent us from seeing the other. The Mishna fixes the time for morning prayer “when one recognizes the face of a friend.” We turn to God through acknowledging another human being.

The plague of darkness dramatized the extent to which people could not see each other – not because they were strangers, but because each one could not overcome self-absorption.

This is the darkness we fight. This is the light we must bring to the world each day.

Moses brings news of liberation to the slaves of Israel – but they are unable to hear it. We are told that because of “kotzer ruach” – literally shortness of spirit, and because of hard bondage, the beleaguered people are impervious to Moses’s message of hope (Ex. 6:9).

What can that mean? Surely people in slavery thirst for news that they will be set free? Rashi takes kotzer ruach as literal shortness of breath. Sheer physical exertion makes paying attention impossible. Sforno, the Italian Renaissance commentator, assumes it is “spirit” – that the people are unable to summon hope, their spirit having been crushed by the cruelty of slavery.

Related to this is the first-hand observation from the Aish Kodesh, Rabbi Kalonymous Shapira, the Rebbe of Piaseczno, Poland, who was murdered during the war. He saw his fellow Jews suffering kotzer ruach – lacking the vital spirit necessary to lift their eyes from any but the most necessary tasks. Even when fulfilling religious obligations many would act by rote, because the vital spark had disappeared due to the oppression and fear daily visited upon them by the Nazis.

These ideas are subtly different, for as there are shades of hope there are shades of despair, but threading through them is an important lesson, illuminated in the comment of the Meshech Chochmah. He relates that Moses had two messages for the Israelites: first that they would be freed from bondage and second, that God would lead them to the Promised Land.

Yet people in distress cannot envision a far-off goal. Had Moses delivered only his first message they might have listened, because the assurance of immediate freedom spoke to them. But once he continued with the possibility of entering the Promised Land, the Israelites could no longer pay attention. The possibility was too remote from their current situation. In future instructions, therefore, God told Moses to speak only of liberation – other plans would come after they were free.

As I write this I am in Israel, having visited with hostage families and wounded soldiers, and seen the devastation of Oct. 7. Yet in this country there is no kotzer ruach: Israelis have not been exhausted by the struggle, their spirit has not been crushed, and the remoteness of peace has not made them unwilling to bear the sacrifices of the moment. I asked my cab driver what he wishes me to tell the Jews of America. He said, “Tell them we are hurt but we are strong, and together we will emerge victorious.”

The book of Genesis presents a family, with all of the dysfunction common to families. Then under very peculiar circumstances, that family becomes a different kind of entity. Families we understand – but what are the Jews?

Among the baffling realities of Jewish life is that Jews are not a religion. Don’t believe me? Suppose tomorrow I woke up and decided that everything I believed about God and Torah and Jewish ideas and history and ritual were wrong. You know what I would be called? A Jew. Now that’s puzzling. It is clearly not exactly a belief system since one can be born a Jew. Let’s try again.

A race? Jews are emphatically not a race. You cannot convert to a race, but you can convert to being Jewish. Moreover, Jews come in all the different and diverse shades of humankind. So, if we are not a race and we are not a religion, what are we?

To say Jews are a “people” is at once too general and unhelpful. New Yorkers are also a kind of people, as are chess players and archeologists and redheads. What kind of people are Jews?

Here, Exodus gives us the answer. The Israelites have become numerous in Egypt, yet the story of their liberation begins with Moses and his family and God’s call. In other words, we are dealing with a unique kind of religious family. You are born into a family and you can also join one. You can’t really leave a family unless you reject yours and choose another one (“long lost cousins” are still family, after all). Jews have been held together by a deep sense of common mission, a sacred calling in this world that makes us not just a family, but a religious family.

None of these phrases are perfect, because Judaism was born before the English language and the Western tradition. That is one reason that it is so hard to pigeonhole the Jewish people, and so easy to attack them from various directions. We don’t exactly fit. Jews, being part of a family, can act in ways that violate the deep values of the family as a whole, yet they are still Jews. They can fight with one another, join together and split apart, fulfill or disappoint the expectations of our tradition, and still, still they are Jews.

What are we? A religious family with a long history and sacred teachings and a traditional home, the land and nation of Israel. Jewish identity is both given and shaped. In an often unforgiving world, Jews felt a covenantal calling that kept the family going as the ancient and enduring people of Israel.

This column is dedicated to a great, unsung hero in the Torah. In order to understand why he is such a hero, we need to start at the beginning of the story.

The Torah teaches that we are all brothers and sisters. Uh-oh.

The subsequent portrait of siblings is anything but encouraging. The first set of sibling relations, Cain and Abel, ends in murder. Next comes estrangement with Isaac and Ishmael. Then Jacob and Esau, with years of enmity between the two. Finally Joseph, whose brothers plot to kill him, and is kidnapped and brought to Egypt. Genesis could almost be called the book of fraternal conflict.

Warring brothers tell us a wider truth. Aggression in us emerges from the start, inside the family. Those closest to us sometimes suffer most from our anger or unkindness. The Torah also emphasizes how often such rivalries involve the parents. Ishmael is exiled by his father; Esau is upended by his mother’s plotting and his father’s credulity; Joseph is favored by his father. Even Cain and Abel in their unequal offerings to God are in conflict over the Heavenly Parent’s preferences. Favoritism breeds antipathy. Family relations are rarely frictionless.

Even as the Torah presents the conflict it tells us of the ideal. When Cain, having slain his brother, asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, we know the answer is yes, that all human beings should care for each other, but siblings have a special responsibility.

This week Joseph presents his children to his father for a blessing. Jacob, realizing that Ephraim is the younger, nonetheless crosses his hands, blessing Ephraim with his right hand and Menashe with his left. It is another instance of the favoritism that has so often been destructive.

What does Menashe do? Nothing. He does not protest, cry or scream at the unfairness of it all. Menashe breaks the pattern of family fracture.

Why bless a boy on Friday night that he should become like Ephraim and Menashe? The Netziv wrote that Ephraim was a Torah scholar and Menashe was great in labor and community works – we pray our children have both attributes. The Sefat Emet teaches it elevates these foreign-born children to their status as tribes of Israel, as we wish Jewish children everywhere to be children of Israel. Let us add that these are the brothers who got it right – who acknowledged that everyone has a different role, that distinctions need not cause rancor for God does not make duplicates.

Menashe is unheralded. But through his silence, his acceptance – his understanding of difference – he changed history. We should honor his memory and emulate his example.

I don’t mean to make light of serious things, but a lot of the problems of the bible could have been solved by cell phones.  Imagine Joseph, lost for years, texting his father Jacob back in Israel: “In Egypt – all is well.” Camel emoji?

Even without cellphones, it is still a problem – why did Joseph not get in touch with his father when he was in Egypt and his father in Canaan? Why permit his father to believe he was dead? Joseph might have sent an envoy in the decades of distance. There are many theories. But we can posit one based on Joseph’s own words.

Joseph had two children in Egypt and explains the significance of their names. Menasseh – “God has made me forget my troubles and the house of my father.” And Ephraim – “God has made me prosper.” As my friend Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin said, Joseph named his children “Amnesia” and “Assimilation.”

We can sympathize with his motivations. As far as Joseph knows his family not only sold him into slavery but they never came to look for him. Perhaps he simply wants to forget where he came from and celebrate his success in his new land.

In other words, Joseph sounds like us. We too wish to celebrate our joys and forget our historical sorrows. How many Jews now fast on Tisha B’av, the holiday commemorating the destruction of the Temple? It is sad the Temple was destroyed, to be sure, but it was so long ago.

Yet Joseph’s past returns in the form of his brothers. When he sees them, Joseph goes into the next room and weeps. Suddenly he remembers that his core is Beit Avi – not just the house of his father, but the house of his tradition.

October 7 brought our past to our door. Many Jews have reawakened to their people since the horrors of October 7th. It reminded us of our origins.

And what is Joseph’s last command? “When I die bring me back to the land of Israel.” And at the time of the Exodus Moses retrieves Joseph’s coffin and brings him home. When people saw the ark of the covenant and Joseph’s coffin in the desert side by side the Israelites would explain, “the person in this fulfilled the commands in that.”

On Friday night we bless a male by wishing them to be like Ephraim and Menasseh. We hope for success and social integration, but also recall that in the end both Ephraim and Menasseh became tribes of Israel. We cannot let ease or obliviousness turn us or our children away from the lessons of history or the present struggle to battle hate, preserve tradition, protect Israel and carry the blessing forward to a new generation.

We are told that Jacob “saw that there was shever in Egypt” (Gen. 42:1). What is “shever”? Although it is normally translated as grain or provisions, in the Midrash Rabbi Yohanan ties it to the word “sever” (Gen. R. 91:1), meaning “hope.”

The Midrash sets up an opposition between shever and sever: there was famine and there was plenty. Joseph was sold as a servant, Joseph became the ruler. The Children of Israel became slaves, the Children of Israel were freed. Throughout the Joseph story the interplay of opposites is a theme.

Joseph is the favored child (by his father), he is the hated child (by his brothers). He is adorned with a coat and stripped of his coat. He descends to the pit, ascends to Potiphar’s house, descends to jail and ascends to Pharaoh’s palace. Joseph knows his brothers and acts as though he does not. He reveals himself in love, and the brothers react in fear.

Even the dreams of Joseph and Pharaoh embody this oppositional movement. In Joseph’s dreams the older serve the younger. In Pharaoh’s dreams the weak cows consume the strong ones. There is an intertwining of strength and weakness, age and youth, dark and light.

No biblical character is without flaws, no act without repercussions, no statement single in its implications. The Torah is a sustained argument against simplemindedness and single meanings. Jacob is named Israel and is nonetheless the patriarch responsible for taking his family to Egypt; Joseph is the savior of his people who names his children to represent forgetfulness of his old home and prosperity in the new, and still exacts a promise to have his remains brought back to the home he has never truly forgotten.

We just celebrated Hanukkah, which is a military victory and yet the motto of the holiday is “Not by might, nor by power but by My spirit, says the Lord” (Zechariah 4:6). Everything contains something of its opposite, all things interpenetrate and each flicker of the candle is a dance against the darkness.

Why did Jacob love Joseph?; “Because he was the son of his old age” (Genesis 37:3) the Torah says. Of course, Benjamin was the son of his even older age, and from the same mother. Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Nehemiah offer different answers, both of which have lessons about love (B.R. 84:8).

Using the word zekunim (age) Rabbi Judah says his features (ziv ikunim) were like Jacob’s. Rabbi Judah’s interpretation is based in part on the striking parallels in the two lives (BR 84:6). Here are just a sample of the parallels offered: Both were born to previously barren mothers. Both were hated by their brothers. Both had brothers who sought to kill them. Both were shepherds. Both achieved wealth. Both left Israel and both married a woman outside of Israel. Both became great through dreams. Both died in Egypt and were taken after death to Israel.

Some studies have shown that parents, especially fathers, favor children who look like them, perhaps since it sends an unconscious signal about the reliability of paternity. There is a deeper spiritual lesson as well. We favor those who are like us. This is not only true inside families but in the world. We are drawn to those with the same interests, attitudes, outlooks, and aims in life. The Torah admonishes us to love the stranger, which can be seen as more than a national or geographical category. Those who are different from us are strange to us. To love them is not natural and we have to learn to love.

Rabbi Nehemiah points to another kind of love, which is the bond of those who learn from one another. He says that it is because Jacob became Joseph’s teacher (using zaken, old man, as an abbreviation for zeh kanah chochmah, this one has acquired wisdom). This is no longer about affinity, because we can learn from people very different from ourselves. Often, we learn more from those who are different than we do from those who are the same.

Rabbi Judah teaches of a love for those similar to us; Rabbi Nehemiah points to love that arises from the connection to the stranger.

This weekly Torah portion is read on Hanukkah. Hanukkah seeks to spread light to the world. In an age of polarization and prejudice, this message is vital: To overcome hate we must love beyond ourselves and our group, a lesson of embrace deeply needed in our time.

Jacob returns to Beth El and prepares to build an altar to God and amidst these profound events we suddenly read this:

“Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died, and was buried under the road below Bethel; so it was named the tree of tears.” (Gen. 35:8).

In the middle of the drama of Jacob’s life why does the Torah pause to note the death of a woman about whom almost nothing is known?

Deborah is mentioned but once before in the Torah (Gen. 24:59). Deborah was either Rebekah’s childhood nurse or is intended to be the nurse to Rebekah’s children when they are born. Rebekah and Isaac live in Haran. What is she doing decades later with Jacob, all grown, at Bethel?

Deborah is buried under “allon bachut,” the tree of tears. We assume that Deborah took care of Jacob himself when he was a child. Noting her passing, and the mourning it evoked, the Torah is hinting at something we now know from neuroscience.

In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second. Years of research have emphasized how much of our personality is shaped by our early years. This formative educational time was – and still often is – the province of mothers and nurses who brought the wisdom of the community to the newborns. The essential shaping of Jewish character was the legacy of women. By the time fathers began to educate children, their personalities were largely formed.

Robert Louis Stevenson describes the nurse of his childhood, Allison Cunningham, in a poem in his “A Child’s Garden of Verses”:  

For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake…
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted… 
The angel of my infant life. 

Perhaps, as Ramban suggests, she was with Jacob not to bring him back but to pass on the legacy of child care to Rachel and Leah, to be their teacher. Now an old woman, having raised Jacob, Deborah would have generations of childcare wisdom to offer to the young mothers. If so, Deborah was instrumental in shaping not only Jacob, but the tribes of Israel.Deborah’s resting place is named “the tree of tears” to remind us how precious and dear she was to Jacob and his family. Our sages tell us we do not forget “girsa d’yankuta” – the version of our youth. Those who sing our first lullabies and steady our first steps remain forever precious. Let us give a moment to Deborah who like the many unsung women who shape our youth, helped take Israel from the cradle to the world.

“When morning came, there was Leah!” (Gen. 29:25). Jacob had thought he was with Rachel, but how could Jacob mistake the sister beside him? Even if Rachel colluded, telling Leah secrets she and Jacob shared, is it credible that a man in love would not know that the woman he loved was not the woman to whom he made love?

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote about the difference between two types of relationships – I-it and I-Thou. The first is a relationship governed by utility. I need you for something – whether a glass of water or a shoulder to cry on.

An I-Thou relationship is one in which, even if only for a brief time, you are both fully present. There is no calculation, it is not about my own needs; each person is seen in the fullness of his or her humanity.

Jacob serves his own needs. He tricked or coerced his brother Esau into selling him the birthright. Esau’s pain is not real to Jacob.

Jacob fools his old, blind father into believing he is Esau to obtain the birthright blessing. Jacob sees his own father as a means to an end. Isaac is an ‘it’ not a Thou. To the young Jacob every situation provides opportunities, not encounters.

Even after his dream of the ladder at Bethel, Jacob declares: “If God will be with me and will watch over me…then the Lord will be my God…” (Gen. 28:20, 21). “If!” Jacob sets conditions even to God.

Jacob has not learned love. Love, in the words of Irish writer Iris Murdoch, is the “extremely difficult realization that someone else is real.”

Now place such a man in a bed next to a woman he believes he loves. He doesn’t see her.

But there is more to the story. Jacob hears his brother is coming for him after many years. He wrestles an angel in the middle of the night. He is wounded and he is changed. The next day Jacob goes out and sees his brother Esau – really sees him. They fall on each other’s necks and weep.

At times, the greatest act of faith is not to believe in God but to see God in one another. A lesson for this Thanksgiving: To combat hate, we must see in the other an image of God, as did Jacob, who gave the Jewish people our name, Israel.

My parents lost family in the Shoah and smuggled Jewish books and Tefillin into the Soviet Union. As a Rabbi my father spoke about hatred of Jews and what the fight demanded of us. When I was ordained as a Rabbi I remember thinking – that was part of my father’s task. Thank God it won’t be part of mine.

How naïve I was. As I read the portion for this week, Toldoth, I realized that my father had given me the essential tool to meet the challenges we face. That character trait is exemplified by Isaac in his own life.

In Genesis 26:28, we are told that Isaac redug the wells that his father had dug, because the Philistines had stopped them up. Yet once was not enough – the first two times Isaac dug wells others came and fought him over their possession until he finally dug a third well that proved successful. Isaac renewed the achievements of the past and added his own.

My father once wrote a letter to all four of us (I am one of four boys) telling us that over the course of his life the single quality he believed was essential was stamina. Struggling once, succeeding once, creating once – it was not enough in life. You had to do it over and over again.

Right now we are in a war. As we saw on Tuesday, people are mobilized in ways that would have seemed impossible just a month ago. But this war will end and then it will be time to redig wells, to renew all sorts of efforts, to carry on with courage and determination.

In mystical teachings, Isaac’s digging of the wells is an indication that he was seeking the depths of existence, the buried secrets of spirit. One of those secrets is that the world is still being formed and we, all of us, have a hand in creating it. Hatred is on fire across the globe and the end of the war will not end the hatred. We in the ADL together with our allies, no matter how tired we may be, must take a shovel in hand to redig the wells that our ancestors dug. To dig new wells is to produce living waters demanded yet again in a parched and needy world.

Rabbi Nahman of Breslov lived a very short and difficult life. He lost four children and his first wife to tuberculosis and saw his house burn down in a fire. Shortly after his engagement to his second wife he discovered he had tuberculosis as well and died from it a few years later in 1810, only 38 years old. Rabbi Nahman was also a religious visionary of genius and left profound stories and teachings. Among the most important was his lesson about despair.

Rabbi Nahman told his disciples that it was forbidden to despair. He went so far in one recorded teaching as to say there is no such thing as despair. He knew people could feel it, but he taught it was a kind of illusion, that in fact hope always existed, and the sparks buried at the beginning of creation could be unearthed. In today’s Torah portion we can see just such a spark and what Rabbi Nahman meant.

For Jews all around the world this is a time when it is easy to despair. Where do we see that spark in the Torah? Read verses 25:8,9 from the book of Genesis:

“Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah near Mamre, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite.”

Ishmael and Isaac had not grown up together. They had different mothers – Hagar in the first instance, Sarah in the second. Traditionally each is the father of different people: Ishmael of the Arab nation, and Isaac of the Jews. We see they joined to do the mitzvah of burying their father.

Right now it is very hard to believe in a lasting peace. Some will say that this is an eternal battle, between Arabs, or Muslims, and Jews. Yet I hear the voice of Rabbi Nahman saying that we are not permitted to despair. We can be angry, we can be shattered, we can rage and shake our fists against the sky, but we cannot despair.

Then we read this remarkable verse and recognize that the Torah is telling us to hope. Peace will not come tomorrow or next week or perhaps anytime in the near future. But if the children of Abraham in ancient times could join together at the grave of their father, we cannot give up hope that one day we too shall join together in peace.

Rabbi Nahman also said, “If you believe you can damage then believe that you can heal.” We have seen how much damage hatred can wreak in this world. Let us not give up on the hope that we can heal.

Few things are less interesting than other people’s medical history, but bear with me for one moment. A brain tumor taught me a new way to look at the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

In 2003, right after speaking at the opening of the University of Pennsylvania Hillel I had a grand mal seizure. A few weeks later I had surgery for what proved to be (thank God!) a benign brain tumor. Seven years later a leak developed in the original site of the surgery and I had to have another brain surgery.

Although you may have intuited this, I can attest that brain surgery is not fun. I recommend avoiding it. I have also had chemo for lymphoma, which is also not fun, but in a different sense. Recovering from my second surgery, they put a plaster cast around my head and I had a swollen head (insert joke here), immobile, pretty miserable, for a few days.

However, when they cut the cast off and I could go home, I was suddenly and unexpectedly exhilarated. This giddy moment gave me a new way to look at the parasha.

Most commentary on the Akeda deals with the motive of God and the reaction of Abraham. (And a beautiful Yehuda Amichai poem about the fate of the ram.) Relatively little is written about the feelings of Isaac.

Leaving the hospital, I realized everyone goes under the knife. For many it is a literal experience, as for so many of our brothers and sisters in Israel right now.  For others, as for those of us who watch each day with anxiety, it is a trial that threatens what we love. The Akeda is a paradigm for the existential questions of fear and fate.

Many feelings coexist in the human heart, and surely alongside Isaac’s perplexity and faith there was fear. Yet could there not also have been exhilaration? Isaac stepped away from the altar, as I did from the hospital, with the electrifying recognition that he had been under the knife and survived.

Despite the enormous tragedy and enduring shock, should Israel succeed as we wish and pray in this struggle, perhaps we will feel a bit as Isaac did after the Akedah. “Yitzhak” literally means “he will laugh.” Yet there is no instance in the Torah of Isaac laughing. When did our patriarch fulfill the destiny of his name?

After I left the hospital, I imagined that perhaps, as he walked down the mountain, Isaac laughed. Ken Y’hi Ratzon – so may it be God’s will for us and all Israel.

Imagine if you could return to that moment: Abraham hears a voice that tells him to go to a land he does not know and has not seen. Imagine if you could whisper to Abraham all the beauty and pain and yearning and loss and renewal that land would see in the thousands of years to come. What if Abraham knew how his first step would affect the course of human history?

As we know today, it changed everything. Of course, it determined the course of Abraham’s life and Sarah’s life and that of their family. But the journey went so far beyond those domestic dramas. Abraham’s step changed the beliefs of more than half the world, the faith and battles and progress of Europe, the creation of world religions and at times the intolerance and brutality of people who saw faith as a sword, not a shield.

In these painful days it is a strange feeling to revisit that first step, as we do in this week’s parasha. It is like the feeling of returning to one’s hometown and seeing how the decision you made while standing on this corner, or in that house, determined more than you ever knew. God said “Go.” Abraham went. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Therefore, it is important to say this about that moment in history. I have spent a good deal of my life reading and studying Jewish texts and writers and poets and thinkers. The range of subjects they address is as broad as the reach of mind and as wide as the expanse of sky. Yet although they address the long and often agonizing saga of Jewish wandering and suffering nowhere have I seen expressed the wish that Abraham had not taken that first step.

Sometimes in a house of shiva, or mourning, I have asked the mourner, “Do you wish the one you had lost had never lived?” No, they invariably say, knowing the great truth that the measure of our blessing is the measure of our loss. When we stand now in a place of pain amidst a conflict that may grow, do we wish that Abraham had not taken that step? Surely we do not. The great truth of Jewish life is that we begin each day in appreciation and end each day in praise. The pain is real, the suffering sometimes overwhelming and the fear of what may come is acute. We are a people of too much experience to believe that life can be unaccompanied by struggle and suffering. But looking back on the remarkable brocade of the Jewish story, we are nonetheless grateful that at the greatest hinge of history, when God said “Lech L’cha,” Go forth, Abraham took the first step.

This week we read about the near destruction of the world. Why does it come about – because, the Torah tells us, the earth “was filled with violence (6:11).” The Hebrew word for violence in the Torah, remarkably enough, is Hamas: ותמלא הארץ חמס.

Flood stories exist in other ancient civilizations. The striking difference is that in the Torah alone is morality a feature of the story. The Babylonian epic of Atrahasis explains that the flood comes because human beings are making so much noise they annoy the gods. That is a typical tale of the civilizations that surrounded Israel. The gods were annoyed, or in a bad mood, or had a fight with one another.

In the world of ancient religion, consequences depended upon how human beings treated the gods. The great innovation of Hebrew civilization is that God cared about how people treated one another. The consequence of having one God is that all human beings are kin. Therefore, God cares for us all, and moral actions and consequences are tied to our behaviors.

On this solemn week when we continue to reckon with the horrific massacre perpetrated on the people of Israel, we recognize yet again that the Torah has anticipated our pain and our plight. And the legacy of violence is resolution toward those who would continue to be violent. The Torah does not see war as something to be celebrated or encouraged or hoped for – it is an unfortunate, grim necessity, but a necessity it is. In this parasha, of course, the flood comes from the hand of God. In the aftermath of the flood God promises that never again will such a cataclysm destroy the earth. But violence continues, and as the Torah progresses, human beings must fight on their own behalf.

The choice of Noah is the beginning of rebuilding a world. In the aftermath of destruction there is hope that a more stable, peaceful order can emerge. That is the hope of all decent people today. First however, the structures that would undermine that order, the ideologies that gleefully perpetrate atrocities, that fill the world with violence, must be extirpated. The war against hatred is not new. Much of the time it can be fought with words and arguments and advocacy. But there are times, and this surely is one of them, when it requires that a nation take up arms against those who would destroy it. So that Hamas, in both the ancient and modern senses, will no longer wield its sword.

What is the most important sentence in the Torah? It will probably not surprise you that the Rabbis are not in full agreement on this question (Sifra Kedoshim 4:12). Rabbi Akiba offers the verse, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). Many of us might agree with Rabbi Akiba. Love of others is indeed fundamental to the Jewish tradition, and if you study Akiba’s life you see in this large-hearted man an embodiment of the principle.

But Akiba’s colleague Ben Azzai proposes another verse, one that we read this week: “This is the book of the generations of Adam (5:1).” The first part of the verse is to let us know that we share common origins, but Ben Azzai also has in mind the end of the verse: “When God created human beings, God made them in the image of God.”

For Ben Azzai, genealogy is destiny. The two fundamental teachings Judaism gave to the world are contained in one verse: First, we all spring from the same stock. As the Mishnah puts it (San. 4:5), God created us all from one person (really one couple of course) so that no one could claim their ancestor is greater than that of others. The verse goes further however – it reminds us that we are not only kin, but we are each created in the image of God.

This is a particularly powerful teaching this week. When human beings commit evil acts, we condemn them not because they are animals, but because they are human, and violating the image of God within them. We do not judge lions for their savagery, but we do judge human beings because they are capable of better. When we see those whom they have victimized, we feel the same – overwhelming empathy for images of God who suffer.

We pray, all of us, for the restoration of order, the safety of the hostages, the comfort of the bereaved and that Israel continues to stand strong, safe and free. Despite the hatreds that endure, in the face of those who do not honor the Divine image within themselves, the Jewish people will not stop insisting upon our essential message to the world: human life is holy and all human beings should see one another as kin. As we begin to read the Torah again, perhaps the lesson of this verse will find a renewed resonance in a beleaguered world.

Our world has a passion for novelty. That which is new captures our attention and creates a self-erasing cycle of ever more up to date personalities, events and art. In this dizzying age, what can possibly be discovered in returning again and again, like someone stuck with a single channel television, to the same program?

Yet we see Jews dancing in the streets on Simchat Torah, eager to read the story they read last year and the year before that. We understand that for many it is a religious obligation, but where is the novelty in Adam and Eve eating the fruit again, watching Sarah and Abraham struggle again, witnessing the wandering Israelites sin and learn still one more time?

Contrary to what one might think, it is not an objection to novelty. Listen to the American naturalist John Burroughs: “If you wish to see something new, take the same walk you took yesterday.” That is the philosophy of Simchat Torah. Yes, you have read the story before, but that was you last year. As you change, the Torah presents new insights, new patterns, a new possibility to grow. Like the human beings who read it, the book is inexhaustible.

The joy of rereading is the joy of spending time with an old friend and learning how much there still is to learn about that person’s character and ideas, but also feeling how well you know one another. It is the pleasure of recognition and novelty combined. When the sages say of the Torah, “Turn it over and over, for everything is in it” they remind us that the 101st reading will be different from the 100th, and it may yield the insight that you need for this moment in your life.

Each year we revisit the cycle of seasons. Yet each new autumn has a different resonance as the years pass. The leaves fall differently and the bloom returns in novel ways. We read the Torah not as a circle but as a spiral, touching on the same place but knowing it anew, more deeply, with greater experience and understanding. I am looking forward to seeing what happens to Sarah and Abraham this year, for even though the words may be the same on the page, I am certain of one thing – it will not be exactly what happened to them last year, or the year before that. Everything old is new again.

The Talmudic sages enumerate three great miracles in the desert. First was the manna, which fed the wandering Israelites. Second was Miriam's well that provided water. Third was the covering of clouds that offered shade in the scorching days. Although we usually think of the sukkah as the booths of harvest, one interpretation of the sukkah is that it commemorates the cloud covering in the desert. The Steipler Gaon (Rabbi and Scholar Yaakov Kanievsky) (1899-1985) asks an intriguing question and gives a beautiful answer.

Why of all three desert miracles does only the cloud covering deserve a holiday? There is no festival of the manna or the water, only Sukkot remembering the clouds. His answer is that the manna and the water were necessary; without them Israel could not survive. But the cloud covering was an act of love. Festivals — the liberation of Pesach, the gift of Torah on Shavuot — are tokens of God's love.  

Sustenance alone is not enough; love finds its expression in offering more than the beloved needs. Love is lavish; parents are not satisfied to give children just what they need. Love overspills boundaries, whether spreading a blanket on a sleeping child or covering the desert with clouds.

As we sit in the sukkah we are surrounded by the wonders of nature. We invite in great figures of our past (“Ushpizin”) to recall the glories of history and the continuity of the Jewish people. Sukkot is called “zman simchateinu” – the time of our joy. There are many reasons for that, but I would like to offer an additional one. It is joyous to actually build something with one’s own hands. We live in structures that others made, drive cars assembled far from us, and only on Sukkot do we actually construct our dwellings. As we do, we realize that to build something too is an act of love. Coverings, from a chuppah to a sukkah, express the protection and care in our hearts.  

From clouds to booths, we stand in a beautiful circle where antiquity meets the modern day, and all of it is animated by God’s love for humanity and our love for one another. May this new year reflect those ideals, and may we guard one another as the Israelites were guarded and protected in the desert thousands of years ago.

Human gestures are almost always ambiguous. A person whose hands are raised toward the sky could be praying, cheering or the victim of a hold up. Without the context and the intention, one cannot know.

So what does it mean when Jews beat our chests in the confessional of Yom Kippur? Is it self-punishment, an attempt through a long day to keep ourselves awake akin to slapping one’s own face, or perhaps ritual theater?

To me it most resembles an attempt to jump start our hearts. Moving through the world each day we glide over the possibilities as well as the misdeeds that litter our lives. The modern world is so crowded, with so many stories competing for our attention, with the rapid succession of news, that callousness is a frequent response to the sadnesses of life.

Who can feel a constant outpouring of compassion?  We know others are suffering – we suffer ourselves – and yet day after day we grow ever more tired from the parade of need. Gradually fatigue becomes a habit and even the good we used to do seems too much. Perhaps we survey the result of all our efforts and think that, for everything we have given, there is just too little return in goodness and peace in the world. We make excuses for our inaction because, as the poet Yeats put it, “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”

Yom Kippur is a chance to break the cycle of empathy-exhaustion. We beat hearts that have grown sluggish from the fray. The Al Chet, the confessional, is a Jewish defibrillator. A few good, sharp knocks to the chest get the heart sensitized anew. We are reminded that each act of kindness, each improvement in our own character and aspiration, makes a difference in the world. Hearts are expected to feel battered and tired, that’s understandable. They are just never allowed to give up – there is too much at stake.

On Yom Kippur we repent of what we have done, but is it a stretch to say we also repent for what we have not felt? The joys and pains in the world should touch us and move our hearts. Hatred should galvanize us to action, love should energize us to love in return. So we knock on the door of our hearts, in the hopes that they will beat more powerfully and compassionately in the year ahead.

Rosh Hashanah is the holiday that celebrates everything. It marks the birth of creation, and on this day Jewish tradition encourages us to remember how beautiful and blessed and various is the world we have been given. There are two ways in which we prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

Those responsibilities are to take care of the gift itself, the world in which we live, and to care for one another. The Torah recounts that in the garden there were two people, not one. For as the Jewish philosopher Levinas taught, in the face of the other is the demand of ethics. To see another person, to really see them, is to understand that no one exists singly, that we are not stewards of our own souls alone but caretakers of each other, celebrants of the same garden. The Rabbis envision God saying: “Take care of the garden I have given you for if you disdain it, there are none to come after you to restore it.”

The work that ADL does each and every day is challenging as it combats the hatred that lives in our society. But that is ultimately a task of love. We share a vision of this world as a creation that can realize its potential for goodness. On Rosh Hashanah it is traditional to blow the shofar, the ram’s horn. It serves as a moral alarm clock, reminding us to wake up to our mission to be grateful for the blessing of creation, and to expand the circle of concern until this world is healed: a world without hate, a place of peace.

Many years ago, I listened to an interview with neuroscientist Colin Ellard, who wrote a book called You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall. He explained that when we get lost, we tend to make two mistakes. First, we do not stop. Instead, we tend to speed up, often in the wrong direction. Panic induces us to undo the mistake, only to end up compounding it.

On Yom Kippur, one of the confessions reads “for the sins which we have committed by running to do evil.” I have often wondered – why run? Why not leisurely evil? Anyone who has ever been on a diet understands. There is half a box of cookies; you don’t wish to waste them; if you eat them very fast, it doesn’t count. There is an impulse to do things we suspect to be unwise quickly, so it can be behind us. When we are lost we do the same thing. Let’s solve this, fast. But that is the wrong approach. We need to stop.

The second problem Ellard discussed was that we don’t appreciate that we are lost. Appreciate in two senses: first, know that you are in fact lost. Admit and accept it. Also, savor being lost – remember that some of life’s most remarkable experiences come from losing one’s way. Travelers know that the mistakes and unintended side roads often yield the most remarkable adventures.

Those are good rules for being lost in life as well. Stopping is scary, like the cartoon character who runs off the cliff – as long as his legs keep moving he stays up but the moment he stops he falls like a stone. We make poor investments and throw good money after bad because we are afraid to stop. We get into arguments and double down because we are afraid to stop. When you are lost in life, stop. Take a moment and a breath and a prayer.

This week is a double portion in the Torah. In the first, Nitzavim, we read: “You stand here today.” Stop before you go into the land. Israel’s fear has led them to rebel, complain and panic. Now, before they enter the land it is time to pause and appreciate the need to change direction. The second portion is Vayelech, when we are instructed to go forward. Moses explained where the Israelites came from; having paused and learned they – and we – are ready to move.

The High Holy Holidays begin in a week. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we have the chance to stop and admit that in our lives we are lost. Then we can reset our spiritual GPS and begin anew.

Imagine that each year at tax time you made a declaration recounting American history – the origins of the country, its battles, its failures, its triumphs. Finally, you concluded, “and therefore I bring these taxes to the government.” It is hard to envision Americans enacting such a ritual.

Yet that is what the Torah prescribes in a passage made famous by its inclusion in the Passover Haggadah. As one brings first fruits to the Temple, which is indeed a tax, we read in Deut. 26: “You shall then recite as follows before your God: My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the God of our ancestors, and God heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression…” The Israelite finishes the declaration, “wherefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil.”

The imperative of national memory had special poignancy this past week on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and motivated ADL’s co-sponsorship of the march. For as the Torah teaches us, it is essential to remember the past to understand and appreciate the present. The many distinguished leaders from across the country who spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial recalled not only the words of Dr. King, but the long history of struggle, suffering and resilience that both brought us to that moment and clarified the urgency of continuing the work.

Later in Deuteronomy (32:7) we are told, “Remember the days of old…ask your parent who will inform you, your elders, who will tell you.” It was moving to see Dr. King’s family and many who remembered the speech alongside those who had not been born in 1963 gather to fulfill the injunction to remember the ideals and reinvigorate our efforts to realize them.

We owe the past a debt of memory. Human advancement is the work of many lifetimes; as my slightly free translation of Rabbi Tarfon’s words put it at the March: “You don’t have to finish the work – but you’re not allowed to give up on it.” For all of us there in the heat of the August sun, and those watching it on TV and online, just as those who brought their first fruits to the Temple pledged to remember and renew, we felt both gratitude for those who had brought us to the moment and resolve to continue on the path so stirringly expressed 60 years ago on that indelible day in U.S. history.

Perhaps the oldest magic trick is to make something disappear. As an audience we are astonished – how does anything suddenly vanish? The Torah reminds us that we perform this astounding bit of prestidigitation all the time, only we do it with ourselves.

Deuteronomy 22 teaches that when you see another’s oxen or sheep that is lost, you should not remain indifferent. In other words, the Torah takes people’s property seriously and speaks of the responsibility to help others regain what they have lost. Each of us has an obligation to care for the belongings of others.

Deeper than the civil legislation, however, is the wording: the usual translation is “you may not remain indifferent.” The literal translation is “you may not disappear.”

We vanish by looking away. How many times have we seen acts of injustice but pretended they are not happening? Walked by someone in need, but hidden ourselves from them so we will not experience their call upon us? How often, knowing our presence is needed, have we instead vanished? To be invisible is to be unaccountable – it is not my fault, after all, I’m not even there.

This could be an alternate motto for ADL: “Don’t disappear!” Our aim is to encourage people to show up, to be there for one another, to take the concerns and fears and losses of other people seriously, not to remain indifferent and not to vanish at a time of need.

We have many stratagems for avoiding the difficult work of aiding others. We pretend it isn’t possible, saying “I can’t” when we really mean “I won’t.” When asked to oppose hatred or bigotry or injustice people will say, “I can’t.” It isn’t true that we can’t. In this case, remove the apostrophe, because it is cant. All that is required is the passion to make things better. In a world where hatred is on the march and discrimination is a reality in many people’s lives, the Torah’s admonition rings throughout the ages: You are needed. Do not disappear.

My brother Paul and I had a record of Bible songs when we were children. We listened to them constantly as we learned about biblical heroes, like the mighty King Rosenfeld, featured in the “Daniel” song: “Dan-Dan-Daniel, came out of Israel, looked on the Good Lord and prayed. Mighty King Rosenfeld, and honored Daniel…”

Perhaps you have never heard of mighty King Rosenfeld. That makes sense. When we got a little older we realized with hilarity and embarrassment that the lyric was “mighty kings rose and fell.”

Rose and fell indeed. At a time of unlimited power for kings, the Torah was wisely skeptical about human power. As our parasha tells us, God reluctantly allows Israel to have a king, but with limitations. Kings may not multiply horses (lest they be tempted to go back to Egypt to enlarge the stock), may not set up a royal harem by multiplying wives and may not acquire too much silver and gold.

The Torah seeks to humble a king, because his position will elevate him. While reciting the standing prayer, the Amida, a king must remain bowed throughout the prayer (Ber. 34a). And a king must both write a Torah scroll and carry it with him and read it throughout his life (Mishna Sanhedrin 2:4).

The great kings of Israel are famous for different characteristics than we might assume. David is known for the Psalms and for being the ancestor of the Messiah. Solomon is renowned for wisdom and having three books of the Bible attributed to him (Song of Songs, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). Kings of Israel do not earn their reputations by the magnitude of their conquests. Kings of other nations, even when accomplished in other areas, are often remembered more for battles. Alfred the Great was a scholar who translated books and undertook legal reform, but in history books it was his war against the Vikings that made him great. Omri in the Bible rules for over a decade and is undefeated but merits fewer than 10 verses because he did “evil in the sight of the Lord.” (I Kings: 16).

Rulers in the ancient world acted like Pharaoh in the Torah – capricious, often cruel, and unlimited in the scope given to their appetites and preferences. According to the Greek Historian Herodotus, Cambyses the King of Persia wished to marry his sister. The learned men searched and reported they could not find a specific law allowing him to marry his sister, but they did find a law stating the king could do whatever he wished.

Human sovereigns should never consider themselves as omnipotent. Those who lead should be subject to more constraints, not fewer, than those whom they lead. They will rise and fall, like mighty King Rosenfeld. “For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted (Prov 22:4).”

In the space of seven verses, the Torah seems to contradict itself three times. First, we are told “There shall be no needy among you” (15:4), then “If, however, there is a needy person among you” (15:7) and finally, “The needy will never disappear from the land” (15:11).

So, will there be needy or not, one or many, and why the confusion?

We might follow the medieval commentator Nachmanides, the Ramban, who writes that while it is theoretically possible that the poor will cease to exist, it will not happen in practice. The Torah is wise about human nature. People are given the possibility of eliminating poverty but will not ultimately do what is necessary to accomplish the goal. There should not be needy among us, because we know how to help, but there will be, because we are too indifferent and will not rouse ourselves to act. (Although humanity is making progress across the globe. According to the World Bank, in 1990, 36% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. By 2019 this number had fallen to 9.2%. That still means, however, that well over 700 million people live in extreme poverty in our world.)

Others understand the Torah to be speaking on more than an economic level. Tosefet Bracha on this verse quotes the rabbinic maxim from Pirke Avoth: “Who is wealthy? One who is satisfied with his lot.”

In this instance, needy is not a purely objective or even economic circumstance. We all know people who live in grievance. Many individuals are wealthy by any objective standard, yet live with a constant sense of deprivation. Nothing is ever fair, nothing is ever just – and nothing is ever enough.

This kind of need can be addressed, but it is not likely to ever disappear. If you live with a chip on your shoulder, no matter what you are given, you will find a new chip. Thus the “needy” – that is, those who feel themselves needy – will never disappear. Those who feel blessed, on the other hand, will be thankful for more without feeling cheated.

The Torah’s lesson here is the multiple levels on which to understand poverty. We have a moral obligation to deal with real poverty and to ameliorate it as best we can. Tzedakah, giving to the poor, is a central mitzvah for our tradition. Alongside the social mandate there is a clear individual one: to elevate our attitude so that we do not live constantly dissatisfied with what we have.

The Torah’s counsel is simple, if not always easy: to be giving and to be grateful. If one day we indeed accomplished that both for ourselves and for our society, the prophecy would come to pass – “There shall be no needy among you.”

I was once told the story of philosopher Gregory Bateson’s daughter who, when she was young, asked her father: “Why does my room always get dirty but it never just gets clean?” The seemingly simple question hides a deep concept, that of entropy. Systems break down, from rooms that get dirty to cells that deteriorate and stars that explode. Everything, including the universe, is subject to decay. Effort is required to build but neglect is all that is needed to destroy.

Entropy may be a deep and complex idea, but it makes an almost unassuming verse in our parasha particularly fascinating. The Torah describes many different types of miracles. A miracle is a singular event, that is what makes it miraculous. Yet it contains a lesson intended to be enduring. The sea may have split only once, but many people throughout history have taken inspiration in dire and frightening situations from the salvation of the Israelites at the Red Sea. A single cruse of oil that lasted for eight days reminds us throughout the generations that resources can be more abundant than they appear and persisting in noble deeds yields unexpected results.

This week’s parasha, Ekev, has an almost pedestrian miracle. In speaking of the wandering through the wilderness Moses says to the people, “The clothes upon you did not wear out” (Deut. 8:4). The need for this miracle is clear: there were no means to mend or make clothes in the desert. And presumably the heat and sands were pretty tough on the Israelites’ garments. But what exactly are we supposed to learn from the fact that God was the ultimate couturier?

There is a spiritual defiance of the law of entropy. We expect clothes to wear out and memory to fade. But Jewish history has proven that certain things endure despite the universal law of decay. The empires that conquered Israel have been subject to the law — just try to find an Assyrian or a Babylonian to ask about it. But the Israelites endure; despite the heat and sands and wandering and batterings of time, Israel as a people defy the law of entropy. We do not fade.

After the centuries of discrimination and anguish faced by the Jewish people, the law of entropy should be accelerated — time was abetted by the cruelty of so many over the ages. Yet the Jewish people endure to lift our collective voices against hate of all kinds across the globe.

The theme of miraculous endurance is a keystone of Jewish tradition. The prophet Isaiah writes, “They will soar on wings of eagles, they will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint (Is. 40:31).” For thousands of years we have managed to ensure that our hearts do not grow tired, our voices unsteady — that “our clothes do not wear out.” We continue our walk through the wilderness, unflagging and unafraid.