When it comes to ghosts, Hamlet has his father, Sleepy Hollow has the Headless Horseman and the Jews…we have Fruma Sarah. Haunting the Fiddler on the Roof universe, Fruma Sarah is the deceased wife of the butcher Lazar Wolf. Pious Dairyman Tevye fabricates a nightmare involving Fruma Sarah to convince his wife Golde that their daughter should not marry Lazar Wolf. Fruma Sarah, as a viral tweet puts it, “shows up for one scene, traumatizes the audience, and leaves…[she’s] iconic, truly.”
Jews don’t believe in ghosts. Or at least Torah tells us to not to. Exodus and Deuteronomy tell us you shouldn’t promote witchcraft, psychics, or those who call upon the dead. And yet, despite these dicta, Jewish lore is full of ghost stories. In the Bible, the prophet Samuel’s ghost appears to King Saul. The Talmud has stories of cemetery spirits in conversation around their graves. General Jewish folklore even has deceased souls that attach themselves to the bodies of living people - they’re called dybbuks.
Across cultures, and through time and space, ghosts have haunted the human imagination. They’re entertaining - making for exhilarating storytelling. Ghosts also serve as a way to make sense of eerie sensations and unexplained occurrences.
More poignantly, though, I believe the notion of ghosts reveals something deeper about how we view our lives…or more accurately, our deaths. Ghosts point to a genuine human desire: we want to believe that a “soul” endures after the body dies. We want to believe that even when a physical life has run its course, there is the possibility of more - that death is not the final word. The soul, in some way, lives on eternally.
If this is the case, it would mean that the lives we live and the people we became are not simply erased when we die. It combats the human concern that, to borrow from Ecclesiastes, life is “utter futility.”
But is the “soul” real or is it just a hopeful figment of our imagination? Well, perhaps the words “soul” and “ghost” are distracting. Afterall, they conjure images of translucent spectres caught in bedsheets rattling chains.
To speak of the soul to speak of our consciousness; that is, the full expression and awareness of one’s unique self.
But then what is consciousness, exactly? Scientists would define consciousness as “the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings, thoughts, feelings, and own existence.”
We know the brain processes associated with consciousness, but science lacks a solid explanation for how each individual comes to have a subjective experience of that consciousness. Simply put: we can observe the brain at work, but we still cannot fully explain the experience of being a self. This mystery is where the concept of a “soul” begins.
Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger reasons that “[the] soul is the collective metaphor for the aspects of our consciousness that we subjectively feel are the essence of our humanity…it is a convenient shorthand for our love, our creativity, our aesthetic capacity, for our apprehension of truth and justice, as well as for the opposites of all this…[it is] the metaphor for our yearning, our exaltation, our suffering and for our faith…”.
Unfortunately, the “bitter pill to swallow,” Mecklenberger concludes, is that “…the brain is an organ of the body, and our consciousness is one of its functions. So when the brain ceases to function, the soul disappears…[the] soul was the life that the body had and would eventually lose at death.”
Yeah…if what he says is true, that is a tough pill to swallow. It would mean that despite all the beautiful reflections of the poets and philosophers, the soul becomes inaccessible, irrelevant even, after we die. The “soul,” as Mecklenburger sees it, is just an emotional reaction to living.
Now, on the one hand, some may find this idea of the soul comforting. It can be daunting to think that we are stuck with ourselves for more than our lifespan. Some of us want the end to just be, well, the end.
And on the other hand, it can be tremendously comforting to believe in a soul, particularly in the face of the unknowable void of death. In a lifetime, we develop into such complex thinkers and feelers, it stands to reason that some shadow, echo or residue of our being could persist after a body’s death.
Furthermore, given the depth of human relationships and the pain of separation brought by a loved one’s death, it can calm the heart to think that our beloveds exist somewhere else, in some form, waiting to reunite with us - that not only our souls, but our relationships are eternal.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to faith, because no one actually knows.
Do I believe in the existence of a soul? I don’t think it hurts. Honestly, I think it would be chutzpadik of us humans to think that we know and understand the full totality of "existence." Humility comes in recognizing that reality may be bigger than what we can see, hear, measure, or explain.
I also think that we weave such beautiful webs with our lives that some element of that work must remain, even when blown away by the terminating gust of death.
Jewish tradition, while not definitive on the subject, remains open to there being a cosmic imprint of a person who has departed. You could think of it as a shadow left in the physical world from the bright exposure of a person’s life. Or you could look at it as a person’s impact remaining in this world in the form of memory and inspiration.
Ultimately, Judaism holds true something science can neither prove nor disprove: that in the absence of any real understanding of our subjective consciousness and what happens to us after we die, believing in the concept of a “soul” adds an urgency to how we live. It provides a concrete purpose to our existence.
Jewishly speaking, the work of the soul is to take the life we have been given and, as Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur understands it, “transform life into destiny.” The soul is what takes us from existing to living.
Tradition holds that the soul is an animating, generative force in every living being and that it comes from a pure, Divine source. Judaism has three related words that describe this force, each with a different connotation. First, there’s ruach, the animated spirit of God that resides in and around each human life. Then there’s nefesh, which means living being. A nefesh then contains a neshama, the closest Hebrew word to “soul.”
These concepts come together in Genesis 2 where the ruach elohim, the spirit of God, breathes life into the first human being. The Divine life-spirit enters the human body through the nostrils. God breathes in נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים, the soul of life, וַיְהִי הָאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, and the human becomes a living being.
This moment is recreated with every baby born. As breath enters the body, the child becomes animated with life away from the womb. And then on the other end of the lifecycle, when breath has ceased, the spirit no longer animates the body and we die.
But that doesn’t mean the spirit itself has died. Just as matter is neither created nor destroyed, the soul, Jewishly speaking, is a force neither created or destroyed, just transformed - ebbing from and to a central source.
Judaism is most concerned, therefore, with what we do with our living soul while we have consciousness of it. Think of us as energy generators. Torah’s laws and customs program us to function in a way that will electrify the world. Jewish tradition motivates us to generate holy light that illuminates now and will sustain the world long after our consciousness and breath leaves our bodies. The machine - the body - only works for so long, but the energy it generates can exist long after the machine has been retired.
Now, when I say energy, I don’t only mean things you’ve built, dissertations you’ve written, or other material by-products. Energy can also mean the love and inspiration we leave as a legacy in our loved ones and our communities.
Mecklenberger offers: “There is an element of self-transcendence when we devote ourselves to groups and activities that are larger than ourselves. This is a less self-centered notion of immortality. Our souls themselves do not go on, but much that most profoundly concerned and motivated them does.” In short: the soul is the way our lives become part of other lives, either directly or indirectly. It is not something we possess, but it is something we pass on.
Who does it pass on to? The people we love, of course. But we can think broader as well. Our souls are connected “to groups and activities larger than ourselves.” That's our physical and spiritual communities, our neighborhoods and networks.
No individual soul has never existed entirely on its own. Every human is born into a story already in progress. We are part of a collective consciousness - that’s shared memory, a shared set of obligations, and shared aspirations that evolve. Which brings us to another word Jews use all the time but also have a hard time defining: peoplehood.
Peoplehood points to religious, ethnic, and cultural identity. It is perhaps the most authentic way to describe Judaism. However, the Enlightenment and early Reform movement pushed back against this idea, arguing that Judaism is just a religion - a shared set of theological beliefs and practices.
But Judaism has always been more than a religion. You can feel it. It’s tribal. It’s cultural. It's at times nationalistic. It’s all these things and more: a living, breathing amalgam of souls…past, present and future.
Author Dara Horn summed it up brilliantly when she said, “Are Jews a religion? Are Jews a race? Are Jews a nationality? There's an answer to this, and it's simple. It's not a complicated answer, it's just old. Jews predate every single one of those categories. Jews are a type of group that was common in the ancient Near East, very uncommon today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture. That was a [whole] sentence in English! In Hebrew it's one word that's two letters long: am. Jews are Am Yisrael,” the people of Israel.
To be an am is to be an individual bound up with others, taking a shared history and applying it to present and future living. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik speaks of how Jews are a community of shared fate - that is, people bound together by shared history and circumstance - as well as a community of shared destiny - united by a common vision and ideals for the future. An am is a group with a collective consciousness, a communal soul.
As an aside, I believe it important to note that this includes anyone who loves, supports, and participates in Jewish peoplehood, that’s people who are formally Jewish, and those who are not. As far as I’m concerned, all of these are part of the am, the people.
Jewish peoplehood means we are bound to one another by layer upon layer of shared memory, history, place, practice, story, and aspiration. Some of those connections are chosen; others are inherited or even forced. Some are joyful; others are painful. But together they create something remarkably thick: a sense of belonging that can stretch across centuries, continents, and generations. We are connected to people we never met, and responsible to people who do not yet exist. Hence our Torah reading this morning: “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the ETERNAL our God and with those who are not with us here this day” (Deut 29: 9-14).
Peoplehood is the woven flag of Jewishness, stitching together religion, family, culture, and pride into a unique tapestry. It is an emblem of honor.
And sometimes it makes you a pariah. Or a target.
Being bound together across time and space, we inherit it all: the joys and the oys. Their stories are our stories. Their fears are our fears. When our people are wounded, sick or behave badly, we feel distress.
You don’t need me to tell you that today, our communal soul is in pain, and that we are haunted by the trauma of the past as well as the external and internal threats to our safety and cohesion today. Jews and Jewishness are in the headlines, in ways that are deeply uncomfortable.
It turns out some ghosts are real. These are, in the words of Horvilleur, “restless apparitions from our personal, family, or collective histories…”.
“Such ghosts,” she says, “have always existed in families, but sometimes historical events multiply their number. War tends to create a great many of them. In Jewish families in particular, ghosts live for a long time and in excellent health, well-nourished on stories rich in trauma, ideal for their development.”
Antisemitism is one such ghost. Since the dawn of our people, this ghost has been lurking in the walls with a consistent rattle, habitually bursting out in full blown terror. It’s deceptive and disorienting. It makes us question our surroundings and our relationships. Sometimes we wonder if we’re crazy, if we’re imagining things, and yet a litany of occurrences show us the haunting is very real.
On October 7, for example, our generational fears were proved real. It was a gruesome day of horror. The faces of the murdered and the cries of the hostages joined with the generations of our people’s martyrs, whose memories rest within our own souls.
October 7 then gave birth to new ghosts: the war in Gaza and the expanding settler violence in the West Bank. We are haunted by the injustices propagated by our own people. The ghosts of our people’s own moral failures are the most difficult to contend with.
This is the deepest meaning of peoplehood: not simply that we share a past, but that we inherit the responsibility of determining where we go in the future.
How we take on this responsibility matters greatly - which brings us to Yom Kippur.
There is a major difference between modern “cancel culture” and the way Yom Kippur asks us to take responsibility for our individual and communal souls.
Yom Kippur does not ask us to exorcise our ghosts—to banish the people, histories, and parts of ourselves that make us uncomfortable. It tells us to face them; to take responsibility, and to stay in relationship long enough to imagine what might be different - together. It is not a culture of calling people out; it is a culture of calling one another in—to conversation, to accountability, and ultimately, to teshuvah.
Peoplehood asks us to care not only about the kind of people we are, but about the kind of people we are becoming together. This cannot be achieved by walking away or cutting off part of the am, even when it might be popular, or easier, to do so.
Yom Kippur centers around vidui, confession. Notice that we do not confess as individuals alone. We stand together and say: ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu—we have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen. We take responsibility not only for what our own hands have done, but for the world we are collectively creating.
This is the time to look honestly at ourselves, and at what we have inherited—the beauty and the brokenness, the trauma and the triumph—and then to ask the quintessential question of teshuvah: What will we do differently now?
As individuals, this means remembering the purity of our souls. It is knowing that we come from an eternal and sacred lifesource, which means we are capable, and obligated, to use our lives to generate as much goodness as possible.
As a community, this means remembering that we have a responsibility to and for our people. We inherit not only their stories and traditions, but also their mistakes and unfinished work. We cannot choose which parts of our history belong to us. But we can choose what we do with what we inherit. We can preserve what is worthy of preserving, challenge what needs to change, and, through conversation and commitment, forge a new future together.
—
The Talmud makes a startling claim about our forefather Jacob. Some rabbis say that: “Jacob our father did not die.” (Ta’anit 5b). “Of course he died,” other rabbis retort. “He was mourned, buried, and returned to the earth. It’s right there in the Torah!” So then what could the first group possibly mean by, “Jacob never died?”
They are pointing toward a different kind of immortality. Yes, Jacob’s individual life ended. His body died. But Yisrael—the name he received, and the people who descended from him—continued. His soul, in a sense, became woven into the soul of the people. The people Israel. Am Yisrael.
Perhaps this is what Judaism means by having an immortal soul. Not that an individual life goes on forever, but that what is most sacred in us does not have to end with us. A soul can become part of another soul. A life can become part of a people. What we inherit from those who came before us can be transformed by the lives we live, and then passed on to those who come after us.
On this Yom Kippur, may we carry forward the wisdom and resilience of those who came before us. May we remember that we are not separate souls moving through the world alone, but rather bursts of the same Divine breath—connected to one another, connected across generations, and connected to the Source from which we all come.
May we have the courage to face the ghosts that follow us: the fears we have inherited, the wounds we carry, and the injustices we have caused or allowed. May we neither be ruled by them nor pretend they are not there. Instead, may we have the wisdom to learn from them, the courage to name what must change, and the humility to recognize where we have more work to do. Let us do that work individually and together, never abandoning or purposefully hurting one another in pursuit of those goals.
And when our own lives eventually end, may we trust that this is not the end of the story. May our souls continue in the people we have loved, the communities we have strengthened, the values we have lived, and the generations we have helped shape.
In the year 5787, let us transform life into destiny! And may the Divine breath that animates each of us continue to move through us, through our people, and into the future. Amen.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Sunday, September 13, 2026
A Wager, Not a Guarantee - Rosh Hashanah 5787
My grandfather, Morris Zimmerman, was the child of poor Russian immigrants. Growing up in a small Brooklyn apartment, he shared a bed with his two younger brothers. On October 17, 1941, Morris turned 16. Soon after, while commuting to Townsend Harris Boys High School in Manhattan, he met my grandmother, Faith. Their subway flirtation soon turned into an engagement.
Then on December 7, 1941, The Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
News of the war floated in through radio broadcasts and news reels at the cinema. One year later, 17 years old and filled with a sense of patriotic obligation and duty, my grandfather enlisted in the US military. He chose the Army Air Corp, a fairly new division and precursor to the Airforce. Having heard the stories of WWI, he reasoned that this new air division would keep him in the sky and out of the trenches. Given that he was 17, he had to obtain written permission from his parents. They proudly signed the documents. Faith gave her blessing as well.
Morris was enrolled in City College at the time, and never actually graduated. When he returned from the war, the GI Bill allowed him to go straight to dental school at NYU. As a suburban dentist, he would eventually build a life for his family well beyond what his immigrant parents ever imagined.
Like a lot of people in his generation, my grandfather spoke of his service to his country with pride. It imbued him with a patriotism that lived comfortably alongside his bleeding heart liberal values and his strong Jewish identity.
Fast forward 60 years to 2001. I was 17 years old and a senior at Westfield High School in New Jersey, just a few miles outside of Manhattan.
On September 11, at 8:50 am, I walked into homeroom. The instructor, with a bewildered sort of tone, said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. He didn’t have many details, so I booted up the desktop computer at the back of the room. But in 2001, the computer was rudimentary and the internet was slow, so I returned to my seat and, like my peers, took the information in small bits as it trickled into the school. Classes were unofficially canceled, but we were held at school.
A loudspeaker announcement ordered students who had parents that worked in or near the World Trade Center to come to the office. The rest of us wandered around the halls for the day, sometimes stopping to watch the news coverage on the various TVs around the school.
12 people from my hometown died that day, counted in the 750 souls from New Jersey. Our graduation speaker that year was a survivor of the attack. We departed to college feeling vulnerable, second-guessing the security of our American future.
I only recently lined up my grandfather’s experience and mine, their parallels sending a shiver down my spine. Both are days that live in infamy, forever named by their dates. Both shattered the protective veneer of ordinary life on American soil.
More poignantly, my grandfather and I were both teenagers when we experienced a defining moment in American history. On the precipice of adulthood, these days would change our respective relationships to national identity. Each forged a bond to our peers in a shared generational experience that would influence our politics, livelihoods and even how we parent.
And yet this is also where our experiences diverge. Born in the 1920’s, my grandfather already knew a broken world. WWI lingered as a national trauma. The Depression had busted through American institutions and families causing economic and emotional hardship.
For me, 9/11 was a more stark line in the national landscape. There was the idyllic simplicity of before and the forever changed tumult of the after.
Most notably, 17 year old Morris stepped into a dramatically more unified America. The war and legislation like the GI Bill provided upward mobility that helped my family and others catapult into the middle class. The struggle for civil rights and gender equality followed in the next decades.
While 17 year old Mara experienced a brief national coalescence, my early adult years were dominated by deep mistrust in the US government due to a deceptive and divisive war as well as a crippling recession.
This breeded an emergent societal polarization, a widening divide that has come to roost today. All this, with the fact that millennials are the first generation in modern American history to grow up and expect that they will not achieve the upward mobility and economic security of their parents.
I am neither a historian nor a futurist. But I am a mother—now, the mother of a teenager. Having reflected on America’s 250th birthday this summer, and on this solemn 25th anniversary of 9/11, I find myself wondering:
When my children look back at America’s 300th birthday, what will they say were the defining moments of their teenage years? What events will have shaped their understanding of who we are as a nation, and what kind of generation will those moments have made them?
Will it be COVID - another moment of national unity that quickly gave way to deep societal divisions?
Is it climate change, with its extreme weather events impacting physical and social well-being?
For Jewish teens, will it be October 7th - a calamity also defined by its date - that has both bonded and divided our community?
I shudder knowing that the next generation will likely face catastrophes that I can’t even imagine today.
There is no lack of large-scale problems facing today’s teens.
However, Dr. Eliza Filby, a historian and expert on generational change, argues that the nature of the concept of a “generation” is changing. Whereas once generations were defined by fixed age-brackets that included common experiences and shared media, technology has made today’s experience more individualized. The lens by which we hear about, digest, and endure our reality is dizzyingly fast paced and polarizing.
Hyper-individualized internet algorithms create hyper-individualized perceptions around national and global experiences like Covid, Climate change and October 7. We literally live in different realities.
Filby calls this “fragmentation of shared generational experience.” As this fragmentation occurs, societal trust erodes. We lose not only a shared sense of the present facts, but also lose a shared framework for imagining the future. We no longer share a common story about where we are headed.
As a result, we are starting to meet the future with anger, apathy, and binary thinking, rather than communication, discernment, and compassion.
Writer David Wallace-Wells describes an “[unnerving] implicit philosophy” in how we currently interact with one another and the world. He argues that we are no longer “relating to the future…as citizens or moralists, problem solvers or advocates, but as gamblers, each of us surveying the horizon of possibility somewhat indifferent to human outcomes and looking instead for a betting edge.”
His concern is that, when it comes to imagining the future, we’ve become cynical gamblers and not responsible stewards.
Along those lines…another date - not as infamous, but consequential in its own right: September 17, 1787. The close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The Constitution was finalized. The uncertainty ahead had to do with its ratification and implementation. In a famous exchange, prominent Philadelphian Elizabeth Willing Powel asked founding father Ben Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,” to which Franklin responded, “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Reflecting on America’s 250th anniversary, the NYTimes Editorial Board rightfully pointed out: “A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee.”
The future of American democracy, they argue, “is whether self-governing people still share a common reality. Democracy rests on something we rarely notice — a rough agreement about what is true and what happened. That ground is cracking, as trust erodes in the institutions that once settled fact, and artificial intelligence can fabricate convincing lies in seconds.
A citizenry that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate. It can only split into camps.”
This certainly reflects our reality today and our fear of a crumbling democracy and a splintering populace.
“Two and a half centuries later,” the Editorial Board warns, “[that initial constitutional] wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it...— America is still being made.”
A gambler places a bet and watches for an outcome completely outside of their control. The founders’ wager was different. Early Americans were not betting on the future; instead they firmly believed in their ability to shape it. That wager has been inherited by every generation, not as a guarantee, but as a responsibility.
This early American ethos was inspired by the democratic thought born in the Bible. Ancient people consulted oracles, cast lots, read omens, and interpreted dreams in an effort to glimpse what was coming. The Hebrew Bible itself describes some of these practices. For example, we read about the Urim and the Thummim, two stones that were waved about as divination tools by the ancient priests, used to "inquire of God.”
Our ancestors were not gamblers, though. They were builders, partners with God.
So Exodus describes how the Urim and Thummim stones were placed in the High Priest’s ornate and sacred “breastpiece of decision.” The divination tools sat directly over his heart, reminding him and the community that God’s wisdom and human decisions work as partners.
Because while the future is written by God, it’s shaped by humans. Like the weighted stones of the Priestly vestments, this is a heavy, sacred responsibility.
Which brings us back to the question: if generational experiences and media are increasingly fractured, and there is no common reality to agree on, how can we stay stitched together? As Lincoln warned in one of our nation’s darkest moments: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Again, Judaism has a blueprint for this, as through the generations, we too have faced internal and external conflicts that threaten schism. And yet we have persisted for millenia, our people still intact.
Pirkei Avot, the famous collection of rabbinic wisdom, begins: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in administering justice, raise many disciples and make a fence around the Torah.”
Each name in this spiritual genealogy represents a generation. We know that each generation listed faced a set of internal and external challenges. They were no less divided and dissenting.
But by passing judgement deliberately and fairly, by sharing knowledge truthfully and broadly, and by living by a code of compassion, we survived.
Also, notice how the genealogy moves from the singular: Moses to Joshua, to the plural: Joshua to the elders, to the prophets, to the Great Assembly.
Judaism has survived because to now, each generation understood itself as part of something bigger than itself.
Our ancestors knew that progress lies in expansion: expanding ideas, expanding who had access to those ideas, and expanding the definition of the “we.”
The power of American democracy, like Jewish civilization, lies in the collective responsibility and fortification of the “we.”
Now, I am painfully aware that in segments of American society, Jews are being actively cast out of the “we.” It is breaking our hearts, it is splintering our people.
I will state clearly that these segments of American society make themselves weaker when they cast Jews out of the “we,” and that the Jewish people are justified in demanding our safety while also insisting on our full participation in the American project.
I also understand that we will sometimes have the impulse to capitulate, to run away, to disengage, or change ourselves in a way that will herald acceptance.
But being part of a people, a community, a democracy, is not about finding a world in which everyone agrees. It is about accepting responsibility for one another even when we don't.
Rabbi Hillel understood this thousands of years ago when he cautioned: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?”
The Jewish way is to do two things simultaneously: to stand up for ourselves, and remain part of the larger “we.”
Which brings us to our Rosh Hashanah observance. At the heart of our prayer today, we recited Unetaneh Tokef, a terrifying reminder of how little control we have. It anticipates the many calamities that may befall us this year. Wildfires and floods, cancer and terror. It asks, who will live and who will die? Who will be safe and who will suffer? Who will flourish and who will struggle?
But Unetaneh Tokef does not leave us there, frozen in the face of an unknowable future. Instead it asks us: what will we do with the future’s uncertainty? Our lives may be shaped by forces beyond our control, but we are not powerless.
Our approach to these terrifying possibilities is “teshuva, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah,” that is: returning to the right path, meditating on goodness and giving righteously. It powerfully asserts: the severity of life can always be mitigated with moral courage and, above all, human connection.
This is because Judaism frowns upon closing our eyes and throwing the dice. Instead, we are told to place our bets on one another.
I think about my grandfather at seventeen, standing on the threshold of adulthood. He looked out at a world he could not possibly understand or predict.
Sixty years later, I stood at that same threshold, a seventeen-year-old watching the world change.
Now I look at my own teenager and wonder what she will face.
None of us can know what the future will ask of our children. We cannot know which dates they will one day remember as the “days that changed everything.” We cannot know which institutions will hold, which moral assumptions and considerations will fall away. We can’t know if new technology will herald an age of broadening wisdom or if AI fabrications will darken critical thinking and cloud judgement.
But in the face of this uncertainty, we have a choice. We could choose to be gamblers, casting our lots with one side or another in a “winner takes the future” game.
Or, we can choose to be stewards, shaping the future with critical thinking, equity, and kindness at the center.
My grandfather stepped into an uncertain future at seventeen and with a sense of duty and purpose.
It turns out, so did I. While my peers and I struggled to define what it meant to be American, I’ve come to see being American as building a “we” out of people who might otherwise have little reason to see themselves as belonging to one another.
We cannot guarantee what America will look like on its 300th birthday. But we are not helpless in shaping what comes next. Now is the time, as a Jewish community, to insist on connection.
We must teach our children to broaden their horizons and, most importantly, to care for one another. We must teach them to stand up for themselves without giving up on the larger “we.”
This year, let us not allow disagreement to become estrangement. Let us pledge to volunteer, vote, and donate in ways that don’t hedge our bets or draw lines in the sand, but instead build bridges.
Let us pray with our whole hearts that when our children’s turn comes to forge the future, they will have the courage, wisdom, and love to choose themselves and one another again and again. Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be worthy of God’s blessing.
Closing benediction
Kit Dillon is an author who writes on how to prepare for a crisis. You can collect cans and store water, but true preparedness, he explains, is “[expanding] your home beyond just the four walls. Learn what others have to offer and recognize what brings us together and what we hold in common…”
In other words, the answer to an uncertain future is not necessarily to fortify our personal bunkers: whether that be physically, emotionally or spiritually. The answer is to engage with one another.
Dillon puts it even more vividly: “The sirens will sound...Pack a bag if you want. But the real preparation begins when you knock on your neighbors’ door and invite them over.”
We cannot know exactly what is coming for us personally or communally. But preparing for it does not mean figuring out how to survive on our own. It means figuring out how to survive together.
L’Shanah Tovah tikateivu, may the new year be a good one for us ALL.
Then on December 7, 1941, The Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
News of the war floated in through radio broadcasts and news reels at the cinema. One year later, 17 years old and filled with a sense of patriotic obligation and duty, my grandfather enlisted in the US military. He chose the Army Air Corp, a fairly new division and precursor to the Airforce. Having heard the stories of WWI, he reasoned that this new air division would keep him in the sky and out of the trenches. Given that he was 17, he had to obtain written permission from his parents. They proudly signed the documents. Faith gave her blessing as well.
Morris was enrolled in City College at the time, and never actually graduated. When he returned from the war, the GI Bill allowed him to go straight to dental school at NYU. As a suburban dentist, he would eventually build a life for his family well beyond what his immigrant parents ever imagined.
Like a lot of people in his generation, my grandfather spoke of his service to his country with pride. It imbued him with a patriotism that lived comfortably alongside his bleeding heart liberal values and his strong Jewish identity.
Fast forward 60 years to 2001. I was 17 years old and a senior at Westfield High School in New Jersey, just a few miles outside of Manhattan.
On September 11, at 8:50 am, I walked into homeroom. The instructor, with a bewildered sort of tone, said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. He didn’t have many details, so I booted up the desktop computer at the back of the room. But in 2001, the computer was rudimentary and the internet was slow, so I returned to my seat and, like my peers, took the information in small bits as it trickled into the school. Classes were unofficially canceled, but we were held at school.
A loudspeaker announcement ordered students who had parents that worked in or near the World Trade Center to come to the office. The rest of us wandered around the halls for the day, sometimes stopping to watch the news coverage on the various TVs around the school.
12 people from my hometown died that day, counted in the 750 souls from New Jersey. Our graduation speaker that year was a survivor of the attack. We departed to college feeling vulnerable, second-guessing the security of our American future.
I only recently lined up my grandfather’s experience and mine, their parallels sending a shiver down my spine. Both are days that live in infamy, forever named by their dates. Both shattered the protective veneer of ordinary life on American soil.
More poignantly, my grandfather and I were both teenagers when we experienced a defining moment in American history. On the precipice of adulthood, these days would change our respective relationships to national identity. Each forged a bond to our peers in a shared generational experience that would influence our politics, livelihoods and even how we parent.
And yet this is also where our experiences diverge. Born in the 1920’s, my grandfather already knew a broken world. WWI lingered as a national trauma. The Depression had busted through American institutions and families causing economic and emotional hardship.
For me, 9/11 was a more stark line in the national landscape. There was the idyllic simplicity of before and the forever changed tumult of the after.
Most notably, 17 year old Morris stepped into a dramatically more unified America. The war and legislation like the GI Bill provided upward mobility that helped my family and others catapult into the middle class. The struggle for civil rights and gender equality followed in the next decades.
While 17 year old Mara experienced a brief national coalescence, my early adult years were dominated by deep mistrust in the US government due to a deceptive and divisive war as well as a crippling recession.
This breeded an emergent societal polarization, a widening divide that has come to roost today. All this, with the fact that millennials are the first generation in modern American history to grow up and expect that they will not achieve the upward mobility and economic security of their parents.
I am neither a historian nor a futurist. But I am a mother—now, the mother of a teenager. Having reflected on America’s 250th birthday this summer, and on this solemn 25th anniversary of 9/11, I find myself wondering:
When my children look back at America’s 300th birthday, what will they say were the defining moments of their teenage years? What events will have shaped their understanding of who we are as a nation, and what kind of generation will those moments have made them?
Will it be COVID - another moment of national unity that quickly gave way to deep societal divisions?
Is it climate change, with its extreme weather events impacting physical and social well-being?
For Jewish teens, will it be October 7th - a calamity also defined by its date - that has both bonded and divided our community?
I shudder knowing that the next generation will likely face catastrophes that I can’t even imagine today.
There is no lack of large-scale problems facing today’s teens.
However, Dr. Eliza Filby, a historian and expert on generational change, argues that the nature of the concept of a “generation” is changing. Whereas once generations were defined by fixed age-brackets that included common experiences and shared media, technology has made today’s experience more individualized. The lens by which we hear about, digest, and endure our reality is dizzyingly fast paced and polarizing.
Hyper-individualized internet algorithms create hyper-individualized perceptions around national and global experiences like Covid, Climate change and October 7. We literally live in different realities.
Filby calls this “fragmentation of shared generational experience.” As this fragmentation occurs, societal trust erodes. We lose not only a shared sense of the present facts, but also lose a shared framework for imagining the future. We no longer share a common story about where we are headed.
As a result, we are starting to meet the future with anger, apathy, and binary thinking, rather than communication, discernment, and compassion.
Writer David Wallace-Wells describes an “[unnerving] implicit philosophy” in how we currently interact with one another and the world. He argues that we are no longer “relating to the future…as citizens or moralists, problem solvers or advocates, but as gamblers, each of us surveying the horizon of possibility somewhat indifferent to human outcomes and looking instead for a betting edge.”
His concern is that, when it comes to imagining the future, we’ve become cynical gamblers and not responsible stewards.
Along those lines…another date - not as infamous, but consequential in its own right: September 17, 1787. The close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The Constitution was finalized. The uncertainty ahead had to do with its ratification and implementation. In a famous exchange, prominent Philadelphian Elizabeth Willing Powel asked founding father Ben Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy,” to which Franklin responded, “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Reflecting on America’s 250th anniversary, the NYTimes Editorial Board rightfully pointed out: “A quarter of a millennium is long enough to make a nation feel permanent, as though it had always been here and always will be. But the founders who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that they were making a wager, not a guarantee.”
The future of American democracy, they argue, “is whether self-governing people still share a common reality. Democracy rests on something we rarely notice — a rough agreement about what is true and what happened. That ground is cracking, as trust erodes in the institutions that once settled fact, and artificial intelligence can fabricate convincing lies in seconds.
A citizenry that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate. It can only split into camps.”
This certainly reflects our reality today and our fear of a crumbling democracy and a splintering populace.
“Two and a half centuries later,” the Editorial Board warns, “[that initial constitutional] wager is still being placed by every generation that inherits it...— America is still being made.”
A gambler places a bet and watches for an outcome completely outside of their control. The founders’ wager was different. Early Americans were not betting on the future; instead they firmly believed in their ability to shape it. That wager has been inherited by every generation, not as a guarantee, but as a responsibility.
This early American ethos was inspired by the democratic thought born in the Bible. Ancient people consulted oracles, cast lots, read omens, and interpreted dreams in an effort to glimpse what was coming. The Hebrew Bible itself describes some of these practices. For example, we read about the Urim and the Thummim, two stones that were waved about as divination tools by the ancient priests, used to "inquire of God.”
Our ancestors were not gamblers, though. They were builders, partners with God.
So Exodus describes how the Urim and Thummim stones were placed in the High Priest’s ornate and sacred “breastpiece of decision.” The divination tools sat directly over his heart, reminding him and the community that God’s wisdom and human decisions work as partners.
Because while the future is written by God, it’s shaped by humans. Like the weighted stones of the Priestly vestments, this is a heavy, sacred responsibility.
Which brings us back to the question: if generational experiences and media are increasingly fractured, and there is no common reality to agree on, how can we stay stitched together? As Lincoln warned in one of our nation’s darkest moments: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Again, Judaism has a blueprint for this, as through the generations, we too have faced internal and external conflicts that threaten schism. And yet we have persisted for millenia, our people still intact.
Pirkei Avot, the famous collection of rabbinic wisdom, begins: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in administering justice, raise many disciples and make a fence around the Torah.”
Each name in this spiritual genealogy represents a generation. We know that each generation listed faced a set of internal and external challenges. They were no less divided and dissenting.
But by passing judgement deliberately and fairly, by sharing knowledge truthfully and broadly, and by living by a code of compassion, we survived.
Also, notice how the genealogy moves from the singular: Moses to Joshua, to the plural: Joshua to the elders, to the prophets, to the Great Assembly.
Judaism has survived because to now, each generation understood itself as part of something bigger than itself.
Our ancestors knew that progress lies in expansion: expanding ideas, expanding who had access to those ideas, and expanding the definition of the “we.”
The power of American democracy, like Jewish civilization, lies in the collective responsibility and fortification of the “we.”
Now, I am painfully aware that in segments of American society, Jews are being actively cast out of the “we.” It is breaking our hearts, it is splintering our people.
I will state clearly that these segments of American society make themselves weaker when they cast Jews out of the “we,” and that the Jewish people are justified in demanding our safety while also insisting on our full participation in the American project.
I also understand that we will sometimes have the impulse to capitulate, to run away, to disengage, or change ourselves in a way that will herald acceptance.
But being part of a people, a community, a democracy, is not about finding a world in which everyone agrees. It is about accepting responsibility for one another even when we don't.
Rabbi Hillel understood this thousands of years ago when he cautioned: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?”
The Jewish way is to do two things simultaneously: to stand up for ourselves, and remain part of the larger “we.”
Which brings us to our Rosh Hashanah observance. At the heart of our prayer today, we recited Unetaneh Tokef, a terrifying reminder of how little control we have. It anticipates the many calamities that may befall us this year. Wildfires and floods, cancer and terror. It asks, who will live and who will die? Who will be safe and who will suffer? Who will flourish and who will struggle?
But Unetaneh Tokef does not leave us there, frozen in the face of an unknowable future. Instead it asks us: what will we do with the future’s uncertainty? Our lives may be shaped by forces beyond our control, but we are not powerless.
Our approach to these terrifying possibilities is “teshuva, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah,” that is: returning to the right path, meditating on goodness and giving righteously. It powerfully asserts: the severity of life can always be mitigated with moral courage and, above all, human connection.
This is because Judaism frowns upon closing our eyes and throwing the dice. Instead, we are told to place our bets on one another.
I think about my grandfather at seventeen, standing on the threshold of adulthood. He looked out at a world he could not possibly understand or predict.
Sixty years later, I stood at that same threshold, a seventeen-year-old watching the world change.
Now I look at my own teenager and wonder what she will face.
None of us can know what the future will ask of our children. We cannot know which dates they will one day remember as the “days that changed everything.” We cannot know which institutions will hold, which moral assumptions and considerations will fall away. We can’t know if new technology will herald an age of broadening wisdom or if AI fabrications will darken critical thinking and cloud judgement.
But in the face of this uncertainty, we have a choice. We could choose to be gamblers, casting our lots with one side or another in a “winner takes the future” game.
Or, we can choose to be stewards, shaping the future with critical thinking, equity, and kindness at the center.
My grandfather stepped into an uncertain future at seventeen and with a sense of duty and purpose.
It turns out, so did I. While my peers and I struggled to define what it meant to be American, I’ve come to see being American as building a “we” out of people who might otherwise have little reason to see themselves as belonging to one another.
We cannot guarantee what America will look like on its 300th birthday. But we are not helpless in shaping what comes next. Now is the time, as a Jewish community, to insist on connection.
We must teach our children to broaden their horizons and, most importantly, to care for one another. We must teach them to stand up for themselves without giving up on the larger “we.”
This year, let us not allow disagreement to become estrangement. Let us pledge to volunteer, vote, and donate in ways that don’t hedge our bets or draw lines in the sand, but instead build bridges.
Let us pray with our whole hearts that when our children’s turn comes to forge the future, they will have the courage, wisdom, and love to choose themselves and one another again and again. Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be worthy of God’s blessing.
Closing benediction
Kit Dillon is an author who writes on how to prepare for a crisis. You can collect cans and store water, but true preparedness, he explains, is “[expanding] your home beyond just the four walls. Learn what others have to offer and recognize what brings us together and what we hold in common…”
In other words, the answer to an uncertain future is not necessarily to fortify our personal bunkers: whether that be physically, emotionally or spiritually. The answer is to engage with one another.
Dillon puts it even more vividly: “The sirens will sound...Pack a bag if you want. But the real preparation begins when you knock on your neighbors’ door and invite them over.”
We cannot know exactly what is coming for us personally or communally. But preparing for it does not mean figuring out how to survive on our own. It means figuring out how to survive together.
L’Shanah Tovah tikateivu, may the new year be a good one for us ALL.
Saturday, August 8, 2026
Monument Mountain
Thou who wouldst see the lovely and the wild
Mingled in harmony on Nature's face,
Ascend our rocky mountains. Let thy foot
Fail not with weariness, for on their tops
The beauty and the majesty of earth,
Spread wide beneath, shall make thee to forget
The steep and toilsome way.
This is the beginning of the poem “Monument Mountain,” written by William Cullen Bryant. Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New-York Evening Post. He penned the piece in the early 1800’s, inspired by Monument Mountain, a large peak in Great Barrington MA.
He continues: There, as thou stand'st,
The haunts of men below thee, and around
The mountain summits, thy expanding heart
Shall feel a kindred with that loftier world
To which thou art translated, and partake
The enlargement of thy vision. Thou shalt look
Upon the green and rolling forest tops,
And down into the secrets of the glens,
And streams, that with their bordering thickets strive
To hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once,
Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds,
And swarming roads, and there on solitudes
That only hear the torrent, and the wind,
And eagle's shriek.
Additional fun fact about Monumental Mountain: in 1850, authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were reported to have spent an afternoon on the mountain picnicking. A sudden thunderstorm forced them to seek cover in a boulder cave where they engaged in a lengthy discussion that inspired some of Melville's ideas for his novel Moby Dick.
While in the Berkshires these last few weeks, I finally had the opportunity to hike Monument Mountain. It has a 1642-foot summit, which you can reach in a rigorous, but thrilling, upward climb. There is a 360 view at the top, that indeed inspires feelings of awe and natural majesty. I get why the poets were inspired.
There’s a more complicated history to the place, though. A plaque at the base of the trail teaches that: “Monument Mountain has been sacred to the Mohican people and their ancestors since time immemorial. Tribal members left stone offerings imbued with prayers on the mountain, creating the “monument” for which it’s named. The original monument, however, was destroyed by white residents after the Mohicans were dispossessed and forced from the area [to Wisconsin], away from their ancestral land and sacred spaces.”
This is the story of any profound natural space, isn’t it? Whether the American mountains, or the tributaries of the Amazon, or African bluffs, human history is full of voluntary migration and forced dispossession; reverent attachments to place and callous exploitation of its natural gifts. Monument Mountain was a sacred Mohican site and a place where the great American poets dreamed. It is not exclusively one thing or the other.
The Torah portion this week speaks extensively about the spiritual importance of a majestic place: the Land of Israel. It designates the central sanctuary site - the one day Jerusalem. The portion explains the sacred pilgrimages to that place. It proscribes the laws about what you can eat there, and how much of the land’s yield you must give to charity.
This Torah portion unequivocally connects the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and it makes clear why the Jews of today still turn our hearts there in prayer. It demonstrates our deep connection and reverence for that place, the central place where we come into conversation with our ancestors and God. It is why we maintain that desire for Zion even after being brutally driven from our homeland time after time, throughout history.
However, the portion also highlights how there are others who are also indigenous to the land and it details how inevitably there will be friction between the different ethnic groups who call it home.
This is why it is important for us to pay attention to the parts of this week’s Torah reading where God reminds us that the land only truly belongs to one entity and that entity is God. God makes it clear that every human of every race, nation, and religion is just a guest on this earth. Every human is a brief sojourner, hiking small steps in the vast beauty of creation. Rather than fight to a bloody death over who owns it more, it would behoove us, Torah teaches, to inhabit and lead others upon that land with reverence for God and God’s natural world. With a sacred gift comes a sacred responsibility, and that message is strongly conveyed this week.
Halfway up the Monument Mountain hike, there’s a giant boulder with an inscription - aptly named “Inscription Rock.” It reads "This ridge and the cliffs of Monument Mountain were conveyed to the Trustees of Public Reservations by deed bearing date October 19 AD 1899 by fulfillment of a wish of Rosalie Butler that such portions of this mountain might be preserved to the People of Berkshire as a place of free enjoyment for all time:”
I enjoyed the sentiment and was grateful to Ms. Rosalie Butler, whoever she was. I was also particularly taken by the punctuation at the end of the inscription.
You see, there is no period at the end of “enjoyment for all time.” Instead, the inscription ends with a colon. I found this peculiar, so I did some research. Turns out, it could simply be indicative of the Victorian times, when monumental inscriptions often ended with a colon instead of a period. It was considered an ornamental flourish, sometimes seen at the end of formal stone proclamations. To my modern eye, however, it made the inscription appear unfinished, open ended.
“Free enjoyment for all time:” the colon begs the question: How can humans, in our impermanence, make this permanent guarantee of “for all time?”
Well, for starters, it takes great faith in the next generation, faith that we have taught them the significant lessons and instilled within them the right values to lead into the future.
That is very much Moses’ position in the Book of Deuteronomy. In just a few weeks, we will read of Moses’ death, the ultimate act of entrusting the Jewish future to the next generation. With Moses’ death, the Torah essentially ends with a “colon,” an unwritten future. It says, it’s your sacred obligation now. Don’t squander it.
Let us pray that our actions today will prescribe a future rooted in covenant: one in which we remember that the earth is God's, that every gift carries obligation, and that holiness is found not in claiming the earth, but in caring for it—and for all who dwell upon it.
Monday, July 6, 2026
Out of Many, One (July 4th and America's 250th)
What is the official motto of the United States of America?
Officially it is “In God We Trust.” That said, for a long period of time, it was unofficially, but widely regarded, as “E Pluribus Unum” (out of many, one).
E Pluribus Unum appears on the great seal of the US and was approved for use there in an act of the U.S. Congress in 1782. Conceptually, “E Pluribus Unum” fit the ethos of the early United States, having much to do with the original 13 colonies. Early on, the colonies struggled to form a national identity. They each had a distinct culture and way of doing things. It’s hard to blend deeply held beliefs and systems. The early Americans had to compromise, argue and reimagine in order to find commonality and trust in one another. Out of the many, eventually, they found a way to one.
I see a parallel here in how we view God. In the very first verse of Torah, the first thing…being…character…we encounter is - you guessed it, God.
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃
When God began to create heaven and earth…
The name for God here is “Elohim” - which you know because it is related to the word “Eloheinu,” (our God) which we hear in a lot of our blessings. What’s curious though is that when you hear the “eem” at the end of the word, that’s a Hebrew indicator telling you that the word is in the plural form.
Wait, yikes, hold up! I thought we only believed in one God? Indeed, we do, and indeed, the Torah pairs the word “Elohim” with singular verbs.
But then we’re left to wonder why we would use a pluralized word to refer to God?
Well, much like we did with the founding mottos of our country, we can take a historical approach to God’s name. Some scholars believe that at one time, our ancestors may have in fact believed in a pantheon of gods, but that ultimately one God was asserted as the God of Gods, the most powerful God. But then this idea transformed into something much deeper. We started to perceive God as an entity whose multifaceted, abstract nature actually encompassed all other “so-called gods” into one large, creative, collected force.
E pluribus unum - out of many, one. One strong, connected, powerful whole, made up of many different attributes. This idea feels very real to me.
And Abraham Ibn Ezra, the great commentator, goes on to sum it up when he says that “God is all and all comes from God.”
By calling God Elohim, Genesis opens up not only our understanding of God but our understanding of how creation might have happened. If God is all and all comes from God, we can see God less as a puppeteer or a magician who magically poofed the universe into existence. Perhaps God is the small and large processes that caused creation to blossom, the many molecules, chemical reactions and years it would take for disparate parts to come together to form the one united world we all inhabit.
Then apply this to people. Out of many disparate people with different stories and cultures we have one human race. Our shared humanity is God-like, the greatest manifestation of being “btzelem elohim” - in the image of God. When we honor the many, we honor the one.
On this idea, especially applied to the US, I particularly like the poem “Prayer for the Descendents of Many” by Alex Carter.
We are descendants of serfs and peasants
who came to these shores with golden dreams for the future.
The Lady’s lamp beckoned them to freedom.
We are descendants of villagers and chieftains
brought in chains and despair.
Their Middle Passage foreshadowed
lives of hardship and pain.
We are descendants of those from many lands
who saw across the border fence
a southwest desert path
to a better life for their children.
We are descendants of ancient peoples,
who revered the Creator and Creation,
whose histories were erased
as they were driven from their lands.
Eternal One, God of all people and all places,
help us honor the grand diversity of our history
and celebrate the kaleidoscope of our present.
Give each of us the strength to help our country
fulfill its promise of freedom and opportunity –
to strike down barriers that still obstruct,
to open doors still closed.
Fill the hearts of our leaders
with Your love of justice and compassion.
Give them strength to seek peace and pursue it,
to resist false gods of politics and power.
Be with us as we strive for a more hopeful future
for all, in our own time.
Amen.
So then how does one go from this prayer of unity into the Aleinu prayer, a prayer that, on its surface, calls for partition:
Praise God Who has set us apart from the other families of the earth; giving us a destiny unlike that of other nations’.
Well, it’s a shame I ignored the lead up to that line and the lines after it. The broader context is:
Let us now praise the Sovereign of all things, Who formed the world from the very beginning, Who has set us apart from the other families of the earth; giving us a destiny unlike that of other nations’. We bend the knee and proclaim the greatness of the Creator, acknowledging the supreme Sovereign, the Holy One of Blessing.
One day, the prayer continues, when all of humanity perceives God's oneness, humanity will perceive our own oneness and on that day, God’s name will be one.
This is not a message of Jewish superiority, that our God’s name will be the name that reigns supreme. We don’t even KNOW God’s name. All we know is that God’s name encapsulates every letter, every word, every language - that of humans, of animals, the language of the flowers and the wind. When we see the one that comes from the many, we will be closer to the Divine.
Friday, June 19, 2026
Water on Stone: Juneteenth and the start of Summer
Before he became the famous Rabbi Akiva, one of the most beloved and influential sages in Jewish history, he was a shepherd. Tradition tells us that he was already forty years old and had never studied Torah. In fact, he believed that learning was beyond his reach. Yet this man would eventually become the teacher of thousands of students, help shape the foundations of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple, and leave teachings that Jews still study nearly two thousand years later.
The turning point came on an ordinary day. While watching his flock, Akiva noticed a rock with a deep groove carved into it. Curious, he asked how such a mark had been made. The answer was simple: water. Drop after drop, year after year, the water had fallen on the same spot until it changed the stone itself.
Akiva stood there and reflected: If soft water can wear away hard rock, then surely words of Torah can enter my heart. If a stone can be transformed through patience and persistence, perhaps a person can too.
That realization changed his life. He began learning the Hebrew alphabet alongside young children. One letter at a time, one word at a time, he studied. The progress was slow, but he kept going. Day after day, year after year, he returned to learning, trusting that small efforts accumulate.
In time, the shepherd who thought he could never learn became Rabbi Akiva—the great teacher whose wisdom helped shape Jewish tradition for generations. His story reminds us that transformation rarely happens all at once. Like water on stone, growth often comes through small acts repeated faithfully over time, until one day we discover that what once seemed impossible has become part of who we are.
Though President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it was unenforceable in Confederate-controlled areas. It wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas to read "General Order No. 3," finally enforcing the freedom of 250,000 enslaved Black Texans.
Juneteenth honors not just emancipation, but the resilience, culture, and achievements of Black Americans, recognizing that true freedom arrived in stages and is still something we must diligently work for.
Along these lines, Juneteenth is a national holiday because of a long grassroots campaign. It was only actualized in 2021. This was a major step forward in nationally recognizing our diversity and reckoning with a more honest account of our nation’s history. It felt like a watershed moment, a major step forward for these ideals. And yet we all know that in the last years, for every step forward, it feels like we took two back.
When it comes to our nation and American society, broad legislation makes big changes. But just broad legislation can be ushered in, a quick hand can usher it out. Sure, emancipation was a major step forward, but the years following it ushered in the tyranny of Jim Crow and the struggle to recognize our nation’s deeply embedded racism.
Now before we get discouraged, we must remember Rabbi Akiva. Do not discredit a constant stream of goodness. Even while gentle, it can reshape even the hardest places. Real change in our country comes from dialogue, and compromise. It comes from genuine, neighborly concern. It means drawing close to others in curiosity and appreciation. It means celebrating together.
To our Black community members, we value your contributions to our local community and to the culture and achievements of our nation.
To all of us: may we never resolve that our country or our hearts are too advanced or too mature to incorporate new insights or to begin a new journey of transformation. Every season brings a new opportunity for renewal or exploration.
This ShaBBQ is our unofficial start of summer. Set an intention tonight for yourself. The proliferation of sunshine and even the large-scale rainstorms, bring out the deepest, most vibrant greens of the year. How might this season do the same for you?
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Annual Meeting Remarks - Surviving
[Adapted from remarks that evening]
When I said that the last third of this synagogue year was like Survivor, I was only half kidding. The metaphor holds up. The show still airs because it asks some deeply human questions: when do we act in self-interest, and when do we choose collaboration? When do we protect our own needs, and when do we take risks for the good of the larger group?
These are not just reality-TV questions. They are community questions. They are synagogue questions. Every Jewish community wrestles with them: when do we turn inward, and when do we stick our necks out? Where should resources be allocated? What stances do we take on hard topics? And perhaps most importantly, how do we continue creating spaces where people feel connected to one another in a world that so often pulls people apart?
Well, we begin with building a calendar of meaningful events that help us celebrate, mourn, and grow together. On my end, one of the year's highlights was the Yesh Tikva Challah Bake in the fall, where we filled this room with folks of all ages baking challah and opening our hearts to taboo topics that affect our lives. There was also the largest Sukkot BBQ ever on record at WCT, a testament to our community’s willingness to take the Jewish calendar up on its opportunities to bring people together.
And then there was the first-ever Women’s Retreat, which was an astounding success. We had over 65 women registered, ranging from those in their late 20’s to their 80’s. We created art, drummed, and benefitted two social action initiatives. As the day went on, I was moved by how different groups were formed and how women who had never met connected. I feel our community has been brought closer to one another as a result.
As a synagogue, we must recognize what a genuine success it is to serve as a catalyst for bringing people together in the hyper-polarized world of 2026. Think about how counter-cultural that is right now! In a world undergoing constant mitosis, we at Woodlands are in the business of bringing together broken hearts, connecting families and communities, and pursuing peace in the world.
Broadly speaking, I’d say many people — Jewish and not — feel like they’re “just surviving” everything daily life and the world are throwing at them. When I think about “survival,” the word usually evokes a haggard image: someone or something at the very end, hanging on to whatever little is left.
But that’s not really the Jewish concept of survival—whether of a person or of a community. In Jewish terms, survival is about endurance and determination. It is disciplined engagement with life as it comes.
The Talmud (Yevamot 121a) relays a story:
Rabban Gamliel said: Once I was traveling on a boat, and from a distance I saw a boat that shattered and sank. I was grieved over the apparent death of the Torah scholar who was on board. Who was it? Rabbi Akiva. But when I disembarked onto dry land, he came, and sat, and deliberated Torah with me. I asked: Who saved you from the water? He said to me: A plank from the boat came to me. As each wave came toward me, I bent my head into the wave so it would not wash me off. Eventually I reached the shore.
In another teaching, Rabbi Akiva said: Once I was traveling on a boat, and I saw a boat sinking at sea, and I was grieved over the apparent death of the Torah scholar who was on board. Who was it? My student, Rabbi Meir. But when I disembarked, Meir came, sat, and deliberated Torah with me. I said to him: My son, who saved you from the water? He said to me: One wave carried me to another, and that wave to another, until I reached the shore, and a wave cast me up onto dry land.
Jewish survival—individual and collective—is about moving with and through the waves rather than being spared from them. The wisdom that comes from learning to navigate the waves becomes the source of strength.
It is also significant that Gamliel and Akiva were contemporaries, moving through the same turbulent waters together. Meir, Akiva’s student, reflects how the story of one generation’s survival becomes the foundation—and sometimes the lifeline—for the next. We cannot promise smooth waters, but we can give the next generation the benefit of our experience.
Woodlands Community Temple is entering its 60th year. We have the privilege of reaching our 60th decade because, as a community, we have met each wave, each challenge, with discipline, determination, and care. Whether it has been social upheaval, financial pressure, antisemitism, or even our own internal politics, we have endured these 60 years. We have not survived by waiting for miracles or by closing our eyes to reality. Rather, we have faced each challenge by putting our heads down, riding the waves with hope, resolve, and compassionate hearts.
This year, our community named at least 10 babies—10 new souls who represent the ongoing life of our community and of the Jewish people. On their account, and on account of all the meaningful work we have done and will continue to do, we are able to declare: Am Yisrael Chai—the Jewish people survive! “Chai,” of course, also means life. Survival is not simply holding on; it is active, engaged living.
May Woodlands continue to be a place where Am Yisrael Chai is not only proclaimed, but embodied—where Jewish people and their loved ones live full, meaningful lives, in our own homes and as a community. May our 60th birthday celebration be a marker of our survival, a testament to vibrant Jewish life, deep community, and enduring hope. Amen.
When I said that the last third of this synagogue year was like Survivor, I was only half kidding. The metaphor holds up. The show still airs because it asks some deeply human questions: when do we act in self-interest, and when do we choose collaboration? When do we protect our own needs, and when do we take risks for the good of the larger group?
These are not just reality-TV questions. They are community questions. They are synagogue questions. Every Jewish community wrestles with them: when do we turn inward, and when do we stick our necks out? Where should resources be allocated? What stances do we take on hard topics? And perhaps most importantly, how do we continue creating spaces where people feel connected to one another in a world that so often pulls people apart?
Well, we begin with building a calendar of meaningful events that help us celebrate, mourn, and grow together. On my end, one of the year's highlights was the Yesh Tikva Challah Bake in the fall, where we filled this room with folks of all ages baking challah and opening our hearts to taboo topics that affect our lives. There was also the largest Sukkot BBQ ever on record at WCT, a testament to our community’s willingness to take the Jewish calendar up on its opportunities to bring people together.
And then there was the first-ever Women’s Retreat, which was an astounding success. We had over 65 women registered, ranging from those in their late 20’s to their 80’s. We created art, drummed, and benefitted two social action initiatives. As the day went on, I was moved by how different groups were formed and how women who had never met connected. I feel our community has been brought closer to one another as a result.
As a synagogue, we must recognize what a genuine success it is to serve as a catalyst for bringing people together in the hyper-polarized world of 2026. Think about how counter-cultural that is right now! In a world undergoing constant mitosis, we at Woodlands are in the business of bringing together broken hearts, connecting families and communities, and pursuing peace in the world.
Broadly speaking, I’d say many people — Jewish and not — feel like they’re “just surviving” everything daily life and the world are throwing at them. When I think about “survival,” the word usually evokes a haggard image: someone or something at the very end, hanging on to whatever little is left.
But that’s not really the Jewish concept of survival—whether of a person or of a community. In Jewish terms, survival is about endurance and determination. It is disciplined engagement with life as it comes.
The Talmud (Yevamot 121a) relays a story:
Rabban Gamliel said: Once I was traveling on a boat, and from a distance I saw a boat that shattered and sank. I was grieved over the apparent death of the Torah scholar who was on board. Who was it? Rabbi Akiva. But when I disembarked onto dry land, he came, and sat, and deliberated Torah with me. I asked: Who saved you from the water? He said to me: A plank from the boat came to me. As each wave came toward me, I bent my head into the wave so it would not wash me off. Eventually I reached the shore.
In another teaching, Rabbi Akiva said: Once I was traveling on a boat, and I saw a boat sinking at sea, and I was grieved over the apparent death of the Torah scholar who was on board. Who was it? My student, Rabbi Meir. But when I disembarked, Meir came, sat, and deliberated Torah with me. I said to him: My son, who saved you from the water? He said to me: One wave carried me to another, and that wave to another, until I reached the shore, and a wave cast me up onto dry land.
Jewish survival—individual and collective—is about moving with and through the waves rather than being spared from them. The wisdom that comes from learning to navigate the waves becomes the source of strength.
It is also significant that Gamliel and Akiva were contemporaries, moving through the same turbulent waters together. Meir, Akiva’s student, reflects how the story of one generation’s survival becomes the foundation—and sometimes the lifeline—for the next. We cannot promise smooth waters, but we can give the next generation the benefit of our experience.
Woodlands Community Temple is entering its 60th year. We have the privilege of reaching our 60th decade because, as a community, we have met each wave, each challenge, with discipline, determination, and care. Whether it has been social upheaval, financial pressure, antisemitism, or even our own internal politics, we have endured these 60 years. We have not survived by waiting for miracles or by closing our eyes to reality. Rather, we have faced each challenge by putting our heads down, riding the waves with hope, resolve, and compassionate hearts.
This year, our community named at least 10 babies—10 new souls who represent the ongoing life of our community and of the Jewish people. On their account, and on account of all the meaningful work we have done and will continue to do, we are able to declare: Am Yisrael Chai—the Jewish people survive! “Chai,” of course, also means life. Survival is not simply holding on; it is active, engaged living.
May Woodlands continue to be a place where Am Yisrael Chai is not only proclaimed, but embodied—where Jewish people and their loved ones live full, meaningful lives, in our own homes and as a community. May our 60th birthday celebration be a marker of our survival, a testament to vibrant Jewish life, deep community, and enduring hope. Amen.
Monday, May 4, 2026
Cursing God
I have to be honest with you: I swear like a sailor. I think, if I’m going to psychoanalyze myself for a minute, that because I generally process through speaking, cursing is a way that my body lets go of anger.
These untoward utterances are not usually at a person, but at a situation. I certainly do not find myself cursing God. The curse words of everyday language are one thing. They’re just words - their meaning changes over time. Intent and tone has everything to do with how they are flung and received.
But cursing God’s name is something else completely. That, by Jewish standards, is particularly problematic. The book of Deuteronomy lays it out straight: God actually gives us the choice between blessing and curse - with blessing leading to life-affirming action and cursing leading to destruction, the unravelling of God’s creation. To invoke “God’s name” means to act in service of that Name, a responsibility we must take seriously.
This week’s Torah portion is Emor - which means “Speak.” The parsha shows the ways in which our words matter - whether in prayer or in the ways we relate to one another.
Early in the parsha, we read:
These untoward utterances are not usually at a person, but at a situation. I certainly do not find myself cursing God. The curse words of everyday language are one thing. They’re just words - their meaning changes over time. Intent and tone has everything to do with how they are flung and received.
But cursing God’s name is something else completely. That, by Jewish standards, is particularly problematic. The book of Deuteronomy lays it out straight: God actually gives us the choice between blessing and curse - with blessing leading to life-affirming action and cursing leading to destruction, the unravelling of God’s creation. To invoke “God’s name” means to act in service of that Name, a responsibility we must take seriously.
This week’s Torah portion is Emor - which means “Speak.” The parsha shows the ways in which our words matter - whether in prayer or in the ways we relate to one another.
Early in the parsha, we read:
וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם֙ מִצְוֺתַ֔י וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָ֑ם אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָֽה׃
You shall faithfully observe My commandments: I am GOD. וְלֹ֤א תְחַלְּלוּ֙ אֶת־שֵׁ֣ם קׇדְשִׁ֔י וְנִ֨קְדַּשְׁתִּ֔י בְּת֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל אֲנִ֥י יְהֹוָ֖ה מְקַדִּשְׁכֶֽם׃
You shall not profane My holy name, that I may be sanctified in the midst of the Israelite people—I, GOD, who sanctify you,When God’s name is profaned, holiness is diminished in the world. Communities fall apart. The universe begins to unwind.
Humans are placed on earth to be planters and tenders of God’s creation. We evolved to our intellectual and physical strength in order to build holy communities that reflect the holiness of the Divine essence that created it all. If we curse God’s name, we act against God’s purpose for us and, with our very words, suck the water out of the ground, spread weeds and chip away at the world’s beauty. We negate its very existence!
Hillul HaShem, profaning the Divine name, is not just about uttering a curse or casually using God’s name derogatorily. It’s not even just about God’s name itself. As a religious concept, hillul HaShem occurs any time a Jew acts immorally in the presence of others. Unethical behavior, in and of itself, is an affront to God’s good name. It rejects our Divinely-given task as God’s agents.
Which leads us to the digression in this week’s Torah portion. Leviticus 24 reads: The son of an Israelite woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the Israelites; and the Israelite woman’s son and an Israelite man fought in the camp. The Israelite woman’s son pronounced the Name [of God] and cursed; and they brought him to Moshe. His mother’s name was Shlomit, daughter of Divri, of the tribe of Dan.… God spoke to Moshe, saying, “Take the blasphemer outside the camp; and let all who were within hearing lean their hands upon his head, and let the whole community stone him.”
This man, “the blasphemer,” is part of the Israelite community. His mother is from the tribe of Dan. His father, however, is an Egyptian. The first thing that should jump out at us is that intermarriage is hardly a modern phenomenon. Torah is FULL of people who draw lineage from different religions and ethnicities.
As ancient as that phenomenon, though, is the social anxiety surrounding such an arrangement. It is the ancient concern of who is in and who is out and sometimes this anxiety results in disastrous consequences, like in this story.
Rabbi Avital Hochstein of the Hadar Institute dips into the midrash, the rabbinic imagination, in order to mine deeper understanding from the passage. The Midrash helps us to see how the blasphemer doesn’t curse God’s name because of his parentage. Rather, the blasphemer curses out of frustration for how society has treated him and how the community has failed to help him integrate:
“R. Hiyya taught: …[Shlomit’s son] came to pitch his tent in the camp of Dan, but they said to him, “What right do you have to pitch your tent in the camp of Dan?” He replied, “I am descended from the daughters of Dan.” They told him, “It is written (in the book of Numbers), ‘The Israelites shall camp each [household] with its standard, under the banners of their father’s house’ —and not their mother’s house.” He entered the court of Moshe and emerged with an unfavorable ruling; then he stood up and blasphemed.”
Rabbi Hochstein explains: “This midrash offers a jarring explanation for the blasphemer’s “going out”: it was an act of expulsion. The blasphemer is a man caught in a housing-identity crisis. He seeks to belong to the tribe of Dan, his mother’s tribe, yet the law dictates that tribal identity is determined solely by the father. As the son of an Egyptian man, he is left without an inheritance, without a banner, and without a place to call home. In his distress, he turns to the legal system—to Moshe himself—but the answer he receives is devastating: he “emerged liable.” He is told that he does not belong and has no place, camp, or tribe. The midrashic narrative portrays his outburst as the direct result of this judicial rejection: “He stood up and blasphemed. This midrash invites us to view the blasphemer not as someone who is simply malicious, but as an individual pushed to the brink by structural injustice. His curse is not merely a religious provocation; it is the desperate cry of someone the community has cast out. This midrash forces us to confront difficult questions: Are there situations where strict adherence to the law produces a rejection of certain people? Are we, as a society, responsible for the curses uttered by those who have no place to pitch their tents? Ultimately, the midrash highlights a grave danger: when a religious community acts in a way that fosters injustice, the inevitable result is the profanation of God’s Name (hillul Hashem).”
Hochstein, my opinion, is not defending the blasphemer’s actions. What he did was still beyond the pale. One should never curse the Divine Name for all the reasons I stated before. She is inviting us, however, to think about what conditions led him down such a dark and dangerous path. When do people feel so desperate that they may be tempted to give up completely and curse the Divine name as an act of surrendering to that desperation? Again, cursing God’s name is an act of unravelling, and this time, it is within a person.
The rabbis understand, as we do, that this Divinely given life is not all sunshine and roses, and there can be circumstances within the organized chaos of creation that push us to the brink; to have us question if it is all worth it and if we really do want to do the hard work of fulfilling the mitzvot and tending to the garden God has placed us in.
Tradition acknowledges this, and it implores us, commands us, to hold on.
This is in fact the theological basis for the Mourner’s Kaddish. Famously, the Mourner’s Kaddish never mentions death. Instead, the prayer highlights God’s greatness and lifts up the Divine Name again and again:
It makes sense that a mourner would be obligated to utter words that assert “God’s great name.” A person in the pit of mourning would probably be most at risk to curse God, to profane the Divine Name. It would make sense to be angry at the Creator of Life and Death, and be tempted to curse the source of one’s pain. And yet our tradition lifts up the Divine name in an effort to lift the spirit of the person reciting the prayer:
“May God’s great name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One.”
Higher and higher we lift God’s name, restoring its glory in the heart of the person saying it, restoring one’s trust in the Divine design of which we have little power but lots of influence.
Which brings me back to a reading we shared earlier this evening. It is on page 24 of our siddur:
“Praise Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me. Curse Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me. Praise Me or curse Me, and I will know that you love Me. Sing out My graces, says God. Raise your fist against Me and revile, says God. Sing out graces or revile – reviling is also a kind of praise, says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God ... if you sit entrenched in, “I don’t care,” says God ... if you look at the stars and yawn, if you see suffering and don’t cry out, if you don’t praise and you don’t revile ...then I created you in vain, says God.”
These are the words of Aaron Zeitlin, a Jewish writer of the early 20th century. This is a different take on “cursing God.” Zeitlin is picking up on the fact that God does in fact allow us our outbursts, and God very much allows us to question God’s Divine design and plans. The Bible is full of direct protest and question of God - from Abraham to Job to the ancient Psalmist.
With this insight, perhaps we see “blasphemy” differently. Afterall, we don’t know God’s actual name, which makes it very hard to curse it. Blasphemy, in this perspective, is apathy, or worse, disregard and detachment from reality. It is lack of purpose.
Jewish tradition maintains that the real danger is not the person who cries out in pain or even in anger. The real danger is the person who loses all sense of purpose. A person who stops caring - about themselves and others.
A holy community is a community that refuses to let anyone be pushed so far to the margins that their only language left is a curse of defeat. It is a community that understands that words have power—not only to wound, but to heal, to include, and to restore dignity; not just to a human soul, but to God’s creation writ large. May we be that sort of community, and in doing so, bless the Divine Name. Amen.
Humans are placed on earth to be planters and tenders of God’s creation. We evolved to our intellectual and physical strength in order to build holy communities that reflect the holiness of the Divine essence that created it all. If we curse God’s name, we act against God’s purpose for us and, with our very words, suck the water out of the ground, spread weeds and chip away at the world’s beauty. We negate its very existence!
Hillul HaShem, profaning the Divine name, is not just about uttering a curse or casually using God’s name derogatorily. It’s not even just about God’s name itself. As a religious concept, hillul HaShem occurs any time a Jew acts immorally in the presence of others. Unethical behavior, in and of itself, is an affront to God’s good name. It rejects our Divinely-given task as God’s agents.
Which leads us to the digression in this week’s Torah portion. Leviticus 24 reads: The son of an Israelite woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the Israelites; and the Israelite woman’s son and an Israelite man fought in the camp. The Israelite woman’s son pronounced the Name [of God] and cursed; and they brought him to Moshe. His mother’s name was Shlomit, daughter of Divri, of the tribe of Dan.… God spoke to Moshe, saying, “Take the blasphemer outside the camp; and let all who were within hearing lean their hands upon his head, and let the whole community stone him.”
This man, “the blasphemer,” is part of the Israelite community. His mother is from the tribe of Dan. His father, however, is an Egyptian. The first thing that should jump out at us is that intermarriage is hardly a modern phenomenon. Torah is FULL of people who draw lineage from different religions and ethnicities.
As ancient as that phenomenon, though, is the social anxiety surrounding such an arrangement. It is the ancient concern of who is in and who is out and sometimes this anxiety results in disastrous consequences, like in this story.
Rabbi Avital Hochstein of the Hadar Institute dips into the midrash, the rabbinic imagination, in order to mine deeper understanding from the passage. The Midrash helps us to see how the blasphemer doesn’t curse God’s name because of his parentage. Rather, the blasphemer curses out of frustration for how society has treated him and how the community has failed to help him integrate:
“R. Hiyya taught: …[Shlomit’s son] came to pitch his tent in the camp of Dan, but they said to him, “What right do you have to pitch your tent in the camp of Dan?” He replied, “I am descended from the daughters of Dan.” They told him, “It is written (in the book of Numbers), ‘The Israelites shall camp each [household] with its standard, under the banners of their father’s house’ —and not their mother’s house.” He entered the court of Moshe and emerged with an unfavorable ruling; then he stood up and blasphemed.”
Rabbi Hochstein explains: “This midrash offers a jarring explanation for the blasphemer’s “going out”: it was an act of expulsion. The blasphemer is a man caught in a housing-identity crisis. He seeks to belong to the tribe of Dan, his mother’s tribe, yet the law dictates that tribal identity is determined solely by the father. As the son of an Egyptian man, he is left without an inheritance, without a banner, and without a place to call home. In his distress, he turns to the legal system—to Moshe himself—but the answer he receives is devastating: he “emerged liable.” He is told that he does not belong and has no place, camp, or tribe. The midrashic narrative portrays his outburst as the direct result of this judicial rejection: “He stood up and blasphemed. This midrash invites us to view the blasphemer not as someone who is simply malicious, but as an individual pushed to the brink by structural injustice. His curse is not merely a religious provocation; it is the desperate cry of someone the community has cast out. This midrash forces us to confront difficult questions: Are there situations where strict adherence to the law produces a rejection of certain people? Are we, as a society, responsible for the curses uttered by those who have no place to pitch their tents? Ultimately, the midrash highlights a grave danger: when a religious community acts in a way that fosters injustice, the inevitable result is the profanation of God’s Name (hillul Hashem).”
Hochstein, my opinion, is not defending the blasphemer’s actions. What he did was still beyond the pale. One should never curse the Divine Name for all the reasons I stated before. She is inviting us, however, to think about what conditions led him down such a dark and dangerous path. When do people feel so desperate that they may be tempted to give up completely and curse the Divine name as an act of surrendering to that desperation? Again, cursing God’s name is an act of unravelling, and this time, it is within a person.
The rabbis understand, as we do, that this Divinely given life is not all sunshine and roses, and there can be circumstances within the organized chaos of creation that push us to the brink; to have us question if it is all worth it and if we really do want to do the hard work of fulfilling the mitzvot and tending to the garden God has placed us in.
Tradition acknowledges this, and it implores us, commands us, to hold on.
This is in fact the theological basis for the Mourner’s Kaddish. Famously, the Mourner’s Kaddish never mentions death. Instead, the prayer highlights God’s greatness and lifts up the Divine Name again and again:
יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא
Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the worldיְהֵא שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא מְבָרַךְ לְעָלַם וּלְעָלְמֵי עָלְמַיָּא
May God’s great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.It makes sense that a mourner would be obligated to utter words that assert “God’s great name.” A person in the pit of mourning would probably be most at risk to curse God, to profane the Divine Name. It would make sense to be angry at the Creator of Life and Death, and be tempted to curse the source of one’s pain. And yet our tradition lifts up the Divine name in an effort to lift the spirit of the person reciting the prayer:
“May God’s great name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One.”
Higher and higher we lift God’s name, restoring its glory in the heart of the person saying it, restoring one’s trust in the Divine design of which we have little power but lots of influence.
Which brings me back to a reading we shared earlier this evening. It is on page 24 of our siddur:
“Praise Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me. Curse Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me. Praise Me or curse Me, and I will know that you love Me. Sing out My graces, says God. Raise your fist against Me and revile, says God. Sing out graces or revile – reviling is also a kind of praise, says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God ... if you sit entrenched in, “I don’t care,” says God ... if you look at the stars and yawn, if you see suffering and don’t cry out, if you don’t praise and you don’t revile ...then I created you in vain, says God.”
These are the words of Aaron Zeitlin, a Jewish writer of the early 20th century. This is a different take on “cursing God.” Zeitlin is picking up on the fact that God does in fact allow us our outbursts, and God very much allows us to question God’s Divine design and plans. The Bible is full of direct protest and question of God - from Abraham to Job to the ancient Psalmist.
With this insight, perhaps we see “blasphemy” differently. Afterall, we don’t know God’s actual name, which makes it very hard to curse it. Blasphemy, in this perspective, is apathy, or worse, disregard and detachment from reality. It is lack of purpose.
Jewish tradition maintains that the real danger is not the person who cries out in pain or even in anger. The real danger is the person who loses all sense of purpose. A person who stops caring - about themselves and others.
A holy community is a community that refuses to let anyone be pushed so far to the margins that their only language left is a curse of defeat. It is a community that understands that words have power—not only to wound, but to heal, to include, and to restore dignity; not just to a human soul, but to God’s creation writ large. May we be that sort of community, and in doing so, bless the Divine Name. Amen.
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