Rabbi Lizzie HOrne Mozes: Relational abundance, or: My car is definitely not on 24th street
Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5786
Sept 24, 2025
Watch
A few weeks ago, I walked out of my house with Shai, my almost-three-year-old, to the car. Except… the car wasn’t there. Despite the complete lack of signage – classic Philadelphia, my car had, apparently, been towed somewhere due to construction. “Walk two blocks this way,” one person said, when I asked where my car might be. “It’ll be down there.” It wasn’t there. We circled back. “Oh, it’s not there? Okay, they said it’s definitely on 24th Street between Wharton and Reed. Go there!” It… wasn’t there. “Oh, God,” I thought, as I realized I was half a block ahead of Shai. I hadn’t even realized that I was basically sprinting and his little legs couldn’t keep up. “Oh, God,” I thought, as we walked frantically from block to block. “Is he going to pee his pants? He’s definitely going to pee his pants.” We’d just potty trained him the weekend prior. “Bad timing,” I thought, considering the circumstances. “Oh, God,” I thought, as I looked at the time. We’d left especially early, but the window to get him to daycare and me to something rabbinically important was getting smaller and smaller.
It felt bleak. There wasn’t enough time, I didn’t have enough energy, there wasn’t enough of me to be a search party, a mom, and a rabbi all at once.
We’re living in a time when scarcity is a reality. Not enough affordable housing, not enough healthcare, not enough courage in our political leaders. Everything feels like it’s collapsing inward – democracy, climate, even the basic capacity to talk to one another. We’re living in a time where we’re told love, friendship, each other, is not enough. If you’ve felt a constant background hum of “there is not enough” – you’re not imagining it. The feeling of scarcity is cultural, it’s political, it’s personal. It’s everywhere.
So there I was, stuck in my own tiny scarcity spiral, when something cracked it open. A group of people doing yardwork in our park spotted us racing around. “Are you looking for your car?” “Yes. I have no idea where it is. They said it’s here. It’s not. I’m running late. I need a bathroom for him. Can he pee on this tree, you think? I really do need to get to work.” They stopped me. “We’ll help you find it.” They all took off after I described my car to them, one of them hitting the alarm feature on my keys incessantly. Five minutes later… “We found it! It’s over here!”
This didn’t make me any less late, any less sweaty, any less willing to encourage Shai to pee on the tree. But that scene reminded me that there’s another kind of arithmetic running alongside scarcity. A math that doesn’t add up neatly, but that somehow still works. I’ll call it relational abundance. The kind that happens when other people, in their messy, ordinary generosity, interrupt the lie of scarcity and say: you’re not doing this alone. The kind that happens when we finally stop and say: I need help.
–
Our tradition doesn’t deny scarcity. Our ancestors knew it intimately.
In our Rosh Hashanah Torah readings, we encounter two women who had lived experiences of it – though in profoundly different ways.
Sarah has lived decades with the ache of absence. The Torah puts it bluntly:
חָדַל֙ לִהְי֣וֹת לְשָׂרָ֔ה אֹ֖רַח כַּנָּשִֽׁים.
The way of women had ceased for Sarah.
However we read that – about her body, about time, about the relentless waiting – we understand she’s aching. The path she once imagined seems no longer possible, or, at least, no longer imaginable. And the text doesn’t soften it, doesn’t rush to reassure us with the miracle that comes later. It lingers in the reality of her pain.
Hagar was cast out from Abraham’s household with her son, Ishmael, and she wanders into the desert with only a skin of water. When it runs dry, she places Ishmael under a bush, unable to watch him suffer. There is nothing abstract about this. Her story does not allow us to turn scarcity into metaphor. It is the most material of realities: no food, no water, no safety.
What’s striking is that neither woman hides from this truth. Sarah laughs, and her laughter is complicated – bitter, incredulous, maybe even mocking. It is the sound of someone who dares to name how absurd hope feels. Hagar cries out. Her tears and her wails do not change her circumstances, but they refuse silence. Both women risk exposing what it means to be human in a moment when the world has collapsed around them.
That’s when we see abundance, of different kinds, break in. A child is born; a well appears. But it’s crucial to see what the text refuses to do. Neither of these things erase what came before. The ache of Sarah’s long years of waiting is not undone. Hagar’s expulsion and the injustice of her treatment do not vanish. The Torah does not resolve the tension. Instead, it insists that life continues even in the wake of rupture.
This is not a theology of silver linings, to be certain. It is a theology, I hope, that names and holds loss without pretending it disappears. Abundance, when it comes, arrives in the middle of a broken story. It coexists with the pain that shaped the path to get there. And maybe that is what makes it real – not an escape from scarcity, but a reminder that even in the desert, even after decades of disappointment, something can still be given, something can still grow.
The risk, then, is not in denying scarcity, but in telling the truth of it – in laughing, in weeping, in refusing to close down one’s longing – and not doing it alone. That risk doesn’t guarantee repair. But it does make space for the possibility that life, fragile and unfinished, will still insist on itself.
–
In today’s haftarah, we read from Jeremiah. And, let me tell you, this dude is audacious. To people whose city has been destroyed, whose leaders have been taken, whose lives feel hollowed out, he shares the words of God:
אָ֣ז תִּשְׂמַ֤ח בְּתוּלָה֙ בְּמָח֔וֹל וּבַחֻרִ֥ים וּזְקֵנִ֖ים יַחְדָּ֑ו וְהָפַכְתִּ֨י אֶבְלָ֤ם לְשָׂשׂוֹן֙ וְנִ֣חַמְתִּ֔ים וְשִׂמַּחְתִּ֖ים מִיגוֹנָֽם׃
Then shall maidens dance gaily,
Young men and old alike.
I will turn their mourning to joy,
I will comfort them and cheer them in their grief.
It’s infuriating. Truly – it makes me seethe. Joy? Cheer? When everything is gone? When survival itself feels like a gamble?
These words land in the middle of the pain. Uninvited, impossible to ignore. Jeremiah doesn’t wait for conditions to improve. He doesn’t say, “Okay, I know this whole exile thing sucks, but one day you’ll feel better.” He says it while the ruins are still smoldering, while the displacement and uncertainty are still raw. He reminds us that we persist, even when everything feels broken. That small sparks of recognition and care can exist alongside despair.
This isn’t about optimism or spiritual gymnastics. It’s about noticing that life and grief coexist. That remembering, being witnessed, being acknowledged – by a community, by history, by one another – is itself a kind of survival. It doesn’t fix what’s broken. It doesn’t make loss vanish. But it insists that, even in devastation, there are other registers of life that refuse to be canceled.
–
Now, it’s one thing to talk about Jeremiah’s exile, or Sarah’s sadness, or Hagar’s wilderness. It’s another to talk about our own. For me to talk about mine.
One of my closest friends, Devon, died last year of brain cancer. She’d been sick for a while, but her death was sudden. Many of us have had those kinds of deaths. Unexpected. I met Devon when I was a freshman in high school, and was lucky to know and love her into adulthood. Eric and I actually moved into our house in South Philadelphia, because she wanted me to live close by – just two blocks away. Over the years, I got to watch her son grow, from a tiny baby into the four-year-old he had just become when she died. Devon was the first person who showed up for me when I came home from the hospital with Shai, and she did it the way she did everything: fully present, attentive, and with a warmth that made ordinary moments feel extraordinary. She brought the “magic” swaddle that would make him sleep. Spoiler: it didn’t. She had a brilliance and energy that made you feel more awake just by being near her – sharp, witty, curious, generous, and completely alive. She devoted herself to teaching, mentoring, and creating spaces where children could flourish, and she carried her family, friends, and community with her through that light. Her death was seismic. It left a rupture so profound that the world felt narrower and harsher – a loss that pressed in from every side and made even simple continuations of daily life feel tenuous.
And yet, in that unbearable space, a few people – Devon’s closest friends – showed up for each other. On the day she died, we sat in the interfaith chapel at the hospital, we held hands, and I sang. My voice was creaky, but I did it anyway. We couldn’t change what had happened, we couldn’t undo the rupture, we couldn’t save her. All we could do was be present: hold one another, tell stories, sit in the dark together, laugh when it broke through, cry when it became too much.
This small group of people, a couple I already knew, a couple I didn’t, became what I needed to hold the grief. This group wasn’t tidy, and it wasn’t a silver lining. It was survival – raw, unvarnished survival that only existed because a handful of people were willing to risk being vulnerable together.
That tension between scarcity and human presence is something I live with daily. Because the lessons of watching grief and care unfold in Devon’s community are mirrored, in a very different way, in raising my own child. Watching a small network come together to carry loss made me realize just how much I depend on networks in ordinary life – in parenting, in friendship, in day-to-day survival.
And if I’m honest, my instinct, in parenting specifically, is often the opposite. My first response to stress, grief, or responsibility is scarcity thinking: “I have to do everything myself. No one else will do this for him the way I do. If I don’t show up perfectly, everything will fall apart.” It’s something I inherited as an eldest daughter (eldest daughters here know what I mean): the unspoken charge to manage, to carry, to solve, to hold. The world feels safer if I’m the one keeping it together.
But I keep getting proven wrong. When I watch Shai grow, I see him surrounded by more love than Eric and I could ever supply on our own. His aunts and uncles teach him games we might not make time for, our friends cheer on his tiny victories – like when he scores a goal at the playground, his teachers correct his mistakes, and our neighbors indulge his absurd toddler sermons.
What I’ve learned is, he thrives, not because I or Eric are enough, but because there is enough to go around – a village of enough. And it’s all right in front of us.
Our relationships – showing up, again and again, can make even the unredeemable survivable.
It’s the willingness to show up when it’s hard, when it’s painful, when it feels like nothing will ever be enough. And yet, somehow, through people willing to carry it with you, it is.
–
Martin Buber, in his classic book I and Thou, describes two basic ways we relate to other people. The first he calls “I-It.” In an “I-It” relationship, we see the other person mainly as a means to an end – as someone or something that helps us get what we want. Most of our everyday interactions fall into this category: buying something at a store, collaborating on a work project, even chatting with someone to get information or a favor. That doesn’t make these relationships bad – they’re just functional, practical, part of daily life. The trouble comes when we treat people purely as tools, using them for our own gain without regard for them as human beings.
The second kind Buber calls “I-Thou.” This is a different level of connection. In an “I-Thou” relationship, we encounter another person as a full human being, not as an object or a means to an end. We recognize their inner life, their dignity, their presence – what Buber calls the essential holiness of their soul. These moments are rare and precious. According to Buber, these kinds of encounters also become the way we experience God in the world: not as an abstract idea, but in the real, lived encounter with another person.
I want to challenge Buber. I think building “I-Thou” relationships – as many as possible, so they aren’t rare – are how we survive in a world that insists there’s never enough. I think seeing the holiness in each other, taking relational risks, are how we fight against scarcity.
Dean Spade, the legal scholar and activist, talks about mutual aid as “the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.” It encourages to be in relationship with one another and to see that needs aren’t a moral failing – they’re systemic. Mutual aid says: there is enough – as long as we coordinate, show up, and build networks that persist beyond any one act of generosity. Every gesture of care becomes part of a living system.
Renowned psychologist Judith Jordan’s relational-cultural theory builds on this emphasizing that human development and well-being don’t happen in isolation – they happen in relationship. Growth, resilience, and even healing emerge in the context of connections marked by mutual empathy, responsiveness, and authenticity. Care isn’t a bonus or an optional extra; it’s central to how we thrive. Jordan also points out that these relationships inherently resist systems that depend on scarcity, competition, and isolation to maintain control. Showing up for one another, then, is more than kindness – it’s a form of quiet resistance, a deliberate act that affirms human dignity in the face of forces that would have us go it alone.
Grief, loss, and struggle are isolating. And yet, time and again, people show up. Relational abundance isn’t about erasing pain. It’s about building enough care into the system that pain doesn’t crush us. Abundant love becomes infrastructure: a scaffold strong enough to hold sorrow and, at the same time, hope.
Adrienne Maree Brown, Rav Adrienne Maree Brown to many of us, a writer, activist, and visionary said on an episode of OnBeing: “We live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told that it is scarce and we are given all these stories of scarcity. What does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there not causing harm to each other and experiencing abundance?”
Abundance isn’t a fantasy or a luxury. It’s practical. It’s collective. It’s how communities survive political, social, and emotional scarcity. Alone, scarcity wins. Together, we create enough – enough care, enough resilience, enough love – to hold each other through grief, through struggle, through life. And it is in these moments of full presence, when we risk seeing and being seen, that we touch something sacred in one another.
–
There’s a Chassidic story about Isaac ben Yakil from Krakow. One night, he dreams that a treasure is buried in a distant city, so he sets off to find it. He asks, searches, knocks on doors, meets strangers, and finally tells a guard about his quest. The guard listens and says, almost casually, “That’s funny… I dreamed of a treasure too – buried under the stove of a man named Isaac ben Yakil in Krakow.” Isaac goes home, digs under his own stove, and finds the treasure exactly where he started.
The story is absurd and familiar. We spend so much of our lives looking elsewhere for enough – enough love, enough care, enough hope – when it’s been under our feet all along. It’s in the people around us, the people doing the yardwork in the park near your house when your car goes missing; in the moments when we hold hands with someone we just met who’s experiencing the same loss, in the quiet gestures that keep a life from collapsing under its own weight.
Look around the room for a moment – at everyone here. We live in a world that constantly insists there is never enough. And yet, I know from my year at Kol Tzedek that abundance is right here. We get to be the treasure under each other’s stove. Scarcity does not get the last word. Presence does. And here, together, that presence is enough.
Shanah tovah.
Sept 24, 2025
Watch
A few weeks ago, I walked out of my house with Shai, my almost-three-year-old, to the car. Except… the car wasn’t there. Despite the complete lack of signage – classic Philadelphia, my car had, apparently, been towed somewhere due to construction. “Walk two blocks this way,” one person said, when I asked where my car might be. “It’ll be down there.” It wasn’t there. We circled back. “Oh, it’s not there? Okay, they said it’s definitely on 24th Street between Wharton and Reed. Go there!” It… wasn’t there. “Oh, God,” I thought, as I realized I was half a block ahead of Shai. I hadn’t even realized that I was basically sprinting and his little legs couldn’t keep up. “Oh, God,” I thought, as we walked frantically from block to block. “Is he going to pee his pants? He’s definitely going to pee his pants.” We’d just potty trained him the weekend prior. “Bad timing,” I thought, considering the circumstances. “Oh, God,” I thought, as I looked at the time. We’d left especially early, but the window to get him to daycare and me to something rabbinically important was getting smaller and smaller.
It felt bleak. There wasn’t enough time, I didn’t have enough energy, there wasn’t enough of me to be a search party, a mom, and a rabbi all at once.
We’re living in a time when scarcity is a reality. Not enough affordable housing, not enough healthcare, not enough courage in our political leaders. Everything feels like it’s collapsing inward – democracy, climate, even the basic capacity to talk to one another. We’re living in a time where we’re told love, friendship, each other, is not enough. If you’ve felt a constant background hum of “there is not enough” – you’re not imagining it. The feeling of scarcity is cultural, it’s political, it’s personal. It’s everywhere.
So there I was, stuck in my own tiny scarcity spiral, when something cracked it open. A group of people doing yardwork in our park spotted us racing around. “Are you looking for your car?” “Yes. I have no idea where it is. They said it’s here. It’s not. I’m running late. I need a bathroom for him. Can he pee on this tree, you think? I really do need to get to work.” They stopped me. “We’ll help you find it.” They all took off after I described my car to them, one of them hitting the alarm feature on my keys incessantly. Five minutes later… “We found it! It’s over here!”
This didn’t make me any less late, any less sweaty, any less willing to encourage Shai to pee on the tree. But that scene reminded me that there’s another kind of arithmetic running alongside scarcity. A math that doesn’t add up neatly, but that somehow still works. I’ll call it relational abundance. The kind that happens when other people, in their messy, ordinary generosity, interrupt the lie of scarcity and say: you’re not doing this alone. The kind that happens when we finally stop and say: I need help.
–
Our tradition doesn’t deny scarcity. Our ancestors knew it intimately.
In our Rosh Hashanah Torah readings, we encounter two women who had lived experiences of it – though in profoundly different ways.
Sarah has lived decades with the ache of absence. The Torah puts it bluntly:
חָדַל֙ לִהְי֣וֹת לְשָׂרָ֔ה אֹ֖רַח כַּנָּשִֽׁים.
The way of women had ceased for Sarah.
However we read that – about her body, about time, about the relentless waiting – we understand she’s aching. The path she once imagined seems no longer possible, or, at least, no longer imaginable. And the text doesn’t soften it, doesn’t rush to reassure us with the miracle that comes later. It lingers in the reality of her pain.
Hagar was cast out from Abraham’s household with her son, Ishmael, and she wanders into the desert with only a skin of water. When it runs dry, she places Ishmael under a bush, unable to watch him suffer. There is nothing abstract about this. Her story does not allow us to turn scarcity into metaphor. It is the most material of realities: no food, no water, no safety.
What’s striking is that neither woman hides from this truth. Sarah laughs, and her laughter is complicated – bitter, incredulous, maybe even mocking. It is the sound of someone who dares to name how absurd hope feels. Hagar cries out. Her tears and her wails do not change her circumstances, but they refuse silence. Both women risk exposing what it means to be human in a moment when the world has collapsed around them.
That’s when we see abundance, of different kinds, break in. A child is born; a well appears. But it’s crucial to see what the text refuses to do. Neither of these things erase what came before. The ache of Sarah’s long years of waiting is not undone. Hagar’s expulsion and the injustice of her treatment do not vanish. The Torah does not resolve the tension. Instead, it insists that life continues even in the wake of rupture.
This is not a theology of silver linings, to be certain. It is a theology, I hope, that names and holds loss without pretending it disappears. Abundance, when it comes, arrives in the middle of a broken story. It coexists with the pain that shaped the path to get there. And maybe that is what makes it real – not an escape from scarcity, but a reminder that even in the desert, even after decades of disappointment, something can still be given, something can still grow.
The risk, then, is not in denying scarcity, but in telling the truth of it – in laughing, in weeping, in refusing to close down one’s longing – and not doing it alone. That risk doesn’t guarantee repair. But it does make space for the possibility that life, fragile and unfinished, will still insist on itself.
–
In today’s haftarah, we read from Jeremiah. And, let me tell you, this dude is audacious. To people whose city has been destroyed, whose leaders have been taken, whose lives feel hollowed out, he shares the words of God:
אָ֣ז תִּשְׂמַ֤ח בְּתוּלָה֙ בְּמָח֔וֹל וּבַחֻרִ֥ים וּזְקֵנִ֖ים יַחְדָּ֑ו וְהָפַכְתִּ֨י אֶבְלָ֤ם לְשָׂשׂוֹן֙ וְנִ֣חַמְתִּ֔ים וְשִׂמַּחְתִּ֖ים מִיגוֹנָֽם׃
Then shall maidens dance gaily,
Young men and old alike.
I will turn their mourning to joy,
I will comfort them and cheer them in their grief.
It’s infuriating. Truly – it makes me seethe. Joy? Cheer? When everything is gone? When survival itself feels like a gamble?
These words land in the middle of the pain. Uninvited, impossible to ignore. Jeremiah doesn’t wait for conditions to improve. He doesn’t say, “Okay, I know this whole exile thing sucks, but one day you’ll feel better.” He says it while the ruins are still smoldering, while the displacement and uncertainty are still raw. He reminds us that we persist, even when everything feels broken. That small sparks of recognition and care can exist alongside despair.
This isn’t about optimism or spiritual gymnastics. It’s about noticing that life and grief coexist. That remembering, being witnessed, being acknowledged – by a community, by history, by one another – is itself a kind of survival. It doesn’t fix what’s broken. It doesn’t make loss vanish. But it insists that, even in devastation, there are other registers of life that refuse to be canceled.
–
Now, it’s one thing to talk about Jeremiah’s exile, or Sarah’s sadness, or Hagar’s wilderness. It’s another to talk about our own. For me to talk about mine.
One of my closest friends, Devon, died last year of brain cancer. She’d been sick for a while, but her death was sudden. Many of us have had those kinds of deaths. Unexpected. I met Devon when I was a freshman in high school, and was lucky to know and love her into adulthood. Eric and I actually moved into our house in South Philadelphia, because she wanted me to live close by – just two blocks away. Over the years, I got to watch her son grow, from a tiny baby into the four-year-old he had just become when she died. Devon was the first person who showed up for me when I came home from the hospital with Shai, and she did it the way she did everything: fully present, attentive, and with a warmth that made ordinary moments feel extraordinary. She brought the “magic” swaddle that would make him sleep. Spoiler: it didn’t. She had a brilliance and energy that made you feel more awake just by being near her – sharp, witty, curious, generous, and completely alive. She devoted herself to teaching, mentoring, and creating spaces where children could flourish, and she carried her family, friends, and community with her through that light. Her death was seismic. It left a rupture so profound that the world felt narrower and harsher – a loss that pressed in from every side and made even simple continuations of daily life feel tenuous.
And yet, in that unbearable space, a few people – Devon’s closest friends – showed up for each other. On the day she died, we sat in the interfaith chapel at the hospital, we held hands, and I sang. My voice was creaky, but I did it anyway. We couldn’t change what had happened, we couldn’t undo the rupture, we couldn’t save her. All we could do was be present: hold one another, tell stories, sit in the dark together, laugh when it broke through, cry when it became too much.
This small group of people, a couple I already knew, a couple I didn’t, became what I needed to hold the grief. This group wasn’t tidy, and it wasn’t a silver lining. It was survival – raw, unvarnished survival that only existed because a handful of people were willing to risk being vulnerable together.
That tension between scarcity and human presence is something I live with daily. Because the lessons of watching grief and care unfold in Devon’s community are mirrored, in a very different way, in raising my own child. Watching a small network come together to carry loss made me realize just how much I depend on networks in ordinary life – in parenting, in friendship, in day-to-day survival.
And if I’m honest, my instinct, in parenting specifically, is often the opposite. My first response to stress, grief, or responsibility is scarcity thinking: “I have to do everything myself. No one else will do this for him the way I do. If I don’t show up perfectly, everything will fall apart.” It’s something I inherited as an eldest daughter (eldest daughters here know what I mean): the unspoken charge to manage, to carry, to solve, to hold. The world feels safer if I’m the one keeping it together.
But I keep getting proven wrong. When I watch Shai grow, I see him surrounded by more love than Eric and I could ever supply on our own. His aunts and uncles teach him games we might not make time for, our friends cheer on his tiny victories – like when he scores a goal at the playground, his teachers correct his mistakes, and our neighbors indulge his absurd toddler sermons.
What I’ve learned is, he thrives, not because I or Eric are enough, but because there is enough to go around – a village of enough. And it’s all right in front of us.
Our relationships – showing up, again and again, can make even the unredeemable survivable.
It’s the willingness to show up when it’s hard, when it’s painful, when it feels like nothing will ever be enough. And yet, somehow, through people willing to carry it with you, it is.
–
Martin Buber, in his classic book I and Thou, describes two basic ways we relate to other people. The first he calls “I-It.” In an “I-It” relationship, we see the other person mainly as a means to an end – as someone or something that helps us get what we want. Most of our everyday interactions fall into this category: buying something at a store, collaborating on a work project, even chatting with someone to get information or a favor. That doesn’t make these relationships bad – they’re just functional, practical, part of daily life. The trouble comes when we treat people purely as tools, using them for our own gain without regard for them as human beings.
The second kind Buber calls “I-Thou.” This is a different level of connection. In an “I-Thou” relationship, we encounter another person as a full human being, not as an object or a means to an end. We recognize their inner life, their dignity, their presence – what Buber calls the essential holiness of their soul. These moments are rare and precious. According to Buber, these kinds of encounters also become the way we experience God in the world: not as an abstract idea, but in the real, lived encounter with another person.
I want to challenge Buber. I think building “I-Thou” relationships – as many as possible, so they aren’t rare – are how we survive in a world that insists there’s never enough. I think seeing the holiness in each other, taking relational risks, are how we fight against scarcity.
Dean Spade, the legal scholar and activist, talks about mutual aid as “the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.” It encourages to be in relationship with one another and to see that needs aren’t a moral failing – they’re systemic. Mutual aid says: there is enough – as long as we coordinate, show up, and build networks that persist beyond any one act of generosity. Every gesture of care becomes part of a living system.
Renowned psychologist Judith Jordan’s relational-cultural theory builds on this emphasizing that human development and well-being don’t happen in isolation – they happen in relationship. Growth, resilience, and even healing emerge in the context of connections marked by mutual empathy, responsiveness, and authenticity. Care isn’t a bonus or an optional extra; it’s central to how we thrive. Jordan also points out that these relationships inherently resist systems that depend on scarcity, competition, and isolation to maintain control. Showing up for one another, then, is more than kindness – it’s a form of quiet resistance, a deliberate act that affirms human dignity in the face of forces that would have us go it alone.
Grief, loss, and struggle are isolating. And yet, time and again, people show up. Relational abundance isn’t about erasing pain. It’s about building enough care into the system that pain doesn’t crush us. Abundant love becomes infrastructure: a scaffold strong enough to hold sorrow and, at the same time, hope.
Adrienne Maree Brown, Rav Adrienne Maree Brown to many of us, a writer, activist, and visionary said on an episode of OnBeing: “We live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told that it is scarce and we are given all these stories of scarcity. What does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there not causing harm to each other and experiencing abundance?”
Abundance isn’t a fantasy or a luxury. It’s practical. It’s collective. It’s how communities survive political, social, and emotional scarcity. Alone, scarcity wins. Together, we create enough – enough care, enough resilience, enough love – to hold each other through grief, through struggle, through life. And it is in these moments of full presence, when we risk seeing and being seen, that we touch something sacred in one another.
–
There’s a Chassidic story about Isaac ben Yakil from Krakow. One night, he dreams that a treasure is buried in a distant city, so he sets off to find it. He asks, searches, knocks on doors, meets strangers, and finally tells a guard about his quest. The guard listens and says, almost casually, “That’s funny… I dreamed of a treasure too – buried under the stove of a man named Isaac ben Yakil in Krakow.” Isaac goes home, digs under his own stove, and finds the treasure exactly where he started.
The story is absurd and familiar. We spend so much of our lives looking elsewhere for enough – enough love, enough care, enough hope – when it’s been under our feet all along. It’s in the people around us, the people doing the yardwork in the park near your house when your car goes missing; in the moments when we hold hands with someone we just met who’s experiencing the same loss, in the quiet gestures that keep a life from collapsing under its own weight.
Look around the room for a moment – at everyone here. We live in a world that constantly insists there is never enough. And yet, I know from my year at Kol Tzedek that abundance is right here. We get to be the treasure under each other’s stove. Scarcity does not get the last word. Presence does. And here, together, that presence is enough.
Shanah tovah.