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For the past three months, the community has been engaged in an ongoing art project. With the guidance of Rabbi Gila Ruskin, we are making a mosaic mural about the modim prayer, instructing us to express our gratitude in the evening, morning and afternoon. It is a prayer about daily miracles and each session begins by sharing personal intentions and naming miracles in our life. So far more than 100 people have nipped, sorted, and glued stones, tiles, and pieces of broken plates. I have loved observing the eclectic groups of people who have gathered to create this mosaic. Teens and elders, new members and founding members. Housemates and people who have never sat at a table together. It has been so soothing to make something beautiful out of literal brokenness.
After weeks of watching others carve out the time to sit and mosaic, I decided it was finally my turn to jump in. I brought to the mosaic a collection of my most beloved broken bowls. A bowl I bought when I was 20 in Istanbul and another from my sabbatical trip to Cordoba, and another my father had given me from Rhodes. All handmade, colorfully painted with intricate designs. It felt so good to have somewhere to put these sacred shards. One of these bowls was a salt cellar, another a serving dish and another held some family heirlooms. (I know the mosaic includes other people's family heirlooms as well. My bowls are now glued up against Abby’s grandmother’s teapot.) I was kind of crushed when they each broke. And each time it happened I gave them to Gila, knowing she could make them into a mosaic. But never did I imagine that I would be the one to actually get to make the mosaic. It’s been surprisingly meaningful to find a use for something that no longer serves its original purpose. To see these broken parts within a larger whole. By last night I started to feel like this is an even better use for these ceramic momentos. Forever sacred art in the synagogue. Somehow it's even more satisfying to have a place to put the broken thing than it would be if the bowls had stayed whole. The process has reminded me of the Rambam’s teaching that teshuvah has the potential to bring people closer together than they were before, because the process of repair is itself deeply connective. And even more, the need to do teshuvah reveals holiness that would not have otherwise been possible. As we learn in Hilchot Teshuvah, מָקוֹם שֶׁבַּעֲלֵי תְּשׁוּבָה עוֹמְדִין אֵין צַדִּיקִים גְּמוּרִין יְכוֹלִין לַעֲמֹד בּוֹ. The spiritual place of one who does teshuvah is not accessible to someone who is entirely righteous (which isn’t possible anyway!) (7:4). This mosaic offers a kind of teshuvah for these bowls and for those of us creating the art together. The mosaic is nearly done - and stepping back, the practice has captured the essence of my experience of Kol Tzedek. It connects to the teachings of the mishkan, when everyone was instructed to bring colorful precious stones to decorate the mishkan and there is much abundance that Moses has to tell them to stop, explaining we have more than enough to create something beautiful. It connects to larger conversations we had at the congregational meeting about the history of Jewish West Philly, how to be good neighbors and embody repair and reparations with the legacy Black community of Kingsessing in the wake of centuries of broken systems. And most profoundly, it reminded me of the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” I started my day by dreaming way into the future. Rabbi Mó signing her new 5-year contract inspired us to do some high level planning. We looked out over the next 5 years with hope and humility, so much potential and so much uncertainty on the horizon.
This time of year, the weeks between Shavuot and summer break, always have this internal forward-looking focus. After the magic of revelation at Sinai comes the to-do list. Or in the words of Jack Kornfield, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” These days, anyone who walks into the KT office is quick to notice a colorful and chaotic wall of sticky notes spread over 12 months of desk calendars. As a staff, we have spent the last few weeks dreaming and planning the year ahead. It’s been an act of creation, taking the time to actually calendar everything known to us, from holidays and committee meetings to B’nei Mitzvah. It’s been fun to see people’s reaction - excitement, overwhelm, intrigue. I have a planning mind. My mother was a planner and her mother before her. Some part of me knows that advance-planning is a coping strategy, an attempt to feel in control in an unstable world. All planning has an element of hubris. I internalized this deeply in March 2020 when the entire calendar dissolved in a day. And again today when my plans to join a Families for Ceasefire delegation to Jerusalem and the West Bank next week were derailed by Israel’s escalation with Iran. I pray that the Shechina spreads her protective wings over everyone in Israel/Palestine and Iran. So terrifying. Another part of me knows that envisioning the future is an act of resilience, an act of resisting despair and choosing to keep dreaming up new ways to build our community, our world with love; to carve out time to manifest our creative ideas. It is its own spiritual practice to be able to hold excitement and satisfaction in our planning and the flexibility of spirit to accept changes as they come, which they will. It feels like a real milestone for Kol Tzedek internally to be planning a year with so much known. A year that includes big changes, like moving the High Holidays to the Friends Center and a year that includes less change overall, with Torah School and Shabbat being stable in our new building. A year that includes tremendous simcha, with 20 B’nei Mitzvah and our 2nd Annual Retreat at Northbay (Save the dates: April 3-5, 2026!). A year full of learning and connection – with so many cool classes on the horizon. Calendaring the year ahead is not unlike the Holy One’s request to take and retake the census of the Israelites in the wilderness. There is a deep human impulse to generate order from the unknown. To be sure that every person, every detail is accounted for. I have learned so much about the soothing powers of a good spreadsheet from the KT board and Josh Bloom. It’s cellular. It has been meaningful to have coated the year ahead with sticky notes, to reclaim our dreams and set our intentions on this side of the river of time. Perhaps you too want to put a sticky on some dreams for the year to come? What plans might you make to fill your future with joy and beauty? To cultivate your resilience? Every year on Yom Kippur morning there is a moment when we invite the entire community to open up their tallitot and extend them out creating a shared canopy. Some years a member even lowers a tallit down from the balcony so that someone can grab hold of a tzitzit from above. The entire room is connected. It is in this moment that we imagine ourselves as the high priests and offer each other the oldest blessing in our tradition, the Priestly Blessing.
The earnest voices of 600 people fill the room with the echo of these ancient words. Words that come directly from this week’s Torah portion, Naso. יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ יְהֹוָ֖ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ׃ יָאֵ֨ר יְהֹוָ֧ה ׀ פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ׃ יִשָּׂ֨א יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃ The biblical poetry can hardly be translated. But what I understand them to mean is the feeling of connection and protection I experience every year on Yom Kippur. It stays with me all year long. I recall it on Shabbat mornings and in moments of fear, and it soothes me. Yesterday I received a short message from a kt member: Any quick tips for feeling overwhelmed with the capacity for human evil? It was not the first time I had been asked some version of this question. In fact, it has been a theme of recent spiritual care meetings. The core practice I have been sharing when folks ask is the Buddhist practice of metta/lovingkindness. It is a very simple practice of wishing oneself or someone else well. Literally, reciting in your heart, “May I be well. May I be safe and protected. May I live with ease.” The exact wishes may vary depending on what you connect with and who you are directing the metta towards. The practice of metta is very effective at strengthening the heart, increasing our sense of safety and our capacity to express love. Only recently have I realized that the priestly blessing is a kind of metta practice.. May The Holy One bless you and protect you. May The Holy One turn towards you and be gracious. May The Holy One turn towards you and place within you shalom. The priestly blessing is thought of as the oldest blessing in Jewish tradition. In fact, it predates the entire rabbinic concept of blessings altogether. The blessing’s three refrains were once recited by the high priest to the entire congregation after the daily sacrifice (Numbers 6:23). We preserve a piece of that tradition on Yom Kippur and more recently, on Shabbat mornings. The words were later adapted and included in birkat yeladim - inviting parents to bless their children with these three wishes every Friday night. The practice of blessing ourselves and sending blessings to others, it really works. These words are an ancient amulet, eager to purify and protect the heart. It's the only quick fix I have encountered to metabolize the overwhelm of suffering in our world. Over the past months I have learned to trust that reciting the priestly blessing, quietly and regularly, can awaken a steady calm, a courageous heart, and an increased capacity to forgive, to heal, and to hope again. May the Source of Life bless and protect you always. May you feel seen and cared for in this world. May you experience the Divine in everything and everyone, and may you know within you wholeness. Ken yehi ratzon. May it be so. On Wednesday night, the students of Treehouse (KT’s afterschool program) planned the sweetest reception for everyone who participated in the Seeds of Torah project. For those who are unfamiliar, six of our young people have been working all year to create a collection of comic parshanut. Every single Torah portion will have a comic strip depiction. (There are still a few left. If you want to make one email [email protected]). The plan is to print the book in time for Simchat Torah!
The comics are beautiful, heartfelt and hilarious. They feature everything from a glittery golden calf to porta-potty jokes. They are digital and hand drawn, made by kids and grown ups alike. The kids planned the entire party from Torah trivia to the menu (featuring cheese, fruit, cookies and seltzer). Each kid even got to add three songs to the party playlist. Vibes were high. It was a very proud moment for Kol Tzedek. Among the display of comics was my own contribution, which just so happens to be this week’s parsha, Bamidbar. When Rabbi Michelle announced the project I immediately volunteered. I love to study Torah and it seemed like a fun challenge. The dialogue came to me late one night on my winter meditation retreat. I wrote it down in a flurry with no idea how I would depict it. Despite my eagerness to participate, the truth is that I am not good at figure drawings. I had no idea how to take the words and make them visual. Out of a deep desire to impress my own children, I had the thought that maybe I could just use images of the Simpsons and insert my words. But it turns out there are some copyright issues with that. Stumped, I had a brand new thought I had never had before (call it a hiddush!?). Maybe I should ask AI for help? So one night while watching the actual Simpsons with my kids, I explained the entire situation to ChatGPT and asked it to illustrate a comic about parashat BaMidbar using my words as the dialogue. It was encouraging yet ran into the same copyright images I had discovered. BUT it was not deterred like I was. Instead it had the genius, ridiculous idea to create a Simpsons-inspired Jewish family. And thus was born “The Mermelsteins!” In my comic you will meet Max, Lila, Mira and Joe. When the comic was done, I was super proud and my kids were not impressed. This in and of itself felt very on par for the Simpsons. Apparently I think it's much funnier than it really is. How Homer, I mean Joe, of me. Take a peak and see for yourself! (Interesting note: ChatGPT cannot depict anything God-like so I had to adjust my Bat Kol expectations and settle for a Marge-like orb. It was refreshing to know it does have limits!) Humor (and Homer) aside, the essential question I was trying to answer, which I find myself asking every year at this time, is why was Torah given in the Wilderness? Many a midrash asks this question and the answers proliferate. The one that resonates most this week, in these times, came to me in the raspy heavenly voice of Mira Mom Mermelstein: “Just think if I gave it to you in your house, you’d think it belonged to you!” Torah was given in the wilderness, a place that is ownerless, so that no one can say they own Torah. In our hypercapitalist world, this is essential for all of us to remember. We are stewards and students of Torah. But Torah is fundamentally hefker – ownerless, everyone’s, up for grabs and open to infinite interpretations. And the fact that Torah is so available, invites those of who study Torah to also make ourselves available to new ideas and insights – including now the creative genius of artificial intelligence. This Shavuot, we have a chance to gather again at Sinai, and allow ourselves to be awash with the wisdom of Torah. To reconstitute the mixed multitude that has always been Jewish community. To remember that no one has a claim on Torah. No one can say Torah is theirs. And as a result, it is available to be shared with abundant generosity. May it bring healing, wholeness and humor from up above, to everywhere that needs it here on earth. This week’s Torah portion reads like speculative fiction. Its opening verse invites us to journey back to Mt. Sinai, to revisit the experience of revelation itself. Parashat Behar then goes on to give detailed instructions for how we observe the shmita and the jubilee years.
The Torah explains that every seventh year shall be a year of complete rest, a sabbath for the land known as shmita. It is a time of fallowness and rejuvenation. In addition to the shmita year, we are also meant to count seven cycles of seven years. This 49 year period is to be followed by a year of release and celebration called the Jubilee. This week, each in our own ways, we feel the chasm between the world of the jubilee and our world. The horrific shooting in DC of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, two staff members of the Israeli embassy, comes at a fragile, perilous time. The famine in Gaza is dire. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil is ongoing. These murders further threaten our already eroding sense of safety and derail the growing movement to get aid to Gaza. They escalate the cycle of violence. Understandably, many of us are reacting emotionally to this news, in grief, fear, despair, and anger, and it can be challenging to parse through our reactions to find a strategic response in moments of crisis. I encourage you to use the pause of Shabbat to be with these emotions and to stay connected to your body and your breath, your loved ones and that which brings you joy. I took some time today to visit DC virtually. I mapped the walking route between the site of the shooting and the National Mall. When I zoomed in I saw the Memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Engraved on it are the words that Rev. Dr. King wrote in a letter from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Reading the news, I keep thinking, there is injustice everywhere and it is a threat to not just justice, but safety and peace, everywherefor everyone. While on my virtual walking tour, I learned something amazing about the Capital Jewish Museum. Inside the brand new museum, there’s an old synagogue. In fact it is Washington DC’s oldest synagogue. Adas Israel was first built in 1876 and in 2019, it was moved to be part of this new museum. You can read the full story here. I am not sure if the architects of the museum had the words of Yehudah Amichai in mind, but I imagine they must have. (Hat-tip to Rabbi Ariana Katz who pointed me to this poem yesterday.) In Poem Without End Amichai wrote, Inside the brand-new museum there’s an old synagogue. Inside the synagogue is me. Inside me my heart. Inside my heart a museum. Inside the museum a synagogue, inside it me, inside me my heart, inside my heart a museum Each of us has within our hearts our own concentric circles of history and community. We are inseparable from each other. Every life is a universe and every loss of life loses that person's unique museum, their synagogue and their heart, whether in DC or in Gaza. The Jubilee, as imagined in this week’s Torah portion, has never come to pass. This is a place where Torah’s idea of justice here on earth exceeds the human imagination and infrastructure. We have yet to turn our swords into plowshares, to study war no more, to hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants; to remove all borders and allow everyone to return to the place they call home (Leviticus 25:10). When the news is dystopian, Torah reminds us to keep imagining something new and better. When I was a kid, one of the regular activities we did with my synagogue was to go gleaning. We would arrive at a farm for the explicit purpose of harvesting the corners of the field and delivering the food to soup kitchens, shelters and food pantries. At the time I knew it was a mitzvah, which I understood to mean a good deed. But I didn’t realize it was literally d’oraita, a written commandment in the Torah.
We read in this week’s parsha, Emor (Lev 23:22), “Now when you harvest the harvest of your land, you are not to finish-off the edge of your field when you harvest it, the full-gleaning of your harvest you are not to glean; for the afflicted and for the sojourner you are to leave them, I am YHWH your God!” The Torah goes on to describe three different categories of gleanings to ensure that everyone who needs it has access to food, known in Hebrew as peah, leket, and shichecha. Peah refers to leaving the corners of the field unharvested. Leket refers to the food that falls to the ground during the harvest, which you shouldn’t go back to regather. And shichecha refers to fruit and vegetables that were left behind during the initial harvest, which you shouldn't return to pick. Between the corners, the dropped food and the forgotten harvest, there should be plenty in the fields for those who are landless, poor and hungry to sustain themselves. This is the entire thrust of Torah’s agricultural laws. That in a just society, everyone should have access to food. Some years ago, before I was a rabbi at Kol Tzedek, I was running an independent Hebrew school. For Sukkot, I brought the entire school to a farm and had them stand around a field of raspberries. Raspberries are both a spring and a fall crop in New England, so they were plump and ready for picking. I had everyone link arms to surround the circumference of the field. And then they released their grip and I asked them to identify the corner of the field which would be left for the community to glean. How many rows of raspberries would they leave for those who needed them? In other words, how big was the peah? The rabbis realized that the instruction to leave the corner of the field is actually not enough information. How do we know where the corner ends? How much of the field is reserved as the corner? Which is why the concept of peah appears at the top of the list of things in the mishnah (Peah 1:1) that have no measure, which is rabbinic idiom for “we can’t do enough of them.” It was the rabbis' way of saying, be as generous as you can with what you have. Do everything you can to feed everyone in your community. Harvest only what you need, and redistribute the rest. And this sentiment persists through rabbinic and medieval teachings. We learn in the Shulchan Arukh, “If there is a hungry person, one must feed them” (Yoreh Deah 250:1) Yes, we work for systematic change, but first we must ensure that every person has access to food. And all the more so, if we are meant to proactively feed people, then we certainly should not be preventing people from getting access to food. In times of war, we are not even supposed to cut down a fruit tree. Nevermind blocking aid and food altogether. Which is why it is unbearable to imagine the famine in Gaza, to know that the only Jewish state is starving the people of Gaza. For the past 18 months I have been donating to soup kitchens in Gaza, reading stories of desperate children now dying of hunger. This is an abomination. This goes against everything Torah teaches. This goes against everything I know about Jewish and Palestinian hospitality, a disgrace to the legacies of Abraham and Sarah. To imagine that there will be shabbes tables in Israel with two loaves of bread tonight, but not even a truckload of flour can enter Gaza, I can’t stomach it. None of us should be able to stomach it. I know from our recent community survey, that as a community we have some consensus. We oppose the forced starvation, displacement and expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. Given this clarity, I encourage you to join the urgent and growing movement to demand the food be allowed into gaza. Please take a moment to sign here. https://www.foodaidforgaza.org/ And then take a moment to text or email 5 people in your life. Thank you for joining me in working to get food to the people of Gaza. I leave you with the words of two poets. First the Pulitzer Prize winning words of the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha excerpted from his poem, Under the Rubble: He left the house to buy some bread for his kids. News of his death made it home, but not the bread. No bread. Death sits to eat whoever remains of the kids. No need for a table, no need for bread. … And the prayer of Martin Espada, So may every humiliated mouth, teeth like desecrated headstones, fill with the angels of bread. May it be so. This month, I am leading a book group about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, The Message. I want to take the opportunity to share some of the insights and invite you all into the learning too. For those who have not yet read it, the book begins as a letter to his students about why he writes. And then in each subsequent chapter he writes about a distinct and recent pilgrimage in his life. It is his hope, in his own words, that the book “haunts.” That it makes you say to everyone you see, “"Have you read this yet?" Which has actually been my personal experience.
The first trip he takes is to Senegal, retracing his roots across The Transatlantic Slave Trade and back to the shores of Gorée. The island of Gorée lies off the coast of Senegal, opposite Dakar. From the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast. As Coates writes about the experience of arriving at Gorée, this passages haunts: “Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess they are imagined… We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharoahs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.” So much of Jewish prayer and practice is rooted in our imagined traditions and places. Coates’ words grant me a kind of spiritual permission to long for the places my ancestors sojourned. Rome, Rhodes, Izmir, Andalusia, the Pale of Settlement, Brooklyn. Yet in my own experience, the rare times I have had to revisit one of these places, I realize how imagined my relationship is. This is my best understanding of exile. I am no longer of these places yet I long for them, for what I imagine them to have been. We are in the midst of a very brutal three week period in the Jewish imagination. It stretches from Yom HaShoah, which was observed last Thursday on April 24, includes Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, which were observed Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. And concludes on May 14 with Nakba Day. Some might even say it began on the 10th of Nisan, known as Yom HaAliyah, which is an Israeli national holiday to commemorate the Jewish people entering the Land of Israel as written in the Hebrew Bible. The holiday was established to acknowledge Aliyah, immigration to the Jewish state, as a core value of the State of Israel. These are days, which for many Jews are holidays, were created alongside the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. They collapse the religious and political imagination in ways that are deep and devastating, and divide. It feels absolutely appropriate and important to honor the memories of our ancestors who died in the Holocaust once a year. In the words of Coates, "We have a right to that memory ... to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning." So why did I not mention it last week? Yom HaShoah is actually timed specifically to lead up to Yom Hazikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. To inspire us to imagine that the State of Israel redeems the Nazi Holocaust. This narrative haunts and fails. Which is why there is a different day, January 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date of January 27 aligns with the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army in 1945. This is a day I hope we might begin to observe more collectively. This commemoration holds no ulterior motives. I think it is precisely this week when Coates’ words are meant to haunt us, to invite us “to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.” And then to invite out memories and our mourning to tell a different story. Where are the places you long for? What piece of your history do you long to recover, redeem, remember? As we pray in the weekday Amidah, תְּקַע בְּשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל לְחֵרוּתֵֽנוּ Sound the great shofar of freedom, וְשָׂא נֵס לְקַבֵּץ גָּלֻיּוֹתֵֽינוּ Let there be a miracle, and may all refugees, all dispossessed people, all who have been forced to migrate, torn from the fabric of land and community, be regathered, returned, to themselves. בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵֽינוּSpeedily and in our days. May it be so. One of my mentors and comrades, Claudia Horowitz, has had the same signature on her email for the decades that I have known her. It reads, “Don't push the river; it flows by itself.” Every time I encounter this wisdom, I think of skipping rock from the sandy banks, wading into to feel the strong current, the way a river bends, the continuous and determined flow of water, uninterruptible.
I recalled the phrase yesterday when a beloved friend gave me some honest feedback. Reflecting on recent interactions, they felt I was being too pushy. Being the generous friend they are, they said it was part chutzpah and part pushy. What arose was shame, some embarrassment and some sadness (including some tender tears). I don’t mean to be pushy and I don’t want to be pushy. I also know that pushiness, on some deep level, is what allowed me to become myself. It can be hard to know when to assert, when to push, when to allow, when to trust. After talking with my friend, I went for a run to help the feedback settle. As I watched the sun set in the Woodlands, I considered the time of year. We are in the second week of the Omer. A time of spiritual awakening and consciousness raising that follows the liberation of Passover. Everything is possible again. Flowers are blooming, leaves are unfurling, the days are longer. The earth’s resilience can inspire our own. In the mystical tradition, each of the seven weeks of the omer corresponds to each of the seven lower sefirot. Sefirot are portals for different aspects of the Divine which manifest in the natural world, in Torah and in us! So for example, the first week is the week of Hesed, which relates to the right hand, to water, Abraham, and kindness. Hesed flows. It dawned on me, in the counting of the omer, we were in the second week, the week of Gevurah. Gevurah is Hesed’s counterpart. It is strength and discipline, courage and boundaries. Not only that but yesterday was the fourth day of the second week, which corresponds to Netzach sh’be’Gevurah, the day of enduring strength, aka pushiness. I chuckled to myself, this would be the day to reflect on pushiness. I have no doubt that there are times when my own capacity for netzach sh’be’gevurah is an asset. And also no doubt it is a liability. The omer is a reminder that like the Divine, we contain it all. Nothing is inherently good or inherently bad. The work of the omer is to come into balance with each of these aspects of ourselves. The last 100 days have been dysregulating, and I am appreciative of the Omer’s invitation to rebalance. In my case to encourage today’s sefirot - hod sh’be’gevurah - acceptance rather than insistence. I know in my heart the good that can come from gevurah, but I also know when overused it can turn into a strong arm, which I do not want. If you have been on the receiving end of my pushiness, I sincerely apologize. I am already looking forward to week three, the week of Tiferet - a week devoted to cultivating beauty, compassion and integrity. I invite you to take a moment to pause and acknowledge today is the 12th day of the Omer, which makes one week and five days of the Omer. Hod Sh’be’gevurah. The day when we remind ourselves we don’t have to push the river, it flows by itself. Strong currents and all. What a relief! With gratitude to Claudia’s practice and wisdom, I offer you her 100 days of meditation. When I was parenting toddlers one of the most delicate determinants of my days was how well I managed to get my kids through a transition from one activity to another. From having breakfast to going to school or dinnertime to tubtime. In order to soothe myself and cope with what were some very difficult transitions, I started singing a parody of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof in my head, “Transitions! Transitions!” This made me chuckle and helped soften me to the challenges of transitioning. (Which you would think as a trans person I would be familiar with).
But the truth is, transitions are most enjoyable when there is spaciousness. The clutter of daily activities seeps into the moments between them, which minimizes necessary time to integrate, arrive, pivot, be present. Which is why I think Judaism calls our attention to transitions. Judaism sees transitions as holy carve outs. Our prayer services mark transitions in time. The reddening of the morning sky. Twilight. The moment the sun dips below the horizon. The first three stars in the night sky. Our festivals mark transitions in seasons and the natural cycles. Sukkot brings on the rainy season in the Fall and Passover the dry season in the Spring. And our lifecycles call attention to personal transitions. The onset of puberty with B’nei Mitzvah, the time between the death of a loved one and burial known as aninut, to name just a few. This Saturday night we get to make one of the most sacred and storied transitions, from havdalah to seder. Much rabbinic ink has been spilled about the holy handoff between Shabbat and Passover, notably how do we honor both sacred times as we end shabbat and begin Pesach. “Transitions! Transitions!” I love to imagine the delicacy of trying to avoid our sacred holidays from getting cranky. We must both sanctify the new holiday and separate between Shabbat and the weekday using the same ritual act of drinking wine. The Havdalah cup does double duty as the Kiddush cup. But how do we manage these simultaneous obligations? Or, more precisely, in what order ought we combine all the necessary blessings? It's a tricky spiritual transition. Both shabbes and Passover want our undivided attention. But the truth is, I am realistically going to be preparing for seder on Shabbat afternoon. How do we offer each the kavod they deserve, and how might we learn to offer that to ourselves? In the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis imagine this moment with royal hospitality. In masechet Pesachim, Rabbi Hanina teaches that this is comparable to a queen who is exiting a city and a governor is entering. Etiquette dictates that the inhabitants of the city first escort the queen out of the city to take leave of her in a dignified fashion, and afterward they go out to greet the governor. Similarly, one should first recite havdala, to take leave of Shabbat, and only then recite kiddush over the Festival, whose sanctity is lesser than that of Shabbat. Now mind you, I am not so deferential to queens and governors as these texts suggest. But I do love considering the social etiquette of sacred time and how to be most hospitable to the flow of honored guests in our home. The answer the rabbis offer is my favorite acronym: יקנה״ז, pronounced YaKNeHaZ: יין (yayin) for the blessing over the wine; קידוש (kiddush) for the blessing over the new holiday just beginning; נר (ner) for the blessing over the flame; הבדלה (havdalah) for the blessing Hamavdil; and זמן (zman) for Shehechiyanu. May we be blessed in our comings and our goings. My father’s charoset and matzah ball soup, afikomen fondue and the full moon. These are a few of my favorite (Passover) things. Part of me is very much looking forward to the songs and flavors of seder season. But another part of me is feeling quite anxious and avoidant, even fearful. (I have uncharacteristically not started my Pesach cleaning).
As one of the three pilgrimage festivals, Passover is designed to bring us all together, across time and space. That is its legacy. Seder night connects me to all the other seders I have been at and all the people I have told this sacred story with. The year I wandered Istanbul searching for matzah, the year I dressed up as a wild beast, the years we were in quarantine. Perhaps one of the most profound moments for me as a Jew is sitting down to seder on Erev Pesach and imagining a web of Jews all over the world also sitting down to their seders. On every continent (except maybe Antarctica), tables will be set, stories will be told, questions will be asked. Even Jews who consider themselves secular find themselves celebrating Passover. Even under duress, even during the Holocaust, Jews found ways to make seder. Passover traditions are one of the most palpable expressions of clal yisrael / the entity, the entirety of Israel. But this year I am really struggling. The concept of clal yisrael has never been easy for me to swallow whole, but these days it feels indigestible. The chasm is deep and so painful. The image of settlers sitting down to seder in the West Bank, rifles around their chests, young Jewish soldiers at checkpoints, Palestinians captive in their homes on their ancestral lands, I can’t stomach it. Death of the first born, death of 10,000 children in Gaza. Will they use the plagues to justify it? Will they claim them as liberation casualties? And then there is the rising fascism here in the US, and its manipulation of antisemitism to silence free speech, deport immigrants and disrupt democracy. I am sick watching so much of clal Israel respond with indifference and in some cases actively cheering on extralegal deportations of people for writing op eds. This administration's explicit manipulation of antisemitism to undermine democracy and the Jewish establishment’s collusion with it is deplorable and dangerous (I highly recommend Rabbi Sharon Brous’ Purim Sermon: I am not your pawn! on this topic.) On April 12 1941, 84 seder years ago to the (seder) day, Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, known as the Esh Kodesh, the rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, was teaching about exactly this. He wrote, “No Jew is a separate individual. He belongs to the entirety of the congregation of the Jewish people. Thus when one person learns Torah and worships God, he thereby illuminates all Jewish people.” He explains that when one Jew does teshuvah, it benefits all Jewish people. But then I suppose the inverse also applies, when one Jew strays horribly from the path of righteousness, it affects all of us. On my recent road trip to Detroit for Shosh’s grandma’s funeral, I opted to take off my kippa at the rest stop. I am still unsure, did I not feel safe or did I not feel proud? The Esh Kodesh goes on to explain that there is a kind of clal in which the whole is composed of separate parts. As any whole thing, take a car or a book, is made up of many smaller parts (metal, words, etc). But then, he elaborates, “There is another kind of clal that constitutes an essential, simple unity from which the details are branches that diverge…When we reach the source or root of such a clal, everything has become one. An example of this is fruit that has fallen from a tree. When we cut it off from its source, we watch it decay. The germ of the tree unifies and sustains all the disparate parts…” For the Esh Kodesh, this is how it is with the congregation of israel. The whole is not comprised of individuals. On the contrary, the individuals are branches of the whole. “The Congregation of Israel exists not because of a decision to join together and unify, but because the germ is the Jewish soul that includes all Jews and from which individual Jews branch out.” As I read this I felt so much grief and disconnect from his romantic vision of clal yisrael. This year, we are more like a broken down car than a tree of life. For the Esh Kodesh, it turns out Passover is also a pinnacle moment for clal yisrael. The Haggadah explains that the wicked child is wicked because he excluded himself from the clal. He asks, “What does this ritual mean for you?” and not “for us?” And the Esh Kodesh takes that to mean that the wicked child has cut himself off from his source, he is like a piece of fruit fallen from the tree, rotting on the forest floor. I am in a bit of an existential spiritual crisis, imagining seders across the Jewish world. This year I’m feeling both part of them and not part of them. I want to feel connected to them, and I want not to feel connected to them. All of this has me wondering, am I the wicked child? Are they? What might it take to feel part of the whole? What might I risk? What might I lose? It is yet unclear to me if I believe in an essential Jewish soul, though it's a soothing image to see us as connected in such a Sinai way. I know it feels bad to fray from my Source, to fear my own people, even my own family. I know I am not alone in this existential discomfort. I know that a big part of what keeps me tethered to clal yisrael is you all. This community makes me believe in a Judaism worthy of our children’s children and the earth itself. I can tell you I plan to clean for passover and brave seder night. To sing songs that have been sung for more than a thousand years. To allow myself to hope it might be healing. To hope it might widen the narrow places in my heart, to taste the tears and bless them. |
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General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143