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I am just returning from the Conference for the Jewish Left, which was held at Boston University. It was an inspiring gathering of nearly 1200 people, in person and on Zoom. What started as a local academic convening three years ago has quickly become an international movement-building opportunity. I wanted to take the time to share a few highlights.
There were academics and activists, artists, organizers, philanthropists, so many rabbis and rabbinical students, writers and retirees looking for a spiritual and political home. There were college students from more than 50 universities. It was a very hopeful window into the Jewish future. I had the privilege of teaching a session to more than 100 participants all hungry for liberatory Torah, which was awesome. But my personal highlight was getting to meet up with Zara Auritt, now a KT college student who came with a crew of eight friends from their newly forming campus student group at Smith called Tzedek Tirdof (Justice shall you pursue). The nachas of talking political strategy and community building with a young adult whose B’nei Mitzvah I officiated was more than a conference highlight; it was a life highlight. Each of the keynote speakers responded to questions in ways that touched me deeply. And I want to convey an insight from each of them. When asked what new he would add to his book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart shared that he finished writing before Donald Trump was back in the Oval office. He sees now that “the refusal of American Jewish institutions to hold Israel accountable to equity under the law for all its citizens reveals their inability to hold our government accountable for the same.” If he were writing the book today, he would stress that point. Arielle Angel of Jewish Currents spoke to the need for new Jewish institutions and the true financial constraints that limit our institution-building efforts. Given unlimited money she thinks we need a new federation (I couldn’t agree more!). But when asked the opposite question, “Given our limited resources, what is the most important investment we can make? She said without skipping a beat, “Synagogues.” There is a deep longing for there to be communities in every city where people can observe shabbat, study Torah, celebrate baby namings, educate their children, protest injustice and mourn their losses, without having to compromise their support for Palestinian freedom. Synagogues coalition spaces that strengthen our resilience and connect us to a moral and spiritual lineage. And coalitions are how we become more powerful. I do not take for granted that we have created that together at Kol Tzedek. That we exist and what we have created together really matters and creates a model for what is possible for the next generation. One of the most profound moments was receiving the words of Fadi Quran, a Palestinian leader who flew in from Ramallah for the conference. He talked about the need for Jews to emancipate ourselves from fear and create a politics rooted in dignity. As someone who has lived under Israeli occupation his entire life, he is intimate with both his own fears and also the manifestation of Jewish fear. He described with great intimacy and empathy the way Jewish fear has led Israel to violently occupy, dispossess and erase his own people and culture. And he articulated with clarity the need for a politics rooted in dignity for all people, as the only path to shared safety. But what really struck me was this moment when he quotes a leader from the African National Congress who said, “We don’t fight to win, we have to win so that we can fight.” Which is to say, we have to know what winning feels like, and then we can fight for it. As he said this, all I could think about was Shabbat. This is why we observe shabbat. To taste freedom, to feel it in our bones, to experience it in real time. So that we can embody it in the struggles that await us in the week to come. This is what it means that Shabbat is a taste of the world to come. It's the moment when we construct a world in which we are free. I arrive at the end of this week, my heart is feeling heavy. One headline captured it well, “The Olympics are a show of global harmony. The world is anything but.” The weight of so much cruelty, our inability to sufficiently disrupt it.
Which is why when I sat down to study this week’s parsha, an expected line attached itself to my heart. In parashat Yitro the Israelites are camped at the base of Mt. Sinai, eager and terrified to receive Torah. Moses climbs the mountain and there God speaks to him. Based on how things went in Egypt, we might expect more Divine instruction but what comes out instead is poetic inspiration. The Holy One begins, “You have seen…how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me” (Ex. 19:4). About this moment Avivah Zornberg comments, “The fact that a metaphor is used at this most significant and serious moment, theologically considered, in world history, is in itself surprising. Indeed, except for the poetic text of the Song of Sea, this is the only metaphor in the Exodus narrative” (Particulars of Rapture, 257). So why, here, does the Holy One speak in hyperbole? I can imagine that after all of it, the Holy One might wish she had just picked up her people and delivered them to safety and freedom. But I would not, after all, describe the great fear and suffering of the plagues, the uncertain crossing of the sea with the Egyptian army chasing after them, as breezy. I think the use of metaphor here is in a way addressing the trauma of it all. God knows it was hard, maybe too hard. The sentiment of the Israelites is heavy. The people are weary. And so precisely in this moment, the image of God’s metaphoric flight catches our attention. Zornberg comments, “The effect of the image is, of course, to convey intimacy, protection, love, speed; but also I suggest, the enormous power of the adult eagle, effortless carrying its young through the air…it evokes the physical sensations of carrying and being carried, the imagined empathy with eagle and young, to convey a spiritual modality…to induce in the people a momentary and partial sense of a transcendent perspective…” It is this image that prepares, maybe even allows, the Israelites to reopen their hearts to God and to Torah. The mention of the eagle reminded me of the words of Franz Rosenzweig, from a letter written to his sister-in-law, which was shared with me by my teacher Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld: “Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to us in the mire. This is the “neighbor” the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire of our self, we can each pull out our neighbor or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under our feet; each of us is only held up by the neighborly hands grasping us by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next one, and often, indeed most of the time…hold each other up mutually. “All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding human hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some nonexistent “solid ground under one’s feet” that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up. As an eagle…hovereth over her young (Deut 32:11).” On eagles wings, on ICE watch, on Shabbat, may we feel held up, carried and cared for. On Tuesday morning, I proudly held a cardboard image of a monarch butterfly and stood in front of City Hall alongside comrades, clergy and council members in the freezing cold as Council Members Rue Landau and Kendra Brooks introduced powerful legislation to protect all Philadelphians from ICE.
Then yesterday morning, Rabbi Lizzie and Rabbi Mó gathered with a triumphant swell in the chambers of city council to witness testimony in support of the legislation, which now has the veto-proof support of 15 of 17 members. Pastor Johnny Rashid of West Philadelphia Mennonite powerfully testified as the child of Egyptian immigrants, “This package of bills fulfills Philadelphia’s mission to love its neighbors and welcome the stranger. It seeks to hold law enforcement officers accountable and it ensures the protection of our community from the growing fascism and authoritarianism in our country. These bills guard against Trump’s bullying and power-grabbing, it protects our migrants from fear and assault, and it makes Philadelphia the welcoming city it purports to be.” In a week this brutal, both the weather and the news, this is a win! And it is no small thing to notice our wins. One of the limited things we can control these days is where we put our attention. And even that is really hard. So let’s practice together. This week’s Torah portion is triumphant! After 400 years of slavery and 10 plagues, and everything between, the Israelites are finally free. It is one of my favorite rituals of the year to read the Song of the Sea. What I am struck by this week is not the fact that we read this Torah portion every year, or that we sing the Song of the Sea every shabbat, but that we actually read from the Song of the Sea every day, twice a day in fact. This biblical poem is at the core of every morning and evening service. It is where the words “Mi Chamocha” come from. The rabbis anchor our entire prayer life to this moment in Torah. We should not take this for granted. They could have called our attention to many other stories, but they chose this one. We are invited to keep the song of the sea before us always. In an essay this week, Rebecca Solnit quotes the poet W.H. Auden who wrote in a review of the final book in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, "Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination…” I think the Song of the Sea is a daily invitation to imagine freedom, to imagine winning. And, to quote Aurora Levins Morales, “Then imagine more.” “imagine winning. This is your sacred task. This is your power. Imagine every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin, the sparkling taste of food when we know that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed, that the old man under the bridge and the woman wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car, and the children who suck on stones, nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter. Lean with all your being towards that day when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.” This is the power of prayer. To undermine the fear of the world and to invite us to imagine every satisfying detail of winning. For the second Friday in a row the city of Minneapolis has canceled business as usual and called for a national strike. Last week, in subzero temperatures, nearly a quarter of the population of Minneapolis was in the streets demanding ICE leave their state. That is a win! In moments of despair, when the urge to doomscroll arises, remember the Song of the Sea. Remember that we danced our way across the sea, drumline and all. Remember that it seemed impossible until it happened. Keep even just the very last words in your pocket if it helps you remember to imagine winning on the daily. וּבְנֵ֧י יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל הָלְכ֥וּ בַיַּבָּשָׁ֖ה בְּת֥וֹךְ הַיָּֽם׃ “And the children of Israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea” (Ex. 15:19) Soon by us! I write to you from frigid South Minneapolis, where it is currently 20 below. (It is so cold outside that as soon as I exited the house, my glasses fogged up. I tried to wipe them clean only to realize it was frost.)
Rabbi Lizzie and I responded to an emergency call from our dear colleague Rabbi Arielle Lekach Rosenberg of Shir Tikvah and March Minnesota for clergy from around the country to gather to witness and learn about how thousands of people of faith and conscience are disrupting ICE’s efforts to terrorise immigrant communities in Minneapolis. It was one of many invitations that brought 1000+ clergy in advance of a statewide strike and day of action today. Our day began with an early morning pilgrimage to two memorials mere blocks from where I was staying. We drove to George Floyd Square, z”l. A small group of neighbors were gathered around a fire, offering each other warm quiche, fresh baked cookies, hot coffee and instant oatmeal. There is a gathering every morning at 8 am. The once gas station is now hollowed ground. We then drove a few blocks to the memorial site where Renee Good was murdered on January 7. There we found more neighbors gathered around another fire on the icy street, frozen flowers piled high. After saying a silent kaddish we got back in the car and tuned into the ICE watch call. There was a lot of activity and we quickly heard that an abduction was underway, just a block away. Two ICE agents stopped a car, pulled two people from it and abandoned the car. Neighbors called for help, parked the car, gathered wallets and names. The whole scene conjured Gestapo, slave-catcher dystopia. And also neighbors becoming the Jedi resistance. I have only ever witnessed military occupation like this in two places: the Sonoran desert and the West Bank. The terror, the uncertainty, disregard for constitutional laws, however imperfect. And throughout it all, I just kept returning to a verse from this week’s Torah portion, Bo. Exodus 12:49 reads, תּוֹרָה אַחַת יִהְיֶה לָאֶזְרָח וְלַגֵּר הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם׃ “One Instruction shall there be for the native and for the sojourner who sojourns in your midst!” The Torah doesn’t get everything right, and yet it stakes its moral credibility on this teaching. On the idea that everyone who lives in a place should be treated equally, under one law. Even thousands of years ago, it was understood that immigrants were vulnerable and the Torah emphasizes that our responsibility is to care for those most vulnerable, which was then defined as immigrants, orphans and widows. This teaching is so powerful it's repeated almost verbatim in Numbers 15:16. What I witnessed in Minneapolis was sobering. The actions of this administration are an affront to Torah and a threat to all of us. There is no way to know how many people have been snatched by ICE, where they have been taken, when they will return, if ever. Our government is occupying one of its own cities and disappearing people. The tactics are not new, but neither is the call to resist. When the gathering started on Thursday, one speaker looked out and asked, “How many people were with us at Ferguson? At Standing Rock? At Selma? Hands were up. It was humbling and inspiring. There is a long legacy of civil resistance and so much to learn. (One book I plan to read is Civil Resistance: What everyone needs to know by Erica Chenowith.) One local Jewish Lakota leader shared this wisdom, “The most effective thing that we’ve seen is neighbors. It’s nobody else’s responsibility but yours to confront ICE and stop them. You don’t have to do this alone. But you are not free to leave the situation. I’m just a very ordinary person who’s in a very ordinary circumstance. When they ask, “What did you do when they were going after your neighbors?” I’m going to say I did what I can.” What is most surprising is how hopeful I feel. We as a community know how to be good neighbors. How to love justice and embody chesed. We have block captains and block parties, and we can use that to build block watches. Everybody knows how to neighbor. This is what Torah is asking of us, and what this moment requires. We can decide today to protect our neighbors. Despite the unyielding flow of terrible news, I do hope that you are starting the year with connection, comfort, love, and hope. A community member started an email to me this week (inspired by a friend who started her emails that way) and it felt like the only reasonable way to begin my Friday email today.
We are at a turning point, both in Torah and in the world. Let’s begin with the world. The past few weeks we have lived through a U.S. backed coup in Venezuela, Israel’s continued devastation in Gaza, the obscene murder of Renee Good in ICE-occupied Minneapolis, the threat of anti-immigrant abductions in Philly, violent repression in Iran, ongoing bloodshed in Congo and Sudan, the supreme court prepare to bar trans athletes, I won’t go on. The news is relentlessly devastating. The world is aching. And I imagine we are each earnestly asking, what can we do? Is this moment the seed of defeat or redemption? So too in Torah. After 400 years of slavery, the Israelites have reached their breaking point. The hard labor has whittled their spirits. They call out, desperate. And finally the Holy One hears them. Exodus 6:5 reads, וְגַ֣ם ׀ אֲנִ֣י שָׁמַ֗עְתִּי אֶֽת־נַאֲקַת֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר מִצְרַ֖יִם מַעֲבִדִ֣ים אֹתָ֑ם וָאֶזְכֹּ֖ר אֶת־בְּרִיתִֽי׃ “I have heard the cries of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt and I will remember my covenant.” This is the moment when the story turns, the seeds of liberation are planted. The internal will of the people prepares to rise up. But not without trepidation. Moses in particular feels both called and afraid, in part due to the weariness of the Israelites, who are “mikotzer ruach u’meivodah kashah” (Ex: 6:9). "מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃” Nearly impossible to translate, this refrain captures this Israelites feeling of inadequacy, both physical and spiritual. They have shortness of breath from the hard labor. And they are short on spirit from the difficulties of slavery. Moses and the Israelites are unsure they can muster the strength and courage required. I imagine many of us can relate. After so much time on high alert, our spirits are also prone to be weary. At the end of a week like this, I too feel kotzer ruach - short of breath. And yet the legacy of the Exodus story is alive within us and it could not be more timely to read it this week. On Tuesday night 125 people filled the KT sanctuary to prepare to keep ICE out of our neighborhoods. This is precisely what we need to be doing. (So much gratitude to Rabbi Lizzie for organizing this! And stay tuned for another training). The most important media I have consumed this week is this episode of adrienne maree brown’s podcast How to Survive the End of the World (thank you Rabbi Mó). Her guest, Autumn Brown, a single mom and resident activist in Minneapolis described her experience as “Intense, Frightening, Surreal and Inspiring." I imagine we are more connected to fear and intensity. I find myself returning to the last time Minneapolis was rising up and the final words of George Floyd, z”l, who literally could not breath. As we enter Shabbat, let this be an invitation to take a deep breath, to literally lengthen our breathing. To turn our attention to community and relationships, to that which sustains and inspires each of us. I encourage you to support organizations in Minneapolis like https://defend612.com/ and https://unidos-mn.org/, as well as ICE OUT efforts here in Philly led by the New Sanctuary Movement, Juntos and others. To organize hyper locally, block by block, in our neighborhoods and schools. To call our elected officials. To wear a whistle. To avail ourselves of any action within our capacity! And also to exhale. To breathe and sing, lest we underestimate our own power. Let this week be the seed of redemption! Dear KT! In response to the survey feedback I received in the Spring, I am beginning a practice of inviting other members of the KT clergy team to write Friday emails. You can expect to hear from one of them roughly monthly. We begin 2026 with some words from Rabbi Mónica. I always want to hear from you, and you are welcome to direct your responses to her directly at [email protected]. - Rabbi Ari Lev
As a person with deep ties to Venezuela, it's been a particularly dizzying week. I imagine not everyone knows that both of my parents grew up in Caracas, a place I visited regularly throughout my childhood and adolescence, a city that this week the U.S. bombed and attacked. My cousin and my aunt are in Caracas, living in the house that my aunt and mom were raised in, and recently mourning the loss of my uncle. Other family friends are still in Caracas, and many have left the country over the last decade, living in exile from the place they call home. We are not a politically monolithic family or community– we hold different positions and perspectives concerning everything from capitalism and socialism to Trump to Israel-Palestine. And also, we love each other. In my efforts this week to disentangle the different narratives about what Trump’s actions in Venezuela mean, talking to family and trusted friends living in this period of great uncertainty about Venezuela’s future, I’ve noticed the desire, among Western media sources and social media, among social justice movements opposing Trump's actions, and opposition movements to Maduro, to oversimplify, to ask: Who is the bad guy here, and who is the good guy? What a human instinct, to want to know which side we are on. But this week, I fear that it’s not the right question. This week I am holding the hope that members of my family feel after so many years under a repressive regime, alongside the foreboding awareness that a president who is systematically unraveling and gutting a democracy at home will not bring democracy to another nation. A Venezuelan family friend posted: “You can contain multitudes. You can be against an authoritarian government in Venezuela, and also, you can be outraged about the idea that the United States would rule Venezuela.” Jewishly we might say, elu v’elu, these and these are both true, more than one thing can be true at once, and the world we long for, a place of freedom, safety, sovereignty and human rights for all people is not a zero sum game. I’m holding the contradictions: that Maduro is gone but Venezuelans continue to live under the authoritarian government; that Trump has deported Venezuelans from the US en masse over the past year and will not offer them asylum, but now claims to be their liberator; that Amnesty International has flagged both the human rights abuses of the Maduro government and human rights concerns now that the United States has ousted him; that Maduro will be tried in a court of law, not for the things he did to the Venezuelan people but rather for charges shaped by US interests. Though we want to understand a complex situation in simple terms, tzarich iyun, it requires deeper engagement. In the early verses of Parshat Shemot, this week’s Torah portion, we read: וַיָּקם מֶלֶךְ־חָדָשׁ עַל־מִצְרָיִם אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדַע אֶת־יוֹסֵף A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” (Exodus 1:8) This is the beginning of the unraveling. The Israelites, having migrated to Egypt at the end of the book of Genesis, have lived there now for generations. They arrived to this foreign land in good standing with its Pharaoh, thanks to Joseph’s political savvy. But time has passed, and a new Pharaoh takes the mantle, one who does not find himself accountable to Joseph or his people. We know this Pharaoh well. He is the one who forces the Israelites into enslavement, the one who ruthlessly oppresses them. When they prevail and multiply, he is the one who issues a decree of infanticide, demanding that the Hebrew male babies be thrown into the Nile. And more than just that. This Pharaoh, this human king, is an archetype in Jewish tradition. Someone we come back to again and again, our ultimate shorthand for tyranny. This week, as I read the news and listened to reporting day in and day out about Venezuela, I found myself reflecting on the history of my family, whose origins trace back to Romania and Czechoslovakia, countries that collaborated with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, surrendering them to labor camps and concentration camps, then sending the survivors into exile in other countries, including Israel and Venezuela, and eventually the United States, all countries that I believe are now under the authority of Pharaohs. If my own family’s history teaches me anything about kings and kingdoms, it is, as our sages say in Pirkei Avot, to be wary, not just of kings, but of governments: Pirkei Avot 2:3 הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לָאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹרֶךְ עַצְמָן. Be wary of the government, as they draw close to a person only when they need him for some purpose. נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בִּשְׁעַת הֲנָאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לָאָדָם בִּשְׁעַת דָּחְקוֹ. They seem like good friends in good times, but they do not stand for a person in his time of trouble. Such was the fate of the Israelites, migrants to the land of Mitzrayim, where with the change of the regime and the rise of a new king, state power turned on them. The archetype of a human king, a melech basar vadam, is developed in contrast to Melech Haolam, or melech malchei hamelachim, the King of all Kings, the Heavenly Sovereign. My favorite line of liturgy is אין לנו מלך אלא אתה, we have no king but You. We sing it on the high holidays– Avinu Malkeinu, eyn lanu melech ela ata– but also in softer, less dramatic moments, like Nishmat Kol Chai on Shabbat morning. It is basically the ancient analog of the slogan “No Kings”– the name of the sweeping protests that took place across the United States, and around the world, in June and October of 2025, decrying authoritarianism. More than five million people participated in these protests, chanting “No Kings!” Which to me means no human kings– not Trump, not Maduro, not Netanyahu, not Putin, not any of them. Instead, this liturgy declares that we place our faith in a source above and beyond power-hungry human despots who exploit our lives and loved ones, our planet and our future. As the powers of this world tighten their grip, let us be wary of governments and draw on ol malchut shamayim in our prayer, in our activism, in our showing up for one another. These may seem like radical ideas, but they are ancient and deeply Jewish, embedded in the lived experiences and wisdom of our ancestors. May they be resources for us in the days to come, for survival and resistance. There was a moment this week, when I was biking in the bitter cold trying not to wipe out on the ice, my ears stinging from the wind, when I realized I was singing to myself. The little hum in my heart had become audible. “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me. The world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away.”
Thanks to Rabbi Mó, the beautiful song This Joy written by the resistance revival chorus and produced by Righteous Babe Records, has become a KT Hanukkah anthem of sorts. This week, the actual darkest week of the year, punctured by numerous acts of heinous violence, the song emerged like a warm light from my frozen, frightened, grieving subconscious. Given the explicit spiritual instruction to light the menorah in public, to take pride and radiate the joy and light, the attack at Bondi Beach was violating and destabilizing. I am grateful to Jewish Currents for translating my heartfelt experience into words: “It was devastating to wake up Sunday morning to the news of a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. News like this is doubly distressing: First and foremost there is the reckoning with the loss of human life—among the dead were a girl of 10 and a Holocaust survivor—a reckoning that is particularly difficult amid nonstop news of massacres and gun violence. Then there is also the exhaustion of knowing that there will be no time to grieve or to collect our thoughts before we on the Jewish left go on defense, as we try to parry brazen attempts by the Israeli government, Jewish communal organizations, and pro-Israel actors to claim victims of antisemitic violence in the diaspora as proxy Israelis, and to link their deaths to the movement for Palestinian liberation.” The coincidence of the 8th night of Hanukkah with the Winter solstice has deep significance. I don’t know how often it happens, but I can tell you that the sages imagine it was like this in Gan Eden, when the world was first created. The Sages taught that when Adam HaRishon, the very first person, experienced the very first winter and saw that the daylight was progressively diminishing, they feared the days would just grow shorter and shorter until the light was gone and everything returned to tohu va’vohu, chaos and disorder. They said, “Woe is me; perhaps because of my own transgressions the world is becoming dark around me.” This must be my doing. In response, that very first human offered songs of praise and lit candles and observed a festival for 8 days. And thus was the very first Hanukkah! until they saw that the daylight was progressively lengthening. They realized the days become shorter and then longer, and this is the order of the world (B.T. Avodah Zarah 8a). This year, despite it being five thousand seven hundred and eighty six years since the creation of the world, there is something primordial happening. We are back in a state of chaos, kindling lights to reclaim order and hope. I know there are days when I feel the violence and disorder will not recede. I know terrorism and fascism are not akin to the solstice, nor should they be part of the natural order of the world. And yet, they are the doom and gloom of our time and we must use every spiritual resource we have to confront them. To quote the best fundraising email I have received this season from Bread and Roses Community Fund, “Despite everything we’ve lived through this year, there is another story unfolding—one where communities organize, resist, and rise up with unflinching resolve.” This joy, the world didn’t give it to us. But we can give it to each other! And we can remind ourselves that the world can’t take it away. Which is what Hanukkah is all about. I invite you to play this song on repeat til it wells up in you. Come sing it with us on Shabbat morning and again at our Hanukkah party on Sunday evening. Joy metabolizes stress and fear and anxiety. It is medicine for these times! Every holiday has its unique preparations. Today I found myself buying an abundance of oil, seven bottles to be exact (I should have added an 8th). It took me three trips to shlep all the bottles of grease from my car to the kitchen. I got a gallon of grapeseed oil for frying latkes, one kind of olive oil for roasting, another for dressing. A few varieties from Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey for tasting. While I was at it I resupplied on toasted sesame oil. This is afterall a celebration of oil. Though unlike the Maccabbes, I will be starting out with an enormous amount. If it doesn’t last all week I will be concerned.
Often I am drawn to Hanukkah as the festival of lights. But this year, I am thinking more about the oil, and what it means to have a holiday that encourages the consumption of greasy foods. When I was growing up fat was the enemy. Diet culture deemed anything fat-free to be healthy. I can still recall the plastic flavor of a Snackwell cookie. Rabbi Minna Bromberg’s new book Every Body Beloved: A Jewish Embrace of Fatness is encouraging me to reflect on Chanukah as an opportunity to reclaim our relationship to our bodies and to food, and to fatty foods in particular. It reminds us that fat is not something to be feared. It is fuel; it is silky, viscous, life-giving, luscious and delicious. In the very first pages of the book she recounts this story being with her daughter at a preschool Chanukkah party while 39 weeks pregnant: “The preschool had hired a young man to play guitar and lead the singing and dancing…After a few lively renditions of familiar Chanukah tunes, we took a break to eat sufganiyot… Kids and parents alike were served the fried, jelly-filled Chanukah pastries. An absorbed hush fell over the munching crowd. Soon the young man picked up his guitar again, and once again I was impressed…And that’s when he check, check, checked his mic and said, “Okay! Let’s all get back to dancing, unless you’ve gotten too fat from those sufganiyot!” (5). Reading this story, I could hear the spiritual screech in the room, and feel the weight of his words in my own body. Rabbi Bromberg captures her internal reaction brilliantly: “Doesn’t this guy know that Chanukah celebrates the miracle of fat?!?... The miracle of Chanukkah is that that oil, that fat, lasted for eight days. We eat fried foods on Chanukah in remembrance of the luminous fat that allowed our traditions, and by extension our people, to survive. We celebrate fat as that which sustains and renews us in the face of hardship. We also eat fried foods because fat is yummy. And we do not need to be afraid of or uncomfortable with our own fat hunger – neither the hunger of fat people nor the hunger for fat” (12-13). Holy, holy, holy is the human body in all its forms. Rabbi Bromberg’s book beckons us to create a world where “we can trust our own hungers,” where “every body is beloved.” And her wisdom seems especially needed on this side of Chanukkah and the Holidays, so that we can enjoy ourselves and model for the young people in our lives a Jewish of embrace of delight, pleasure and desire. One of the most incredible parts of the book is that in between the chapters she interspersed letters she has written but never sent. A letter to her seven-year-old self. And a letter to the people at Yom Kippur services who would not move to let her through. And a letter to her college boyfriend who broke up with her because she was fat and Jewish. You get the idea. They are in essence teshuvah letters. Before Shabbat comes in, who might you write to knowing you never have to send it? I am grateful to Rabbi Bromberg for the idea of Chanukah being the yearly reminder to embrace our bodies and “broadcast the miracle of fat.” I encourage you to get on her mailing list to enjoy A Year of Fat Torah! I am not exactly conflict averse, but I don’t particularly enjoy conflict. I am prone to seeing it as the result of mistakes I, and the other people involved, have made, rather than a healthy opportunity for change.
The honest truth is that I am in conflict with several people in my life right now. The work of Teshuvah may be the focus of Elul but is not contained to those prescient days. Some conflicts have been resolved and others have worsened. I am working to remember that conflict is part of the spiritual path. And that Torah can guide me in navigating conflict with more grace. In a tribute written by Rebecca Solnit, the words of Buddhist teacher and environmental activist Joanna Macy, of blessed memory, captured my attention, a welcome refresh. Macy once wrote, “It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.” There is deep wisdom here that I have learned before but remains hard to internalize. It is hard to internalize because falling apart is painful. It involves loss and grief, disorientation and uncertainty. This week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, contains the anticipated reunion of Jacob and Esau, brothers separated by betrayal, preparing to reencounter one another. Jacob is afraid, and he spends the night alone on the banks of the river Yabbok, where he famously wrestles with a being, somehow both human and divine. The tussle lasts until dawn, at which point the angel begs for release and Jacob relents on the condition that the angel bless him. Genesis 32 reads, וַיֹּ֣אמֶר שַׁלְּחֵ֔נִי כִּ֥י עָלָ֖ה הַשָּׁ֑חַר וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ לֹ֣א אֲשַֽׁלֵּחֲךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־בֵּרַכְתָּֽנִי׃ “Then he said: Let me go, for dawn has come up! But he said: I will not let you go unless you bless me. וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו מַה־שְּׁמֶ֑ךָ וַיֹּ֖אמֶר יַעֲקֹֽב׃ He said to him: What is your name? And he said: Yaakov.” At this point the angel blesses Jacob with the name Yisrael - the one who struggles. Commentators ask if this struggle is internal or external. I am unsure it matters. Either way it is archetypal. It invites us to consider what we do with our fears, what we are struggling with, what we refuse to let go of, what we long to be blessed with. I offer you the wisdom of Joanna Macy, who invites us into a love greater than our fear: “Each one of us has been called into being at this time. I am convinced of that. We are not here by accident. Is it my imagination to think that we have chosen this? Is it not a privilege to be incarnating at a time when the stakes are really high, at a time when everything we’ve ever learned about interconnectedness, about trust, about courage, can be put to the test? Each one of us, I believe, is a gift the earth is giving to itself now, a unique gift. Every anguish, betrayal, disappointment can even help prepare us for the work of healing.” In the early chapters of Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Yochanan asks: Eyzeh hu chacham. Who is wise? What follows is a litany of rabbinic responses. There is no singular answer. But the one I am continually drawn to is that of Rabbi Shimon,who says: Haroeh et hanolad. The one who sees that which is being born.
In most translations of Pirkei Avot, this is interpreted poetically as “the one who has foresight.” But I think that misses the insight of Rabbi Shimon. Hanolad is a term for both that first sliver of the new moon and a newborn child. Today we mark the new Hebrew month of Kislev. In Kislev the nights continue to grow longer, as we anticipate the bright lights of Hanukkah. It is a month that celebrates darkness and the world of dreams. The month when the moon is most visible. This year and this week in particular, this teaching, which links the new moon with new life, has extra resonance. On Rosh Hashanah morning, I spoke about the midwives in Exodus as our defiant heroes, quite literally on the frontlines preventing the genocide of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt/Mitzrayim. And I shared a contemporary midrash by Orna Peltz that I want to return to today. “The midwives were asked: Where did you get your fearful awe of God? To which they answered: From the great and deep things that we saw at the birth stool, from the mystery that embraces us morning and evening: human being after human being coming into the world; where does each one come from and what do they each bring with them? The goodness that a [parent] sees in their child, the compassion and the love that awakens, crying babies bursting forth from exhausted bodies, and the soft seal of God’s finger imprinted on their faces.” While I may have the privilege of seeing the new moon, they have the honor of truly seeing hanolad, witnessing new life as it enters this world. Their wisdom is unparalleled, handed down from generation to generation, from midwife to midwife. For those who have not yet heard, this week the Bryn Mawr Birth Center, also known as the Lifecycle Wellness and Birth Center, announced it will be closing after 47 years of service. In nearly five decades, they have witnessed the births of 16,000 babies, trained hundreds of midwives and provided family-centered care to thousands of families. The loss is immense and utterly tragic. For profit healthcare has deemed birthing with dignity not profitable and therefore not insurable. I cannot help but feel this is a win for Pharoah. I am sending abundant love and gratitude to the many Kol Tzedek midwives, doulas and healthcare providers who currently work at the Birth Center. Please know that I feel awe in your presence, for your courage to witness human being after human being coming into the world. I am thinking about the many KT babies who have been born there, as recently as this past week, and sending comfort to the countless families who will no longer receive care at the Birth Center. This is a tremendous loss. To all of us, on this Rosh Hodesh Kislev, I want to remind us of the resilience and courage of the midwives of old and the ones in our midst. In the midrash, the midwives explain: “Our awe is “not in the heavens” (Devarim 30:12). Lo va’shammayim hi. Our awe of God arises precisely from within nature, from within the pain of what we witness on the birth stool. From there we learn to choose what is good, to protect life, to fight against death and to resist evil.” This is our task every week, and especially this week. To turn our attention to what is possible, to what is emerging, what is being born in our lives. So often we think of wisdom coming from past experience, and Rabbi Shimon reminds us that wisdom comes from paying closer attention to what is emerging in our own lives right now. May the new moon of kislev, the month of darkness and dreams, invite us to look more closely and appreciate that which is unfurling in our lives. May our attention cultivate wisdom. And may wisdom give us the courage to “to protect life, to fight against death and to resist evil.” |
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General Questions: (267) 702-6187 or [email protected]
Shabbat Services: 5300 Whitby Ave, Commercial #1, Philadelphia, PA 19143