Rabbi's Blog

Gmar chatimah tovah.

Kol Nidrei is here. This is the time when Jews all over the world, with all levels of observance, feel the pull back to our spiritual homes. Why?

Yom Kippur is unabashedly transformative. Rabbi DovBer Pinson says that the power of this day calls us toward fundamental transformation. And we call that transformation teshuvah. Now, most people mistranslate teshuvah as “repentance.” Pinson says that is unfortunate, because “return” is the Hebrew root. Teshuvah means a return from the places where we have become strangers to ourselves, a return from the distractions and dispersed awareness and, in the very same motion, a turning toward our deepest selves. Yom Kippur empowers us to return to our essence, to reclaim who we truly are, and to live forward from that place.

Notice what that is not. It is not “be a better person by tomorrow night.” It is not a checklist of your flaws with the boxes waiting. It is a homecoming.

My friend Jeremy Zwelling, zichrono livracha, had an interesting habit. He liked to ask people whether they thought they had fulfilled their destiny. Sit with that question for a moment.

Now that is a deep conversation over coffee. Jeremy asked it of people in their seventies, or past that — people far enough along the road to have some kind of answer.

And I think it is the most Yom Kippur question I have ever heard, for all ages, because it is the question sitting underneath this entire holiday. Yom Kippur does not actually ask whether you have been good. We don’t have someone coming to town and checking twice if you’ve been nice. I’m going to say out loud: if you are here or on zoom, fasting if you are able, today and tomorrow, you are good. Evil people don’t do any of it.

The question is whether the life you are living is the one that is actually yours. The call of this day is that we need to live a meaningful life, in all the ways that matter.

Sometimes that means hanging on. And sometimes it means letting go.

Now, hanging on, persevering, we know that energy well. For hanging on we have a whole vocabulary, a whole literature, movies, a whole set of heroes. Compare, please, that with the energy of letting go, or ye’ush, in Hebrew. For that one we do not have much of a vocabulary nor heroes.

The Hebrew word for perseverance is hatmadah, from the root of tamid, always. Judaism supports this value without embarrassment.

My friend Rachel’s family had always prized persistence — so much so that in seventh grade she was given an award for it at school. An actual certificate. For not quitting.

And why wouldn’t we prize it? A combination of working and failing and dreaming, and working and failing and dreaming, created computers, helped us cure certain cancers, even sent us to the moon.

The State of Israel was founded after centuries of dreaming and built by people who worked a land full of swamps and malaria. We know that dreams often come true only after substantial effort. Take rabbi Akiva, for instance.

He was illiterate at the age of forty. Forty. An age at which most people have quietly closed the door on the person they were going to be. He was a shepherd. But he wanted to be a rabbi. And he stood at a well and looked at a stone with a groove worn into it by dripping water, and he said: if what is soft can carve something hard, then Torah can carve my heart and my mind. And he began to learn the alef-bet. At forty.

And got to be THE Rabbi Akiva. He got to be such a hero that his death will be remembered tomorrow. So our tradition is on record. Firmly, clearly, in favor of not quitting.

And then there is my friend Rachel, persistence-award-receiving Rachel. At a certain point, for all sorts of reasons, her marriage was unsolvable. Unrescuable. They had tried years of couples therapy, different therapists, strategies for communication and whatnot. Nothing helped, and yet she stayed. Because quitting felt like a failure of terrifying proportions. So she held on. That seventh-grade certificate was doing its work forty years later.

Until another friend, seeing how miserable she was in the never-quit camp, reframed the whole thing for her. “Rachel,” she said, “certainly getting divorced is ending your marriage. But in terminating your marriage, what you are really doing is refusing to quit on the rest of your life.”

Refusing to quit on the rest of your life.

I want us to sit with that sentence for a second, because it does not soften what happened.

It does not pretend the marriage was fine, or that the divorce was not every bit as painful as it was. It does not say she was wrong to get married, or that the years of therapy were foolish. It simply moves the question.

Her friend did not ask, why would you think you are a quitter? Her friend asked, what exactly are you being loyal to?

Because it turns out there are two different things a person can be loyal to. The vow, or the life. And we do not always get to have both. And the difficult part is that from the inside, holding on and being stuck can feel exactly the same. They have the same texture. They use the same muscles.

Hatmadah, persistence, and being trapped and stuck…  look identical from underneath. The only difference is whether the thing you are holding on to is still alive.

In May of 2012, a twenty-four-year-old Israeli named Nadav Ben-Yehuda was three hundred meters below the summit of Mount Everest. Three hundred meters. An hour, maybe two, if the mountain lets you. He was about to become the youngest Israeli ever to stand on top of the world.

On the way up he had already passed two bodies. Not old bodies — people in that season’s gear, people who had been on the same ropes he was climbing, who had run out of strength and folded into themselves and died there. Everyone going up had stepped over them.

And then, in an ice crack below the summit, he saw a man in a hat he recognized. Aydin Irmak, a Turkish climber he knew from base camp. They had played cards. Irmak was unconscious. No gloves. No oxygen. No helmet. In Nadav’s own words: he was waiting for the end. Other climbers were walking past him without lifting a finger.

Nadav tied him to his own harness and turned around.

The descent took nine hours. Irmak was heavy. He would surface into consciousness and scream from the pain and go under again. Nadav’s oxygen mask broke. He took the glove off his right hand to fix it, and got a frostbite so serious that the doctors thought they would have to amputate his fingers. But they didn’t.

Nadav said afterward: I was faced with a choice — to be the youngest Israeli to climb Everest, which would be great for my career, or to try to take a climber off the mountain. I chose the second option.

Three hundred meters. After years of training. After all the money and all the preparation and the entire story he had been telling about himself about who he was going to be.

And here is what I want to say about that, because I don’t think this is about sacrifice. I think this is about clarity. Nadav did not fail. He got within three hundred meters of the top of the world and discovered that the summit was not what he had come for.

We all suffer from what the economists call the sunk cost fallacy, the idea that because we have already invested so much down this path, we just have to keep going. The years. The tuition. The house. The training. The thing we told everyone we were going to be.

But remember: the sunk cost is sunk. We do not have to sink the rest of our lives along with it.

And often it is not even a “cost.” It is our past. The decisions and the experiences that have made us who we are. Even if they weren’t good, they likely helped us to learn and to grow. Nadav did not waste his months of training: they were precisely what made it possible for him to carry a grown man down a mountain in the dark. The climb was not wasted. It turned out to be preparation for something he had never applied for.

Ye’ush, letting go, is not something our tradition takes lightly. But it is also very Jewish. Kol Nidrei is here to remind us to stop and listen, and recalibrate, and see what needs to stay and what needs to be let go.

Kol Nidrei is really a legal formula, not even a prayer —in the Lev Shalem version, pre-emptively annulling our vows of the future. In other versions, it’s about the past vows. We say it three times, with the Torah scrolls out of the ark, to make sure we all know what we are doing.

The rabbis were really frightened of vows, and they had good legal reasons. But I want to suggest tonight that there is also a spiritual reason: know when to let go, and know when to keep going.

A vow, if you think about it, really represents a dream. It is a sentence we said out loud about the person we were going to be. I will always. I will never. I will finish this. I will not be the kind of person who. Some of those are holy and we should keep them and this whole day is here to help us keep them.

And some of them are twenty or thirty or forty years old and belong to a person who no longer exists. And they still hold us. Because we swore.

I am not being abstract. I myself lived it: I was going to be a chemist. It took me two years and becoming sick at 19 to figure out that I actually wanted to change to Hebrew Language and Literature. My mother asked the eternal question: from that you’ll make a living?

But here I am. So, not abstract at all. Because we all tell ourselves vows, images, dreams that we are unwilling to let go. There’s the reconciliation you have been waiting for from someone who is not going to offer it, and you swore you will not make the first move. There’s the version of your body, maybe a size, maybe a number on the scale, that you are committed to since you were nineteen. There’s the grudge you took an oath about. There is a vision of a completely perfect marriage, or of a completely perfect life for your child, or the perfect car that you will get one day, or the perfect career… And when you think of those you go to a place where you become hard as a cage with five different locks and you won’t budge no matter what. Those are also oaths, vows, renunciations, formulas of obligations, pledges that were never even said out loud, but bind us anyway.

Kol Nidrei says: those are dissolved. Not forgiven: there was no sin to begin with. They are dissolved. Batlin u’mevutalin. Lo sheririn v’lo kayamin. Void and cancelled. Not firm and not established. As though they had never bound you at all.

Because for many of us, some of these vows, some of these dreams, are simply not going to be realized. Not because we failed. Because we changed, or the world changed, or because reaching the summit turned out not to be the thing you needed – but saving a life did. Because when I wanted to be a chemist it was out of love for my dead father, but I became a rabbi out of love for my own people.

Kol Nidrei gives us a framework through which we can let go, and feel open to embracing new dreams — new, deep commitments, eyes wide open.

Kol Nidrei sets us free from previous visions of ourselves and allows us to move forward with new visions, knowing that we may not get it exactly right, but that we are trying.

Which brings me back to DovBer Pinson, and to why I think letting go belongs on this night and not on some other night of the year.

Teshuvah is return. And if teshuvah is return to your essence, then whatever you need to put down tonight is, by definition, not your essence. It is a costume. It is the old vow. It is the route that you picked up when you were seventeen with the information you had at seventeen. Those things were never who you are now. They were the road. And you are allowed to put down the road.

Jeremy’s question: did you fulfill your destiny? is asking something gentle and considerably hard. Are you living your own life, or are you living somebody’s old idea of it — including your own old idea of it?

Tonight, for the space of this one night, nothing you ever swore is binding. Not one of them. You are standing here unbound.

So from that free place, I want to ask you two things:

What will you leave here, tonight, on the floor of this room, for the first time in a very long time?

And: What will you pick back up deliberately, with your eyes open, because it is genuinely yours?

G’mar chatimah tovah. May we embrace unabashed transformation.

In a few moments we will rise for Yizkor, and each of us will hold someone. Maybe a face, maybe a voice. Maybe many faces and many voices. People whose absence is the reason this hour feels the way it feels. And I want to share a metaphor that has helped me stand in this very hour.

When speaking about a hot war, of making a siege around a city, the Torah teaches us not to destroy. The Torah forbids us cutting down fruit trees. And in the middle of that it asks a strange little question: כִּי הָאָדָם עֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה — “is a person a tree of the field?” In its plain sense it is a question. But our sages could never resist turning it into an answer. Yes, they said. A person is a tree of the field.

And if a person is a tree, then a family is a tree that grows across time.

There are roots down in the dark that we never saw: great-grandparents, great-greats, names we might remember, whole lives we will never know. There is a trunk. And there are branches, and there is fruit. Right now, we are that fruit. Every one of us grew on a tree we did not choose.

Here is the mystery of fruit. Fruit does two things at once. It carries the tree forward, for instance, the apple is made of the very tree that bore it. And yet inside every apple there is a seed, and that seed can be planted in new soil. It can grow toward a different light. Fruit is how a tree continues, and fruit is also how a tree becomes something new.

I say this because I know that in this room, not every face being held right now is a simple one. For some of you, Yizkor is uncomplicated grief for someone who loved you well, and you would give anything for one more ordinary afternoon with them.

But among us there are those for whom loss is not simple at all. Some of us might be holding the memory of a parent who was hard to love. Or maybe a parent who could not, for whatever reason, love you the way a child deserves to be loved. And you came here anyway. You will stand for Kaddish anyway. And I want you to know that our tradition has room for you, exactly as you are, with your whole complicated heart.

The Torah does not command us to love our parents. The fifth of the commandments is kibud av va-em, honor your father and your mother. Honor. Not adore. Not approve. Not pretend.

Judaism does not expect all parents to be good ones, and Judaism never asks you to lie about the one you had. It asks for honor.

Honor is something you can offer with clear and open eyes, holding the truth of a person in one hand and your respect for their tzelem Elohim, their potential towards goodness, in the other. Potential deserves respect, but potential is not actuality.

So what does it look like to honor such a tree? It looks like the work of a gardener. Ask any gardener: to keep a tree alive, to help it bear well, you have to prune it. You cut away what is diseased, so the whole tree will not sicken. You do not do it because you hate the tree, you do it because you love it, and you want it to live. When we take the inheritance our parents handed us and we sort honestly through it; when we say, this I keep, it nourished me; and this I set down, it only ever caused harm; and this hard thing, I will turn into compost, into soil, so that something better can grow up out of it… we are not betraying our parents. We are doing the most faithful thing a piece of fruit can do. We are tending the tree.

And now I want to tell you the most astonishing thing our tradition dares to believe about this day: the Talmud has a phrase bra mezakeh aba — a child brings merit to the parent. It means the soul of someone who has died is not sealed and shelved like a finished book. It is still rising. And what lifts it is what we, the living, do down here. The good we carry forward. The lessons we learned. And yes: even the lessons we learned from what they got wrong.

This happens when you become gentler because you knew, firsthand, what harshness cost. When you hold your own child differently because of the way you were once not held. When you keep the sweetness they managed to give you, and quietly refuse to pass along the bitterness they couldn’t help, you are not only healing yourself. In the strange and beautiful idea of our tradition, you are lifting your own parents. You are developing their soul and your own in the very same motion. The fruit reaches up, and somehow the whole tree rises with it.

That is what we are really doing when we stand for Yizkor. We are holding on to a relationship that was transformed by death but not finished. And we get to decide, today and every day after, what that relationship will keep growing into: what we carry, what we release, what we let their lives go on teaching ours.

So in a moment, I want to invite you to hold all of the people you are here for: the sweetness and the bruises, the gift and the ache, the whole true tree of the person who made you. And then, gently, make the gardener’s decision: this I keep. This I set down. This I will grow into something better. It is the last and best action a piece of fruit can offer its tree: to go on living, and to bear good fruit of its own.

They are not finished. Neither are we. And here, in this hour, the tree and the fruit rise together.

May the memories of all those we hold today be for a blessing, and may we, by how we live, be a blessing to them in return.

Gmar chatima tovah.

I want to begin with a confession that has little to do with the ones we’ve been making all day. It is a confession about love.

When we are young, we believe in the perfect other: somewhere out there, we are sure, the person who will complete us exists. Someone who will understand us without our having to explain, who will know what we need and give it without us having to ask, will never bore us, never disappoint us, never let us down. We fall in love with that idea. And for a while, when we first fall in love with an actual human being, we mistake them for it. We see only the greatest hits.

And then, if we are lucky enough, brave enough… we marry. And in marriage we slowly learn the truth: that the person we love is, well, not perfect. Sometimes, let’s be honest, they are not even lovable. They carry habits that will drive us quietly out of our minds for the next forty, fifty, sometimes sixty years.

And here is the astonishing thing maturity asks of us: we learn all of this and we stay anyway. We keep working on it. On the space in between reality and dream. We learn that disappointment is not the end of love. It is the doorway into REAL love.

One of my uncles, a dashing musical artistic man, a great entrepreneur, never married but had several love-of-my-life relationships. They only lasted until she wanted to take it, as they say, to the next level. He would promptly finish it right then and there. As a child, after meeting a few of the loves-of-his-life, I eventually asked him why he didn’t marry Theresa, the one I liked most.

And he told me, with total seriousness, no wink in it at all: “I don’t like to see the love of my life in compromising positions, like in the bathroom, without makeup.” Then I understood: my adored uncle could not bear to see his love as a real, unglamorous, embodied human being. He wanted the illusion, not a real person. And so he kept every love of his life perfect — by closing the door to reality.

The writer Alain de Botton put it bluntly: none of us, in the end, marries the right person. We marry a person — and then we spend the rest of marriage learning to love the real human being we actually found. To choose a partner, he says, is really to choose a particular set of problems that you are willing to live with for the rest of your life. Because everyone arrives with a set. There is no person without problems. There is only the question of which problems you would rather have, which problems can you say – yes, and… I keep demanding our mutual growth.

Now — some of you were in this room last night, when I said something close to the opposite. I talked about Kol Nidrei as permission to let go. I told you about a woman who left a marriage. And this morning I am telling you to stay. So let me say the difference out loud, because I think the difference is fundamental.

Leaving a marriage that has died and leaving a marriage that is merely hard are not the same act, and telling them apart is the hardest spiritual work most of us will ever do. Kol Nidrei releases us from vows we made to a fantasy, because the point is to uphold a covenant we made to something real.

Last night was about the dream you swore to, and the shackles those dreams put around growth.

This morning is about the person actually in front of you, your ezer knegdo, the helpmate that will bring growth to you and to themselves in the process. We put down the dream so that our hands are free for reality.

That is not a romantic thing to say. But I have come to believe it is one of the most important spiritual truths there is, and not only about marriage. Because the same childhood dream that wrecks so many relationships also warps the way we love almost everything larger than ourselves. We do it to our synagogues. We do it to our leaders and our movements. And we do it, most of all, to Israel.

I fell in love with Israel before I fully understood Israel. Like many Jews, I first encountered Israel through its greatest hits: the ancient homeland, Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the Hebrew language resurrected after centuries, the desert made to bloom, the Holocaust survivors and Mizrachi Jews arriving on ships and boats, the kibbutz, the soldiers, the technological miracles, the Entebbe rescue, the Six-Day War — all that improbable, miraculous story of a tiny Jewish country surviving against enemies vastly larger than itself.

And I will say it plainly: the creation of the State of Israel is one of the most extraordinary stories in recent history. Our people, scattered for nearly two thousand years, kept the memory of one land, prayed toward one city, preserved one language in prayer and in study, and somehow returned to build a functioning, sovereign state in the very place from which their ancestors had been exiled. There is something hopelessly romantic about it.

Which is exactly the problem.

Because Israel is not a romance. Israel is a country. And countries are made of people. And people, just in case you haven’t been paying attention, are, God-help-us, messy and difficult and exasperatingly frustrating.

The Israeli writer Amos Oz said it in a 2016 interview: “Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.” Amos Oz loved Israel his whole life, and he insisted that our disappointment in it is not a verdict on Israel’s failures.

It is a verdict on the nature of dreams: the only way to keep a dream perfect and shining and flawless is to never once try to live it out. Because the moment you build it, the moment it happens, with people being rude and traffic jams and politicians being corrupt and bureaucracy and army… it stops being perfect, because now it is real. Israel is not disappointing because it is a bad dream. Israel is disappointing in the precise way that every dream is, the very moment it comes true.

And here I have to be honest with you about my own heart — because it is Yom Kippur, and honesty is the whole assignment: I am a Zionist. But if I began as a star-eyed Zionist, now I am a Zionist because powerlessness did not work out so well for the Jewish people over the last two thousand years. I have read that history. And so I prefer, with my eyes and my heart fully open, the problems that come with the Jews having a country to the problems the Jews had when they did not have one. That is a choice.

It is exactly the choice de Botton was describing: not a choice between problems and no problems, but a choice of which problems. And I know which set I prefer. I prefer the problems of a people that can defend its own pregnant mothers, children and elderly to the problems of a people that could not.

But… and this is the part the romance never prepared us for: choosing a set of problems means actually carrying them. It means loving a real country and not a poster on a teenager’s wall. A country that, like every nation that has ever held power, must make agonizing decisions, and sometimes makes them badly, and must be argued with, and fought, and wept over, and held to the highest standard precisely by the people who love it most. Mature love is not resignation, it is the covenant that keeps demanding we do better.

Loving Israel like an adult does not mean defending its every act as if it were flawless. Because that is not love – that is infatuation. Just like storming out of a marriage at the first heartbreak, disappointment, or disconnect because it is not the utopia we dreamed.

This response, that the imperfect deserves no love at all, is a child’s response. A child demands the perfect parent or none at all: I hate you! they scream, banging the door. (Or so they tell me…)

The adult stays, and looks clearly, and keeps working on it, on the space between dream and reality.

Yom Kippur works exactly the same way. You would never guess it from the fasting and the white and the prayers, but our tradition insists, almost defiantly, that Yom Kippur is one of the two most joyful days in the entire Jewish year. The Mishnah says so outright: there were no days as good for Israel as the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, it tells us, the daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards, and matches were made, and lives were joined. Yom Kippur — wait for it — is a wedding day. Why? Why would the most solemn day of the year be a day of love?

Because of what happened on this date, long ago. Go back to the story. At Sinai, God and Israel are, in effect, married: The Torah is our ketubah, our written love commitment. And then, almost at once, before the ink is dry, before the honeymoon even began, Israel betrays it with a shiny Golden Calf. No marriage that I know of would survive this, a partner straying during the wedding party. Moshe shatters the tablets on the ground, the marriage looks finished. And yet – Moshe climbs back up the mountain, pleads, and on the tenth of Tishrei, on this day, on Yom Kippur – Moshe comes back down with a second set of tablets and words that echo throughout Jewish history to this very day — ה ה אֵ ל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן — the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy: Ad-nai Ad-nai compassionate gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love. Every time the ark is opened and we rise and chant them again, we are standing back at that mountain, all of us Moshe, re-enacting the exact moment the marriage was saved.

So this is what Yom Kippur actually is. It is the anniversary of the day God took Israel back. It is the day the marriage did not end. The second tablets are the tablets of a covenant that has already survived its worst betrayal.

They are the covenant of a love that has looked clearly at the very worst in the beloved and chosen, anyway, that this is not dead, but alive, worthy to be kept, worthy to make us grow. It is a realistic marriage, one with no more illusions, one that lasts.

And every single year, we do it again. We stand here all day and we say it out loud: ashamnu, bagadnu — we have failed, we have betrayed, we have fallen short. We hold up all of our flaws; we hide nothing; and then we ask to be taken back. And God? God does not love a utopian ideal of Israel, a flawless people that exists only in somebody’s distorted imagination. God loves this real and exasperating people, this stiff-necked one, this disappointing one — and stays, and keeps working on us. It is this love that the prophet Hosea heard God promise to a people who had been anything but faithful: וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ לִי לְעוֹלָם — v’erastich li l’olam, “I will betroth you to Me forever.” Not “I did.” I will. Forever. Again. Still.

Do you see what this day is trying to teach us? It is teaching us how to love without utopia. It is the master class in it. Because the same wisdom that lets God stay married to us is the wisdom we need for every real love in our lives. For the spouse who is not perfect and never will be. For the child who turned out different than what we imagined. For this wonderful community — which will disappoint you, too, if you give it long enough. For the Jewish people, this maddening, arguing, glorious family of ours. For Israel, this dream that came true, and therefore, like every dream that comes true, arrived with problems attached. And, hardest of all, love for ourselves, because the deepest teshuvah is not the fantasy of finally becoming the flawless person we always meant to be. There is no such person. Teshuvah is choosing to stay in the relationship with the real, imperfect self we actually are, and to keep working: one more year, and then another, and then one more, always reaching to become more perfect, always reaching, the way a people reaches for a more perfect union: never arriving, always binding ourselves closer.

There is no such thing as utopia. Not in a marriage, not in a country, not in a soul. What there is, what this day offers us, what it has always offered us, is something better, because it is real. Not a romance but a covenant.

A love that has seen the worst, and stayed, and is still, after everything, willing to turn to the imperfect beloved and say: forever. Again. Still.

G’mar chatimah tovah. May we all be sealed, the real us, the imperfect us, for a good year.

This parsha is one of the few where the triennial cycle and the annual cycle are the same. The greater part of the Torah reading of Haazinu (“Listen In”) consists of a 70-line “song” delivered by Moses to the people of Israel on the last day of his earthly life.

Calling heaven and earth as witnesses, Moshe asks the people to remember their history – how God “found them in a desert land”, made them a people, chose them as His own, and gave them a bountiful land. The Song also warns against the pitfalls of plenty and warns of  calamities that would come because of abandoning God’s ways due to bounty. The Parshah concludes with God’s instruction to Moshe to ascend the top of Mount Nebo, from which he sees the Promised Land before dying on the mountain.

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Shabbat shalom.

Clothes matter. We dress for the things that matter to us. We dress for weddings, for interviews, for the people we love. When we put on our best for the High Holidays, we’re saying: this day is important, and I want to show up for it.

And yet this evening I want to ask us a different question. Not “what are you wearing?” but “what is your soul wearing?”

Now, listen to how our parashah opens. Ha’azinu ha-shamayim va-adaberah, ve-tishma ha-aretz imrei fi. “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.”

Lots of clothes hanging neatly in the open wardrobe

We know, Moshe knows, everyone knows: in the arc of the story, Moshe is at the end of his life. This is his last song, his last testimony. And he does what you do when something is serious: he calls witnesses. He calls heaven, and he calls earth.

Why those two? The simple answer is that they last. People come and go, but heaven and earth will still be here to testify.

The Sifrei, an old collection of midrashim, says that heaven testifies to the mitzvot that come from heaven, like sanctifying time, and earth testifies to the mitzvot of the earth, like leaving the corner of your field for the poor. I’d take it one step further: heaven can be symbol for the mitzvot bein adam la-Makom, between a person and God: prayer, Shabbat, study, kashrut, the blessings we say. Those are the moments when we reach up. Earth then can be a symbol for the mitzvot bein adam la-chavero, between a person and another person: tzedakah, honesty, visiting the sick, a kind word, a phone call to someone who is lonely. Those are the moments when we reach out.

So the witnesses Moshe calls are not only the sky and the ground. They are our deeds. What we do testifies about who we are.

Now listen to this: Moshe calls two witnesses. You all know the rule: al pi shnayim eidim yakum davar, a matter is established by two witnesses. One witness is not enough, because one witness alone gives a partial testimony.

Think about a person who has only heaven: someone who davens beautifully and keeps every detail and yet is unkind to the people around them. Such a person has a witness with a very lopsided story. And a person who has only earth, who is generous and decent and good but never lifts their eyes, never stops to say thank you to the Source of it all, also has a witness with only half the story. The Torah wants the whole testimony: heaven and earth, up and out.

And now we come back to the clothes.

Every morning, in birkot ha-shachar, we say a blessing: Baruch atah Adonai… malbish arumim. Blessed are You, who clothes the naked. It sounds like a thank-you for a closet.

But the Ramak, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, the great kabbalist of Tzfat, teaches that when we say this blessing we are really talking about the clothes of the soul. And those clothes are the mitzvot. They are what surrounds the soul after we leave this world. The body stays behind, but the soul goes on dressed in what we did.

Think about that on Yom Kippur. In a few days many of us will put on a kittel, a plain white robe. Some of you know that the kittel is also what we are buried in. On the holiest day of the year we wear the outfit we will wear at the end. That’s not meant to be morbid. It’s meant to wake us up. It asks: when you arrive, what will you be wearing? Not the white linen. What the white linen carries.

So here’s the thing about closets. Most of us have favorites. The sweater we wear every week, the comfortable shoes. And most of us also have things we bought, or were given, and never really wore. Some might still hang with the tags on.

Our spiritual closets are the same. We each have mitzvot we wear constantly. For some of us it’s Shabbat dinner, for some of us it’s showing up for every shiva minyan, for some of us it’s tzedakah, for some of us it’s Torah study. Those are beautiful. Keep wearing them.

And each of us also has mitzvot we’ve barely tried on.

So this is my invitation this Shabbat Shuvah. Before Yom Kippur, go to your closet. Pick two mitzvot you haven’t invested much in yet. One from heaven, and one from earth.

One between you and God. Maybe it’s saying Modeh Ani when you wake up, before you reach for the phone. Maybe it is putting on tefilin. Maybe it’s lighting Shabbat candles every week, not just when it’s convenient. Maybe it’s coming to Torah study, or saying a brachah before you eat, or ten quiet minutes of prayer in your own words.

And one between you and other people. Maybe it’s calling someone who is alone, every week, the same day. Maybe it’s a set amount of tzedakah that goes out before anything else does. Maybe it’s shmirat ha-lashon, one conversation a day without gossip. Maybe it’s finally visiting the person you keep meaning to visit.

Two mitzvot. Two witnesses. Heaven and earth. Al pi shnayim eidim.

And don’t make it huge. You don’t need a whole new wardrobe. Think of it as an accessory: a scarf, a pin, a new tie for the soul. Something small that you actually wear, not something grand that stays in the closet with the tags on. Remember what we learned last Shabbat from the Rambam: one mitzvah can tip the scale of the whole world. Small is not small.

Then, every morning, when you say malbish arumim, remember your two. Say the blessing and think: today I’m getting dressed. Today I’m adding another thread.

And a year from now, when we come back to this parashah and hear Moshe say ha’azinu ha-shamayim, ve-tishma ha-aretz, heaven and earth will have something new to say about you. Not a threat. A testimony. A witness that speaks up for you, that says: this person reached up, and this person reached out.

This Yom Kippur, wear white on the outside. But this year, let’s make sure that underneath, our souls are dressed too.

Shabbat shalom, and g’mar chatimah tovah.

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Shacharit

~ What are the main contrasts in this parsha?

~ What is the most repeated image for God in this parsha?

Tzur – appears 8 times in this parsha alone, 5 referring to God.

~ Is there a way to connect the parsha with Yom Kippur? [deathscape, Hatzur tamim poalo]

Shanah tovah.

Tonight is the second night, and we say Shehecheyanu again, but this time we say it over something new. Look at what we chose. A fruit. Something with seeds in it.

Inside each of those seeds is an instruction manual: its DNA, wound in a double helix, two strands twisted around each other. It is quite astonishing to me that this manual is written with only four letters. Four. Every living thing that has ever existed on this earth like the cedar and the sparrow and the whale and every one of us; all of it is spelled out with four letters and two strands.

Now being Jewish is also written on two strands: religion and peoplehood. Religion, as the strand where we find God, Torah, mitzvot, is the strand that reaches up, linking us to transcendent ideas like creation, revelation, redemption.

The other strand is peoplehood: family, history, language, culture. That strand reaches horizontally, linking us to each other.

And here is the thing about a helix: neither strand can hold its shape alone. Any strand of DNA needs its complement. The thing that is not the same as it, and that it cannot do without. Being Jewish is as infinite as DNA.

I want to tell you about a man who helped me think through this.

His name was Franz Rosenzweig. Born in Kassel in 1886, into a family so assimilated that he did not learn what Erev Shabbat was until he got to university. At eighteen he wrote to a friend that God, to him, was a weather maker. He was brilliant, he was German, he was on his way to a professorship, and by 1913 he had decided to be baptized – having received nothing from his family, he was looking for something.

Understand who was in the room with him. His cousin Hans, born a Jew, baptized as an adult. His cousin Rudolf, baptized as a child by his assimilated Jewish father who saw this whole Jewish thing just an impediment for the horizons of Rudolf. His friend Eugen, born to a Jewish family, converted as a teenager — and wanted to stand as Franz’s godfather at the baptism. One man who had left, one whose father had left for him, one who had left young and wanted company. Franz was the last of the cousins still holding the Jewish strand.

As philosophers do, they argued all night, and he lost. He agreed to be baptized. And then he made one condition. He said: I am not a gentile. I am a Jew. Let me look once at what I am leaving. Give me the days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. He walked into a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin as a man taking a last look. No one really knows what happened on that Kol Nidrei night, but he walked out with the decision of not converting. And what caught him was not a logical argument, full of proofs. No one had a “let’s talk Jewish theology” session with him on Kol Nidrei. What caught him was the people.

And then, on the thirty-first of October, he wrote a letter to his cousin Rudolf — the cousin who had been born Christian — and in it were four words: Ich bleibe also Jude. So I remain a Jew.

The people caught him first. The theology came after. That is the double helix in a single life.

And what a theology. Over the next six years, much of it written on army postcards from the front and mailed home to his mother, Rosenzweig built one of the great books of modern Jewish thought. He called it The Star of Redemption — and the star of the title is two triangles. One triangle: God, world, self. The other: creation, revelation, redemption. Two strands, laid across each other. He drew a Magen David. That is a Jewish helix.

Now. The letters are few, but the sequences are endless.

Look around this room. Shabbat. Hebrew. Kashrut. Tzedakah. Israel. Mourning. Blessing. Study. Argument. Not one of us spells the same word out of them. Your Judaism and my Judaism are written in the same alphabet and they do not read alike, and that is not a failure of transmission. That is what a living thing looks like. A language in which everyone says the same sentences is a dead language.

Rosenzweig knew this from the inside. In 1922 he was diagnosed with ALS. He was thirty-five. Within a few years he could not speak, could not write, could move one finger and later only his eyes.

Before he got sick, he founded a dream: a Jewish house of learning in Frankfurt open to anyone at all — no exams, no references, no credentials. It was called Lehrhaus. It became a place to strengthen people under the Nazi regime, and was shut down for good in 1938. But the strand was picked up again, in Zurich in 1951, in Germany again in the eighties. Today you can access The Lehrhaus online and do what Rosenzweig dreamed: to grow by studying with other Jews, debating, learning, changing minds and having your own mind changed.

While battling ALS, Rosenzweig translated ninety-two poems of Yehuda Halevi, and began with Martin Buber a new translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. He got as far as Isaiah. All of it letter by letter, his wife Edith naming letters aloud and Franz signaling that one. He spelled out his life one letter at a time until the end.

He died in 1929, at forty-two. And Buber went on and finished that translation in 1961. That is exactly how a helix copies itself. It comes apart. And the strand that is left becomes the template for the whole.

That is what a generation is. It has happened to us after Babylon, after Rome, after Spain, after Europe. It happens in smaller ways in every family sitting in this room. Something comes apart, and out of what remains, a whole thing is built again.

Somewhere in those years, someone asked Rosenzweig whether he put on tefillin. His answer was: Not yet. Not no. Not yet.

[hold up the fruit] The seeds in this fruit were in the fruit that made the tree before it. And before that, and before that. Never the same, never a copy, and always recognizable. That is the seed of our people, and it is sitting in this room.

So in this year, 5787 — may the old and the new hold each other the way two strands do. May our Judaism be renewed and still recognizable. And if anyone should ask whether we have finished becoming the Jews we could be: may every one of us still be able to say, not yet.

Shehecheyanu v’kiy’manu v’higianu la-z’man ha-zeh. Shanah tovah.

Shanah tovah. Thanks for letting me share my thoughts with you this new year. I’m grateful that you are all here.

Years ago, a friend of mine was backpacking through Europe, and decided to go to Iceland. He stopped at a Chabad rabbi’s house in Reykjavik. The rabbi invited him for a Friday night meal. During the meal, packed house, many kids, he was asked a question: why are you backpacking through Europe? And he answered what he thought was the right answer: to find myself. And then he looked at the 5 year old kid, sitting across him, she had been good throughout the meal but now she looked at him with a mix of pity and concern. But you are here! She said.

Of course from a five-year-old’s perspective this looks like a looney tunes dialogue. What do you mean, find yourself? How can you lose yourself  – you are where you are! And the funny thing is, the five-year-old was right, maybe more right than the backpacker who needed a plane ticket to figure out where he was standing. You can’t go find yourself, because you never left; presence isn’t somewhere you travel to.

And yet – being located somewhere and being present are different things. You can be exactly where you are and still not be there. We are masters of this in our modern age. And there is one word in our tradition for the moment you stop merely standing somewhere and actually being there.

Now three times in the Torah portion of tomorrow, Avraham will be called. And three times, he will answer that single word. God calls: “Avraham.” And he answers: Hineni. Here I am. His son Isaac calls: “Avi, my father.” And he answers Hineni, my son. Here I am. And at the last unbearable moment, the angel calls from heaven: “Avraham, Avraham.” And he answers again — Hineni. Here I am.

What does it mean, “here I am”? Does God not know where Avraham is? Does his son not know? Does the angel not know?

Hineni is one of the most important words in the Torah, and it is almost impossible to translate. The English says “here I am” but really Hineni does not tell you a location. Hineni tells you a posture of the soul. It means: I am present. I am ready. I am yours. I see you. Hineni is the word you speak as you rise to act and embrace your belonging to something larger than yourself.

Look at what Avraham is actually doing on that mountain. He is an old man. Everything in this terrifying story is about the future, about his son, about the descendants he is promised: I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand on the shore. Avraham will never live to count those stars. He is standing on a mountaintop saying yes to a future he will never meet. That is what it means to belong to something larger than yourself: to act, with your whole heart, for people whose faces you will never see.

And that is the question Rosh Hashanah quietly puts to us, underneath all the apples and honey. Not only “who am I?” but “what am I part of?” Folded inside that question are three harder ones.

The first: what do I owe the people who came before me?

The second: what do I owe the ones who haven’t arrived yet?

The third: what do I owe the ones who share this moment with me? Let us take them one at a time.

Dara Horn, a brilliant scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, published a few years ago a book with a title so uncomfortable that, she jokes, no one will sit next to you while you read it on the beach. She called it People Love Dead Jews. And her argument was this: the world has become very, very comfortable with dead Jews. It builds them beautiful memorials. It weeps over their diaries. It loves Anne Frank… but just as long as she stays safely in the past, behind glass, a tragic silent victim. What the world has a much harder time with, Horn says, is living Jews: you know, the ones with opinions, demands and definitely not victims.

And she noticed something else: she noticed that we ourselves have let our memory of who we are collapse into a memory of how we died. That we can raise a generation that knows exactly how many and by which methods Jews were murdered by the Nazis — six million in total, 1.5 million children, the Einsatzgruppen, the camps — and knows almost nothing about how Jews lived: the vast, centuries-long arguments of the Talmud; the poetry of the Golden Age of Spain; the mystics of Tzfat; the law, the philosophy, the sheer stubborn genius of a civilization that has been thinking out loud for three thousand years.

And, if all we hand our children is the death, Horn warns, we have handed them a museum. And you cannot love a museum. You cannot build a life on a graveyard.

She has a new book, with an even more shocking title. She has taken the most infamous phrase in the German language — the Nazis’ own name for their plan to murder us, “the final solution to the Jewish question” — and she has reclaimed it back. Her book is called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living. And her actual solution turns out to be almost simple. Learn the history of the Jews and let it claim you as different. Jews have survived precisely because they are different. Learn the Jewish life: don’t be content with learning about our deaths. She argues that you cannot even understand Western civilization without understanding the Jews.

For instance, ours is the people that gave the world the weekend, the radical idea that a living being is not a machine, that even a servant, even a stranger, even an animal is entitled to rest. That is part of what was almost erased. Not only people – but values: a way of seeing what a person is worth.

So here is the first answer to what we owe the ones who came before us. We owe them more than yahrzeit candles. We owe them our attention and the work of actually knowing them: what they built and argued and dreamed. And then it is on us to carry the living substance of it forward.

I can even hear you thinking: oh, there goes the rabbi, talking about God again. But I am not – and Dara Horn isn’t either, God knows that!

I am saying that we owe our collective past, our ancestors, a Hineni. We owe participating in this conversation that began four thousand years ago. Hineni. I’m listening. I picked up the thread. It did not die with you.

And this brings me to the second question. What do we owe the ones who haven’t arrived yet?

Go back to Avraham on the mountain. The promise he receives is not about him. It is about stars: descendants he will never count, a whole people not yet born. Everything he does in the Torah’s story, he does for them. He says Hineni not only to the God above him but to the generations coming, the ones he is holding the door open for. And we are those stars. Every single one of us in this room is somebody’s impossible promise, somebody’s Hineni whispered on a mountain we never saw. And now the door is in our hands.

To say Hineni to the future is to make sure there is something living to inherit…  not a museum, but a home. It means we teach, and learn, and learn to teach. It means we show up: at the Shabbat table, in this sanctuary, inside the messy, ongoing argument of Jewish life so that our children walk into a tradition that is warm and awake and theirs, and not a locked glass case of beautiful dead things.

Avraham’s stars are counting on us exactly the way we were counting on Avraham. That is the chain. Hineni is how you take your place in it.

Last night I spoke about the day after — about how, when the worst happens, people turn toward each other instead of away. This morning I want to tell you about someone who did exactly that, for us. Someone who was not one of Avraham’s Jewish children at all.

Her name is Anila Ali. She is a Pakistani-American Muslim woman, a retired California public school teacher, the founder of the American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council. And in the raw weeks after October 7th, when so many people were choosing a careful silence if not openly attacking us, Anila Ali stood up at the March for Israel on the National Mall in Washington, looked out over that ocean of people, and said: “I stand before you as a friend of the Jewish people. I am here to affirm to my Abrahamic brothers and sisters that you are not alone.” And she ended with: Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live.

I am here. That is our word, in her mouth.

Do you know what that cost her?

Muslim women who stood beside her were told by their own mosques to resign from her organization or be turned away at the door. She lost friends. She received death threats. And she did not look away. She led Muslim women to Israel to bear witness with their own eyes, and stood with Jewish women to break the silence around what was done to women on that day. She walked into Auschwitz alongside imams who stopped and prayed for our dead. And here is the most beautiful part: when you ask Anila Ali why, she does not start with politics.

She starts with her grandmother. Begum Syeda Khurshid Hafiz was a Muslim woman in pre-partition India who taught herself to read, and then went on to write more than a dozen books, and to build schools for girls who had never been allowed inside a classroom.

Ali says her own courage is a calling rooted in her family’s legacy. She is a link in her own chain. She is, in her own way, saying Hineni to her grandmother.

And she reminds her fellow Muslims of a piece of history they might rather forget: that when Muslims in America felt alone and afraid after September 11th — twenty-five years ago yesterday — it was Jewish organizations who stood up for them.

So let me say this as plainly as I can: if a Pakistani granddaughter can stand in the middle of Washington and say Hineni for a people that is not even her own, and pay a real price for it… then what is being asked of us, for our own people, for our own three-thousand-year-old chain, is not so much. It is only this: don’t look away. Be present. Be a link.

And now the third question: what do we owe the person sitting beside us right now, this morning, this year: what do we owe to those who share this moment on this earth with us?

For that, go back to the mountain one more time — but this time, do not listen to what Avraham says to God or the angel, listen to what Avraham says to his son.

Because there is a second hineni in this story, and we almost never speak about it. Halfway up the mountain, the son turns to his father and says a single word: Avi — my father. And Avraham answers with the very same word he had given to God: Hineni beni. Here I am, my son.

Think about how much harder that Hineni is. When God calls, infinite, invisible, a power you’ve never encountered before, it is almost easy to say yes. Awe carries you away. But sometimes this infinite power does not speak from heaven. Sometimes it is walking right next to you on the path, and it turns and asks you a question you can barely bear to answer. And still Avraham says hineni. I do not turn away from you either — not from the God above me, and not from my child beside me. I am here for both.

That is the hineni we owe one another. Not reverence for the dead, not plans for those yet to come, but plain, unglamorous, face-to-face presence… to the people who share this moment with us and call us by name. To be the kind of person who, when someone turns and asks are you there?, answers without flinching: Hineni. Here I am. I see you. I will not look away.

There is a moment, later today, when our own prayer leader will step forward before the open ark, and before daring to pray he will whisper a prayer that opens with this very word: הִנְנִי הֶעָנִי מִמַּעַשׂ. Hineni he-ani mi-ma’as.

Here I am: poor in deeds, trembling, unworthy, and standing up anyway on behalf of this whole community.

I love that the prayer begins by admitting he isn’t ready. Because none of us ever quite feels ready. Avraham wasn’t ready: you are allowed to be frightened and unfinished and full of doubt, and still say hineni. Here I am anyway. Count me in anyway.

And then, tomorrow, we are going to do something that is really nothing more than hineni with the words stripped away. We will raise the shofar — the horn of a ram, the very animal caught in the thicket on Avraham’s mountain, sounded from the exact spot where the third hineni was spoken — and we will blow. That cry is the sound of an entire people standing up at once answering the call. Here we are. All of us. Still here.

So this is the charge I want to leave you with as the year turns. And so you don’t have to hold it in your head alone, there is this magnet in your envelope. For the fridge. For the car. One word. This is the charge: say Hineni every day of this new year. Say Hineni to those who came before you — by learning who they truly were, life and stories and values and fights and loves and peace and dreams and desires. And carry it forward like the treasure it is.

Say Hineni to those who haven’t arrived yet, by handing them something living: a Judaism with pulse, passion, hand them a home and not a museum.

Say Hineni to one another: present, unafraid, willing to be counted. We are all links in a chain that did not begin with us and will not end with us.

Avraham looked up at a sky full of stars he would never meet, and he said: Hineni. We are those stars. And the only question this morning is… whether, when we are called by name, we will have the courage to answer the way he did.

Hineni. Here I am.                      

 L’shanah tovah tikatevu — may we all be written, together, into a good and living year.

Ki Tavo – summary

“Ki Tavo,” means “when you come”, and that means when you, as the collective Israel, come to the Land of Israel, the promised land. It opens with the declaration of the farmer bringing the first fruits to give to the kohanim in the Temple. We also read laws of 10% given to Levites and the poor; and how the blessings and curses on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval are supposed to be done – we read the general command for this back in Parashat Re’eh. The symbiotic relationship between God and us, being chosen and choosing, is also described. The portion then turns a bit sour, as we read a long list of rebukes, in the form of curses for breaking that relationship. The portion concludes with Moses telling the people that only forty years after their birth as a people, have they attained “a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”

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So tonight, I want to invite you to picture the farmers who bring the first fruits.

They have waited all season. They have watched the sky, worried about the rain, walked the rows at dawn looking for the first blush on the fig, the first swelling of the grape. And now the time has come. The land has given. They fill a basket with the first and the best of what they have grown, lift it onto their shoulder, and climb up to Jerusalem, to the House of God. They hand the basket to the priest. This is the moment. They have arrived. They have made it.

And what does the Torah command a person to say, when standing at the summit of such success? Not “Look what I have built.” Not “Look what I have earned.”

Storytelling. Story Telling Education and literature Business concept. Ability to tell stories.

Instead, these are the words placed in the farmer’s mouth: Arami oved avi. My father was a wandering Aramean. A perishing Aramean. Also translated as “an Aramean tried to destroy my father”. My ancestor, really, was a wanderer with no land, no security, no basket of first fruits — someone who very nearly did not survive. At the height of the harvest, the Torah puts in the farmer’s mouth the story of when there was nothing.

The tradition itself never quite settled what to do with Arami Oved Avi. Those three words sometimes are translated as “my father was a wandering Aramean.” But Onkelos, and the Haggadah, read those words as: an Aramean sought to destroy my father and mean by them that Lavan was out to erase Jacob. A father wandering, or a father nearly destroyed: two memories drawn from the very same verse. Even our founding line is remembered more than one way.

The declaration keeps going: you know the words, we say them every Pesach. Our ancestors went down to Egypt, few in number, and there became a great nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us, and afflicted us, and laid hard labor upon us. And we cried out. And God heard our voice, and brought us out with a mighty hand, and brought us to this place, this land flowing with milk and honey.

Listen to the shape of that story. Down, and up, and down, and up.

A wanderer near perishing. Then a great nation. Then slavery and affliction. Then crying out. Then redemption. Then a land flowing with milk and honey. It is not the story of a people who were always great. It begins with a parent who was lost. It moves through bondage and tears. Only then does it arrive at sweetness.

The Torah could have given us a cleaner story, but it didn’t. This foundational story, the one we are commanded to declare, the one around which the Rabbis built the entire Haggadah is a story of struggle and victory, of descent and rise, braided together and inseparable. And it turns out the Torah understood something that researchers would only measure three thousand years later.

A study came out of Emory University by two psychologists, Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush. They set out to learn what makes children resilient, what helps a child weather stress and loss and disappointment. They built a simple set of twenty questions they called the “Do You Know” scale. Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness, or something hard, that your family lived through?

What they found was striking. The children who knew their family’s story were steadier, more grounded, better able to handle whatever life sent them. The “Do You Know” scale turned out to be one of the best single predictors of a child’s emotional health and resilience they had ever measured. But it went deeper than knowing. It was the kind of story that mattered.

Some families, they found, tell only an ascending story: we came from nothing, we rose, and everything has only gotten better. Some tell only a descending story: we once had everything, and we lost it. And yet  they found out that the children who were the most resilient came from families that told a third kind of story, what the researchers called an oscillating narrative. It goes like this: We have had ups and we have had downs. We built things and we lost things. We buried people we loved and we celebrated people we got into our family. There were good years and terrible years and through all of it we held onto each other, and here we are.

That is the story that makes a child strong. Not “we made it.” Not “we lost it”. But “we have known struggle, and we have come through.”

Now let’s look back to Arami oved avi. That is an oscillating narrative. That is the story our tradition has been telling its children for three thousand years, precisely because it is the story that keeps a people alive.

So let me ask the question the season is already asking all of us. Rosh Hashanah is almost here. In these days of Elul we are meant to take stock — cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. We open the ledger of the year, of the life we lived. The days we made.

What is the story you tell about yourself?

Not the story of the posts. Not the one we tell at the dinner party to entertain. The story you tell yourself, about who you are, about the year behind you, and the years behind that. Is it an honest story? Or is it a story you have quietly, gently, edited?

Because here is the danger, and here is where we have to come back to Onkelos and the Haggadah, reading one verse two ways. We now know something about memory that our tradition intuited long ago: memory is not a recording. Every time we remember something, we rebuild it; every time we rebuild it, we change it, even if just a little. Memory is recreated each time we reach for it. And there is one editor always standing ready to help: pride. Pride sands down the rough parts, the ugly ones, the ones we would rather not have done. Pride quietly deletes the chapter where we failed, where we were cruel, where we were small, where we were lost, where our baser instincts took over. Pride takes an oscillating story and slowly flattens it into a smooth, ascending line: I was always right. It was always someone else’s fault. I have nothing to answer for. I did everything right.

And that flattering, flattened, all-good story is the enemy of teshuvah, of repentance, repair and return.

Because one cannot repair what one refuses to remember. We cannot turn back toward the good if we have convinced ourselves we never left it. Teshuvah requires the true ledger, one with both debits AND credits, one with both descents and ascents, one with both being lost and finding the way, with departures and arrivals. Teshuvah requires the courage to say: I was a wandering Aramean. I got lost this year. I hurt someone. I fell short. I could have done better. I was petty. And that honesty is not despair, it is exactly what makes repentance, repair and return possible.

The one who brings the first fruits does not stop at Arami oved avi. They do not end their declaration in the wilderness. They tell the whole story, all the way to milk and honey. But they can only taste how sweet it truly is because they have just spoken aloud the wandering, the affliction, the tears. Tasting the good means remembering the lack, the loss, the heartbreak.

So this is my blessing for us, as we walk these last two weeks toward Rosh Hashanah. May we have the courage to tell ourselves our whole story. The wandering and the arrival. The failures and the victories. The years we perished a little, and the year we cried out and were heard. May we refuse the flattering edit, may the honesty of that telling be the ground we stand on as we begin, once again, to return. Shabbat shalom.

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Shacharit

~ Look closely at the declaration for offering the first fruits. What are we supposed to say, and why? Where else do we know these words from? Why tell this specific story?

~ What is the idea of chosenness expressed in the parsha?

~ How do you see the connection between the first fruits declaration and the idea of choseness?

Our portion is Ki Tetze – which means “when you go out”. The laws that follow are laws regarding what happens when you – the Jewish person – go out to war, and the limitations imposed by Torah to certain behaviors, specifically around beautiful women of the conquered. Not only the soldier cannot commit rape – the soldier actually needs a cool off period of 30 days before he consumates anything. The Rabbinic tradition will add more days – 60 more – and a set of rules that intend to make the woman be seen as a person, and not as someone who the soldier can lord over. And, of course, the rabbis add conversion to the mix. Ki Tetze continues with an enormous amount of laws, 74 to be exact, making it the most law-dense portion of the entire Torah.

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“Ki tetzei la-milḥamah al oyvecha — begins our Torah reading. When you go out to war against your enemies.” The scene is a battlefield, and the first law this reading gives us is strange and unsettling: the law of the yefat to’ar, the beautiful captive. A soldier sees a beautiful woman among the captives, desires her. The Torah then slows everything down. He needs to bring her to his house. She shaves her head. She cuts her nails. She takes off simlat shivyah, the clothing she had before. And she sits in his house and weeps for her father and her mother, a full month of days. Only then can he touch her, and make her his wife.

The Zohar Ḥadash refuses to read this only as a law of war. It reads it as the story of every one of us. That beautiful captive, the mystics say, is actually the soul. “Ki tetzei la-milḥamah” — the war is this life, this world, this ordinary week, its pressures and desires rubbing against the beauty of the soul, trying to bring us down from the best we can be. The yefat toar is the soul: she is captive to the pressures of the world. She is beautiful because she comes from a beautiful place; she is a daughter of the King. And as the soul descends into a body and a world, she is taken captive — stripped of her own garments and dressed in the rough clothes of exile. . All week long the soul is a captive weeping for home — and most of the time, she does not even know that what she feels is grief. And so she sits, weeping for her Father and her Mother, for  God and Tora, the divine source from which she has been torn.

We know that weeping. And in a few moments, we are going to sing it. “Yedid nefesh av ha-raḥaman” — Beloved of the soul, Father of mercy. “Nafshi ḥolat ahavatecha” — my soul is sick with love for You. Rabbi Elazar Azikri, in Safed, gave the captive her voice. The weeping of the yefat to’ar and the longing of Yedid Nefesh are one voice — the soul calling out to the Father she was taken from, lovesick, homesick, exiled in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

Because that is what the week is. Six days the soul is at war and in exile. Not because the world is evil, but because the world scatters us. We go out. We are taken. We are distracted. Our thoughts of being good are dispersed. We put on the clothing of the week, work work work, and forget that we are children of the King.

And then, once a week, the exile is interrupted. Lecha Dodi calls: “Hitna’ari me-afar kumi” — Shake yourself from the dust, arise! “Lo tevoshi ve-lo tikalmi” — do not be ashamed, do not be confounded. We sing Lecha Dodi to the Shekhinah, to Jerusalem, to the bride — but it is sung, too, to the captive soul sitting in the dust of her own week. Get up. Shake it off. Your Beloved is coming out to meet you, and you are going home. That is what Shabbat is: the soul’s homecoming. Once a week the exile is suspended and the neshamah is allowed back to her Father’s house. Perhaps this is what we mean by the neshamah yeteirah, the extra soul of Shabbat. The extra soul that we all receive on Shabbat is not an addition so much as it is a reunion. The exiled soul comes home for a day, tastes a little of the homecoming that will one day be complete.

And now I want to say something honest, because I suspect you feel it too. Do we truly feel this homecoming? Or maybe do we manufacture it? We light the candles, we dress nicely, we prepare meals, we sing and tell ourselves the week is behind us. Do we perform our contentment? Somewhere underneath, we might suspect that the peace we feel on a Friday night is at least partly something we made up, a mood we talked ourselves into.

If that worry sounds familiar, you are in very good company. Two brothers were once troubled by exactly this — Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk and Reb Zusha of Hanipol. Both of them felt the holiness of Shabbat pour through the entire day, especially at the table, when the Ḥasidim sat together over words of Torah. And one day Elimelech confessed: “Zusha, ahi, my brother, sometimes I am afraid the holiness I feel on Shabbat isn’t real — that I only imagine it. And if I imagine that, then maybe my whole service of God is imagined too.” “Ach, ahi, my brother,” said Zusha, “I feel the very same fear!”

So they decided they’d make a test. On a Tuesday — an ordinary weekday — they would hold a complete Shabbat: the candles, the white clothes, the streimel, the meal, the songs, the services, the Ḥasidim, the Torah, every detail. And their reasoning was this: if we feel the holiness of Shabbat on a Tuesday, it proves the feeling was never real; and if we feel nothing, that proves our Shabbat is true. So they dressed, and they sang, and they danced, and they learned — and they felt it. Every bit of the holiness of Shabbat. On a Tuesday. Alarmed, they traveled to Mezritch and laid the whole thing before the Maggid. And the Maggid answered: “When you put on the Shabbat clothes and the streimel, when you made the meal and opened the Torah — of course you felt the holiness of Shabbat. These things have the power to draw the light of Shabbat down onto the earth. The holiness of Shabbat is always there. You simply brought it down, on a Tuesday, with your own hands. It is people, and what people do, that make a day holy. You have nothing to fear.”

They had nothing to fear because the making was never faking. This is exactly what the Torah asks of us: “Ve-shamru vnei Yisrael et ha-Shabbat, la’asot et ha-Shabbat” — to make the Shabbat.

We do not fabricate a false peace. When we light candles, when we prepare, when we carve out this moment of rest from all our labors – we build the vessel. And the holiness that is always waiting comes down to fill it. The soul does not come home to a house that builds itself. She comes home to the house we build for her — and when we build it, she comes. Then she is at home.

So tonight, when we sing Yedid Nefesh, hear the captive finding her voice. When we sing Lecha Dodi, hear the call to shake off the dust and rise. We are the yefat to’ar, we are taking off the clothes of the week. We are letting the week go so we can find the beauty of our souls anew, so we can sense it shine and glow with the candles. We are the lovesick soul turning back toward the Father she was taken from, going back to the Mother, to Torah, from where our souls sprung up. And we are Elimelech and Zusha — dressing for a homecoming with our own hands, drawing down, with candlelight and melody and the willingness to let the week go. We are ready to receive the holiness that is always there, waiting for us to make it room.

Shabbat shalom.