Rabbi's Blog

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.

“Shoftim,” means “Judges” – The portion begins with the commandment to appoint judges and police in every city. “Justice, justice shall you pursue” is the most famous half-sentence of our reading – justice needs to happen without corruption or favoritism. Crimes must be investigated and evidence thoroughly examined, a minimum of two credible witnesses is required for conviction and punishment.

Shoftim also includes the prohibitions against idolatry and sorcery; laws governing the appointment and behavior of a king; and guidelines for the creation of “cities of refuge”. Also, rules of war: the prohibition against wanton destruction and cutting down a fruit tree when laying siege. It concludes with the law of the eglah arufah, a procedure to be followed when a person is killed by an unknown murderer and his body is found in a field between two towns.

==

Our parasha opens with a command about power and order: שֹׁפְטִים וְשֹׁטְרִים תִּתֶּן־לְךָ בְּכָל־שְׁעָרֶיךָ “Judges and officers you shall appoint for yourself in all your gates.” On its surface this is judicial planning: Appoint courts. Make sure you have officers at the city gates, since there were the judgments pronounced.

The rabbis, however, through the ages, heard something more personal in the words be-chol she’arecha, “in all your gates.” Each of us is like a walled city. Sefer Yetzirah counts seven gates in the human face: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and the mouth. Through these gates the whole world streams into us, and out of them our own world streams into others. And in that level, the Torah is really saying: at every one of these gates, post a judge, and post an officer.

Who are those two? A shofet, a judge, is one who discerns. That is the force of our judgment, telling what is worthy to pass through a gate from what is not. A shoter, an officer, is one who enforces. This is the discipline to actually close the gate and prevent entrance. We all know the distance between the two.

How often do we know perfectly well that something is unworthy, something that brings us down, diminishes us, makes us forget who we are and what our values are — and yet we let it through anyway. The Torah is telling us: at the gates of the self, knowledge is not enough. You need both the judgment to recognize, and the discipline to act.

And then, a few verses on, comes the verse that gives this parasha its moral spine: צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף — “Tzedek tzedek tirdof,” “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” The word is doubled, and the Sages could not let a doubled word rest unexplained. The Gemara in Sanhedrin reads one tzedek for strict law and one for compromise. But there is another reading, long cherished among the commentators, that I want to hold up tonight: tzedek Tzedek, they say, means that not only you pursue justice, but that you pursue justice justly. The end you seek must be just, and so must the road by which you seek it. You cannot arrive at a righteous destination by an unrighteous path.

We usually picture injustice as something large and official — courtrooms, contracts, visible wrongs. But if justice must be pursued justly, then injustice can hide in the smallest, most ordinary places. It can hide in how we speak about one another when the person is not in the room.

Consider what happens when we gossip; when we shave a little off someone’s reputation; when we repeat the story that makes them smaller. We tend to think of this as harmless, just a bit of talk. But the Talmud will say this is such a deep transgression that it amounts to murder. As we gossip, we are taking something away from a person — their standing, their good name, their dignity. We are killing them with words. And we do it in a way that leaves no evidence and offers no recourse. There is no beit din they can bring us to. That is not a small injustice. It is, in a way, a perfect one: a murder with no witnesses.

And whose dignity are we spending? Mishlei/Proverbs says it plainly: לֹעֵג לָרָשׁ חֵרֵף עֹשֵׂהוּ “One who mocks the poor blasphemes his Maker.” To diminish a human being is not merely to insult that person; it is to insult the One in whose image they were made. The tzelem Elokim is not a decoration upon the human being; it is the human being. When we hold someone up for ridicule, when we mock, when we disrespect – we are holding up their Maker for ridicule, our intentions are immaterial.

That same verse in Mishlei ends with a warning that cuts even closer to our own age: שָׂמֵחַ לְאֵיד לֹא יִנָּקֶה: One who rejoices at calamity will not go unpunished.” The verse is not speaking of the person who causes the calamity, the verse is talking about the one who merely enjoys it. There is a particular pleasure the human heart takes in watching someone fall, listening to bad stuff about someone we dislike: the disgrace of the powerful, the scandal of the admired, the tragedy we get to watch from a safe distance. We have built whole industries on that pleasure. We scroll toward it. And the Torah names it for what it is — a form of injustice, because it feeds on another person’s ruin and calls it entertainment.

The Talmud teaches that lashon hara kills three: the one who speaks it, the one about whom it is spoken and the one who listens. The listener. We tend to feel innocent when we are only the audience. But there is no gossip without an ear willing to receive it. When we listen to people degrading one another and let it wash over us as normal, when we lean in, when we nod, when we say nothing… we have opened a gate. We have let the officer sleep at his post. It is not just that we became complicit, but that we are letting those values – degradation, disrespect, demeaning others – become our values.

This is how injustice becomes ordinary: not by one great crime, but by a thousand small ones that no one stood guard against. Every unguarded gate is an invitation to become less: less in our respect, less in our grace, less in our compassion.

So on this Shabbat of Shoftim, in the week we began the month of Elul, the onth of preparation for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, let me offer this small avodah, this small connection to the Transcendent: as we cross into Shabbat, which is itself a kind of gate, Kabbalat Shabbat is really the threshold between the noise of the week and the stillness of the holy, as we cross into Shabbat let us appoint our judges and our officers. At the gate of the ear, let us decide what we will refuse to listen to. At the gate of the eye, what we will refuse to look and oggle upon. And at the gate of the mouth let us be most careful of all. We say it at the close of the Amidah:אֱלֹקַי נְצוֹר לְשׁוֹנִי מֵרָע  “My God, guard my tongue from evil.” Guard my gates. Let nothing pass through them that would rob another person of the dignity You gave them. Perhaps this week we can mean it a little more. Tzedek tzedek tirdof. Pursue justice, justly — beginning with the smallest kingdom you will ever be asked to govern, which is yourself. Shabbat Shalom.

=== Questions for morning ===

Why do you think the word justice is repeated twice? What are the lessons we can derive from this?

How are the powers of an Israelite king limited, according to our text? Do you know of Jewish kings who did not observe these limitations?

How do you think the triennial’s end connects with its beginning?

On Shabbat, around tables in this town and around the world, parents will rest their hands on the heads of their children, close their eyes, and say three short lines. They are the same three lines our parashah gives us this week, tucked into the middle of Nasso —

יְבָרֶכְךָ ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ May God bless you and keep you.

יָאֵר ה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וִיחֻנֶּךָּ May God shine the divine face upon you and be gracious to you.

יִשָּׂא ה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם May God lift the divine face toward you and grant you peace.

Here’s something to hold onto. In 1979, archaeologists digging in a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, just outside the Old City of Jerusalem, found two tiny silver scrolls, rolled up like amulets. It took them three years to develop a method to unroll the scrolls without the metal shattering – and when they did they were more than surprised. Etched into silver some twenty-six centuries ago were these very words. The Ketef Hinnom scrolls are the oldest fragment of biblical text ever discovered. They are older than the Dead Sea Scrolls by many centuries. Which means that of all the words in the Torah, the ones we have been whispering the longest.

So tonight, let’s slow down and actually listen to the words we say so easily. In our siddurim, turn momentarily to page 107, so we can see the text together.

Let’s look first at the shape. Count the words in the Hebrew: the first line has three, the second has five, the third has seven. Count the letters: fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five. The blessing widens as it goes. It opens like a hand — or like the dawn, a little more light with each line.

And notice: every “you” in it is singular. Not yevarech’chem, “bless you all,” but yevarechecha, “bless you” — you, one person. The kohanim stand before an entire crowd and bless every single soul as if each one were the only person in the room. However many of us are here tonight, the blessing is not crowd-sized. It is heart-sized. It is meant for you.

The first line: יְבָרֶכְךָ ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ — bless you, and keep you.

Rashi asks the obvious question: if you’ve been blessed, why do you also need to be guarded? And he answers plainly — a blessing of wealth needs guarding, so that no one comes and takes it from you. A gift you can’t hold isn’t much of a gift.

But sit with that a moment longer, because it’s truer than it first sounds. Every blessing arrives with a shadow. Money can free you, or it can own you. Success can open your heart, or close it. Children are a blessing — and any parent in this room knows how this blessing can also keep you up at night. The rabbis coined the phrase = tza’ar gidul banim – the tzures of raising children. The sufferings of raising another human being. And I want to say – even a community like this one is a gift that has to be guarded, tended, protected from the small resentments that can corrode it. So the very first thing we ask is not only bless me, but help me keep what is holy about the blessing. Let me remember that even when I can’t see the blessings because of its accompanying tzures, it is still a blessin. Help me guard the gift, so it stays a gift.

The second line lifts us somewhere else: יָאֵר ה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ — may God’s face shine upon you.

Notice the shift. The first line was about what we have. Now, suddenly, we’re talking about a face. The deepest blessing turns out not to be a thing God gives us at all. It is God turning toward us. You know this feeling. Think of walking into a room and watching someone’s face light up — because it’s you who walked in. That lit-up face — that is being loved, being seen, being wanted. We all know that there are people that when you meet them their faces are – look, I’m here. And there are those who when we meet them it is like – look! You are here!

This line is the prayer that the God’s look at us, and shine with the pleasure of seeing us, God’s creature, trying the best we can at all times. Just like when we see a baby giving their first steps, or a student having an aha-moment, or a friend accomplishing something they really wanted. THAT feeling is the greatest feeling – their greatness, their reaching that milestone.

And then: וִיחֻנֶּךָּ — and be gracious to you. The word is chen, grace — and chen shares its root with chinam, “for free.” Grace is the gift you didn’t earn. It is the reminder that not everything in your life is a wage you worked for. Some of it — maybe the best of it — is simply given. The love you didn’t deserve. The love you receive just because. Pure chen. That is what we want you to feel when you feel the presence of God – being purely loved.

And the third line, the widest one: יִשָּׂא ה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ — may God lift the divine face toward you.

The Talmud is troubled by this one. The angels, it says, come before the Holy One and protest: Master of the Universe! In Your own Torah You wrote that You are the God who “lifts no faces” — who shows no favoritism, who cannot be flattered or bribed. So how can You promise Israel that You will lift Your face to them? And God answers — and I love this answer — How can I not lift My face to them? They sit down to a meal, and even if all they have to eat is an olive’s worth of bread, they stop to bless Me. How can I not show favor to a people who look for Me in something as small as a crumb?

To “lift the face” is a Hebrew idiom for forgiving — for overlooking a debt, for choosing love over strict accounting. So the highest line of the blessing is this: that God, who in principle plays no favorites, looks at us and tips the scale anyway. Out of love.

And it all comes to rest on one word: שָׁלוֹם. Peace.

The entire Mishnah — that whole vast sea of it — ends with a single teaching: that the Holy One found no vessel able to hold blessing except peace. Shalom is the kli, the cup. You can pour every other blessing in the world into a life, but without shalom — without some wholeness to hold it — it all just runs out through the cracks. That is why the blessing ends here. Peace is not one more item on the list. Peace is the container that lets you keep all the rest: the feeling of being at peace with the life you have been given, with the life you created, with the life that you made out of your choices with the hand you have been dealt – that is wha makes it possible to hold blessing.

So watch what this blessing has done. It started with our hands full — bless your things, guard your stuff. It moved to our faces — be seen, be graced. And it ended with our whole selves made whole — be at peace. From having, to being seen, to being whole.

One last thing. Right after these three lines, the Torah adds a quiet sentence that changes things a bit. Sephardim still say that line every morning. God says: “They shall place My name upon the children of Israel — וַאֲנִי אֲבָרְכֵם — and I Myself will bless them.” The kohanim, it turns out, don’t actually do the blessing. They are only the conduit the blessing passes through. The hand on the head, the voice saying the words — those are the pipes through whoch the shefa, the abundance, the light comes through. The blessing itself comes from somewhere higher.

Which means every one of us can be that vessel – it is the words that matter, the energy behind them, not just the kohanim being kohanim. Tonight, when you bless a child, a partner, a friend — when you simply wish someone shabbat shalom and mean it — you are doing exactly what the kohanim did. You are letting something larger than you pass through your hands.

So now, as we rise for barechu, as we rise to bless the source of all blessings, when we stake – shabbat is here, also remember: Shabbat is itself the kli, the vessel, the one day built to hold all our blessings. Shabbat is the day we breathe and feel our blessings. So may we be blessed and kept; may the face of the Holy One shine upon us and be given more than we deserve; may we be lifted, and made whole.

And may we, each of us, be a vessel through which that blessing reaches someone else.

Shabbat shalom.

The name of the Parshah, “Bamidbar,” means “In the desert”. It opens with God commanding Moshe and Aaron to conduct a census of the twelve tribes of Israel. The tribe of Levi is counted separately becausethey serve in the Sanctuary as kohanim and workers.  We read which of the families are responsible for dismantling and reassembling the Mishkan, the portable Tabernacle; and where each tribe and family encamped.

==

There’s a question so obvious we almost forget to ask it: Why was the Torah given in the wilderness — in the desert, of all places?

God could have waited. Forty years later, standing on the banks of the Jordan, the people would have had land, stability, a future they could almost touch. Surely that would have been the moment for Sinai — a Torah rooted in place, given to a people who had arrived.

But it wasn’t. It was here. Bamidbar — in the desert. In the between-space. In the transition. You could say – in the middle of nowhere.

The Midrash in Bamidbar Rabbah asks exactly this question, and offers an answer that I find almost unsettling in its simplicity: Why was Torah given in the desert? Just as the desert is hefker, ownerless, belonging to no one — so too, Torah must be hefker, free and available to anyone willing to receive it.

The desert, in other words, is not a problem in the story, a condition to be solved, a defect to be fixed. The desert is the condition for the story – and for us.

Think about what the desert does to a person. It strips you. There are no landmarks. No social hierarchy. No accumulated reputation. You can’t say “I am from the tribe of Such-and-Such, I have a house, I have a past, I know who I am.” The desert doesn’t care. The desert holds nothing — and therefore, it holds you.

This is exactly what Bamidbar opens with: a census. “S’u et rosh kol adat B’nei Yisrael” — lift up the head of every member of the community, count them, one by one. Every person is counted by name, not by category. In the middle of the wilderness, at the moment of most radical displacement, God says: You are not just a number. You are not lost. You are seen.

Resilience doesn’t begin with certainty. It begins with being seen.

There’s a teaching from the Sfat Emet that strikes me every time I come back to it. He says the desert represents a kind of emunah peshutah — pure, unadorned faith. That faith, that emunah, is impossible to sustain once you settle down. When you have a house and a harvest and a routine, your trust in God gets quietly, comfortably replaced by trust in your own infrastructure. If we are not aware, we can forget God’s presence completely – even if we are very observant. Not so in the desert: it forces a different posture – a posture of  hands open, nothing held, complete trust.

This is not weakness. This is the prerequisite for receiving. You cannot receive Torah with closed fists. You cannot receive wisdom if you are already full of yourself.

And then comes Shavuot — arriving almost always after we read this portion of Bamidbar — and we are supposed to re-enact standing at Sinai. We stay studying Torah all night long.

But notice: we have been traveling through the wilderness to get here. These seven weeks of the Omer were not just a countdown, but a count up. The weeks of the Omer are a journey. They are our own midbar — our own stripping down, our own willingness to arrive at Sinai without knowing exactly who we’ll be when we get there.

Resilience isn’t the ability to stay the same under pressure. Resilience is the capacity to keep moving through the desert without demanding that the desert become a more comfortable place. The Israelites didn’t tame the wilderness. They traversed it. And in traversing it, they became the people who could stand at Sinai.

My friends, I want to ask all of us: What is your desert right now? I mean this as a real question, not a rhetorical one. Each of us carries a midbar — a place of not-yet, of between, of stripped-down uncertainty. A relationship in transition. A grief that hasn’t resolved. A question about meaning or direction that doesn’t have an answer yet.

Our Torah doesn’t tell us to escape the desert. It tells us that the desert is exactly where revelation happens.

Openness is not passivity. It is one of the most courageous spiritual postures there is — to hold your hands open, to say: I don’t have all of it figured out, and I am still here, I am still receiving, I embracec the mystery and the transition.

As we move from Bamidbar into Shavuot, let us ask ourselves: What do I need to put down in order to stand at Sinai this year? What certainty, what resentment, what tight grip on how things were supposed to go — can I leave behind?

Because Torah is given to those who arrive with empty hands.

Shabbat Shalom — and Chag Sameach.

==

Morning:

Look closely at the text. There are at least two possible readings of this census. What seems to be a simple reading, and what could be a more complex one?

Second question – look at what happens to the tribe of Levi. What are their functions?

Patriarchal lens – only men are counted. But the text says two census were made: kol adat implies that everyone was counted – but then the text pivots to all males above 20 – no mention of the other limit, given later, of 50 years old. In this census, we only get the numbers of the men who are able to fight.

Acharei Mot-Kedoshim covers instructions for Yom Kippur, prohibitions against forbidden sexual relations, and a call to holiness through ethical and ritual laws, including “Love your neighbor as yourself”. The portions are combined this year. Together, they emphasize that holiness has to do not only with separating from idolatry, but extends to personal and interpersonal relationships: sexual morality, social justice, and acts in our everyday life.

==

Acharei Mot literally means “after the death of”, and it opens in the shadow of death. Nadav and Avihu are gone. God speaks to Moshe and says: tell your brother Aaron — he cannot just walk into the inner sanctuary whenever he wishes. There is a moment, a specific day – Yom Kippur – for him to enter. And when that day comes, there is a protocol. We begin with what he should wear. Now listen to this.

On every other day of the year, the Kohen Gadol wears eight garments. Gold woven through his breastplate. Bells of gold on the hem of his robe. A golden headband engraved with the words Kodesh l’Adonai — Holy to God. Colorful – blue, purple and red yarns. The clothes are magnificent, hierarchical, unmistakable. You cannot look at him and miss what he is.

But on Yom Kippur — on the one day he enters the Holy of Holies — he takes all of it off. The text says: כְּתֹנֶת בַּד קֹדֶשׁ יִלְבָּשׁ  — He shall wear a tunic of white linen. Linen pants. A linen belt. A linen turban. Four plain white garments. No gold. No color. No bells.

Why?

There is one simple answer, practical: gold is the metal of the Golden Calf. You don’t bring the symbol of Israel’s great failure into the place of Israel’s repair. That’s Rashi. It holds.

But the Zohar reaches further. It calls the white linen levush ha-neshamah — the garment of the soul. The eight golden vestments are magnificent, but they are a symbol of the office. They are hierarchical. They announce him. They carry his authority, his accumulated weight as Kohen Gadol. And the claim the Zohar is making is this: none of that can enter where he is going. Not because it’s bad. Not because honor and office don’t matter.

But because there is a place of encounter where all of that becomes noise. At the holy of holies, on Yom kippur, the Kohen Gadol is supposed to meet God’s presence at its most condensed. That place, at that moment, becomes a sacred threshold. In that confluence of holiest time, holiest place, holiest person, holiest nation – who you are in the world becomes an obstacle to who you are before God.

In Brazil, there is an afro-religion called umbanda. For any ceremony, all its practitioners wear white. When you see them in the seaside, on December 31st, you can’t help but understand the power of deciding to wear white for an important, religious moment.

Now, neither Jewish tradition nor umbanda practitioners invented this insight. It belongs to something much older in human spiritual experience — the recognition that genuine encounter requires a certain nakedness.

We live our lives heavily dressed. And I don’t mean literally. We are dressed in our roles — parent, professional, congregant, rabbi, the person who is carrying this particular grief or this particular pride right now. We are dressed in our histories — what we’ve survived, what we regret, what we’ve achieved. We are dressed in our expectations of whether God will answer our prayers in the affirmative, and whether this prayer is even worth saying.

All of that is real. All of that is us. But there is a question the white garments ask: can you put it down long enough to have an authentic connection with God?

That’s the spiritual technology embedded in this passage. The protocol isn’t just about the priest’s purity. It’s about his receptivity. You can’t hear what you aren’t open to receive. And you can’t be open while you’re fully armored in the signals of your identity.

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The High Priest did this once a year. He had a ritual architecture for the putting-down. We don’t have that on an ordinary Shabbat — or do we?

There’s a reason we come here and not somewhere else. There’s a reason we stop — once a week and enter a different kind of time. The question is whether we arrive already dressed in an armor. Whether we’re here with our minds filled with our complaints and our certainties and our rehearsed negotiations with God.

What would it mean to come, even briefly, in white linen? Not naively — not as if our lives don’t matter, as if our pain isn’t real. But with the deliberate intention of putting it all down at the threshold. Of saying: I’m going to try to be available right now. Open. Unguarded.

In Acharei mot the Torah gives us a fundamental message for the encounter with God: even the most important man in Israel’s religious life can only connect truly with the Divine by becoming, visually, the same as everyone else.

The golden vestments will be waiting when he comes out. The role will be there. The authority will be there. He doesn’t abandon them — he sets them down for the duration of the encounter.

Maybe that’s what prayer is, at its best. Not the abandonment of who we are. But the willingness, for a few minutes, to take off the externalities — and see what speaks to us when we’re not announcing ourselves so loudly.

Shabbat Shalom.