At Home in the Wilderness

[A d'var Torah from May 10 to the Bronfman Center community, and especially to our graduating seniors. A special thanks to Julian Gonzalez and Sofia Pasternak for sharing their thoughts on the wilderness.]

This week’s Torah portion finds us bamidbar: in the wilderness.

I have a feeling some of us in this very room are feeling a little bit bamidbar right now, and it’s a complicated feeling: the joy of getting to the other side; the gratitude for freedom; the fear of a life of new and as-yet-unknown responsibilities; the sadness of letting go of a place we have come to know.

In the wilderness, there are few landmarks. There are no roadmaps. It’s a place of sand and rock, mountain and—we hope—oasis. It’s beautiful and it’s scary. It is wide open and expansive. It makes us feel free, and it makes us feel small.

For the people Israel, wilderness was a place of bitter complaint—“Were there no graves in Egypt, that you brought us here to die in this wilderness!?” (Exodus 14:11). And wilderness was a place of profound nurture and care and love—with the pillars of cloud and fire to guide the community, with the manna to nourish them, with God’s presence in the Tent of Meeting, always at the center of the camp.
< At our Torah study this week, I asked what wilderness means to you. Two responses stood out in apparent contradiction. “Foreign,” said one person. But another person offered, “Home.”

Indeed, the midbar is both utterly foreign and utterly familiar. It is a place of wandering and it is a place that somehow feels like home.

And so for many of us—whether we are graduating this coming week or headed out for summer road trips and internships, whether we are returning to this place or flying across an ocean for a semester abroad, whether we are culminating a long-term project or conceiving a new endeavor—we are all on the cusp of a wilderness. And we are wondering, Will it feel forgeign? Will I be at home?

And I think it isn’t just the place or the experience we’re worrying about. It’s our very selves. Will I be foreign or at home? Will I be welcomed? Will they get me? Will I be recognized for who I really am, what I really have to offer? Will the inhabitants of this wilderness come to truly know me?

The poet Kadya Molodowsky writes:

I am a wandering girl.
My heart is practiced in longing.
And when the day eats up the dew of the night,
I tuck up the small white curtain from my window pane,
And look upon a new street.
There lies coiled up
In a little corner of my heart
Such a singular, trembling idea:
Maybe no one here will love me.
Maybe no one here will want to know me!
But God forbid!
Like the threat of rain always hanging in the air
And falling in unexpected abundance on the earth,
That’s how each new city is for me,
Each new place.
And I don’t know how manifold my flesh is.
Every year a new ring
Grows in me, as on a tree,
I am mazily woven of rising and setting.
I am a wandering girl,
My heart is practiced in longing.

It is our longing for something more that brings us to the wilderness: our longing for freedom, our longing for community, our longing to escape slavery and idolatry, our longing to make deep and abiding commitments, our longing for the responsibility to use our free will to decide how we will conduct our lives, our longing for the Torah that will guide us to the promised lands we will someday reach. We long for something more and we find ourselves bamidbar, in the wilderness.

And here in the wilderness, feeling so very small against the wide expanse of the desert sky, we wonder, “Will they love me? Will they want to know me?”

When the Moabite Ruth finds welcome, acceptance, and even love in the Israelite Boaz, she marvels, מַדּוּעַ מָצָאתִי חֵן בְּעֵינֶיךָ לְהַכִּירֵנִי וְאָנֹכִי נָכְרִיָּה: —“How is it that I have found favor in your eyes, that you recognize me, though I am a foreigner?” (Ruth 2:10).

Lehakir, to recognize, to know, to be familiar. And nochriya, foreign, Other. Both stemming from the same root. Opposite and intimately linked. At home. Out of place. Ruth the Moabite—the quintessential outsider in the Torah—finds acceptance. She is recognized among Israel.

Will they know you? Will they love you? Out there, in that vast wilderness?

I pray that they will, and that you will each be able to marvel, Here I am, a newcomer and a foreigner,in a new wilderness, finding home.



[Molodowsky's poem appears in The Torah: A Women's Commentary.]

Perfect Sacrifice

Does God demand perfection?

This week’s Torah portion, Emor, has multiple references to both priests and sacrifices (the animals offered on the altar of the Temple) needing to be “without blemish”:

“Speak to Aaron, saying: Any man among your offspring throughout their generations אֲשֶׁר יִהְיֶה בוֹ מוּם who has a defect [or blemish], shall not come near to offer up his God's food” (Leviticus 21:17).

The kinds of “blemishes” the Torah outlines are ones we recognize as things over which we have little control—natural accidents of birth or results of tragedy and trauma: “A blind or a lame person, or one with a sunken nose or with mismatching limbs; or a person who has a broken leg or a broken arm; or one with long eyebrows, or a cataract, or …” the list goes on (Leviticus 21:18-19).

Here, the Torah seems to suggest that in order to offer a sacrifice, a korban, something that is supposed to help us maintain a close relationship to God, to help us “draw near” to God, lekarev—we need to be perfect. Both in ourselves and in our offerings. We need to be perfect to approach God…

And not only that, but it seems to be a superhuman kind of perfection—because lots of people are differently-abled, living meaningful—and full—lives while being judged unfairly by society as lesser than, as outside… We would hope God would draw us all near.

What a time of year to be thinking about perfection… and to be wondering, Does God need my offering to be perfect? Does God need ME to be perfect?

Finals. Graduate School Admissions. Fellowships. Summer Jobs. Resumes and CVs. Tenure. Internships and Fall Classes and Majors and Minors. Grades and Transcripts.

There are a million and one messages you receive every day that tell you: Be perfect. Nothing less than perfect will do.

So now some Rabbi is telling you that the Torah demands perfection, too!? It’s Shabbat! Give us a rest!

We get so caught up in perfection, we are paralyzed from drawing near to the very things that lend our lives meaning, link us to tradition, and nourish our souls. And sometimes we confuse our offerings for ourselves, demanding perfection at all costs in all things, and nearly unraveling when our offerings fail to be accepted in the way we had hoped or expected. We tell ourselves that the animal we sacrifice must be without blemish, and we, like the priest, must also be without blemish: An “A” for the course and an “A” for us.

And sometimes we don’t even know what counts as a “blemish” – it seems like every little misstep disqualifies our offering, nullifies the sacrifices we have made. If they’re not perfect, they don’t count. We drop them from the transcript and ask to start over...

But there’s something I remind myself when I read these chapters in Leviticus, with all their blood and sacrifice, all their unblemished goats and perfect priests in their fancy outfits…

I remind myself that we don’t have a Temple anymore in which we perform AVODAH, the service of blood and fire and animals and meal offerings. We don’t make sacrifices like this anymore. Instead, we have prayer. We have avodah shebalev, the service of the heart.

We have the regular practice of gathering in community, of being alone together, of reciting ancient words and finding in them links to our own lives. We have communal prayer and we have silent, personal prayer, too. We have prayers for healing for ourselves and our world. We have memorials for our dead.

What does perfect service, the perfect sacrifice, look like now? Now that we have avodah shebalev?

The perfect service of the heart is what is perfectly true and honest for you. It is being self-reflective, and sometimes self-critical, but it is taking the responsibility for self-care, too. It is offering all of what lies in your heart—with no concern about anything being “without blemish,” because there is no external scale by which I can measure your heart. How can the service of your heart be perfect? If it is open. If it mirrors both your rational self and your emotional self. If it engages your memories and your hopes and your fears.

Whatever it is, it will be perfect.




This drash was inspired by Cantor Elana Rosen-Brown’s senior sermon for the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion on perfection in this week’s Torah portion.

As If…

As I prepare for Different from All Other Nights: NYU’s Annual Queer Seder at the Bronfman Center, lawyers on two sides of what has become a vitriolic and polarized debate over the legalization of marriages between persons of the same sex will argue their causes before the Supreme Court of the United States.

I confess that, when I think about gay marriage, I think selfishly. I think about my own partner of fifteen years: we have a ketubah (Jewish marriage contract), but no civil marriage. I think about our son: I was present at his birth, but his original birth certificate had only my partner’s name as parent. We spent time and (quite a bit of!) money obtaining what’s called a second-parent adoption so that I would be recognized as his legal parent in the eyes of the State (I am grateful, of course, for the opportunity to obtain those rights and responsibilities). When it comes to the legalization of gay marriage, I think selfishly.

It’s easy to stand up for marriage equality when you’re talking about your own family. Your partner. Your child.

Perhaps you already know where I’m going with this: Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and his celebrated (infamous?) reversal of opinion on gay marriage—from opposition to support—because he learned that his own son is gay. Many pundits and commentators—indeed many of my own friends (you know who you are…)—have acknowledged Senator Portman’s act as one of love. And rightly so. A father who loves his son stands up for him. But, what many of us also recognize are the limitations and dangers that the Senator’s actions imply: I care about the rights of my family—and no one else’s. As one online commenter quipped, “The best thing that could happen to such politicians is that they discover minority blood in their lineages, experience mental illnesses, realize their hired help are illegal immigrants, or have family who benefit from social programs.”

It’s kind of an Ahasueros move, if you think about it. You remember Ahaseuros—from the Scroll of Esther that we read just a few weeks ago on Purim. He’s the bumbling king who learns that his beautiful and obedient new wife Esther is actually one of them: a Jew! Knowing that the woman he loves is Jewish changes Ahaseuros’s mind about his own edict to annihilate the Jewish people. His love overrides his prejudices.

At our seder table this Tuesday night, a few students will share their coming out stories. We will celebrate their bravery, lament the discrimination they faced and continue to face, and give thanks for the family members (inherited and chosen) who support them with the unconditional love we all deserve from our families. I know I will find these stories moving and inspiring. And I know I will understand the crucial role that coming out has played and will continue to play in changing minds, in changing the culture.

But Purim cannot be the only model. It’s not a model for lasting change. It puts the burden on LGBTQI folks to be vulnerable and brave—as Esther was. But most insidiously of all, it assumes that we cannot support the rights of “Others” unless and until we can consider them our own. Must every single Ahasueros find his Esther?
Thankfully Jewish tradition gives us another model. Balancing the importance of honesty and bravery—the importance of coming out—that we learn from Queen Esther, the Jewish tradition gives us Passover. The holiday of as if:

בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ, כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרָיִם

B’chol dor va-dor chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza mi-Mitzrayim.—“In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he had gone out from Egypt.”

כְּאִלּוּ K’ilu—as if.

In his weekly podcast, Dan Savage, sex and relationship advice columnist and creator of the “It Gets Better” Project, called Senator Portman’s argument a “failure of the moral imagination.”

We might expect the Passover haggadah to emphasize our personal, familial, historical experience with enslavement. And it does. We recall the Torah’s oft-repeated dictum: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). But our tradition knows that the direct experience of oppression cannot be the sole moral motivation to oppose the oppression we see—and sometimes inflict—in the world around us. Our seder invites us to imagine. To act as if.

In other words, it is precisely an act of imagination that our Passover seder asks of us. It does not ask us to recall our own bondage in Egypt so many ages ago. It obligates each of us to imagine that we had been enslaved in bitter bondage, and liberated by God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm. It invites us to imagine that awesome—terrible and overwhelming and miraculous—moment when the sea split, revealing dry land.

So this year, as the Supreme Court Justices ponder the arguments they will have heard on Monday and on Tuesday, let us imagine a world in which each Ahaseuros is indeed married to an Esther. Let us act as if our moral precepts demand ethical treatment of those Others around us. Let us act as if our fate were bound up in the fate of those around us—not just our own sons, our own daughters, our own children, but all those Others who cry out for freedom. For in every sense that matters, it is.

An Ark of Sanctuary

The cavernous brick ceiling vaulted over us like the roof of some massive ark, filled to capacity with refugees from a deluge, a storm that raged with winds and with surging waters that would not relent. Not forty days and forty nights, thank G-d, but a storm that devastated the world we had known. This was the Park Slope Armory YMCA just days after Superstorm Sandy.

On Friday evening and again on Saturday morning, I and two of my colleagues from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion led Shabbat services for Jews and non-Jews evacuated to the Armory from their nursing facilities and assisted residencies in Rockaway and other flooded neighborhoods. A volunteer “wellness coordinator” had contacted my home shul, Congregation Beth Elohim, which has been and continues to be a center for volunteer and relief efforts in Brooklyn and beyond. Our clergy team—Rabbi Andy Bachman, Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, Rabbi Marc Katz, and Cantor Joshua Breitzer—have been working around the clock, along with a dedicated staff and dozens upon dozens of community volunteers. Our community has prepared and delivered meals, collected and distributed water and batteries and other much-needed supplies, and offered words of comfort and hope to so many people stranded in their ruined homes or displaced to shelters around the city. Unable to lead the services themselves as they attended to the ongoing needs of our spiritual community, CBE’s clergy reached out to rabbinical and cantorial students in the neighborhood, empowering us to bring some Shabbat rest and joy to the evacuees at the Armory.

Imagine creating the rest of Shabbat on an indoor track in a room echoing with sound: confused shouts and cries of disoriented patients, joyful noises of reunion and relief as people are able to contact loved ones via cell phone, volunteers being oriented to the sights and smells of what is basically a medical operation as well as a residential facility. Rows upon rows of army-style cots (just canvas stretched over metal frames) line the room. Residents from nursing homes and mental healthcare facilities lie on these makeshift beds; there is no privacy, no space for personal effects. Indeed, in many case, people have no personal effects to speak of: they came here with the clothes on their backs. Yet Shabbat in that room, with a motley minyan gathered together on folding chairs, was the most joyful and grateful Shabbat I have ever experienced.

Shabbat, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, does not depend on space: it is a sanctuary in time. And so it simply didn’t matter: it didn’t matter that we sat on folding chairs on an indoor track at what is normally a YMCA sports facility. What mattered was that we created a sacred moment in time: a moment for holiness, a moment to invite in the Presence of G-d, a moment to breathe and be reminded that, behold! we are alive! Unable to light candles because of fire code laws, we kindled the spark of Divinity in each of our souls, visualizing that light filling the time and the space of our Shabbat service. We pictured ourselves on the hills of Tzfat or the shores of Hertzelia. We imagined that the canopy of brick above was instead a blanket of stars. One man remarked how beautiful it was, fleeing the storm, to look up and see stars, even over New York City. Beauty in a moment of chaos: a powerful image for our Shabbat in that modern-day Ark.

And so we gathered a little closer together. We sang and we blessed. We laughed and we cried. We prayed for healing. And on Shabbat morning, we shared not the traditional nissim b’chol yom (miracles of every day), but our own blessings of thanks. “I am thankful that I was able to hear my mother’s voice over my cell phone, and to know that she and my sister are alive, and safe.” “I am thankful that I got these new sweatpants, because I lost all my clothing in the storm.” “I am thankful that the Jewish people is alive and celebrating, after all that has befallen us, up to even this storm.”

A wave washed over me, but this time not the waters of the Hudson or the East River or New York Bay or the Atlantic, itself displaced from its normal position by the winds of Sandy. A wave of gratitude and humility, a wave of hope, a wave of belief in the real Truth of the fact that each of these people—these strangers with whom I was so blessed to spend my sacred Shabbat—is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of the Divine. I got to experience a moment of that Divinity, there beneath the arch of the Park Slope Armory, and for that I am grateful.


Help and hope will be needed in the coming weeks. Please check the Bronfman Center’s website for ongoing information on how you can respond—with your wallet, with your hands, with your prayers, and with your hearts.

A Success that Misses the Mark

Yom Kippur Morning 5773, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

על חטא שחטאנו Al cheit she chatanu l’fanecha—for the sin we have sinned… for our failings… for the ways we have missed the mark…

The Hebrew language speaks about sin in terms of targets and slippages. To sin, להחטיא lehachti, is literally to “miss the mark.”

I’ve never tried to string a bow, loose an arrow, and hit a target, but judging from how much strength, precision, and patience it seems to require, I can only assume I would have done terribly in The Hunger Games. Sometimes, as the long and hungry minutes of Yom Kippur slowly tick away, I picture myself awkwardly raising an arrow to the taut bow. I’m already straining and my form is all wrong. And then, like a whisper in my ear, my own doubt distracts me—and the arrow falls lamely to the ground two inches in front of me. Nowhere near that bulls-eye. I failed.

Sometimes, even when we hit the target, but off somewhere in the outer edges, we also think to ourselves, “I failed.” We want that perfect shot. We want to succeed. And, somehow, success means only one thing. There’s one red bulls-eye, and our arrow simply must reach it with speed and precision.

None of us are strangers to this pressure to succeed—this pressure to excel at hitting that coveted bulls-eye. And the pressure seems to begin earlier and earlier these days—apparently, my wife and I are supposed to tour preschools this fall to ensure our 16-month-old son a spot in “the twos class.” We compete with our neighbors and our classmates for dwindling spaces in prestigious graduate school programs, or for research and travel grants. We put increasing pressure on ourselves to make more money, to earn more accolades.

And it seems that our cultural model of success is failing us miserably.

In her books The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, psychologist and educator Madeline Levine demonstrates how our cultural obsession with success hurts us. In her work with middle- and upper-class adolescents, Levine discovered that pressure to conform to one, narrow model of “success” has contributed to a range of emotional, physiological, and behavioral problems among young people, including “stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, poor coping skills, an unhealthy reliance on others for support and direction, and a weak sense of self.” Levine is not alone Writers and researchers in education and adolescent psychology voice the worry that, in our manic scramble to “succeed,” we are failing at creating a culture of self-aware, self-confident individuals who can adapt to change and who, perhaps more importantly, have developed strong character traits and values. In our well-intentioned race to “the top,” we are neglecting to nourish a broad range of human emotional, psychological, and character needs. We are feeding ourselves on material success—on iPhone fives and on just one more minor and on another A for the GPA—but what are we missing? Levine tells of one affluent young girl, well on her way to admission to an ivy-league college, who turns over her arm to show the word she has carved into her own skin: “Empty.”[1]

“Empty” is a charge often railed against an entire generation—the generation and the demographic depicted in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, the tale of a twenty-something named Hannah whose parents have cut her off financially and who struggles, as she says in one episode, “trying to become the person that I am.” Many critics argue that Hannah wants a “success” that has no substance—she simply wants to be successful. One Tablet magazine writer quips, “What neither character nor creator seem to understand is that success, defined on those terms, is impossible. If success is the goal, and if no other depths of feeling or breadths of interest are anywhere in evidence, what hope do these girls have other than making a spectacle of their lives?”

Don’t get me wrong—I like the show just as much as I know some of you do. I’ve talked to several of you about the strange experience of watching Girls—both the pain and the delight in seeing a struggle that many can relate to. Is it merely a show about self-indulgent, spoiled youngsters with an entitlement problem? Or is it a sign and a symptom of a broader cultural ailment? Levine argues that such a skewed vision of success is practically a cultural epidemic. She writes, “Many kids have become proficient at image management”—young people know how to appear successful. But, she continues, “[A] deeper examination of these children shows that their external success is superficial and even meaningless to them.”

Somewhere along the line, we have become caught up in a notion of success that leaves too many of us feeling empty. This “success” has gripped us tightly—so tightly that we can hardly breathe.

I have been thinking about success and failure a lot lately, as I watch my young son develop in ways that seem to me miraculous. Suddenly, it seems, he can throw a ball! For weeks, I had watched him try, and for the first time I really thought about how complex it must be—not just the aiming part, but knowing precisely when to let go of the ball. I watched him try and “fail.” I let him get frustrated. And then one day he held on to the ball much longer than usual, refusing, this time, to let it slip behind him. He threw the ball! Obvi, we all celebrated with a dance and some hugs and maybe a high five.

What am I teaching my son about “success” as he sets goals, misses the mark, and eventually reaches a target? What in our Jewish tradition can help guide me as a parent in teaching a more meaningful and realistic and emotionally healthy version of “success”? What in our Jewish tradition can guide each of us to a new kind of target?

The word מצליח—succeeds—appears many times in the Torah. Sometimes it implies that there is only one outcome that “counts” as success—hitting that bulls-eye. Often, the verb is associated with God: God is the one, the only one, who can truly be called accomplished and reliable. From the prophet Isaiah: “So is the word that issues from My mouth: it does not come back to Me unfulfilled”—literally empty, ריקם—“but performs what I purpose, achieves”—הצליח—“what I sent it to do.” Never a misstep, never a word spoken in vain, never a promise un-kept, never a goal un-reached. Certainly such “success” seems divine!

What about us humans? I think the verse in Isaiah points to an important factor in success, which is desire. When God says that all of God’s words “perform what I purpose,” the verb for “purpose” is חפצתי—what I desired. Every self-help book on success tells you: to succeed, you have to know what you want.

Today, on Yom Kippur, on our holiest of days—the day on which we acknowledge our missteps, our missed targets—what do we want… besides a sandwich right about now?

Many of us think we do know our goals for success: we can visualize ourselves in that career, or living in that beautiful house. But let’s make sure that what we desire is realistic enough, flexible enough, broad enough, ethical enough, emotionally and spiritually fulfilling enough—to really count for success.

From a Jewish perspective, some of the things that make us successful as people are not items to be checked off on a list—achieved once and displayed like so many trophies. “Honor thy father and mother? Check!” The Mishnah tells us that there are some obligations—some values we carry as Jews—that we never “check off the list.” There are some values we must fulfill again and again and again. Our rabbis adapted this list of values and inscribed it in our prayerbooks so that we might remind ourselves daily: “These are things that have no limit […]: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion, arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, being devoted in prayer, and making peace among people. And the study of Torah encompasses them all.”

These verses kept coming to mind as I read Paul Tough’s book, How Children Succeed. Tough urges us to measure success not only by material success, but by emotional health, creativity, and empathy. He challenges what is known as “the cognitive hypothesis,” which he defines as “the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” The cognitive hypothesis contributes to the preschool-rat-race and to parents’ spiraling fears about their child’s scores on a whole battery of tests that require her to regurgitate bits of information. But, Tough argues, what really contributes to success is not whether we instill in our child piles upon piles of discrete information, but rather, “whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.”

To tend to those things that are limitless—to take seriously an obligation to those items on the Rabbis’ list—requires emotional generosity and a great deal of empathy. It requires redefining success to include not only material wealth or professional accolades but how much we have integrated ourselves into our communities, how much we tend to learning for learning’s sake, how much we cultivate spiritual exploration, and how much we give to those in need. Success is measured by how well we tend to that which is limitless: our character.

And, during our 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, we remind ourselves of another important lesson for success: failure.

It’s something many of us fear. It’s something we even dread. I recall the many times when, as an instructor in NYU’s Writing the Essay, I received emails and phone calls from frantic parents about their child’s grade. Many of them were worried not about a literal failure—all of my students passed the class. They were worried about a B+. Trust me, I’m an overachiever, and my own definition of personal success is often, frankly, unreasonable. But I know, too, that I need days like today: I need Yom Kippur. I need it not to set the bar even higher, not to convince myself that all I’ve done over the past year is miss the mark again and again and again. I need Yom Kippur to remind me that missing the mark can help me to be a better person. I need Yom Kippur to help me recalibrate my notions of failure and success.

What matters for success—so says Paul Tough and Madeline Levine and positive psychology and educational experts and our Sages, the Rabbis, too—what matters for success is not so much how much information we can stuff into our heads. It is not so much how well we did on our SATs. It is, rather, how much grit and determination and passion and drive we bring to all our endeavors. It is our ability to envision not just hitting the bulls-eye, but the ways we might miss… and what we might do when that happens. It is developing our character and our values through habits, through daily and weekly and yearly practices that remind us that we are whole persons—brains and hearts and hands and souls.

Our target is not a small one, but an ethos. Our target—our definition of success—is not a bulls-eye. It is a way of being and acting in the world. This is what we desire.

The prophets remind us that what God wants of us is not that we “check off” items on a list. Not that we rack up accolades in just one area of human existence. We can succeed by imitating the God who declares, “For I the Eternal act with lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the world, for it is these I desire.”

חסד משפט וצדקה—Lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness. These are not achieved in isolation. These are not achieved with a quick tweet. They are achieved through a daily attention, in community, to a broad range of human needs—intellectual, material, emotional, recreational, financial, spiritual. Levine puts it this way: “While we all hope our children”—and, we might add, ourselves— “will do well in school, we hope with even greater fervor that they will do well in life. Our job is to help them to know and appreciate themselves deeply; to find work that is exciting and satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal; and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to society.”

When our son was born, Rachel and I thought about the values we wanted to pass on to him, and we gave him a name that would serve—both for him someday, and for ourselves, too—as a reminder of those goals, those values. Ilan.

An ilan is a tree. A tree that drinks deep and reaches to the sky. A tree that can offer shade. A tree that must, if it hopes to survive the winds of the world, remain flexible. We read in the Mishnah:

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariyah […] used to say, anyone whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, to what may he be compared? To a tree—an ilan—whose branches are many and its roots few—the wind comes and uproots it and turns it on its face […]. But anyone whose deeds exceed his wisdom, to what may he be compared? To a tree whose branches are few and whose roots are many—that even should all the winds in the world come and blow on it, they will not move it from its place […].

Our success is measured not by what we know, or how much we know, or how many pieces of paper we have to prove that we know it. Our success is measured in our deeds. In deeds that increase our love of learning. In deeds that increase our empathy. In deeds that nourish our roots and that enable us to spread out our branches, sheltering others in our shade.

This Yom Kippur, may we each find the potential to be that tree, that person of whom the Psalmist writes: “[T]he Torah of the Eternal is his desire, and on that Torah he meditates day and night. וְהָיָה כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל פַּלְגֵי מָיִם אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ וְעָלֵהוּ לֹא יִבּוֹל וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה יַצְלִיחַ He shall be like a tree planted beside streams of water, which gives its fruit in it season, and its leaves never fade, and all that it does succeeds.”



[1] Levine, Madeline. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
[2] Leibovitz, Liel. “The Unbearable Lightness of Girls.” Tablet. April 6, 2012.
[3] Levine, Madeline. Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.
[4] Isaiah 55:11.
[5] Daily prayerbook, adapted from Mishnah Peah 1:1.
[6] Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Jeremiah 9:23.
[9] Levine, Teach Your Children Well.>br>[10] Mishnah Avot 3:17.
[11] Psalm 1:3.

Don't Go It Alone

Rosh Hashanah Morning, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

Anyone who watched the sci-fi television drama Buffy, The Vampire Slayer knows that Buffy’s biggest challenge—the most pernicious demon she ever fought—was not a vampire or a monster or a giant snake or the incarnation of some primordial evil. No, the blonde former-cheerleader-turned-superhero fought an even mightier battle: A battle with her own inflated sense of responsibility.

You see, legend told Buffy that she alone stood between the ordinary and innocent people of her little California town and utter destruction. She had a noble mission to fight evil—and she had to fight it alone. Burdened with the weight of the world, she time and again averted literal apocalypse. Just one girl. Against all the evil in the world.

But, somewhere along the line, Buffy learned that she couldn’t go it alone. More and more, she came to rely on her friends and their individual talents to complement her strengths. They helped her investigate mysterious enemies, put her work into historical perspective, added humor and emotion, performed magical feats she could not accomplish, and plainly widened her individual perspective. If Buffy provided pure brawn and battle tactics, they provided other necessary components, and combined, they were Hand and Heart and Brain and Spirit—whole, and able to confront just about any enemy. In one episode, the group confidently sang out, “What can’t we face, if we’re together?”[1]

Cheesy as it may seem, this refrain—“What can’t we face if we’re together?”—relates to an important Jewish lesson, one I feel especially keenly during these Days of Awe, and one we might consider prioritizing this year, here at New York University, diversely talented as we are. We each bring different strengths to this community, but how often do we think of our strengths as linked? It is easy to get cordoned off into our own silos—pre-med, Steinhart, Gallatin; humanities majors, education experts; secular and all shades of religious. As students, as young professionals, as faculty and administrators, and as experts in our respective fields, we can get caught up in our own day-to-day responsibilities. Sometimes it can feel like the weight of the world rests on our individual shoulders. Such an overdetermined sense of our own role can be daunting and paralyzing; taken to the other extreme, it can turn us into callous megalomaniacs.

But what couldn’t we face, if we acted together?

We’re together during these Days of Awe: unlike the two most-celebrated Jewish holidays among a majority of American Jews—can anyone guess what those might be? [Hanukah and Passover]—we do not spend the Days of Awe secluded with our own families. On Hanukah and Passover, we gather in the privacy of our homes to mark the miracles our ancestors experienced. But on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur—the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, respectively—we come together, in a public place, in a shared praying and learning community. Though we are tasked with taking an account of our own personal misdeeds and sins over the past year, these “High Holidays” bring us into community. We can neither retreat into ourselves nor inflate our sense of individual importance. We are in this process of taking account together. Even the confession we will utter on Yom Kippur will be a communal one, expressed in the first person plural: we have sinned, we have transgressed, we have missed the mark. Whether we have each committed every single sin on the laundry list we will together recite, we make communal confession.

How can this be, the Rabbis of the Talmud asked? Doesn’t the Torah teach that each person is responsible for his own sins alone? On the contrary, our Sages assert; each of our sins brings negative consequences upon the whole world! This comes to teach us, say the Rabbis, that כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[2]

What does it mean to be “responsible”—to be עריבים areivim? What happens when we act as though we truly believe and understand that we are each עריבים זה לזה areivim zeh la’zeh—“responsible, one for the other”?

What does it mean to be עריבים? The word itself is tricky. עריבים comes from the word ערב erev—“evening.” Neither day nor night, but the border-time, the time in-between. And, in Modern Hebrew,מעורב m’urav means “combined,” “mixed.” To be עריבים means to be attentive to those places where we meet: where our needs and desires bump up against the needs and desires of our neighbors. To be עריבים means to be “mixed-up” in one another’s fate.

kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And it is this mutual responsibility that transforms us from a collective into a community.

The medieval Jewish community—the kahal—served not only religious and moral but also educational, political, and administrative needs. The kahal ran the Jewish courts that adjudicated certain matters of civil, criminal, and religious law. The kahal managed business relations and negotiated with the non-Jewish ruling authorities. Even in the time of the Rabbis, in the first centuries of the Common Era, a Jewish community concerned itself with collective responsibility. A person eager to live a life according to the moral and ethical precepts of the Torah ought to seek out the right kind of community. We read in the Talmud, “[A] student of the Sages may not live in a city that does not have the following [essential things]: a court […], a charity fund collected by two officials and distributed by three, a synagogue, a [public] bathhouse, a [public] privy, a physician, […] a scribe, a [Kosher] butcher, and a teacher of young children.”[3] These are things a community must have in order to nurture and sustain those who would live according to Jewish values. A community needs a fair court to adjudicate the law and to resolve disputes. A community requires each of its residents to contribute to a social safety-net to provide for the needs of the poor and the orphan and the widow, and it distributes those funds fairly and impartially. A community cares for the spiritual and religious lives of its inhabitants. A community tends to the physical and medical needs of its residents. A community provides opportunities to record its deeds and its learning. A community ensures that people have access to appropriate food. A community educates future generations. The great Sage Rabbi Akiva even added that an ideal community must have “several kinds of fruit trees, because their fruit gives light to the eyes.”[4] Aesthetics and beauty, fresh air and natural resources—these, too, make a Jewish community whole and enriching.

Traditional Jewish law took community responsibility very seriously. Contribution to the communal charity fund, for example, is required of each individual, according to his wealth; of course, the specifics of this requirement are contested and argued and adjudicated in many cases throughout traditional Jewish literature—but the general sentiment is that community sustenance is up to the whole community. Community leaders carried great responsibility, too. In the Talmud, we learn that community officials must perform an annual inspection of public facilities and utilities like roads, plazas, and ritual baths; should they neglect their repair and upkeep, these officials incur guilt for any injuries or deaths that occur as a result of accidents.[5]

How will you tend to the upkeep of your communities this year? Will you participate in the political process as a way of ensuring attentive care over public institutions from which we can all benefit? Will you work to improve the education of children in your hometown, in New York City, across the world? Will you engage in spiritual exploration here with the Bronfman Center? Besides yourself, to whom are you responsible?

And how far can our responsibility extend before we feel, like Buffy, that there’s just too much evil to fight alone? Jewish law guides us to a notion of concentric and expanding circles of obligation: sustaining our own families must take precedence, for example, over our contribution to the community charity fund; those “closest to us,” says one Code of Jewish Law, must take precedence over every other person.[6] Even to care for “the poor of one’s own city” is my responsibility before I become obligated to sustain someone in a faraway land.[7] And a person cannot be expected to financially sustain another if he cannot financially sustain himself.[8]

Our own community involvements are not singular. We each exist in many communities—some of them overlapping concentric circles and some of them seemingly isolated cells. We live in tension. Princeton professor Kwame Appiah calls it the pull between “the idea that we have obligations to others, ties of kith and kind” the world over, and “the value not just of human life but of particular human lives”[9]—a pull between universal and particular, between global and local, between a broad sense of care for all our human “brothers and sisters” and our real ties of affection and responsibility for our families and friends. In his study of “community” ties in America, Robert Putnam finds that, when most people think of “community,” they cling to the most inner of inner circles; he writes, “For most of us, our deepest sense of belonging is to our most intimate social networks, especially family and friends.”[10] Community organizers seem to want to tap into this sense of affection and mutual obligation—this sense of identity and belonging—and build on it to connect to our ethical obligations to those in ever-widening concentric circles. In the past, the kahal confined its “community” obligations to “the permanent [Jewish] residents in a given locale”—even going so far as to “decide who might or might not settle there.”[11] But in a postmodern, “cosmopolitan” world—a world in which we might feel responsible to family and to friends and to neighbors and to fellow citizens and even to strangers—the borders of “community” can seem messy and confusing.

To whom are you responsible? I cannot answer that question for you, though I hope that, over the course of the coming year, some of us can begin to explore that question together—through Jewish learning, through social justice projects, through Shabbat celebration, and in our social interactions.

כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[12]

And who is “all Israel”?

If you argue that “all Israel” refers only to ethnic Jews and converts to Judaism, you could find evidence to back your assertion, sure. Rabbinic literature abounds with claims limiting how we might apply Torah precepts like “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[13] Our neighbors, the Rabbis sometimes argue, refers only to the Jewish people.

But the Torah also tells us that “the Jewish people” itself is a mish-mosh gathering, a diverse collection. When God frees us from Egyptian enslavement with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, we pour out of Egypt—men, women, children, and livestock. And with us, marching joyfully in the Exodus—with us an ערב רב erev rav—“a mixed multitude.”[14]

Today, the Jewish community is most certainly an ערב רב erev rav. Each of us has endured a different kind of Egypt. Each of us walks to freedom a little bit differently. But we’re all mixed-up in this together. And we’re mixed-up, too, in the widening concentric circles of community in which we find ourselves—the ערב רב erev rav of this University, this great City, our nations, the world.

As we build and strengthen a progressive Jewish community this year at the Bronfman Center, we would do well to recall, as the Talmud reminds us, that sometimes we must imitate God by gathering together diverse materials from which to shape our holy communities. God, Rabbi Meir was known to say, did as such when creating the very first human being: “The dust of the first man was gathered from all parts of the world.”[15] Isolated, specialized communities will not fulfill the ethic of this act of the creation of human beings in the Divine image—gathered, as we each were, from the humble dust, collected not from one, single source, but from all the places of the earth. Perhaps it is this very diversity in our origins that contributes to our holiness, as the Torah teaches, “for all the community are holy, all of them, and the Eternal is in their midst.”[16]

Be a part of that holiness, this year—that divinely-sparked essence within each human being that, gathered in community, can create amazing things. Be the Hand or the Heart, the Brain or the Spirit. Be the one strong enough to know you can’t go it alone.

כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And together, there’s nothing we can’t face.



[1] References are to Joss Whedon’s FOX Network show Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003.
[2] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[3] Bavli Sanhedrin 17b.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Teshuva.
[6] Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Tzedakah, 251:3.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, xv.
[10] Putnam. Because I purchased and accessed Putnam’s work on a Kindle device that does not support page numbers, I am unable to cite precise page numbers in referring to Bowling Alone.
[11] Katz 88.
[12] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[13] Leviticus 19:18.
[14] Exodus 12:38.
[15] Bavli Sanhedrin 38a.
[16] Numbers 16:3.
[17] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.

A Year/A Learning/A Change

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5773, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

עולם מוזר [...] יש בדידות ,יש כאב [...] ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע Olam muzar […] yeish b’didut, yeis k’ev [...] u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“This world is strange […] There is loneliness, and there is pain […] And no one knows what tomorrow will bring.” [1]

Tonight and tomorrow, on Rosh HaShanah, we mark the birthday of the world in a time of change and uncertainty. Some of the changes we have seen are strange and wonderful; others, strange and frightening. And, indeed, no one knows what tomorrow will bring, situated as we are in a time of economic and institutional and political transition.

ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“and as for what will be tomorrow, there is not one person who knows.”[2]

In some strange way, the words of this Israeli pop song make me think of that new text-messaging acronym: “YOLO: You only live once.” I’m sure this slogan is supposed to be upbeat and encouraging, but I can’t help hearing it fatalistically: “YOLO! Seize today, because tomorrow it’s probably just gonna get worse.”

Live the one life you’re given to live, and if you take too many risks, if you make too many mistakes, אין זה משנה ein zeh meshaneh—it doesn’t matter all that much.

אין זה משנה ein zeh meshaneh—literally, it doesn’t change. Within that phrase lies a key word for today: שנה. A year. The cycle of days that brings us back to the beginning. What does it mean for us, in this time and in this place, in this changed and changing world, to wish one another a shanah tovah?

For the students and teachers among us, שנה represents a familiar activity: learning. In Hebrew, shin-nun-heh, the letters and sounds that mean “earth’s trip around the sun,” can also mean to learn, to repeat, to go over again. Learning, for the Rabbis of our ancient tradition, meant reviewing and repeating. Young men memorized the debates and questions and disagreements of their rabbis, repeating not only legal outcomes but all the preliminary dialogue and debate. They preserved majority opinions and minority ones, too. They recalled and re-told tales of rabbinic wisdom and folly. They remembered and they repeated. An old model of learning, perhaps: the parroting students faithfully regurgitating information placed in their heads. Yet not entirely outdated or unhelpful: recalling and cherishing the lessons of the past and preserving lively debate so that we need not make similar errors in the future, so that we preserve our heritage, so that we benefit from the collected wisdom of the generations who came before us. In the Torah, we read that the ideal political ruler for Israel would carry with him at all times משנה התורה הזאת mishneih ha’Torah ha’zot—a copy of this Torah, this teaching.[3] Why? So that he might be accountable to the truths contained in it, so that he might understand his responsibility to the Jewish people, past present and future. He carries a copy, a second Torah, so that he might remain faithful to the “original.”

In these days and times, how can we tell a copy from the original? Do we even think it is possible to simply reproduce a copy? Would such a static, faithful copy be desirable? Lady Gaga “copies” Madonna who “copies” voguing houses in New York City… yet each “version” remains distinct. And, after all, didn’t the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “copy” Ovid’s rendering of the ancient Roman lovers Pyramus and Thisbe? Copies and originals blend; African beats become soul classics become hip-hop remixes become Afro-hip-hop fusion. Every repetition is a repetition with a difference.[4]

משנה, learning, can never be a simple parroting—and not only because direct copying is nothing more than plagiarism. Learning might be a repetition, a going-over, a turning back to the collected wisdom of Sages who precede us, but we also add our questions and our interpretations. We become part of future repetitions, like the bordering commentaries on a page of Talmud. Whether we consider our “Torah” to be the five books of Moses or our native country’s constitution or the canon of Western literature or Sondheim’s songbooks or the collection of the MET, we and our learning contribute to a conversation that long precedes us and, we fervently hope, will continue long after we are gone. A new year invites us to make משנה תורה mishneih Torah, a “second Torah,” of our own. Our “second Torah” must be recognizably linked to its “original” ancestor, else we run the risk of separating ourselves from generations upon generations on whose shoulders we stand. And yet our “second Torah” adds nothing to the vibrancy of contemporary life if it does not respond to the changes in our world.

I wish for all of us, then, משנה טובה Mishneh tovah—good learning.

And so we “repeat” the annual cycle. Another shanah turns. We sit through the same services. The shofar blasts the same patterns. We hear that melody again and again and again, forever it seems, l’olam va’ed!

And yet the world surprises us: patterns break; mutations emerge without precedent; variation abounds. Indeed, Judaism calls God משנה הבריות meshaneh ha’briyot—one who makes various creations. There’s even a blessing for it: When you see a monkey, the Talmud urges, or an elephant—a strange and wondrous creature you might not see every day—you take a moment to recognize the miraculous variety of God’s creation. “Blessed are You, Eternal, […] for making various creatures.”[5] It’s a blessing that inspires us to consider how we treat the natural world, how we take responsibility for the billions of organisms we cannot even see—those hundreds and thousands of species deep in rainforests or floating in the dark deep. And it is a blessing, too, about change.

Remember your high school yearbook, and those endless entries at the back, usually from people you barely spoke to: “Don’t eva change!” And those captions beneath the photos: “Most likely to…” “Least likely to…” We recall our days in patterns and predictions.

Well, if God—כביכול, if it were possible to say such a thing—if God had a yearbook entry, it might read: “Least and most likely to change—and to change others.” משנה meshaneh: God as the One who changes.

I’d like to think of the blessing meshane habriyot as a blessing over the undeniable fact that our Creator did not make us static. A statement of profound gratitude for the reality that our God changes each of God’s creatures. Yes: Blessed are you, Eternal our God, […] who makes different creations—who makes myriad creatures, strange and familiar. Yes, and: Blessed are you, Eternal, […] who changes creations—who surprises us each, during our lifetimes, with our own capacity for growth, with our amazing ability to remain recognizably ourselves and yet sometimes be utterly foreign to the life we thought or assumed or were told we would lead.

This is the same God who “turned the flinty rock to a pool of water” (Psalms 114).[6] Miraculous and terrifying! The reliable landscape floods and turns firm ground into waters in which we might drown. Blessed and miraculous! The unforgiving stone becomes a life-giving source of water. A new year opens us to the potential for a sudden change.

I wish for all of us an openness to משנה לטובה meshaneh l’tovah—the One who changes us for the better.

עולם מוזר Olam muzar—It’s a strange world in which we live. Constantly changing. At times inspiring. At times overwhelming. עולם מוזר כולו שלך Olam muzar, kulo shelcha—“This world is strange, and all of it is yours.”[7] The responsibility for the coming shanah lies with each of us.

With an eye to ten days from now, to Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, we begin our new year by reflecting on the past one, returning to our deeds and misdeeds. We make atonement through a process called תשובה teshuva—from a verb that means “return,” go back. שובו אלי ואשובה Shuvu elai ve’ashuva—“Turn to me and I will turn back, too,” says God.[8] Change direction. In Rabbinic parlance, תשובה means “reply” or “answer”: a dialectic process. The world asks us many questions, and it is up to us to respond. A new shanah is a call for us leshanot—to change, to become agents of change in a world that needs changing.

Sometimes the change we are called to bring about is external: alleviation of poverty, education of the next generation, enrichment of the arts. And sometimes it is internal: a change in our own habits, our own outlook. In this new shanah, as we return to our learning, to our mishnah, we return the same and yet different. The process of teshuva cannot be one of returning to the starting block exactly as we were, running in circles. Such a feat would be impossible, at any rate: each event, each moment in our lives changes us in some subtle way. And such a “return” would be empty and meaningless. Repentance is not about going back to the moment before we erred, but rather, changing our direction, changing our pattern, changing our behavior.

No matter how overwhelming it seems, no matter how powerless we may feel—if we see a need for change in ourselves or in the world, we simply do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for change to come. Rabbi Tarfon used to say, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, yet neither are you free to desist from it.”

I wish us each a שנה טובה, a good year, and I wish that we each can seize an opportunity to be ראש שינוי, a leader of change.

עולם מוזר כולו שלך כשהתקווה איתך נשארת Olam muzar, kulo shelcha k’she’hatikva itcha nisheret—“This world is strange, and it’s all yours, so long as the hope remains within you.” אל תאבד אותה ,תשמור עליה Al t’abed otah, tishmor aleiha—“Do not lose [that hope]; protect it.” ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“No one knows what tomorrow will bring.”

No one knows what tomorrow will bring, for this strange world is yours to learn and to know, to shape and to change, in this new year.

שנה ושינויים טובים shana v’shinui’im tovim, A good year, and good changes, to each of you.







[1] שיר תקווה (“Song of Hope), Miri Mesika, words by Michael Vaknin, translation by Rabbi Karyn Kedar.
[2] Ibid., translation by Nikki DeBlosi.
[3] Deuteronomy 16:18.
[4] With acknowledgements to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
[5] Gemara to Mishnah Brachot 6.
[6] Acknowledgements to Professor Joy Ladin, whose workshop on the Psalms as transformative text continues to influence my thinking (from Transforming Beitecha 2010, CBST’s conference on LGBTQ inclusion).
[7] “Song of Hope,” transl. DeBlosi.
[8] Malachai 3:7.

Evening-Fall

There is evening, and there is morning. One day turns into another.

And yet, sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I’m still standing before an open rectangle cut into the ground. I see the clods of earth, there, where I shoveled them over my father’s coffin. I hear that sound. The thud of earth falling … And part of me falls with it.

What does it feel like to lose someone?

To lose someone… feels like falling.

At least, for me it does. And I wonder, will I be able to rise at the end of this year—the traditional Jewish year of mourning for a parent? I wonder, will I again be able to get mixed-up in the lives of those around me? Will I always feel removed, as I do so often now—suspended, wandering aimlessly?

What does it feel like to lose someone?

For me, it’s like being Isaac. Isaac who walks, alone, at twilight.

When Sarah dies, Abraham turns his grief outward. He comes לספד לשרה ולבכתה, lispod l’Sarah v’livkotah, “to eulogize Sarah and bewail her” (Genesis 23:2). And then he is able to move on: ויקם אברהם מעל פני מתו וידבר..., va’yakom Avraham mei’al p’nei meito vay’daber, “And Abraham rose from beside his dead, and he spoke…” (3). Abraham gets up and gets going: he negotiates for the Cave of Machpelah as a burial-place; he fills his time with concrete tasks; he even looks toward the future, planning a marriage for Isaac.

In stark contrast, his son, who disappears from the Torah’s narrative after Mount Moriah. Isaac is conspicuously absent at his mother’s burial. Three years after his mother’s death, Isaac still mourns.¹ Not active, not vocal, not like his father, Isaac is passive and pensive. ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out לשוח lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

Alone, in a field, as the darkness descends, what does Isaac do? How should we translate that rare verb, לשוח lasuach?

Traditional commentators offer several interpretations: a שיח siach is a bush or a shrub, so Isaac went out to walk in nature, or to work in the fields. ² A שיח siach is a conversation, so Isaac went out into the field to meet up with friends. ³

Perhaps the most pervasive traditional interpretation is that Isaac went into the field to pray. The Midrash identifies Psalms as a source for our tradition of prayer three times a day: ערב בבקר בצהרים אשיחה, Erev va’voker va’tzohorayim asichah, “Evening, morning, and noon, I plead” (Psalms 55:18). According to this midrash, we pray in the afternoon to imitate Isaac, who walked out into the field at twilight—that strange mix of day and night—lasuach, to pray mincha, the afternoon service. ⁴

I guess he began with Ashrei, the opening prayer? “Happy are they who dwell in your house, O God”? …. But, no. He couldn’t have.

As a mourner, I can only imagine Isaac’s שיחה, sichah, out there in the field as night began to fall.

It’s three years since she died... Why can’t he shake off this darkness? Why can’t he eulogize and cry, and then “rise up,” like his father Abraham? Isaac lingers in his grief. He can’t return to routines. He pours out words, but they’re not like Abraham’s neat and purposeful sentences. Not rational. Not a linear presentation of thoughts and wishes. Rather, a lament—as Rachel Adler describes: “contradictory rather than emotionally consistent.” ⁵

Whatever Isaac voices out there, in the field, at twilight, it is not a siach—not a conversation where Isaac says “X” and God replies “Y,” but rather lament’s “tumultuous and disordered language.” ⁶ At least, that’s how I imagine it. Unruly.

Because the world just doesn’t make sense anymore. Language fails… “How are you holding up?” Am I holding up!? What do I have to hold up? What’s holding me up?

It’s dark. And I’m falling.

ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ער, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

Isaac went out to pray in the field at twilight… Perhaps. We might read לשוח lasuach as לשתחוות lishtachavot, which means “to bow”—in prostration and deference. Va’anachnu korim u’mishtachavim u’modim, we bend and bow and give thanks before God. ⁷

(But) How difficult it is to bow to God when I am already bent in grief.

What if Isaac bends not in prayer, in thanks, in acknowledgement of God? What if it is Isaac’s emotion that bends him? He sinks down to the earth in unremitting sorrow. So, don’t read לשוח lasuach but rather: ויצא יצחק לשוחה בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak la’shuchah basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to a pit⁸ in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62). In the depths of despair, Isaac wanders to a shuchah, a gaping hole in the earth, a reminder of his mother’s burial in the deep dark ground, a landscape that reflects his own low feelings. How could he carry on with life when his mother has been lowered into the dust?

Isaac walks into the field at evening-fall to bow… not in prayer, but in despair. Shachoach: to lower, to incline downward, to be bent, to be oppressed. ⁹ To lower his body toward the ground—because his soul is already lowered. From Psalms: כְּרֵעַ כְּאָח-לִי הִתְהַלָּכְתִּי כַּאֲבֶל-אֵם קֹדֵר שַׁחוֹתִי, K’reah, k’ach li hithalachti, ka’avel eim koder shachoti, “I behaved as though he had been my friend, my brother; like one who mourns for his mother, I darkened with grief and bowed low” (Psalms 35:14).

Isaac can’t get up and get going like his father Abraham. Instead, he walks into a field, alone, at evening’s-fall, and he drops to the ground in despair and in grief.

What does it feel like to lose someone? What does it feel like to mourn?

Philosopher Judith Butler describes mourning in her recent book, a post-9/11 reflection called Precarious Life. She writes, “[O]ne is hit by waves. […One] starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen” (Butler 21).

You fall. Darkness descends.

What is the significance of Isaac’s wandering precisely as evening falls? He is crossing into a time that is neither here nor there.

ערב, erev, evening, is a time for עירוב, eiruv, for mixing.

Isaac walks in the field לעת עירוב, l’eit eiruv, at the time when boundaries blur. Neither day nor night, but something in-between. Neither day nor night, but a mixing of the two.

When we think of the Shabbat עירוב, eiruv,¹⁰ we might think of a boundary. A line that marks the farthest one can travel. A marker of the limits of the public realm, the outside. But an עירוב eiruv is also a way to extend the inside. What is an עירוב eiruv if not a plea that I might carry a little farther, that I might blur the boundary between the safety of my home and the risk of the wide, wide world? ¹¹ Perhaps, for Isaac, the ערב erev represents an עירוב eiruv for his grief: he wants to linger there, to carry on a little further. To wander out into the field and fall sobbing to the ground as darkness falls around him.

Love and loss topple us from our careful plans and our automatic routines. Some of us recover quickly, like Abraham. We weep and we mourn and we rise up. And some of us run from the messy work of mourning—we run because we don’t want to fall. If we keep moving, maybe we won’t notice how off-balance we are. And some of us are like Isaac, and we can do little but go out lasuach.

We can ask, as Judith Butler asks, “Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability […]? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for […] one another?” (Butler 30).

Because, when we wander into evening, we are turning not only to the despair of ending. We are wandering into the time for mixing. It’s a tricky time, an in-between time, a liminal time.

And so with Isaac. Walking out into the field, bent low in his grief, Isaac enters the realm of the liminal.

Anthropologist Victor Turner notes that, in the liminal, one is “betwixt and between” ¹²—not this and not that. Isaac, too, is betwixt and between: A boy who has lost his mother. A man not-yet a husband. A person walking alone in a tribal society. Like an initiate in a rite of passage, Isaac walks in the wilderness, בשדה, basadeh, in darkness, לפנות ערב, lifnot arev.¹³

And in the darkness, boundaries blur. When we walk into the liminal, we risk the breaking of some ties, and the building of others. As critic Richard Schechner writes, the point of liminal space is “to reduce those undergoing the ritual to a state of vulnerability so that they are open to change.” ¹⁴

Liminality represents potential. In a liminal state, we might become anything. Truly anything. That kind of transformation is frightening and risky. No particular result is guaranteed. And yet, we walk out into the field, lowered. We walk at twilight, vulnerable.

ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out lasuach in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

But not just evening… ערב erev. Jewish-time. Evening not as ending, but as beginning. First, there is evening. And then, there is morning.

There’s a line in Freud’s famous essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he makes a peculiar observation about mourning—a phenomenon he can’t explain through psychoanalysis. It’s what he calls “the regular amelioration” of grief that happens “toward evening” (Freud 589). How remarkable. Mourning eases at twilight. As if our bodies know that dawn will come.

ויצא יצחק לשוח בשדה לפנות ערב, va’yeitzei Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, “And Isaac went out to despair in the field at the turning of evening” (Genesis 24:62).

But the story continues: וישא עיניו וירא והנה גמלים באים, va’yisa einav va’yar, v’hinei! G’malim baim! “And he lifted up his eyes, and behold! Camels are approaching!” (Ibid.). Isaac wanders, hunched over in the field, and only then can he lift up his eyes – נשא nasa – an action that leads to נשואין nisuin, a marriage, a love, a turn from the past and from death to the future and to relationship.

Because it is Rebecca approaching there, in that caravan. It is Rebecca, and, like Isaac, her transformation begins as darkness falls.

When does Eliezer the servant first meet Rebecca? לעת ערב לעת צאת השאבות, l’eit erev, l’eit tzeit hasho’avot, “At evening-time, the time when women come out to draw water” (Genesis 24:11).

And now, in the caravan, approaching the field, ותשא רבקה את עיניה ותרא את יצחק, va’tisa Rivka et einehah va’teireh et Yitzchak, “Rebecca lifted up her eyes and she saw Isaac” (Genesis 24:64). Saw him there, sunken in grief. Saw him there, betwixt and between. Saw him there, as he lifted up his eyes to new possibilities. ותפל מעל הגמל, va’tipol mei’al hagamal, “And she fell from her camel” (Genesis 24:64).

Like the sudden miracle of love, she falls into Isaac’s life.

So Isaac meets Rebecca at twilight, the liminal time. And, out of this ערב erev, out of this עירוב eiruv, emerges love and comfort and hopefulness:ויבאה יצחק האהלה שרה אמו ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה וינחם יצחק אחרי אמו, va’y’vi’e’hah Yitzchak ha’ohalah Sarah imo va’yikach et Rivka va’t’hi lo l’ishah, va’ye’eh’ha’ve’hah, va’yinachem acharei imo, “And Isaac brought her toward the tent [of] Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67).

How do we know we’ve found our comfort? Though I have turned, eagerly, to traditional Jewish mourning customs, I don’t expect my comfort to come all at once at the close of eleven months. In his classic work on Jewish mourning, Rabbi Maurice Lamm writes, “Twlight is neither day nor night, or perhaps it is both day and night. The law, however, must be clear.” ¹⁵ The laws of mourning are neat and clear and measured. They can give shape to the overwhelming messiness of grief. But what if we can’t help but linger, like Isaac? The practices of shiva and sheloshim and yarzheit offer a way for the mourner to move, as Rabbi Lamm puts it, from darkness to light. ¹⁶

But some of us find ourselves in the twilight. What can we do? We can take the risk to truly experience that in-between. If we can be willing lasuach basadeh lifnot arev, perhaps we too can look up from our dark place and be transformed.

Because, like Isaac, we are never the same. Love and loss change us. Love and loss hurl us down into the pit. We walk out into the evening, fallen.

You see, the bad news is that our relationships leave us vulnerable.

But the good news is that we might, through falling, manage to lift up our eyes and see the caravan approaching. היני! Hinei! Behold! We know something is about to happen to us—but we don’t know what. We lift up our eyes and we see an Other walking toward us in the field. וניפול מעל הגמל Va’nipol me’al hagamal, and we fall from the camel. We know our lives are different—but we don’t know how we will be forever changed.

What does mourning feel like? It feels like falling. But, then again, so does love.






¹ Radak on Genesis 24:62.

² Ibn Ezra on Genesis 24:63; Rashbam on Genesis 24:62.

³ Ramban on Genesis 24:62.

⁴ Bereshit Rabbah 68:9, cf. Rashi on Genesis 24:62.

⁵ Rachel Adler, “For These I Weep: A Theology of Lament,” Dr. Samuel Atlas Memorial Lecture, The Chronicle, Issue 68 (2008): 10-15, p 11.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Evan-Shoshan’s Biblical Concordance.

⁸ Evan-Shoshan. See Jeremiah 2:6; 18:20, 22; Proverbs 22:14; 23:27.

⁹ Evan-Shoshan.

¹⁰ Under traditional Jewish law, carrying an object from the private sphere into the public sphere is prohibited on Shabbat. An eiruv, usually a string suspended on poles, even telephone poles or street signs in modern neighborhoods, links neighboring houses in a community into one big “private realm.” This symbolically enlarges the private realm, allowing people to carry objects during Shabbat in their own neighborhood.

¹¹ Wendy Zierler, “Feminist Voices,” My People’s Passover Haggadah, Volume 1: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing): 2008, pp 104-105; and Zierler’s conversations with this writer in preparation for writing and delivering the sermon.


¹² Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine Transaction): 1969, p 95.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge): 2003, pp 57-8.

¹⁵ Lamm, Maurice. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, Inc): 2000, p 82.

¹⁶ Jewish mourning customs are extensive, and offer stages for the mourner to move from the shock and isolation of hearing the news of the death of a loved one to the embrace of the community and a return to normal routines. During shiva, the first seven days, mourners remain at home, sitting on the floor or on low stools; it is the most intense period of grieving. The first thirty days, sheloshim, represent a mix between sadness and return to routine. A yarzheit is the anniversary of a death; Jews end the strict mourning practices for a parent (like not attending public celebrations or not cutting one’s hair) one year after a person’s death (sometimes measured as eleven months). We also mark the anniversary of a death each year.

K’sharim, Ahava (Relationships, Love)

So, I wrote this whole other sermon for this morning. It was something about Facebook and Twitter and how we speak to and about one another in public forums and via social media. Perhaps someday I’ll give a version of that sermon. But, this morning, I’m giving a different sermon. I’m giving a different sermon because I decided I couldn’t ignore two crucial facts: (one) the mounting tension between Israel and Palestine over the new “roadmap to peace”… and (two) you.

One: Israel and Palestine. Let me assure you that I’m completely uninterested in telling you what to think about the recent Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN, the merits of the proposed Quartet peace plan, Netanyahu’s position on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or any other aspect of what is known in the Middle East as “the conflict.” I’m not going to stand here and talk to you—many of you politics majors who know more about international relations than I do!—about the details of the peace plan itself. I want to talk about something related… but different. I want to talk about what our Jewish tradition teaches us about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to fact two: you. When I was here at Bates during Rosh Hashana, I learned a little bit about how some of you navigate expressing and exploring your Jewish identities on a campus with a relatively small Jewish presence. The choices you each make about your Jewishness, your faith, and your identity are not exactly parallel with the choices Israeli and Palestinian leaders face in figuring out how to express both their national identities. But Jewish Bates College students do make myriad decisions about how to relate to non-Jews and about how to relate to an institution that runs counter to the Jewish calendar. On the first day of the Jewish New Year, many of you faced the difficult choice of whether to attend services or go to class. Some of you had tests and assignments. Many of you wondered, what’s the point in going to services if I’m not even religious? Some of you may have felt disappointed that the services weren’t more “traditional” or familiar. Some of us, together, were chastised for performing the tashlich ritual in the Pond—something we might want to reimagine for next year! And then suddenly it was parents’ weekend—a raucous, joyful, and maybe even stressful time, smack in the middle of what was supposed to be, for Jews, a period of intense introspection and soul-searching.

What could I do with these two facts—the tenuous peace process in the Middle East and the decisions you make as Jewish students of Bates College?

I remember standing here on Erev Rosh Hashana, ready to pray the Aleinu at the end of the service, and panicking for a moment. Did I really want to say the line “she’lo asanu k’goyei ha’aratzot”—“that you have not made us like the other nations of the earth”? I was acutely aware of the fact that my hosts here at Bates include the Multifaith Chaplaincy Office and the Dean of Intercultural Education. I was acutely aware of the fact that, here at Bates, Jews and non-Jews explore one another’s culture and worship. And yet we pray in thanks to God for making “us” different from “them.”

What does Jewish tradition say about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews? To say the least… it’s complicated.

It’s really a shame we’re not going to hear the traditional Yom Kippur afternoon Torah reading. In it, we are charged to pursue justice and to eschew revenge, to share the fruits of our harvest and to deal kindly with the disadvantaged. How do we become holy? By providing food for the hungry. How do we become holy? By conducting our business honestly. How do we become holy? By judging the privileged and the poor equally. How do we become holy? By refusing to hold a grudge. How do we become holy? By letting go of hatred.

Sure, some of these guidelines to holiness refer only to how Jews must treat other Jews. But many of them are universal. We learn how to be holy in our interactions with others: K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Not only are we enjoined to treat the stranger as a citizen, but we are commanded to love the stranger as we love ourselves.

Is this really from the same Torah that also instructs, Rak me’arei ha’amim ha’eileh asher Adonai elohecha noten l’cha nachala, lo t’chyeh kol neshma, “But of the cities of these nations which the Eternal your God is giving to you as an inheritance, do not allow any soul to live” (Deuteronomy 20:16)?!

So, which is it? Are Jews the holy people who are supposed to love the stranger, welcome the disadvantaged, live peacefully with other nations? Or are Jews the people who are commanded by God to kill entire peoples—down to every last man, woman, and child?

The thing is, we can look to the Torah and to the broader field of sacred and rabbinic literature and argue either way. There are verses that support war and destruction and verses that urge justice and mercy. There are interpretations that restrict how we read inspiring passages like “Love your neighbor as yourself” to one meaning: Love your fellow (and I kinda do mean “fellow”) Jew as yourself. Whatever your personal political position on the conflict between Arabs and Jews in that tiny strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, you can probably cite a Bible verse or a passage from the Talmud in your favor.

So I’m not turning, this morning, to any of those passages about “us” and “them.” I’m not going to offer a comprehensive—if that were even possible!—overview of what “Jewish tradition”—as if there were such a monolith!—says about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews. I’m turning to something much smaller in scale. I’m turning to something much more intimate. I’m turning to a relationship. I’m turning to the relationship between Abraham and Hagar.

On Rosh Hashana, didn’t read the traditional First Day Torah reading, the story many refer to as “the birth of Isaac”—a story chosen for the holiday because of its association with birth (Rosh Hashana as the birthday of the world) and with God’s remembering us (God remembers Sarah and gives her a son in her old age). But the Torah portion of Isaac’s birth is also the story of another boy, another son of Abraham. It is the story of Ishmael. And the tale of how God remembers Sarah is also the story of another woman, another beloved of Abraham. It is the story of Hagar.

Isaac and Ishmael have come to stand iconically for Judaism and Islam, for Jew and Arab. In the Biblical story, Ishmael is born first. He is the son of Abraham’s concubine and slave, Hagar. Ishmael is born because Abraham’s wife Sarah is barren and fears she will never be able to give Abraham children. And somehow, Abraham is to be the father of many nations. On the first day of Rosh Hashana, we read that, finally, Isaac is born to Sarah, in fulfillment of the promise of the two angels who visited Abraham and Sarah in their tent. In the span of one verse, Isaac grows up and is weaned, and Abraham throws a huge celebration. Suddenly, we read that Sarah “saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had borne to Abraham playing” (Genesis 21:9). We’re not precisely sure what the Torah means by “playing,” but Sarah certainly doesn’t think it’s a good thing. We read next, “And she said to Abraham, ‘Banish that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave-woman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac’” (21:10). The Torah says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes, because of the matter of his son”—that is, because Ishmael is his son and Abraham does not want to banish him (21:11). Despite that emotion, despite the bond between Abraham and Ishmael, God orders Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert. At the story’s end, Ishmael languishes in the desert, nearly dying of thirst. Hagar weeps some distance away so that she does not have to witness her son die, when suddenly “God heard the voice of the lad” and saved them by showing them a nearby well (21:17-19).

This complex story of a blended family gives just one tiny indication of how Abraham might have felt at the prospect of sending a woman with whom he had fathered a child, along with his first-born son, into the desert—never to see them again. The Torah only says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes” (21:11) because of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son, his flesh and blood. But did Abraham weep over Hagar? Did he hesitate to send her into the desert? At the moment of banishment, the Torah tells us nothing whatsoever about the relationship between Abraham, father of the Jewish people, and “Hagar the Egyptian.”

For more than a thousand years, Jewish commentators have seen troubling gaps in this text. They have been troubled by the relationship between Abraham and Hagar, and troubled by Abraham’s apparent lack of concern for this woman with whom he shared a bed. Did Abraham really care so little for Hagar? Did the father of Judaism really treat as expendable the woman who would later become a beloved mother in Islam? Surely not! Despite the banishment, despite the fact that Abraham’s blessing is handed down only through the line of Isaac, despite Sarah’s suspicions about Ishmael—despite so many indications that Hagar was “only” a concubine, a slave-woman—Jewish tradition asserts that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar was marked by love.

In the Midrash, we find imaginative retellings of Biblical stories. In one expanded version of the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar saga, the author hints that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar exceeded the commercial bounds of an owner-slave arrangement. In this version of the story, when Sarah urges Abraham to exile Hagar, she says, “Write a get and send that slave-woman and her son away!” (Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer 30). What is a get? It is a bill of Jewish divorce—a document one gives not to a slave but to a wife.

Even further, this midrash imagines a lasting connection between Abraham and Hagar, even after the banishment to the desert. In the Torah story, Abraham places something on Hagar’s shoulders before sending her off as Sarah had ordered. What was it? It was a large barrel, says the Midrash, or a long, trailing piece of clothing. What is the significance of this? Abraham sent Hagar off into the desert dragging behind her an object that would leave a trail. A trail he could follow. A trail that would allow him to see his beloved Hagar and Ishmael again.

In the Torah, at several crucial points in Abraham’s life, Hagar and Ishmael are absent. Perhaps they don’t matter very much to Abraham. The Midrash disagrees. Hagar and Ishamel are never far from Abraham’s heart. At the moment when God asks Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice—to kill his son—the Torah reports God’s words thus: “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him up as a sacrifice” (Genesis 22:2). Your only son!? The Midrash imagines instead a conversation between God and Abraham: “‘Take, please your son.’ But he replied, ‘I have two sons.’ So [God] said, ‘Your only one.’ But he replied, ‘This one is the only child of his mother, and the other one is the only child of his mother.’ So [God] said, ‘The one whom you love.’ But he replied, ‘I love both of them.’ And God said, ‘Isaac’” (Bereshit Rabbah 45:7).

In the Midrash, the relationship between Abraham and Hagar does not end in the desert. After the story of the binding of Isaac, when Sarah has died, Abraham busies himself with the burial and with trying to find a proper wife for Isaac. But Isaac himself wanders out in the field, pouring out his fears and his grief in prayer. And where has Isaac been all this time, after his ordeal on the mountain? We read in the Torah that Isaac was returning from a place called “Be’er Le’hai Ro’ee” (Genesis 24:62)—the very same place where Hagar and Ishmael heard the voice of an angel of God, rescuing them from their thirst in the desert. And why did Isaac travel there? To find Hagar and bring her to his father Abraham so that they could be married (Bereshit Rabbah 60:14).

And indeed, just a few verses later in the Torah, we read that Abraham did remarry: “And Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah” (Genesis 25:1). The rabbis link the name “Keturah” to precious incense, katoret. And they link the name “Keturah” to the verb katar, to tie up. Keturah, says the Midrash, is none other than Hagar (Bereshit Rabbah 61:5). Hagar is “Keturah” because, like incense, she is pleasing. Hagar is “Keturah” because she “tied herself” only to Abraham—keeping chaste all those years between her banishment and her reunion with her beloved.

In Hebrew, the word for “relationship” is kesher—linked to a verb that also means to tie or to bind. Abraham tied a burden to Hagar’s shoulders so that she would leave him a trail to follow. Hagar tied her faithfulness to Abraham, despite the fact that he sent her and her son into the desert alone. To tie oneself to another demonstrates devotion and, indeed, love.

As we think about the relationship between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and non-Jews, it can be all too easy to look only at the level of institutions and nations and generalizations. And yet, when the rabbis of our Jewish tradition looked at the iconic rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael—between Sarah and Hagar—they saw more than the struggle between one nation and another. Admittedly, our tradition includes some pretty disturbing instructions on how to maintain the division between “us” and “them.” But Judaism also includes the Midrash: stories that reconcile the divide between Isaac and Ishmael, Sarah and Hagar, by looking for those relationships where there had to have been love.

We do not relate to one another solely as representatives of big categories. When Abraham banished Hagar into the desert, he might have been acting as “Father of the Jews” toward “a Mother of Islam.” But he was also a man who loved a woman. Imagine his anguish, standing at the opening of his tent, watching them enter the desert with just a loaf of bread and a canteen of water.

And, though we don’t necessarily face life-and-death consequences, it’s like that for us, too. Our daily lives are not, when it comes down to it, about “Bates College” and “Jewish students,” but about you and your professor, the one who was willing to give you some extra time on that assignment because you told her about the conflict between the academic calendar and the Jewish holiday. And, when you think about it, “Israel” and “Palestine”—symbolic and overdetermined as those categories have become—are really just collections of relationships, one person to another.

We will achieve nothing of peace and mutual understanding by thinking and strategizing only at the level of the nation, the icon, the generalization. We will achieve peace only if we look to individual relationships. The authors of the Midrash knew, in their heart of hearts, that banishments and birthrights and blessings were not the only story. There was also the tugging pull of love, the trail cut deep across the desert, leading one person to his beloved.



[I gave this as the Yom Kippur sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there for a wonderful experience! I thank my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen, for his reflections on the Midrashim about Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar in his Introduction to Midrash course at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.]

We Will Be What We Never Always Were

If you’re a nerd like me, then you remember the sheer childhood joy of back-to-school shopping… and I don’t mean the new shoes. I mean the trip to the stationery store: all those pencil sets with matching erasers and sharpeners, all those empty folders waiting for labels and stickers, and, best of all, the blank notebooks full of promise. Each page clean.

Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.

Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.

Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.

Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.

And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.

God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).

For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?

Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?

Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.

When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.

Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).

Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”

The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.

Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.

When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”

As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.



[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]