When I launched the rubble, I set the intention of offering classes through the platform. That is finally happening.

Starting this fall, paid subscribers to the rubble get access to live classes over Zoom, a few times a year, as part of your subscription. This is the first one, and it’s also open to everyone else on a sliding scale basis.

You can register for the class HERE.

I keep coming back to a question about what study is actually for. A lot of the study I’ve done in my life made me feel different when I left the room than when I walked in. That’s real, and it matters. But it also isn’t the whole of what the Torah is tasked with as Jews. I want the classes I teach to ask more of us than an hour or two of feeling stretched beyond our own edges. I want them to build something that holds up outside the room, with people who are willing to be accountable to the world beyond the beit midrash and not just to their own reading of a page.

That’s the spirit behind what I’m building here. We don’t need another lecture series. We need rooms where people commit to each other and to the text long enough for something real to happen beyond the space of study.

My first class offering launches on September 9th and will take place over four weeks amid the holiest days on the Jewish calendar. We’ll ask big questions of ourselves and each other during the season where the veil between us and the Divine is thinnest. My hope is that this class transforms something in us as 5787 unfurls and that we can carry that into the new year with us.

First class: Sharpened, Not Erased
Four Wednesdays — September 9, 16, 23, 30 2026 — 5:30pm PT / 8:30pm ET, on Zoom

Built from my essay of the same name, this course sits Talmud next to philosopher Theodor Adorno to ask what real disagreement requires, if no one is supposed to come out diminished. We’ll move through the essay’s own structure, one beat a week:

Week 1 — Hefker. Bamidbar Rabbah’s teaching that Torah can only be received by someone who makes themselves like the wilderness, ownerless.

Week 2 — Machadedin. Shabbat 63a’s teaching that two scholars sharpen each other the way iron sharpens iron, held right next to the same page’s teaching that scholars should also be gentle with each other. We’ll look at Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, built with a similar architecture.

Week 3 — Betzidkati. Moses at the edge of the Jordan, warning three times against the story that says you arrived here through your own righteousness. What that warning has to do with walking into Torah or Talmud already certain what it says.

Week 4 — Preserving losing opinions and multivocality. Mishnah Eduyot’s insistence on preserving the losing opinion, the Zohar’s claim that the wars of Torah are peace and love, and the essay’s open, unresolved question: whether that’s a teaching available mainly to people who are already safe.

You don’t need Hebrew or prior Talmud study. All you need is a willingness to sit inside a challenging text with other people and be curious.

Cost: Complimentary for paid subscribers. For everyone else, $54–108, sliding scale. If you can’t pay, you’re still in. No one is turned away from this class for lack of funds. Pay by Venmo or PayPal (info is on the registration form), whatever amount is right for you, or reach out to me directly if cost is the only thing standing between you and the room.

To join: REGISTER HERE - please email or message me if you have questions about the class or registration.

I don’t mean this as critique waged from a place of innocence. I have done it myself, for years, happily. You sit with a text, you feel its weight, you let it widen something in you that was narrow before. You leave the room different than you entered it. This is real and the self as a site of transformation is not nothing. But it is also not enough, and increasingly I think it is a problem we have learned to mistake for the whole of the work.

The study is real. The transformation is often real. But it stops at the threshold of the self. It does not pass through the doors to everything that lay beyond.

This is not a new problem and it is not particular to Jews or to Talmud. Grace Lee Boggs saw the same failure in the movements she organized in, decades before any of us were studying anything. Kathie Sarachild saw it in the feminist circles she helped build, watched it happen in real time, watched her own practice get hollowed out and turned into therapy. This kind of failure has a shape. It is the substitution of activity for development, performance for transformation, momentary intensity for protracted commitment. It is studying your own life, or your own text, with real seriousness, and never asking what the world now requires of you because of what you learned.

The beit midrash, properly built, is a cadre. The cadre, properly built, is a beit midrash. And the thing that makes either one real, rather than a more sophisticated version of the same failure, is whether the study moves all the way through: from the individual, to the pair, to the group, and out into the world. Most of what passes for radical study stops at the pair. If we are lucky, the group discusses it. Almost none of it reaches direct intervention on the world at large. I want to talk about what it looks like to not stop there.

Three texts, one problem

I have been reading three texts against each other. They were not written to speak to one another. They come from completely different worlds: a pamphlet for would-be revolutionaries in the early 1970s, a radical feminist developing a method inside the women’s liberation movement at almost the same moment, and two contemporary education scholars writing a philosophical account of chevruta. But they are diagnosing something similar and proposing, in different languages, a similar resolution.

Grace Lee Boggs, in Organization Means Commitment, argues that spontaneous rebellion cannot become revolution without a small, disciplined group engaged in protracted collective struggle. Not a group oriented merely toward seizing power, but one oriented toward transforming the people who will hold it. Kathie Sarachild, in Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon, argues that personal experience, tested against the experience of others in a structured group, is the starting point of theory. Not testimony for its own sake–evidence. Elie Holzer and Orit Kent, in A Philosophy of Havruta, argue that chevruta is not a neutral technique for getting through a text faster with company. It is a praxis: a site of real transformation that requires each partner to take responsibility not just for their own learning but for their partner’s.

All three are saying that the small, committed unit, properly constituted, is where the actual work happens. None of the three would accept a beit midrash, or a consciousness-raising group, or a cadre, that stayed inside itself.

What they share

Boggs is explicit that commitment has to come before the activity starts, not grow out of it. “The first step of any group seeking to build a cadre organization must be the decision of each individual to commit herself or himself to a collective, protracted struggle.” Holzer and Kent say something nearly identical about chevruta: the shared norms that make real text study possible do not arise naturally. They have to be built.

Both insist that you are responsible not just for your own growth but for your partner’s. Boggs: the cadre organization exists to transform “every member” into someone “more conscious, more responsible, more creative and more critical.” Holzer and Kent: “havruta text study entails each partner taking responsibility for both partners’ learning.” This is not a sweet sentiment about collaborative learning. It is a structural claim about what the relationship is for.

Both treat criticism as an act of care, not an act of war. Boggs calls it the “dynamic of error,” the recognition that examining a mistake honestly generates energy rather than draining it. Holzer and Kent describe challenging a partner’s reading as a way of helping them reach the strongest possible interpretation, not a way of winning an argument. Both are fighting the same subcultural current, the instinct to protect feelings instead of pressing toward truth, and both reframe that pressing as love.

Sarachild names something the other two assume but never quite say. “Everything we have to know, have to prove, we can get from the realities of our own lives.” Experience is not illustration. It is evidence. “The only ‘methods’ of consciousness-raising are essentially principles: going to the original sources, both historic and personal, and going to experience for theory and strategy.” Historic and personal, together, in the same sentence. This is the epistemological foundation the whole proposal stands on. The test of any reading of a text, or any reading of a political situation, is whether it actually clarifies the lived experience of the people doing the studying. Which means study has a direction. Sarachild is unambiguous about what that direction is: consciousness-raising is “neither an end in itself nor a stage, a means to a different end, but a significant part of a very inclusive commitment to winning and guaranteeing radical changes for women in society.” Winning. Not understanding. Not transformation of the self.

The third partner, and the fourth

Here is where the three texts diverge, and the divergence has been the most useful part for me.

For Holzer and Kent, the third partner in the chevruta relationship is the text itself. The pair is accountable to what the text actually says, not just to each other. The text resists, constrains, opens worlds neither partner brought into the room.

For Boggs, the third partner is the revolutionary social forces: the community, the historical moment, the actual material conditions of actual people’s lives. The cadre is accountable outward, not just to its own internal coherence.

Sarachild holds both at once. Historic source and personal experience, in the same method.

This is the question I keep returning to: what happens when the text is itself politically live? When you are learning Yoma on the obligation to save a life, in a city where ICE is operating? When the community studying the text is also a community under siege? The Talmud has a name for this condition already. It calls Torah study milchemet haTorah, the war of Torah. What if we were to hold this not as a metaphor for vigorous disagreement, but as real war. The study is in sync with the struggle. The chevrutot sitting at the table are already in it, whether or not they have noticed.

Scaling the work: pair, group, world

If the study is already the struggle, then the structure of the study has to be built to scale. Not just the pair. The pair, the group, and the world the group is accountable to. Three levels in connection with one another, but a beit midrash that stops at the first two has only done part of the work.

The chevruta pair does local interpretation. This is where the slow work happens: the close reading, the dwelling in a hard segment of text, the testing of a reading against your own life and your partner’s. But whatever the pair finds, however sharp, is not yet theory. It is a spark. It has not been tested against anyone else’s experience.

The full group does generalization. This is where Sarachild’s method becomes indispensable. Pairs report back, not as testimony but as evidence: not “here is my story” but “here is what we found, and does it hold for you too.” Sarachild was insistent that going around the room was never about giving everyone a turn to be heard. It was a method for determining whether one pair’s reading was common, or merely personal. Boggs makes the same point from the organizing side: theoretical synthesis is the work of the cadre as a whole, not any one member. The pair interprets. Only the group can theorize, because only the group can test one reading against every other and see whether it generalizes.

And then there is the third scale, the one most beit midrash practice never reaches. The world outside the room. Theory is not the destination. It is raw material for a program. Sarachild again, and I want to sit with this sentence because it is the whole argument in miniature: the purpose of the talking, she wrote, “was to develop theory so we could take action and make major changes in our common condition... not so interested in changing our heads as in changing men, changing the world.” The cycle does not close with a good discussion. It closes with an action, taken outside the room, and an honest evaluation of that action afterward, the way Boggs insists every cadre project has to be evaluated: did it do what we meant it to do, what did we learn, what do we change next time.

A beit midrash that does the first two and stops has built something real and beautiful and insufficient. It has built a study group. Sarachild has a name for this failure too, drawn from her own diagram of where consciousness-raising can go wrong: scholasticism, book worship, pre-ordained conclusions, the personal severed entirely from the political. And she names the stakes of that failure precisely: “The view of consciousness-raising as an end in itself, which happens when consciousness-raising is made into a methodology, a psychology, is as severe and destructive a distortion of the original idea and power of the weapon.” Sarachild isn’t proposing a stage we pass through, but a political practice with revolutionary aims.

Assemble a study to action group

I did not conjure this synthesis from nothing.

Adi Callai, in a video essay called “WHAT-DO: Gaza is the Compass,” gives almost exactly this proposal, and turns to Boggs by name to build it. “Assemble a study to action group of trustworthy associates,” Callai says. Not an affinity group that forms around a shared identity and never produces a program. Not a collective that gathers ad hoc for one action and dissolves. A “semi-permanent affinity group... capable of ongoing study, reflection, and the carrying out of revolutionary tasks.”

And then Callai goes straight to the same passage in Boggs I have been sitting with: a revolutionary cadre organization, “a group with defined membership that would be concerned not only with increasing the anger and militance of the oppressed, but also their determination and capacity to transform themselves, while at the same time providing the framework within which the cadre members themselves can be constantly transforming themselves into more conscious, more responsible, more creative, and more critical human beings, to whom the revolutionary masses can increasingly look for leadership because they can recognize in them actual living witnesses to the possibility of creating new men and women.”

Living witnesses. Not theorists of the possibility of a new world. Evidence that one is already being built, is in how the people in our batei midrash treat each other and what they do when they leave.

Callai goes on about the closing of the cycle, where study has to turn outward or fail: “Once you’ve completed this first period of study, come up with a systematic course of action for the group. A course of action can involve engaging in a grassroots campaign, setting up autonomous infrastructure, doing labor organizing, or whatever you think will contribute towards a revolutionary transformation.”

Orientation is the discipline

Callai also frames the whole proposal through John Boyd’s OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. “What I want is a vast constellation of groups capable of doing that, capable of observing the changing situation, orienting themselves accurately to the new terrain, deciding on a course of action and acting upon it.”

I looked at Boyd’s own diagram of this loop, the one he drew himself. It is not a clean circle. Orient is the largest box, the most densely connected, with cultural tradition and prior experience and new information all feeding into it, and feedback running in and out of it in every direction. Observe and Decide and Act are comparatively thin. Boyd’s argument, visible in the very shape of his own diagram before he says a word about it, is that orientation is where the real work happens. You can observe accurately and still act wrong, if your orientation is off. Observation without correct orientation produces noise. Action without it produces motion, not advantage.

This is, I think, the best argument I have found for taking the full-group stage of this proposal seriously, rather than rushing past it to get to the action everyone wants to take. The group testing one pair’s reading against every other pair’s reading, refusing to let a personal insight pass as a generalizable one, slowing down long enough to get the synthesis right: that is orientation work. It is not a delay before the real organizing starts. It is the discipline that determines whether the action that follows is accurate to the actual terrain, or just motion that feels like progress.

A constellation of beit midrash cadres, each one cycling through pair, group, and world, each one doing its orientation work honestly before it acts: this is what Callai is calling for, and it is, structurally, exactly what Boggs called for fifty years earlier, and exactly what Sarachild built at almost the same moment.

Talmud teaches us that Torah is acquired only in a group, in a havurah, the same root as chevruta. Acquired, not received. The word already tells you this takes work, and that the work is not solitary. What it does not say, but what I think every serious tradition of collective study eventually has to say for itself, is that the havurah that only acquires Torah, and never acquires the capacity to act on what it has acquired, has stopped halfway.

Boggs asks for something harder than study and more rigorous than action taken separately. The revolutionary cadre organization, she writes, must provide “the framework within which the cadre members themselves can be constantly transforming themselves into more conscious, more responsible, more creative, and more critical human beings”. When we bring Sarachild to our analysis, we gain clarity on how to move beyond the personal and towards the general as we formulate theory and praxis. Where Boggs believes this process leads is to revolutionaries in whom the people around them can “increasingly look for leadership because they can recognize in them actual living witnesses to the possibility of creating new men and women.” Not theorists of the possibility. Not people who have read about it. Witnesses. People whose lives, and whose collective practice, constitute evidence that the world being described is already, in some form, being built.

This is what the beit midrash as cadre is for. We aren’t here to produce better readers, or more spiritually developed Jews, or even more politically informed ones. Our task is to produce people who, when they leave the room, are recognizable as living proof that something different is possible. The text was never the destination, the world is.

_{This essay draws on… Grace Lee Boggs, “Organization Means Commitment” (Boggs Center, 2011); Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” in Feminist Revolution (Redstockings, 1973); Elie Holzer with Orit Kent, A Philosophy of Havruta (Academic Studies Press, 2013); Lazz Kinnamon, “’We Stayed Up All Night Rapping’: Toward a History of Feminist Consciousness-Raising, 1964–1986,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 50, no. 1 (Autumn 2024): 144–188; and Adi Callai, “Gaza is the Compass” (Rev & Reve)}

On the morning of November 30, 2023, I put on my tzitzit and went to the west entrance of the Raytheon campus at the University of Arizona Tech Park. I wore layers against the cold. I stood blocking the roadway that allows Raytheon employees to enter the campus. I hoped it would be enough.

I was there because Raytheon designs and manufactures weapons used against human life in Gaza, in Yemen, and around the globe. I was there because I had spent years studying the texts that form the spine of Jewish life, and those texts had made the calculus clear. I was not there as a political actor first. I was there as a Jew trying to meet a Torah obligation, a mitzvah. Later, when I was charged, I wrote in a legal affidavit what I had come to understand: standing in that roadway was the bare minimum of what I could do for those who are b’tzelem Elohim—in the image of God—and in order to fulfill פִּקּוּחַ נֶפֶשׁ, the obligation to preserve life.

Later that morning, I would be arrested along with a few dozen others for refusing to clear the path for Raytheon workers to go to their offices and continue their work as the engineers of war.

The tradition I was drawing on is one of the most argued-over principles in all of halacha, Jewish law, and its argument runs in one direction across five centuries of legal codification. Understanding that direction changes everything about how we read the moment we are in.

The root of the word pikuach, פ-ק-ח, means to open the eyes. To see clearly. To be watchful. The nefesh is not just a soul in some disembodied sense; it is the whole living person, breath and blood and embodied presence. Pikuach nefesh: seeing clearly the life-that-breathes. The principle holds that preserving a human life overrides nearly every other commandment in Torah, including Shabbat, Yom Kippur, kashrut, and most of the 613 mitzvot.

The Mishnah is direct about this and direct about its conditions. Mishnah Yoma 8:6 rules that if a person is buried under a collapsed building on Shabbat, even in conditions of safek, of doubt, even if we do not know whether the person is alive or dead, even if we do not know who they are, we dig. We clear the debris. If they are found alive, we continue. The Mishnah does not say: dig if you are certain. It does not say: dig if you know the person. It says: the presence of doubt is not a reason to stop. Uncertainty does not become permission to do nothing.

This is the radical core of the teaching. The Mishnah is a practical law text, not often a philosophical text, and what it reveals is an obligation that runs through uncertainty rather than waiting for clarity. The life at risk–the unknown life, under the rubble, on Shabbat–that life commands. Safek, doubt, is not the obstacle. Safek is the very thing that summons us.

I want to pause on that word, because it does something unusual in the architecture of halacha. Safek is ordinarily a source of caution, when you are uncertain whether you have violated a prohibition, doubt typically triggers leniency, restraint, the safer path. But pikuach nefesh inverts this entirely. Here, the doubt is the ground of the obligation. The Talmud states it plainly: סָפֵק נְפָשׁוֹת דּוֹחֶה אֶת הַשַּׁבָּת, a doubt about saving a life overrides Shabbat. Not certainty. Doubt. The very not-knowing is what compels us to act.

Our ancestors understood something essential about the human condition in this formulation. We almost never act from certainty. We act from svara, from our moral intuition, from the deep knowing that precedes proof. The rabbis who laid the foundation of our tradition lived under occupation, in conditions of communal destruction and daily uncertainty. They knew what it meant to be afraid, to be unsure whether the action in front of you would make any difference. And they built a law that said: act anyway. The possibility of a life at stake is enough.

I want to offer a second obligation from our Mishnah that is rarely taught alongside Pekuach Nefesh. Tractate Shabbat 54b states that anyone who could have protested against wrongdoing in their own household and did not is held accountable for it. The scope expands: against wrongdoing in one’s city, in the whole world. The key word in the Aramaic is efshar — it is possible. Not: protest if you are certain your protest will succeed. Not: protest if you can guarantee the outcome. Simply: if it is possible for you to protest, you must. The obligation is conditioned on capacity and possibility, not on efficacy. And the standard rises with your communal standing. Those who study and teach Torah, who hold more knowledge, more authority in a community, they are held to the higher obligation. I wrote in a legal affidavit that I believe this applies to me. I was in the second year of a Talmud pedagogy fellowship. I teach these texts. I host Jewish ritual in community. I am on a hopeful path toward ordination. The obligation is not general. It is addressed to me, by name.

The Talmud in Yoma 84b makes this even sharper. If you see a child who has fallen into the sea, you spread a net and bring them up–on Shabbat, without asking permission. And then the Gemara says: the one who stops to ask permission while a child is drowning? That person sheds blood. Delay is not caution. Delay is culpability. The tradition is not hedging. It is ruling.

What the later medieval authorities did with these texts is remarkable. The Rambam, writing in the twelfth century when many Jews lived under conditions of forced conversion and communal destruction, established the hermeneutic that grounds everything after: Torah’s prohibitions are not vengeance against the world but chesed, compassion, and shalom, peace in the world. Rambam pulls no punches, teaching us bluntly, a commandment that would kill is a misread commandment. Three centuries later, Yosef Karo codified the ruling in the Shulchan Aruch with a single extraordinary word. His ruling in Orach Chaim 328:2 does not say: it is permitted to desecrate Shabbat for a life-threatening illness. He writes: מִצְוָה לְחַלֵּל עָלָיו אֶת הַשַּׁבָּת, it is a mitzvah to desecrate Shabbat. The act of saving is not a justified violation of Jewish law. It is Jewish law. It is a commandment, an obligation, a mitzvah.

Then Karo adds: one who hurries to do this is praised; one who stops to ask permission, this person sheds blood, echoing the words of the Sages before him. The later Arukh HaShulchan, written in the 1880s under Tsarist pogroms and state terror against Jewish communities, carries the argument to its furthest point: the act of pikuach nefesh is not merely a sanctioned exception to Torah’s obligations. It is itself a fulfillment of Torah. Five centuries of codification, moving in one direction–moving towards life.

I stood in that driveway because I had read these texts and could not pretend I had not. More than a year later, I sat at my dining table with a friend and fellow SVARA student when our phones lit up: ICE was raiding a taco shop a mile from our home. We didn’t know if we could stop them. We didn’t know who else would come. We went with nothing but our bodies, hands empty, and trusted our own svara that this was the right choice. Within minutes nearly a hundred people had come. We blocked the driveway. An unmarked van arrived. Masked men piled out throwing tear gas and flash bang grenades toward adults holding young children. My partner was chased, tackled, and put into that van. I followed the masked men, yelling and begging to know where they would take him. They refused to answer.

Raytheon’s daily operations pose a threat to human life. ICE enforcement is a machinery of disappearance. These are not political opinions, they are descriptions of what these institutions do. The people in Gaza, the people being pulled from their homes and vanished into unmarked vehicles, they are people made in the image of Hashem. Sanhedrin 4:5 is explicit: anyone who destroys a single soul, Scripture regards as if they had destroyed an entire world. Universalism is built into the text’s own origin story: all humans descend from one ancestor, which is why no lineage can claim superior standing.

Later arguments in the Gemara wrestle with the scope of pikuach nefesh. They argue whether it extends equally to Jews and non-Jews, where its limits run. Those arguments are real and I do not pretend otherwise. But I want to locate us in an earlier and more authoritative text, because the Mishnah speaks before the Gemara does, and the Mishnah’s own ruling already answers the question.

Mishnah Yoma 8:6 does not say: clear the debris if the person is a Jew. It says: clear the debris even if there is doubt whether the person is a Jew or a non-Jew, safek nochri. The doubt about the person’s identity is named explicitly, and it does not pause the obligation. The Mishnah chose to write it that way. In a document where every word is deliberate, where inclusion is never accidental, the rabbis of the Mishnah looked at this ruling and decided to extend it explicitly into the condition of not-knowing-who. They could have written the ruling narrowly. They did not.

The Rishonim move in the same direction. The logic of b’tzelem Elohim–that every person is made in the image of Hashem, stated without qualification in Bereishit–has always pressed toward inclusion. And the hermeneutic the Rambam gave us, that Torah’s purpose is chesed and shalom and not vengeance, bends the same way. A tradition that names the safek about a person’s identity and then rules dig anyway, that tradition is telling us something about what it believes a life is worth. The Gemara’s arguments are important, but they do not override what the Mishnah encoded first. I follow the ruling that chose the most life-affirming interpretation it could reach. When in doubt, toward life.

That is the inheritance I am asking us to receive. And it turns out that US law has created a path to defend exactly this.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993, was not designed with us in mind. It was written in response to a Supreme Court case involving two Native American men fired from their jobs for using peyote in a religious ceremony, then denied unemployment benefits. In theory, Congress passed RFRA to ensure that the government cannot substantially burden a person’s religious exercise unless it can prove a compelling interest and has chosen the least restrictive means to pursue it. In the years since, the law has been wielded most visibly by the religious right: by corporations claiming religious exemption from contraception coverage mandates, by those who would use faith as a shield against civil rights protections. We did not build this tool. But it is ours to use.

The proof of this is already here, in Tucson, in the desert west of us. In 2017, Scott Warren, a geographer and volunteer with No More Deaths, was arrested after leaving water, food, and supplies in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, where migrants cross and where countless have died in the heat. He was charged criminally. He defended his actions on RFRA grounds, arguing that his religious belief—that all life is sacred—compelled him to act. The court found that the government had not demonstrated a compelling interest sufficient to override his religious exercise. He was acquitted. The government’s case against him collapsed entirely, and the remaining charge was dropped with prejudice in 2020. A federal court in Tucson established that faith-compelled humanitarian aid in the desert is a protected religious act.

I am using the same argument. When I stood in the Raytheon driveway, I was not simply protesting. I was practicing my faith, compelled by texts I have spent years studying, governed by an obligation the tradition addresses to me. The Shulchan Aruch says it is a mitzvah. Shabbat 54b says silence is liability. Yoma 84b says delay is culpability. These are not metaphors I am reaching for. They are the legal architecture of Judaism, more binding to me than any statute the state can conjure. RFRA says the government must reckon with that. Scott Warren proved it could work, here, in an Arizona federal court, for a person who left water in the desert for people crossing it.

We can be that person too. The desert is everywhere now.

On Shavuot we receive Torah again. We stand at the mountain again. We take in again the text that contains v’chai bahem, live by them, not die by them, and lo ta’amod al dam rei’echa — do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor. Proverbs adds its own warning: אֹטֵם אׇזְנוֹ מִזַּעֲקַת דָּל גַּם הוּא יִקְרָא וְלֹא יֵעָנֶה, those who close their ears to the cry of the poor will themselves cry out and not be answered. This is not a promise of divine retribution. It is a description of moral reality. When we close our ears to the cries of those being disappeared, we participate in building a world where cries go unanswered.

What the earliest rabbis understood, what they encoded in the Mishnah’s radical ruling about the collapsed building, is that our tradition does not require certainty before we act on behalf of life. It requires only the presence of the possibility that a life is at stake. They were not naive about the weight of that. They were living in conditions designed to extinguish their communities, writing down a tradition of life-preservation with full knowledge of what it would cost. They chose the most life-affirming interpretation available to them and they embedded it in halacha. They trusted the generations after them to receive that tradition and carry it forward.

We are that generation. The rubble is real. The children are in the sea. The vans are unmarked and the agents wear masks and they will not answer when you run after them asking where they are taking your loved ones. We do not know with certainty what our actions will accomplish. We act anyway, because efshar, it is possible. We act because safek is the summons meant to stir our souls, and because the Mishnah told us nearly two thousand years ago, in plain and binding language, that we do not stop to ask whether the life under the rubble is Jewish enough to be worth saving.

This is what the tradition demands. That is what we owe each other. That is the bare minimum, and it always was.

One looked up and came over quickly, apologizing, explaining himself with the slightly embarrassed energy of a person who has just been caught caring about something. They were watching the launch, he said. The Artemis mission. A moon mission, can you believe it, a moon mission. His face was lit up the way faces get when something genuinely astonishing has broken through the noise of ordinary life.

I told him my grandfather was an engineer on the Apollo missions.

He hollered to his coworkers. He actually hollered. “Hey! Her grandpa built a moon rocket!” The whole crew turned around, and for a moment we were all just standing there together. Me on one side with my list, them in their white coats and hair nets on the other—connected by a thread that ran from a butcher shop in 2026 back to a launch pad in 1969 and to a man I barely knew, who died when I was five, whose shoes I never had to fill because I was too busy complaining about my own.

We talked for a few minutes about the launch, about how welcome it was to have something like this in the news, something that pointed upward rather than downward, something that wasn’t the war or the threats or the daily accumulation of grief and dread. How strange and necessary it felt, in that particular week, to have a reason to crowd around a phone and feel something like awe. We did not say any of this precisely. We didn’t need to. I was just another Jew buying groceries on the afternoon before Passover, with the news running in the background the way it always runs, and a rocket was leaving the earth, and for a moment that was enough.

I drove home with my groceries and started my preparations for the seder. I did not watch the launch. But I have been thinking about it ever since.

The first seder of Passover 5786 began at sundown on April 1, 2026. Somewhere in the gathering dark, while Jews around the world were filling the first cup of wine and preparing to tell the oldest story we know, a rocket left the earth. At 6:35 in the evening, NASA’s Space Launch System ignited at Kennedy Space Center and carried four human beings off the planet. By the time most families had reached the Four Questions, the Artemis II crew was already in orbit.

My grandfather helped build the program that Artemis was named to complete. And because the week that followed—a week of Passover, of lunar flyby, of a president threatening to annihilate a civilization while a spacecraft named Integrity arced around the moon—was the kind of week that makes you feel the whole weight of Jewish history pressing up through the floorboards. The kind of week that makes you need not only a holiday like Pesach, but also one like Tisha B’Av. The kind of week that makes you understand why we have these holidays.

My grandfather was an engineer who worked on a team that helped put Apollo mission after Apollo mission into orbit. One of those missions landed on the moon in July, 1969. On the Jewish calendar, the first man landed on the moon on the 5th of Av in 5729, just before the most mournful day of the whole year, the 9th of Av.

I read once that the moon was in Scorpio when the first astronauts to walk on the moon returned home. I was born under the mazels, the stars, of Scorpio. This has always struck me as a tender coincidence. Maybe the moon connected him and I through time that day, weaving beams of light between us, herself, and the stars that would watch over my birth thirteen years later.

My grandfather died when I was five. I remember how tight my shoes felt at his funeral. I remember feeling shame because I wasn’t mourning him and instead I was complaining about the black patent leather shoes that felt too tight and I knew would leave my feet with blisters. I didn’t know how to mourn yet, and I wouldn’t learn for a long time.

Tisha B’Av is a day we can take every pain from all of history out of the tidy stack we keep them in all year, unfurl them, and linger with them on the floor as if we were literally steeping in the tears that once accompanied them. Tisha B’Av offers a set of rituals designed to allow us to feel pain and to learn to mourn. Because we might not have learned yet.

When the astronauts landed on the moon in 5729, Buzz Aldrin quoted Psalms 8:4-5:

When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars that You set in place, what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him.

The moon landing was an admirable and inspiring accomplishment. It brought us closer to the wonders of creation and caused the world to stop and look on in awe. My grandfather was a small part of that accomplishment, but he didn’t just help put men on the moon. He dropped bombs on Korea. He helped design weapons for aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin. He was a part of something so momentous, so inspiring, and also part of other things that have caused countless deaths and incalculable suffering.

The Apollo program was named for the sun god; radiant, masculine, singular, triumphant. It was, in the deepest sense, a Moses program: world-historical, face shining, tablets in hand, capable of parting the impossible. And like Moses, it was not built alone. The Apollo era depended enormously on women and on Black mathematicians and engineers who were systematically excluded from the story of what they made possible. People whose brilliance was essential to every trajectory calculation, every mission plan, every stitch of every spacesuit, and who watched the white men take the glory and the ticker tape. Miriam, standing at the reeds, watching. Present. Essential. Unnamed in the official record.

The Artemis program is named for Apollo’s twin sister, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild places. She is the sibling who made the story possible, who kept watch when the radiant one was not yet ready. A midrash in the Mekhilta teaches that the righteous women who left Egypt were so certain that redemption was coming that they packed their timbrels in Mitzrayim, before any miracle had occurred. They prepared instruments of celebration for a liberation they could not yet see. That is not naïveté. That is a specific kind of hope. A belief in the not-yet, a trust that the song will be needed. Artemis II launched after years of hydrogen leaks and cracked heat shields and bureaucratic weight that surely felt, at times, insurmountable. Someone had packed the timbrel. And on the first night of Passover, the timbrel sounded.

The crew of Artemis II was, itself, perhaps a repair of something. Victor Glover became the first Black man to travel around the moon. Christina Koch, the first woman. The moon my grandfather served never carried anyone who looked like most of the world. The moon Artemis flew to was, in this small and insufficient way, more whole. Apollo was Moses. Artemis is Miriam. We have been running the Moses program for fifty years, and we are only now beginning to learn Miriam’s name.

We cannot think about the distance from Apollo to Artemis without hearing Gil Scott-Heron:

I can’t pay no doctor bills

But whitey’s on the moon

Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still

While whitey’s on the moon

The man just upped my rent last night

Cause whitey’s on the moon

No hot water, no toilets, no lights

But whitey’s on the moon…

We may have sent a Black man and a woman to the furthest reaches of the moon, but the Miriam program holds much more promise than representation ever could. What can be said of my own wonder at this moon mission when Gil Scot-Heron’s words land as hard as they ever have? Miriam’s is a promise yet to be fulfilled. Her program is not a diversity initiative. It is a reckoning.

On the final day of Passover we hold Yizkor, one of four times each year we stop to formally remember our dead. I say my grandfather’s name then, and I mean the brilliant engineer who helped reach the moon. But Yizkor holds only so much. On Tisha B’Av I bring the rest, the parts that don’t fit inside ordinary remembrance. His brilliance, his hard work, his limitless possibilities, lost in part to militarism and imperialism. I add that to the long list of tragedies we unfurl on that day, and I add alongside it the grief I owe to all those whose deaths he contributed to. The people I will never know how to name.

As Artemis flew toward the moon, a war raged on Earth. The United States and Israel had launched strikes against Iran in late February, and by the first night of Passover, the war was entering a horror inducing phase. On April 7, Chol HaMoed, the middle days of the festival, Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz by his deadline. On the first day of the war, a US airstrike hit an elementary school in the city of Minab, killing at least 168 children and 14 teachers. The spacecraft orbiting the moon that week was named Integrity.

I keep turning that word over in my hands like a stone. Integrity. From the Latin integer—whole, untouched, complete. Tikkun olam begins from the premise that the world is not integer. That something was shattered at the beginning, and the work of every generation is to gather the scattered sparks and tend them. We named a spacecraft Integrity and flew it to the moon in the same week a president threatened civilizational annihilation. We have done this for as long as we have had the tools to do both. But tikkun olam is not a teaching about the way things are. It is a teaching about what we are capable of doing with our hands before we die. The moon is always beautiful. Whether we are always making war beneath it is still, I have to believe, an open question.

The far side of the moon, the side that always faces away from us, that the Apollo astronauts passed through in darkness, was, for the Artemis II crew, illuminated for the first time in human history. They saw it in daylight. Parts of the lunar surface that had never been seen by human eyes, hidden all this time not because they were not there but because we had never gone far enough or come around right to see them.

I have been thinking about what it means that we needed to go further than Apollo to see the far side in the light. My grandfather’s far side—what I do not know about the people on the other end of the weapons he designed, the faces unknowable to me, the locations where the bombs fell—is always there, whether I turn toward it or not. The history we inherit is always complete, even when we can only see part of it. Tisha B’Av is the practice of forcing ourselves to look at the far side: the destruction of the Temples, the expulsions, the Crusades, the Shoah, the long catalog of what we have suffered and what has been done in our name and by our own hands. We unfurl all of it and sit with it on the floor.

The Artemis crew, coming around from behind the moon, lost all contact with Earth for forty minutes. No signal. Nothing. Just the four of them in the dark and the silence, moving through a part of space where no transmission could reach them, and then: they came back into the light and Earth reappeared on the lunar horizon, and the sun was in total eclipse behind the moon, and the corona formed a halo, and the stars were visible in full daylight.

That is almost too much to read as anything other than midrash. Forty minutes—the number of years in the wilderness, the number of days of the flood, the number of days Moses spent on Sinai—of silence, and then the hidden face of the sun blazing behind the moon, and the stars. The seventh day of Passover commemorates the splitting of the sea, and it is Miriam who brings out the timbrel on the other side. Not because the danger is fully past. Pharaoh’s army is still behind them, the wilderness is still ahead. But because she knows the song will be needed. She had already packed it.

The ceasefire between the United States and Iran was announced on April 8, the seventh day of Passover, the day we remember the sea. It was fragile from the first hour, immediately strained by Israel’s continued strikes on Lebanon. It was not peace. It was a held breath. But it was also not, that night, the end of a civilization.

My oldest child is twenty-one. They have known about my grandfather the engineer their whole life. They have grown up with the same two-sided story I grew up with, the pride and the grief braided together. They are old enough now to have their own grief about the world, their own accounting with what we inherit and what we owe.

My middle child is sixteen. She is at the age of questions. The age where you stop accepting the story as it was handed to you and start pressing on it to see where it gives. She is learning that the plagues fell on everybody, that the Haggadah tells us to reduce our wine for the suffering even of those who enslaved us. She is learning to mourn.

My youngest turned thirteen this year. Her bat mitzvah was recent enough that she still carries the weight of the Torah portion she leyned, about the midwives Shifra and Puah, two women who defied Pharaoh to save children. In this week, in this year, I did not take that lightly. She still feels the newness of gravity from the obligations she took on. At thirteen you become, in the tradition, responsible. For the mitzvot, yes, but also for the ongoing project of repair. She sat at the seder, the youngest voice asking the questions, and I watched her and thought about what she is inheriting. She is inheriting a moon that Miriam’s people finally flew to. She is inheriting a war. She is inheriting a spacecraft named Integrity that flew through the dark and came out the other side.

She is inheriting a great-grandfather who helped put men on the moon and dropped bombs. She is inheriting Yizkor for remembering our people and Tisha B’Av for the practice of learning to mourn what we don’t know how to mourn. She is inheriting the obligation to see the far side, even when it is easier to stay in the orbit we know.

The rabbis teach that the moon was once the same size as the sun, equal in radiance, and that it was diminished—and that tikkun, repair, includes the eventual restoration of the moon to her original brightness. It is understood, in the mystical tradition, as a story about the Shekhinah, the feminine face of the Divine, waiting for restoration. Every month, just before the moon is full, I look up at the sky and recall my grandfather’s brilliance. The luminous moon reminds me of all the limitless possibilities that have been bestowed upon us. I quietly bless the moon and thank the Divine Presence for bringing it back to us, full and bright, once again.

The blessing of the moon, kiddush levana, is a Jewish liturgical practice, a monthly act of communing with the light that is always returning, always incomplete, always on its way back to fullness. We bless the moon because she is not finished. Because repair takes longer than a single cycle. Because we are asked to greet even partial light with gratitude and intention.

Through this small act I commune with my grandfather, in all of his flaws and his brilliance. I commune with the crew of Artemis II, who went further than Apollo and looked at the far side in the light and came back around to find the stars visible in the corona of an eclipsed sun. I commune with Miriam, who packed her timbrel in Mitzrayim and led the song on the far shore. I commune with my children, who are beginning to understand that you don’t get to choose which inheritance you receive, only what you do with it.

The moon is not yet fully restored. The world is not yet repaired. The Miriam program has launched, however haltingly. The far side has been seen in daylight. My grandfather’s brilliance is still braided into everything I cannot undo and everything I will not stop trying to. For forty minutes the Integrity and her passengers had been completely alone on the far side of the moon, in the silence before the corona, before the stars became visible alongside the eclipse, before Earth reappeared on the horizon—and someone, in Mitzrayim, the narrow place, before any of it, had already packed the timbrel.

For the last five months, I have spent two afternoons each week in the beit midrash at SVARA’s Gemirna Kollel, tracing the halakhic concept of pikuach nefesh from its Mishnaic origins through its development in the Gemara. I have been doing this while living inside the very questions the texts are asking. I can only imagine you are living in them too.

ICE agents are actively threatening the lives of people in my city and probably yours. I have missed shiur (the class where the Kollel comes together) to respond to raids, to be a body present at a site where someone’s life, someone’s family, is at risk of being torn apart. The calculus I make in those moments is not metaphorical and it is not casual. I am making a true halakhic judgment: that despite the holiness of studying Torah in the beit midrash, knowing that a “fixed time for Torah” is at the core of my Jewish observance, the obligation to preserve a life that is immediately at risk is the higher obligation. I make that judgment with my feet when I walk out the door and with my whole chest when I wonder if I’m getting it right.

And it is not only ICE. The bombs dropped on a girls’ school in Iran were designed miles from my own house, in a facility I can drive past on an ordinary Tuesday and am currently banned from for having attempted to blockade the entrance in November 2023. The question of to whom I am obligated—to whose life my actions and my protest and my body are owed—is not an abstraction I bring to the Talmud. It is a wound I carry into the beit midrash every single time I open the text.

Which makes what I have found there all the more urgent. Because the Talmud is asking the same question I am, in the precise technical vocabulary of halakha, with a rigor I find both clarifying and in moments devastating. The question is this: what variable does pikuach nefesh actually track? Meaning, who counts, and why? Not in the vague sense—we all know the general answer—but precisely, operationally, with the kind of exactness that matters when you are driving down the streets of your neighborhood trying to slow down a Dodge Durango with ICE agents inside.

The Tinok: A Test Case That Asks Little of Us

I want to come at this through a case that feels easy on the surface: the tinok, the young child. The term tinok / תינוק appears in the Talmud in several distinct halakhic contexts, but in the pikuach nefesh discussion it operates as an instance of the broader category of katan, a minor who has not yet reached the age of obligation. Yoma 82a addresses the tinok precisely in this context, discussing whether and how we feed a child on Yom Kippur when their life is at risk, establishing that the obligation to preserve their life overrides the fast. A katan (a boy under thirteen or a girl under twelve) is patur, meaning exempt from the positive and negative commandments of the Torah. They are not yet obligated, not yet bound, not yet full participants in the covenant. And yet nobody in the rabbinic literature argues that we should not violate Shabbat to save a child's life. We do it automatically, of course we do, it's a baby.

But of course is doing an enormous amount of philosophical work here, and I want to pull on that thread. Because if halakhic obligation is the variable that pikuach nefesh tracks, if the reason we violate Shabbat is that the person in danger is bound by Shabbat as we will see is suggested in Avodah Zarah, then the tinok case give us pause. It doesn’t. Which means either we’re being inconsistent, or the relevant variable is something other than obligation. And if it’s something other than obligation, I need to know what it is. Not only for the sake of our texts, though the texts deserve that rigor. But because there are people whose lives are in danger right now, and the question of whether they count—whether I am obligated to show up for them—is the question I am trying to answer.

To say it more bluntly, I need to know that our tradition is one that values human life because all human life is inherently sacred and if it is not, I must reconcile what that means for my own Jewishness. What I find, when I refuse to treat the text as purely technical and instead treat it as the tradition working something in real time, is that the Gemara is asking my same question.

Two Rationales, Not One

I believe to answer this question we have to turn to the Gemara in Yoma 85b, which offers not one but two rationales for why saving a life overrides Shabbat. They are easy to blur together, but Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein separates them with precision in his essay “Mah Enosh: Reflections on the Relation between Judaism and Humanism”, and I think his distinction is a key move in contemporary halakhic thinking.

The first rationale comes from the verse וָחַי בָּהֶם / ve-hai bahem, “and you shall live by them” (Leviticus 18:5). The Gemara reads this as a meta-principle: one should live through the commandments, not die for them. Rabbi Lichtenstein describes this rationale as expressing a genuinely humanistic concern—it affirms the primacy of life as a value over ritual observance. Life is not instrumental to the mitzvot; the mitzvot are instrumental to life.

The second rationale comes from Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya, who reads Exodus 31:16 “וְשָׁמְרוּ בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת הַשַּׁבָּת” / “And the children of Israel shall keep Shabbat" as implying: desecrate one Shabbat so that the person may live to observe many Shabbatot. This is an internal Shabbat calculus, and it is worth pausing to take it seriously before we see where it leads. Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya is not being callous about life, he is making a powerful theological argument that Shabbat itself authorizes its own violation when the net result is more Shabbat. The logic is coherent. But it is entirely self-referential. Life is not the value being protected here; Shabbat observance is. The permission to violate Shabbat flows not from any claim the endangered person has on us as a human being, but from the calculus of what their survival will produce for the community in regard to our covenant. Which means this rationale carries, embedded inside it, a limit. Follow it far enough and you will eventually arrive at a life for whom it yields nothing. Then we will have to decide whether we were ever actually saving lives, or simply protecting Shabbat by other means.

These are not two paths to the same destination. They are two genuinely different rationales, with different logical structures, different scopes, and, this is the key point, different answers to the question of who counts.

Two Theologies of a Life

I want to run the tinok through both rationales and see what happens.

Under Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya’s principle, the tinok case is clean. The child will become obligated. They will grow up and observe Shabbat. Violating Shabbat now to save them produces real future Shabbat observance and the calculation yields a positive return. The tinok is a case of what we might call prospective covenantal inclusion: not yet obligated, but the obligation is almost certainly coming.

Under ve-hai bahem, the tinok case is equally clean but for a different reason. The infant’s life has inherent value, full stop. The permission doesn’t depend on future obligation at all. It depends on the principle that life precedes law.

Here’s the problem: the tinok case is consistent with both rationales, which is why I believe we skip over interrogating it more deeply. Both give you the same answer: save the baby. We never have to choose between them. But to find out which rationale is actually doing the load-bearing work, we need a case where they diverge. The case of the non-Jew is where the two rationales part ways sharply.

Under Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya’s principle: a non-Jew will never observe Shabbat. They are not obligated, not now, not in the future. The net-Shabbat-observance calculation yields zero. The Talmud in Avodah Zarah 26a makes this explicit. Abaye says we can explain to a non-Jewish woman that we violate Shabbat for Jewish women, who observe it, but not for her, because she does not observe it. The exclusion of non-Jews from pikuach nefesh follows directly from this rationale. I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is tempting to read this passage as simple prejudice or xenophobia and leave it there. That reading lets us off too easy. What Abaye is doing is not arbitrary; he is rigorously applying Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya’s internal calculus to its logical conclusion. If the permission to violate Shabbat flows from the promise of future Shabbat observance, then a life that will never produce Shabbat observance cannot unlock that permission. The exclusion is not a moral failure of the Talmud. It is the Talmud being consistent with one of its own rationales. This is why the ruling lands in Shulchan Arukh, as the codified baseline. It is not an oversight or a relic. It is the inevitable endpoint of a specific theological thread.

Which means the question is not whether the Talmud got something wrong. The question is whether Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya’s rationale is the preferable operative or whether ve-hai bahem can and should carry pekuach nefesh independently. Under ve-hai bahem, none of the Shabbat calculus matters. The non-Jew’s life has the same kind of value as any human life. וְחַי בָּהֶם is not a statement about covenantal membership, identity, or halakhic status. It is a statement about the relationship between law and life. If life is the supreme value that the mitzvot serve, meaning if the mitzvot are instrumental to life and not the other way around, then life, any life, commands our response. Not because of what it will produce. Because of what it is.

Path (a), the future-observance path, is closed for the non-Jew. Path (b), the meta-principle path, remains open. I believe the question the entire halakhic history of this issue is really asking—even when it doesn’t ask it explicitly—is: which rationale is primary? Are we saving lives because lives serve Shabbat, or are we saving lives because lives are the point?

A Different Variable

Contemporary poskim who permit violating Shabbat to save non-Jews on principled rather than merely pragmatic grounds are making a choice, and not a comfortable one for many other rabbinic authorities. Rabbi Lichtenstein says plainly that he would act to save a non-Jew's life on principle, relying on those views that permit it in principle and not on societal concerns alone. He notes that even Rabbi Soloveitchik, despite the immense prestige he enjoyed, came under criticism for extending the concept of pikuach nefesh beyond what had then been its common range (Mah Enosh, p. 39). That this tradition of principled extension has always attracted resistance makes it more significant, not less. Both Rabbi Soloveitchik and Rabbi Lichtenstein are, in effect, saying that ve-hai bahem is not merely one prooftext among others. It is a genuine theological claim about the value of human life that operates prior to and independent of a person’s covenantal status.

The Ramban gestures toward the same place from a different angle. In his Hasagot to Sefer HaMitzvot, he counts helping and saving a ger toshav (a non-Jew who has accepted the seven Noahide laws) as a positive mitzvah, including violating Shabbat to do so. The ger toshav framework is significant because it identifies a variable that is neither covenantal obligation nor bare humanity: it is moral-legal personhood. A person embedded in a system of law that prohibits the core moral violations has a claim on us. Crucially, this claim does not flow from the Shabbat calculus at all. The ger toshav will never observe Shabbat; that is not what makes their life worth saving. What makes their life worth saving is that they exist within a framework of divine law that recognizes the sanctity of life itself. The Ramban is, in effect, locating the operative variable inside ve-hai bahem, inside the principle that law exists to protect life, rather than inside the net-Shabbat-observance calculation. He is saying: when a life is embedded in a moral order that honors what our law honors, that life makes a claim on our law and thereby on us.

The Meiri arrives at the same destination through a different methodological route. In his commentary to Yoma 84b, he argues that the harsh Talmudic rulings about non-Jews applied only to ancient idolaters. In his words these people were she’ein lahem dat, without religion, outside any moral-legal framework entirely. For anyone living within a religiously ordered civilization that limits behavior through law and recognizes basic human obligations (his category of gedurim be-gidrei ha-datot, those constrained by the boundaries of religion) those rulings simply never applied in the first place. The Meiri is not overturning the Talmud; he is adjusting its scope. And the scope he draws maps precisely onto ve-hai bahem rather than Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya’s principle: what the Meiri is protecting is not Shabbat observance. He recognizes that certain lives are bearers of the kind of moral-legal personhood that halakha was always designed to guard. Together, the Ramban and the Meiri are building a halakhic architecture in which the question is never ‘will this person observe Shabbat?’ The question is ‘does this person’s life carry the weight that halakha was built to honor?’ The answer, in both their frameworks, is yes. Not for every conceivable non-Jew in every conceivable hypothetical, but for any person embedded in a moral order that takes human life seriously. Which is to say: for the people whose lives are at stake in the world we currently inhabit.

What these approaches share—the Ramban’s ger toshav framework, the Meiri’s gedurim be-gidrei ha-datot, Rav Lichtenstein’s commitment to principled permission—is a refusal to let halakhic obligation serve as the gatekeeper of human life’s value. They are each, in their own register, saying: the relevant variable is not whether this person is bound by our law. It’s whether this person is a bearer of the kind of life that our law exists to protect.

And the tinok, our gentle test case, has been pointing at this all along. We save the child not because they will one day observe Shabbat, though they likely will. We save the child because a life is at stake and that is enough. The prospective-covenantal-inclusion story is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t reach deep enough. Deep enough is: ve-hai bahem, live by them. The commandments exist so that people live. Not some people. People.

Not Math. A Call.

I don’t think this is merely a technical point, the kind you resolve in a responsum and then file away. I think it matters urgently in the way that halakhic reasoning can matter when it is doing its real work. When halakha is confronting us with what we actually believe about whose life commands our response.

Sanhedrin 37a tells us: whoever saves a single life, it is accounted as if they saved an entire world. The statement originates in Mishnah Sanhedrin. Its parallel in the Tosefta reads simply nefesh achat / one life without the qualifier me-Yisrael / of Israel that appears in the standard Mishnaic text. That single word does enormous theological work. The Tosefta's version is letting ve-hai bahem breathe.

Which rationale you hold operative is not just an intellectual question. It is the question of whether, when you look at a life in danger, you are doing math equations or answering a call. Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya’s principle asks: what will this produce? Ve-hai bahem asks something simpler and more demanding. It asks: is someone there? Are they alive? Quick. Go.

Lately, I check my phone just before joining the rest of the Kollel for shiur. When I see a rapid response alert, I close the Gemara and grab my keys. I am not leaving Torah to do something else. I am following Torah to its own conclusion. That conclusion is the one that ve-hai bahem has been pointing toward the whole time, the one that Rabbi Shimon ben Menasya's elegant ruling cannot quite reach.

The girls' school in Iran, before the bomb dropped, was filled with young girls with sweet faces and mothers who loved them. It was filled with lives that our halakha was built to protect whether or not they ever open the Talmud or Torah. I have spent months learning that the halakha of pikuach nefesh demands us to answer what we believe a life is worth before we do any of the math. The tradition I have inherited, at its deepest and most honest, answers that question the same way I answer it when I walk out the door: a life is worth everything. All of them. Every single one. Go.

References:

Talmud and Codes

Yoma 82a, Yoma 85b, Avodah Zarah 26a, Sanhedrin 37a, Sanhedrin 56a–60a, Niddah 45b, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, Mishnah Yoma 8:6, Tosefta Sanhedrin 8:7, Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah 154:2

Rishonim

Ramban, Hasagot le-Sefer HaMitzvot, Mitzvat Aseh 16.

Meiri, Beit HaBechirah, Commentary to Yoma 84b.

Contemporary Responsa

Lichtenstein, Aharon. “Mah Enosh: Reflections on the Relation between Judaism and Humanism.” Torah u-Madda Journal 14 (2006–2007): 1–60.

Ziring, Jonathan. “Saving Non-Jews on Shabbat: Two Perspectives on the Development of a Sensitive Halakhah.” The Lehrhaus, July 17, 2024. https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/saving-non-jews-on-shabbat-two-perspectives-on-the-development-of-a-sensitive-halakhah/

If you hate your phone, you hate yourself. But before you dismiss this as provocation, consider: the same liberal elites publishing anxious editorials about democracy dying in the ‘techno dump’ are mourning their lost power to mediate truth for the rest of us. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, people are using those same phones to track and stop ICE raids, coordinate rapid response, and compose collective bodies capable of actually increasing power rather than just performing anxiety. What changed? Not the technology. The assemblage.

This isn’t abstract philosophy. Right now, as liberals publish fretful op-eds about democracy dying, ICE mercenaries are murdering people in Minneapolis. Right now, thousands of people are using phones to coordinate rapid response, to track raids, to increase collective power. Right now, the same devices designed to extract our attention are being recomposed into weapons against the state. Spinoza gives us a framework to understand not whether this is good or evil, but whether it increases or decreases our power to act. And that’s the only question that matters.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been immersed in studying Baruch Spinoza. What began as a small curiosity evolved into a yearlong study group and an obsessive engagement with how 17th-century philosophy might speak to our contemporary experiences. I found myself sitting with a question that feels particularly alive right now: How might Spinoza’s framework shift how we understand our phones—not as objects of moral judgment, good or evil, but as assemblages that either increase or decrease our power to act?

And perhaps more pressing: How do we reclaim technology at a time when it is claimed both by those seeking to build collective power and by those who use it to extract our attention, engineer our passivity, and profit from our diminished capacity?

Spinoza: Who He Was and Why He Matters

Spinoza probably became most famous for getting kicked out. He was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at age 23, and the herem (excommunication decree) against him is remarkable for what it doesn’t say, never specifying his offenses. Whatever he did was allegedly too severe to name. We can only infer from what he published after his excommunication.

Unlike his dear friend who was also excommunicated around the same time and converted to Christianity, Spinoza never converted to anything else. He simply carved his own path. This has led some to call him the first atheist, though that misses the point. Spinoza didn’t reject God—he radically redefined what God means. (Note: you can catch some of my thoughts on Spinoza’s concept of God here and here.)

But his excommunication wasn’t just about theology. It was about politics. The Amsterdam Jewish community had ties to the Dutch East India Company and aligned with the House of Orange, an anti-democratic monarchist faction. Spinoza, by contrast, was a passionate advocate for democracy—then a nascent revolutionary concept in Europe. Someone tried to assassinate him because of his political positions. He survived and kept wearing his stabbed coat afterward. Not as a symbol of victimhood but as visible evidence that power had tried to kill him and failed. He made the violence visible rather than hiding from it.

What matters about Spinoza is this: he believed that the more connections people form democratically, the more collective right they possess together. This stands in stark contrast to Hobbes’ contractualism gaining traction at the time—the idea that individuals trade freedom for security under state authority. For Spinoza, freedom and connection aren’t opposed. They compose each other.

Martin Buber, a remarkable thinker in his own right, said Spinoza was the most impactful contribution to philosophy that Jews ever made. That’s a striking claim given the richness of Jewish philosophical contributions. But Spinoza laid foundations for modern thought more comprehensively than almost any other philosopher—and yet few of us have taken the time to meaningfully engage with his work.

Why Spinoza for the Problem of Smartphones?

I often hate my phone. It feels like the bearer of bad news, designed to trap me, engineered to extract my attention. And I don’t think this is a me-problem or a you-problem. We are not failing as adults by not regulating our screen time. This isn’t about individual morality.

The issue is that we’re carrying around devices sold on a promise—that we’d become ever more connected—and they often make us feel disempowered. What I want to suggest is that our orientation to these devices, the way we’re viewing them, is what’s limiting our power. We self-limit our power by perceiving these devices as inherently decomposing forces in our lives.

Spinoza offers us an ethical framework stripped of moralism. So many conversations about social media and phones focus on morality—is this good or bad for us? Spinoza instead directs us to focus on what increases our power. The Latin term he uses for this is potentia–the ability to act, create, relate, and produce effects in the world

Spinoza doesn’t ask whether phones are good or evil. He asks whether they increase or decrease our power to act. For Spinoza, the question becomes not “should we use cell phones?” but rather “can we compose relations with our devices that increase our power to act, rather than diminish it?”

Key Spinozan Concepts

Potentia (Power)

For Spinoza, potentia is our capacity to act. What diminishes your power limits your action, making you finite, passive. But the ability to act, create, relate, produce an effect in the world—this is not power over other people (which he addresses separately) but your own power to think, move, build, flourish.

The goal of his ethical framework is to increase all of our potential, all of our power, to become more capable, more alive, more able to act. The question isn’t about domination. It’s about capacity.

Conatus (Fundamental Striving)

Conatus is Spinoza’s term for the fundamental striving of every existing thing to persist and increase its power of acting. And this extends beyond humans—it includes all existing things. Conatus isn’t about survival drive. It’s about the active expression of your essence in the world. It’s about enhancing capacity, understanding, and through that increase of capacity and understanding, increasing our collective power.

Think about the Twin Cities rapid response networks: people whose conatus is under direct physical threat—ICE is literally trying to separate them from their families, their communities—composing a collective body whose power to act vastly exceeds what any individual could do alone. That’s conatus made collective.

In the Ethics, Spinoza writes: “The power of anything, or the conatus, with which it acts or endeavors to act, alone or in conjunction with other things, is nothing else but the given or actual essence of that thing.”

Adequate and Inadequate Ideas

This distinction becomes crucial. An inadequate idea is confused—a fragmented understanding at best, sometimes a willful lack of inquiry. We know the effects: “My phone is making me feel this ennui.” But we don’t understand the cause. That’s an inadequate idea.

An adequate idea is a clear understanding of the cause and the relation. And this distinction is key to Spinoza’s account of freedom: we are only active insofar as we understand. When Spinoza says we’re “only active,” he means we have only tapped into our power, our capacity to act in the world individually and with others, when we have adequate ideas—when we understand the situation, the effects, and the causes of those effects.

The people at Whipple Watch in Minneapolis tracking ICE movements, building license plate databases, identifying patterns of deployment—they’re developing adequate ideas. They know how ICE agents deploy, where they stage, how they drive, how they react. Understanding causes, not just experiencing effects.

The liberal elites writing anxious op-eds? Inadequate ideas. They see Trump, populism, anxiety as effects of smartphones without understanding that phones are assemblages of human, algorithmic, corporate, and political relations. They understand only effects without grasping causes.

Joy and Sadness

Here’s where it gets exciting, and where I think people misunderstand Spinoza most often. Joy (laetitia) and sadness are not feeling states. They’re indicators of change in power to act.

Joy is the passage from lesser to greater perfection—an increase in the power of acting. Sadness is the passage from greater to lesser perfection. What’s notable is that joy is not a destination. It’s a transition, the movement from less to more capacity.

There are two types:

• Passive joy: caused by external factors

• Active joy: self-caused through your own adequate ideas, your own understanding of the world

I remember a conversation I had at Standing Rock. Our clothes were still soaked in tear gas after fighting the police on the bridge all night. In the morning, the sun comes up, someone is playing the drum, there’s a baby waking up, life in camp. And having a conversation with someone: “This is how maybe we’re supposed to live. Like, all the time.”

That feeling—that’s real joy. Not the kind capitalism sells. The feeling of moving from being a passive observer watching horrible things happen to actively composing a new way of organizing together. That’s the passage from lesser to greater perfection, from decreased to increased power to act.

Sad Passions

Spinoza frets intensely about anything that keeps us from acting. Fear, guilt, shame, envy, resentment—these all decrease our power. They make us subjects easier to manipulate. And I would say: much of the attention economy relies upon engineering our sad passions.

We know what it feels like to lie in bed scrolling, feeling fear, guilt, shame, envy—feeling our capacity to act diminish with every swipe.

Deleuze’s Spinoza: Expanding the Concept of Body

Philosophy is a slippery slope. You start with one thinker and pretty soon you’re reading two or three others just to understand the first. That’s definitely true with Spinoza. He wrote 400 years ago in strange geometric formulas, using logic and propositions to outline his concepts. It can get overwhelming.

But thank God for Gilles Deleuze, who wrote Spinoza: Practical Philosophy—a fairly short book that takes Spinoza’s concepts and brings them through his own philosophical filter while keeping the essence of Spinoza intact. The rest of this essay is really a Deleuze/Spinoza mashup.

What Deleuze brings to Spinoza is this: he expands the concept of body beyond the human organism. For Deleuze reading Spinoza, a body is anything that can affect and be affected. Bodies aren’t defined by their substance but by their capacity.

Spinoza writes: “Nobody, as yet, has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities.”

Deleuze responds: “A body can be anything. It can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind, or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”

This is crucial for thinking about phones. A phone is a body. A rapid response network is a body. An algorithm is a body. ICE is a body. The question is never what a thing is in some essential way. The question is what it can do—what it’s capable of affecting and being affected by.

Composition and Decomposition

When two bodies encounter each other, their relations either compose, producing a more powerful whole, or they decompose—one breaks down the other. This is the fundamental evaluative principle in Deleuzian/Spinozan ethics. Not good and evil, but composing or decomposing.

Deleuze writes in Practical Philosophy: “When a body encounters another body, the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole. And sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts.”

These are the two outcomes of any encounter between bodies:

• Composition: Relations combine to form a more powerful whole, leading to joy

• Decomposition: One body’s relations break down another’s cohesion, leading to sadness

ICE operates as a decomposing force in the most literal sense—arriving to separate people from their families, their communities, their neighborhoods. The rapid response network responds to each decomposing tactic with a new composition. When ICE switched to fast snatch-and-grab tactics, the network broke into smaller geographic zones. When ICE swapped license plates, the network increased submission volume to track them. Every decomposition by the state is met with a new composition.

The practical ethics of Spinoza and Deleuze is the art of organizing encounters—actively seeking bodies whose relations compose well with ours, and learning to recognize and avoid (or intentionally decompose) things that decompose us.

Democratic Collapse Anxiety: What Are Liberal Elites So Worried About?

In January of this year, the journal Liberties published an essay titled “Democracy Dies in the Techno Dump” that perfectly captures liberal elite anxiety. It worries: “We hardly have the tools to understand our own disenfranchisement. Americans today take the current arc of technological development and supremacy for granted. In such a world, is there still hope for a saner and more authentically democratic world?”

They sound nervous to say the least.

The New York Times published “The Rise of the Smartphone and the Fall of Western Democracy” in October—a masterfully written op-ed outlining the liberal order’s position in this moment. The author closes with this quote: “The challenge the communications revolution poses to democratic government is more profound than more familiar concerns with disinformation, misinformation, offensive speech, and the like. The revolution might inherently undermine the capacity for legitimate, broadly accepted political authority. The authority necessary to be able to govern effectively in democratic systems.”

They are anxious. What are they so anxious about?

They fear loss of control. They fear the soft coup of the mind. They fear atomization. They fear Trump. They fear cognitive decline. They fear the erosion of truth. They fear fragmentation. But what they really fear—what keeps them writing op-ed after anxious op-ed—is that we don’t need them anymore.

Inadequate Ideas

These articles perfectly exemplify what Spinoza would call inadequate ideas—understanding only effects without grasping causes. They see Trump, populism, anxiety, declining reading scores as effects of the smartphone. But they don’t understand that smartphones are assemblages—compositions of human-algorithmic-corporate-political relations. For better or worse, this is what they are, an assemblage that can be decomposed in its current form and composed towards other aims.

They treat technology as an external force acting upon all of us passive subjects. This liberal imagination positions us as passive subjects.

The Spinozan question they miss is not “what did smartphones do to us?” but “what assemblage are we forming with these technologies and in whose interest?”

Mourning Lost Power—But Whose Power?

I think these authors are grieving. They’re in deep mourning about their lost power to act. But what kind of power was it really?

The anxiety is about a specific class’s diminished capacity. What they are mourning, in their words, is “the legitimate, broadly accepted political authority” that could “govern effectively.” The ability to determine what is true and false for the rest of us—as if our minds were theirs to control in the first place. They’re mourning the loss of their role as knowledge mediators and authority setters.

While we might share concerns about a human-centered, reciprocal democratic society, the world they’re imagining is one where they mediate that world. They’re not mourning lost democratic power. They’re mourning that someone else (Silicon Valley) now has the mediating role instead of them.

This is sadness at their own decreased power to act as gatekeepers. But is this the same as democracy’s decline?

In Phil Neel’s recent essay “Lies You Will Be Told,” he calls upon Ernst Fraenkel, via Aziz Huq who published “America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State” in March 2025. What these anxious liberals are witnessing is what Ernst Fraenkel, writing about the rise of the Nazis, called the “dual state”—the normative realm of laws and procedures shrinking while the prerogative realm of arbitrary power expands. For Fraenkel, born and raised during imperial prosperity, this seemed exceptional, pathological. But Spinoza would tell us: this is closer to the historical norm. The normative state was always a temporary nicety, made possible only by imperial prosperity. The civility they mourn was never universal. Just ask anyone who’s been on the receiving end of ICE, or police, or any prerogative power that’s always operated in the shadows. Their shock reveals how narrow their experience of “democracy” always was.

The Assemblage They Want

The articles from LIberties and the New York Times advocate for something revealing:

• Reciprocity: Face-to-face discourse among particularly educated individuals

• Holistic technologies: Tools that don’t disrupt their existing knowledge hierarchy

• Democratic criteria: Panels of elite people deciding which technologies the rest of us are permitted to have

• Regulation: State management to restore their mediation role rather than dispersed power into a larger collective body

In short, they want to restore liberal democratic order where corporations produce technology but educated institutions control meaning-making. Where markets operate but cultural elites maintain interpretive authority. Where citizens can participate but through channels mediated by credentialed knowledge producers.

They’re not mourning democracy. They’re mourning their monopoly on meaning-making.

What They’re Really Scared Of

On May 26, 2020, Google searches related to George Floyd showed limited geographic distribution. By May 29, 2020, these searches had spread across the entire world. What happened on May 28th?

The Minneapolis Police Third Precinct was burned.

People posted about it on their phones, and it spread across the world. The George Floyd rebellion became the largest protest movement in U.S. history—more than 20 million people participating in protest in this country alone.

In a recent essay published by Ill Will Editions, Phil Neel wrote about the lies we have been and are being told about this rebellion:

Five years ago, only a few blocks away from where Renee Good was murdered by the coward Jonathan Ross, a similar murder triggered the largest popular uprising in over a generation. Soon after, we were told a series of lies about this rebellion. We were told that it was a “non-violent social movement,” even as the image of a burning police precinct flickered in the background. We were told that, though there was some violence, it was started by outside agitators, perhaps police, or even white nationalists. Whoever they were, they were not members of “the community” but instead individuals just “looking to cause trouble.” We were told that the plan had always been to prosecute the murder, it was just a coincidence that charges were filed only after almost every major city in this country saw its downtown cores looted and burned. We were told to go home, that it was over. We were told that rioting was just the excuse Trump needed to declare martial law and cancel the upcoming election. We were told that, if elected, Biden would set things right. We were told that the deportations would end and Trump’s policies would be rolled back. The kids would be released from the cages. We were told that we must return to politics as usual — that this was the only way to “get things done.” Altogether, these lies amounted to a single, great untruth: the uprising never occurred and can never occur again.4 But the spirit of history moves in strange ways. What is dead never quite dies. And we will hear, again and again, the same lies.

The Assemblage We Want: Rapid Response Networks in Practice

CrimethInc. has published two recent articles documenting what’s happening in Minneapolis: “Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities” and “From Rapid Response to Revolutionary Social Change: The Potential of the Rapid Response Networks.”

These networks compose something powerful using technology. They compose a body that has the capacity not only to increase all participants’ power to act but also to decompose the forces endangering communities—and honestly, the world.

Conatus Made Collective

The Twin Cities rapid response network exemplifies Spinozan assemblage in practice. It is conatus made collective.

The network is built almost entirely on smartphones: Signal loops, dispatch calls, license plate databases, language translation, relay chains for multiple languages. But these phones are not capturing attention for capitalist extraction. Instead, they’re being used by people whose conatus is under direct physical threat to compose a collective body whose power to act vastly exceeds what any individual could do alone.

You can’t stop ICE by yourself. But thousands of people, minimally coordinated through phones, can track movement, swarm, and document. The people vastly outnumber the occupying force.

Composition Responding to Decomposition

ICE operates as a decomposing force in the most literal sense—arriving to separate people from their families, their communities, their neighborhoods. The rapid response network responds to each decomposing tactic with a new composition:

• When ICE switched to fast snatch-and-grab tactics, the network broke into smaller geographic zones (hyperlocal chats)

• When ICE swapped license plates, the network increased submission volume to track them

• Every decomposition by the state is met with a new composition

This is an incredibly dynamic, live process.

From Passive to Active Joy in Real Time

The earlier model used by rapid response networks was passive: observers submitted sightings to centralized admins who broadcast them when they determined it appropriate. People converged reactively.

A new model emerged when community members wanted something more confrontational than the existing legal observer-style, bottlenecked system. As the Crimethinc article notes: “Community members wanted something more confrontational.” Now people don’t just wait to submit information. They move to act while alerting others on the chats.

This is true joy in the Spinozan sense. Not the kind of joy capitalism is trying to sell us. Not the kind those anxious New York Times writers think joy is. But the feeling of moving from being a passive observer watching horrible things happen to constituting a new way of organizing, recomposing in response, increasing collective power to act.

Adequate Ideas as Life-Saving Political Activity

The counter-surveillance at Whipple Watch (the federal building in the Twin Cities where they do detention) exemplifies a project of forming adequate ideas:

• Building license plate databases

• Identifying patterns of deployment

• Mapping spatial constraints of ICE operations

From the CrimethInc article: “The people of the Twin Cities have paid close attention to their opponents.” They literally are developing adequate ideas. They know how ICE agents deploy, where they stage, how they drive, how they react. And they have instructed all of us around the country with what they’ve found.

The network’s power grows in direct proportion to the adequacy of its collective understanding. Instead of gatekeeping information, they make it as open source and dispersed as possible, so anybody can pick up their phone and increase their power to act.

The Attention Economy and State Violence Are the Same Assemblage

The attention economy and the deportation regime are not separate phenomena. They’re two expressions of the same fundamental relationship: elite control over our capacity to act. When algorithms capture our attention, they diminish our power. When ICE decomposes communities, they diminish our power. When Target runs facial recognition databases while donating millions to Trump’s inauguration fund, collaborating with ICE operations—we see the assemblage clearly: corporate extraction, state violence, algorithmic control—all serving the same class interests.

This is why “just delete the app” individualism fails. This is why bodycams and better training don’t work. These are perfect examples of inadequate ideas. They understand the effects (violence, abuse, attention extraction) but not the causes (that these systems exist precisely to decompose communities and extract value). Bodycams don’t stop decomposition. They just provide better documentation of it. App deletion doesn’t stop extraction. It just makes you feel virtuous while the assemblage continues operating.

This is why Spinoza’s framework matters: it shows us that individual abstention or reforms addressing effects while leaving causes intact cannot increase our power to act.

Resistance as Positive Composition

Antonio Negri, Italian philosopher and a lover of Spinoza, writes in his collected essays Spinoza: Then and Now: “Resistance is never passive. It organizes positive passions. Thus, we arrive at the heart of the political problem, where the ethics of resistance, or the strategy of the conatus, becomes a political weapon. That is, an instrument of political autonomy, forming the subject. Resistance transforms it from a subjected being into an actor of liberation, of becoming together.”

Negri shows that for Spinoza, resistance isn’t about saying no to power. It’s not about speaking truth to power. It’s about organizing our joyful passions that increase our collective capacity to act. Resistance literally forms subjects as agents instead of leaving us as passive objects.

This is why those anxious people at the liberal think tanks are so worried—they are passive, and things are just happening to them. Maybe if they joined the rapid response group chat, they’d be less anxious, maybe a little more joyful.

We are not just in a negative position to ICE raids. We are actively composing a new assemblage that increases everyone’s power to protect each other. That is a joyful passion. The same phone we often hate can increase our capacity to act together and do this and much more.

What a Body Can Do

We are just beginning to understand what a body can do.

Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition about vita activa—the active life of human beings in contrast to vita contemplativa, the life of contemplation. For her, action—speech and deeds perceived in the public realm—is the highest activity, where freedom is realized, where plurality is expressed, where the unique, unpredictable nature of human life reveals itself.

She writes, “With word and deed, we insert ourselves into the human world. And this insertion is like a second birth... To act in its most general sense means to take an initiative, to begin, and this is the beginning of freedom.”

The Spinoza-Deleuze-Arendt Triangle

Spinoza: Freedom is an increase in potentia, which happens when we form joyful, empowering relationships with others and with ourselves. To become free is to compose a more joyful, less reactive life.

Deleuze: Bodies are defined by their capacity to affect and be affected. Composition creates more powerful wholes; decomposition destroys cohesion.

Arendt: Freedom is realized through action—speech and deeds in the public realm that insert us into the human world.

Freedom is not given but composed. It is not a human right we’re simply imbued with. It’s something we must seize through our action and compose together in a collective act of ethical and political transformation, in which we become more than we are—not by obeying laws or finding our essence, but by joyfully co-creating the real.

What Composition Requires

Here’s what composition requires: not individual choices about screen time, not consumer boycotts, not voting. It requires building the infrastructural intelligence that lets thousands of people coordinate action in real time. It requires being willing to decompose the assemblages that diminish our collective power—which means treating Target, UnitedHealth, the precinct, the detention center, not as neutral economic actors but as enemy infrastructure.

The rapid response networks show this is possible. They show that the same phones designed to capture our attention can instead compose collective bodies capable of tracking mercenaries, surrounding ICE operations, and making the city ungovernable for those who would decompose us.

But—and Negri is clear about this—resistance must organize joyful passions, not just oppositional ones. It’s not enough to resist ICE. We must compose something that increases everyone’s power to protect each other. This is the difference between reactive negation and active composition. This is why the networks matter: they don’t just respond to decomposition, they compose new capacities, new forms of collective power that exceed what any individual could achieve. These same capacities are what are the necessary foundation for self-governance and our compositions should not stop with abolishing ICE, rather we should leverage every new composition towards our collective liberation from tyranny.

If You Hate Your Phone, You Hate Yourself

We began with: if you hate your phone, you hate yourself.

But what I mean is this: if you hate your phone, you might hate the assemblage it currently forms—the passive, reactive relationship where corporate algorithms extract attention and engineer sad passions. But the phone itself is not inherently decomposing. It is a body among other bodies, capable of composing powerful collective assemblages.

We are not passive subjects of Silicon Valley’s design, despite what the CEOs and UX designers want you to think and feel about your relationship to your phone. We are free users of the phone. We are active agents capable of recomposing our relationship with technology.

The rapid response networks demonstrate this: thousands of people using the same devices sold to capture their attention, instead deploying them to increase collective power, protect communities, and actively resist decomposing forces.

The question is never whether technology is good or evil. The question is always: what assemblage are we composing, and does it increase our collective power to act?

Those mourning at the New York Times have inadequate ideas. They see smartphones decomposing their gatekeeping authority and call it the death of democracy. But thousands of people in Minneapolis have adequate ideas. They see the same phones and compose something different: distributed intelligence that tracks mercenaries, coordinates response, increases collective capacity to protect each other.

This is what Spinoza knew and what the rapid response networks demonstrate: we vastly outnumber those who would decompose us. The power of the elite depends on our labor, our attention, our passivity. If even minimally organized—if even a fraction of us develop adequate ideas about how power operates—we have the capacity to defeat them. Not through legal channels or electoral politics or consumer choices, but through joyful composition of collective bodies that increase everyone’s power to act.

The smartphone in your pocket contains both possibilities: engineered passivity or collective liberation. The precinct can burn. The mercenaries can be surrounded. The city can become ungovernable. We still don’t know what a body can do—but we’re beginning to figure out what kind of body we can compose together.

My Reading List:

• Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics (E.M. Curley translation is the only translation in my opinion)

• Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (translated by Robert Hurley, who so graciously attended the lecture version of this essay and to whom I am very indebted for my learning)

• Read, Jason. The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work

• Nadler, Steven. A Book Forged in Hell

• Negri, Antonio. Spinoza Then and Now

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (I once hosted a 24-hour sleepover book club on this text and highly recommend that you try that!)

This essay emerged from an attempt at a yearlong Spinoza study group where we closely read Spinoza’s Ethics together, engaged in partnered learning, and took turns facilitating presentations. We made it through six solid months before life got in the way. But those six months—with about half a dozen to a dozen people reading really closely together—taught me more about Spinoza than I could have ever learned alone. The insights presented here are collective, drawn from rigorous textual analysis and collaborative philosophical inquiry. May all the people who were in the Year with Spinoza study group flourish and live to be a biz hundert un tsvansik (120)!

In my backyard, after the winter rains wash over the desert land, I find it growing again—khubeza, chalamit, mallow. In the Book of Job, the plant was called chalamut. In the Mishnah, it is mentioned by its same modern Hebrew name, chalamit. The name comes from challah—the fruit looks like little bread. Khubeza in Arabic, from khubez: bread. The most important food for so many people.

I kneel in the gravely dirt of my home in the Sonoran Desert, pulling tender stems and leaves. In Gaza today, families gather this same plant from the rubble and tell their children how their grandfather used to cook it. In times of hunger or famine, this wild plant has and continues to sustain people in Palestine. Israel has destroyed 70% of Gaza’s fishing industry, targeted farms and greenhouses, cut off food, water, fuel, medicine. More than 85% of Gaza’s population has been displaced. Children are dying from malnutrition while mallow grows wild in the ruins.

The same plant in two places: my intact backyard with its winter abundance, their demolished neighborhoods where khubeza springs up through the rubble of what were once homes, markets, whole lives.

When I cook these leaves with olive oil and garlic, following recipes from Palestinian elders, I notice both the gentle flavor of the mallow and how much my heart is aching. This is what it means to be a Jew who refuses: to recognize that our liberation has always been bound up with all liberation, that there is no safety built on another people’s starvation, that the plant growing in both places teaches what we must learn—that borders are obscene, that hunger as weapon must be opposed whoever wields it, that solidarity means choosing struggle over comfort every single time.

How to make a mallow stew for a weary heart:

Gather mallow leaves, wash, and rough chop, filling your pot to the brim

Add boiling water to the pot, just covering the mallow, and continue to simmer

Grind garlic, green onion, peppers, along with cumin and salt

Add this to your mallow as it cooks down

Chop a large onion and sauté in a heavy pour of olive oil, cook until soft and fragrant

Add a handful of flour or two to your oily onions as they cool to make a simple rue

Mix the rue in with your stew

Serve over torn pita or other bread and top with lemon

May all of our bodies be nourished. May no child go to sleep tonight with hunger pangs. May Your canopy of peace be spread across our tables as we gather and fellowship with our loved ones. כן יהי רצון Ken Yehi Ratzon

This essay is adapted from the eulogy I wrote for Murphy titled On the Concept of Murphy and Revolutionary Messiahs and shared at the memorial gathering that was held for him. It is also adapted from an essay I wrote for SVARA shortly after his passing titled Something Like Hope. A year after his death, which happened days before the inauguration, we find ourselves using words like “dictator,” and “civil war,” without any hyperbolic tone. Not everyone who reads this will have known Murphy. But, the core truths of our collective power and responsibility in this moment are prescient. Thank you for reading them.

It has been a year since Murphy passed after a suicide attempt that occurred days after the new year in January 2025. His friends repeatedly describe him as the type of person who appears larger than life—he more than lit up rooms: he reinvented space and time everywhere he went. One of our mutual friends said after his death that it was particularly shocking because he always seemed more like a god in the Pantheon than a mere mortal. His presence was so potent.

Murphy was not Jewish, but he sometimes shared in Shabbat observances in my home and told me how meaningful those invitations were to him. My daughter invited him to her bat mitzvah at a weekly community dinner and stipulated, “I want you to come, but you have to wear a shirt…and it can’t be MESH!” Because he was the kind of person who arrived at the function without a shirt, in a white denim vest covered in punk patches and studs, and shorts so short I would tease him that they might be a crime to wear in public. He did wear a shirt to her bat mitzvah, as requested, along with a white suit and a stunning hat. He had a flair for style that oscillated between totally enviable and totally ridiculous.

I miss him. I miss him desperately.

When I was asked to hold a particular part of Murphy for a memorial ritual—that of the revolutionary actor—I knew I needed to reach for Walter Benjamin. Truth be told, this is how I best connected with Murphy. I shared with him my thoughts on the term “historical actors” and how knowing ourselves to be exactly that raises the stakes of every moment. This made sense to him. For Murphy, the revolutionary past was alive. Our ancestors who dreamt and fought called out to him, and he answered.

What follows is a eulogy in five parts, guided by Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (also known as the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), written in 1940 as fascism swept across Europe and Benjamin himself fled toward what he thought would be safety. Instead, he died by suicide at the Spanish border, believing incorrectly that he would be turned over to the Nazis. His final work theorizes revolutionary time, messianic power, and the obligations that the dead place upon us. It is a text about danger, about memory, about how we might yet redeem the past by our actions in the present.

It is, I believe, a text Murphy understood whether he ever read it or not.

Part 1: On Messianic Power

“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”

—Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis II

The whole of history burst with expectation for Murphy’s arrival. Because he was endowed with some small part of Messianic power. We are each born with some part of it. Benjamin’s word choice here is often translated as “weak,” but to those of us who have lived through moments of revolutionary upheaval and reached windows into a world fecund with possibility, we know that “weak” must be a poor translation. Because it’s not weak. Rather it is dispersed, held in common, and comes together to fulfillment in acts of collectivity.

Giorgio Agamben, in his study of Paul’s letters, believes Benjamin chose “weak” for theological reasons rooted in Christian conceptions of power. But I disagree. I know from my lived experience at Trump’s first inauguration of moving in what was called by our sworn enemy, United States Attorney Jennifer Kerkoff, “a sea of black”—moving with anonymous and faceless comrades on every side of me, moving in that sea with Murphy—that Agamben is wrong. It is precisely the way we move together, dispersed yet unified, that allows new relations between past and present to emerge. Every time we conjure a “sea of black,” we renew a promise of redemption, the very one Benjamin calls to our attention. We not only renew the promise, but we fulfill it. We become the Messiah together and redeem the world.

I learned that with Murphy. Many of us did.

This understanding of messianic power stands in stark contrast to both liberal incrementalism and vanguardist theories of change. We are not waiting for a singular savior, nor are we slowly reforming institutions from within. The messianic power Benjamin describes—and that we embody in anarchist practice—is immediate, collective, and already present. It erupts in moments when we move together, when we recognize ourselves as historical actors capable of interrupting the smooth progression of what Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time.”

Murphy and I made each other cry on several occasions. Mostly because of our shared belief in a world to come that we would work to usher in with comrades known and unknown to us. Once, during Trump’s first presidency, my friend Tor texted me asking, “How do you keep going when things are so bad? How do you keep organizing and fighting?” I said something along the lines of “I’m not sure. I just know I have to. I just keep going and hold something like hope.”

Something like hope. I wish those words had been enough to keep Tor alive. They weren’t. A few weeks later, Tor took their life.

Years later, Murphy and I found ourselves in another such moment. Once in an argument that led to harsh words and tears—even then we were rooted in belief that we must struggle to usher in this coming world. One of the times we cried, I spoke in front of a group about our obligation as anarchists to ensure that Cop City will never be built on the land where our anarchist comrade Tortuguita was murdered by the police. When I sat down, Murphy squeezed my shoulder and told me I made him cry. His eyes were still wet. I know he believed, as I continue to believe, this obligation is not metaphorical but real and true. The people meant what they said about Cop City: “if you build it, we will burn it.” Not that either of us would personally burn a police training center. But the Messiah—composed of the parts of all who struggled to defend all forests across all time—will burn it when the cops finish building it.

Murphy will make us all cry when he dances on the hot ashes of that training center in Weelaunee. It will be the most beautiful dance any of us have ever seen and we’ll all comment on how lithe his body and light his feet and how infinite he now is.

The claim the past has on Murphy remains unsettled. The claim Tor’s death places on us remains unsettled. We will have to settle our debts. This is what Benjamin means when he writes that the claim “cannot be settled cheaply.” Cheap settlement would be trite memorialization, nonprofit commemorations, the domestication of revolutionary dead into safe narratives of “progress.” Real settlement requires us to complete the work they began, to honor their dreams not with words but with action, to become a collective Messiah.

Part 2: On Heliotropism

“As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”

—Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis IV

Benjamin offers us this image of the flower turning toward the sun’s light. The past calls out to all of us here, just as it did to Murphy, and it is turning itself toward us as we gather—historical actors ushering in a Messianic age. But who are these ancestors? Who comprises this revolutionary past that orients itself toward our present moment like a heliotrope following the arc of the sun?

For Murphy, the lineage was clear and deeply felt. The anarchists who fought in Spain before Benjamin’s final flight. The Black Panthers who organized breakfast programs and studied Fanon. The AIDS activists who chained themselves to pharmaceutical companies and demanded treatment. The tree-sitters and earth liberationists. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. The Zapatistas in Chiapas and the Kurds in Rojava. The movement to defend the Atlanta forest and Tortuguita, who was killed in the forest they fought on behalf of.

These dead are not peaceful or reconciled. They turn toward us with urgency, with demand. Benjamin understood this. Writing as European Jewry faced annihilation, as revolutionary hope seemed to collapse into fascist triumph, he insisted that the past is not past at all—it is active, striving, reaching toward the present moment where it might yet be redeemed.

Murphy felt this acutely. Being around him was an adventure, bursting with unforeseen turns in events. But it was also hard to be in that presence at times, because it was unpredictable and sweepingly powerful. Whether you wanted to be swept along or not, it was happening. His moods would swing, his plans would change, he struggled in emotional intimacy with his friends, and he suffered in a sadness that was hidden from most people. Writing that out now, I feel the tears welling and my chest tightening because I bear some shame and so much grief that I wasn’t always able to meet him in the shenanigans or in that heavy sadness.

I think Murphy experienced the weight of history not as academic knowledge but as lived pressure. The dead were not abstract to him—they were present, demanding, insistent. This is what it means to live as a historical actor: to feel the past pressing against the present, to understand that your choices matter not just for yourself but for the long chain of struggle that preceded you and will continue after you’re gone.

In Jewish mystical thought, there’s the concept tikkun olam that has been weakened into liberal activism but in origin meant something far more radical: the repair of shattered vessels, the gathering of scattered sparks of divine light trapped in the broken world. The Lurianic Kabbalists understood this as urgent, cosmic work. Every action either gathers light or scatters it further. Every moment is fraught with messianic possibility.

Murphy understood this instinctively, even without the Jewish frame. He knew that we gather the scattered light of past struggles. He knew that moving together in a “sea of black” was not just a tactical black bloc but mystical—a way of briefly repairing the world, of gathering enough sparks that we could see by their light.

Part 3: On Memory, Truth, and the Moment of Danger

“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”

—Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis VI

I’ve mentioned truth in this essay. As revolutionaries imbued with a part of messianic capacity, we have held truth in our hands as a weapon, with love as our sword alongside it. But do not be confused by what constitutes truth in regards to the past. It is not an image of what “really happened,” as Benjamin said. This is a trap.

This is a trap we might easily fall into when holding Murphy or other fallen comrades with us. There will be pressure—from the state, from families, from progressives, from our own grief—to tell a certain kind of story. To make them safe, comprehensible, tragic in ways that don’t threaten power. To say Murphy was troubled, that his death was inevitable, that it had nothing to do with the crushing weight of organizing under fascism or the impossibility of holding “something like hope” when the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

I urge all of us to take hold of our memories of our fallen comrades, to seize them, to respond as memory echoes out of the past, turning its face toward us. Because in moments of danger we can redeem memory with action. We can. We’ve done it before with Murphy at our side and now he stands as part of the long revolutionary thread of the past awaiting us to seize the NOW. To be the redeemers of memory.

This is the memory work Benjamin calls us to. Not a project of reconstructing “what really happened,” but the urgent work of seizing memory in the moment of danger and wielding it as a weapon against forgetting, against domestication, against the smooth narrative of progress that would erase the revolutionary content of the past.

Murphy chose life in this sense, even as he struggled to stay alive. He chose the dangerous work of historical action. And now it falls to us to honor that choice by continuing the work, by refusing to let his memory be cheaply settled.

Part 4: On Setting the Sparks Alight

“The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

—Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis VI

Murphy was a true writer of history. I won’t regale you with further examples than have already been elaborated this year since he stepped into the past to join our innumerable revolutionary ancestors. Murphy knew that our work is to free the future as well as redeem those very ancestors he now stands amidst.

Benjamin’s words bear repeating, friends: “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

We need to be very clear about who the enemy is. The enemy is not merely Trump or any particular politician, though they are its current manifestation. The enemy is not merely the police who murdered Tortuguita, though they are its armed enforcers. The enemy is the entire apparatus of capitalism, settler colonialism, and the carceral state. The enemy is the logic that treats land as property, humans as resources, and resistance as criminal. The enemy is the smooth progression of “history” that Benjamin warns us about—the ideology of progress that insists things are always getting better, that past struggles were necessary steps toward our enlightened present, that we can honor the dead without continuing their fight.

The enemy wants to make Murphy safe. The enemy wants to say: “See? This is what happens to radicals. They burn out. They die. Better to be reasonable, better to accept that change takes time. Better to vote. Better to stay calm amid the dictatorship and the civil war.” The enemy wants to take Murphy’s death, and others like it, and use them as a cautionary tale against revolutionary commitment.

We will not allow this. We will not abandon the past to our enemies. Murphy is not abandoned to those enemies. The long line of anarchists, abolitionists, and freedom fighters who came before us are not.

This is where Jewish mourning practices offer us something profound. In the practice of saying Kaddish, we do not mention death at all. Instead, we sanctify the name of Hashem and pray for the coming of the messianic age. We close the communal prayer: “Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yisrael—May the One who makes peace in the high places make peace for us and for all Israel.” But we know that this peace is not the peace of submission or acceptance. It is the peace that comes when the structures of oppression are torn down, when the messianic age finally arrives.

Mourning, in this tradition, is not private grief but public commitment. It is the community gathering to ensure the dead are not forgotten, that their work continues, that their vision of a different world persists.

What, then, is the work of Messianic redemption in the face of the enemy’s ceaseless victory?

The work is to set the fucking sparks alight.

Part 5: On Dreams, Awakening, and the End Written Into the Beginning

“Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it—as Hegel already noticed—by cunning.”

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

In an unfinished project referred to as “The Arcades Project,” Benjamin turns our attention to the dream world. Written during the same period as the “Theses,” this massive, fragmentary text excavates the utopian dreams embedded in the material culture of 19th-century Paris—the arcades, the exhibitions, the new technologies of glass and iron that promised to transform everyday life. Benjamin shows us how every epoch dreams the one to follow, how revolutionary possibility is encrypted in the very structures of the present order.

I loved to dream with Murphy. I loved to dream the world to come. We sat in my living room, the community center, my backyard, or a dinner table and we would talk about what the world could be. These weren’t idle fantasies. They were planning sessions for a world that doesn’t exist yet but that we were actively working to bring into being. Murphy understood, as Benjamin did, that the dream is not separate from material struggle—it is the motor of that struggle. We dream collectively, and in dreaming together, we precipitate the awakening of the world to come.

Benjamin writes that every epoch “bears its end within itself.” This is a profound insight. The current order contains the seeds of its own destruction. Capitalism produces its own gravediggers. The carceral state’s brutality creates abolitionists. Settler colonialism’s violence generates indigenous resistance. The system cannot help but produce the conditions for its overthrow.

Murphy saw this with clarity. When we cried together about Cop City, when we moved together in that sea of black, we were recognizing that the system is crumbling, that our task is to hasten its end and ensure that what comes next is the world we’ve dreamed and not another nightmare of domination.

That world feels so far away right now. Things are dark. They have felt dark for too long.

I implore all of us to hold these words as a prophetic vision: we have dreamt the world that will follow Murphy, and in that collective act with our comrade, we have precipitated the awakening of that world. We saw with Murphy the cracks, and we have conjured the end of this dead world into being.

The Lurianic Kabbalists teach that when the vessels shattered and divine light scattered into the broken world, it wasn’t a tragedy to be lamented but the necessary precondition for tikkun—for repair and transformation. The shattering creates the possibility for something new, something that couldn’t exist in the original, perfect order. The work of gathering sparks is not about returning to a prelapsarian state but about creating a world that has never existed before.

This is what Benjamin means by the messianic age. Not a return to Eden, but the interruption of the catastrophe we call progress, the emergency brake on the train of history hurtling toward disaster. The messianic age is what happens when we collectively refuse the smooth time of capitalism and instead seize the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) where past, present, and future collapse into a single revolutionary moment.

Murphy is and we all are the redeemers of our ancestors. May Murphy’s memory, beckoning to us, be for blessings of revolution.

Coda: On Choosing Life, On Continuing to Fight

Losing friends and lovers to suicide is so much a part of queer and trans life that I struggle to find words that might serve as a salve to myself or others these days. Living a life that is authentic, bursting at the seams with authenticity, is a risk. Losing friends and lovers to suicide is also a part of life for anarchists and revolutionaries, the political communities I have called home for over two decades. In both these areas of my life, we lose people to despair because living a life that is bursting at the seams with the possibility of a better world is a risk. It is a risk because while we will experience the expansive highs of world-building together, we will also experience the devastation of the work being left incomplete.

Sometimes, continuing to fight feels impossible. It is difficult to find something like hope in a time when, each day, we open our phones and laptops to find headlines about an American dictator unleashing a private army in a city not far from our own, declarations and executive orders that target us and people we love, and the ceaseless parade of horrors that is our current political moment.

But here is what I want to say to everyone reading this, and especially to my comrades in the Jewish left, to the SVARA-niks and the anarchist Torah study groups and the Jews who are fighting for Palestinian liberation and the queers who are building worlds in the cracks of empire:

Choose life. Choose each other right now. We desperately need each other.

The word for life in Hebrew, חי, means not just biological existence but relationship, sustenance, community. To choose life is to choose the work of gathering sparks together. It is to move in that sea of black with your comrades on every side. It is to cry together about the world we’re fighting for. It is to dream collectively and to recognize that in dreaming, we precipitate awakening.

Benjamin teaches us that we are endowed with messianic power—weak not because it is insufficient but because it is dispersed, held in common, activated only in collectivity.

Murphy understood this. Tor understood this. Tortuguita understood this. All our revolutionary dead understood this. The enemy has not ceased to be victorious. The work is incomplete. The claim the past has on us cannot be settled cheaply.

So we gather. We remember. Memory acts as our weapon.

We mourn not as private individuals but as a community committed to continuing the struggle. We recite Kaddish not to mention death but to sanctify the work of bringing the messianic age into being. We choose life—which means we choose each other, we choose relationship, we choose the dangerous work of being historical actors.

Murphy will dance on the ashes of Cop City. He will see the world we’re building. Not from some abstract afterlife, but because we will build it. Because we will not abandon him to the enemy. Because we will take hold of his memory in this moment of danger and wield it as the spark that sets everything alight.

May his memory be a blessing. May his memory be a revolution.

I never expected to fall in love with Talmud. When I first opened Masechet Yoma in 2020—amid a pandemic, surrounded by grief and uncertainty—I found something I didn’t know I was in need of. Those pages filled with letters I recognized but couldn’t yet read became my homeland. Week after week in SVARA Zoom rooms with other queer and trans Jews, I learned to move slowly through the text, to get stuck, to circle back, to let confusion become a portal rather than a barrier. What I discovered was that this tradition of turning and returning, of making the familiar strange again, of treating each word as newly worthy of attention—this was how Torah becomes alive. This is how we find home not in a single place, but in the four cubits of our bodies as we study, in the space between learning partners, in the act of claiming this tradition as ours.

Now I’m inviting you into that experience. I’m facilitating a Daf Shenati Learning Circle—a small group of learners who will spend a year studying a single page of Talmud together using SVARA’s method. We’ll be learning Bava Batra 21, beginning with the Mishnah on 20b. If you’re familiar with Daf Yomi’s breakneck pace, this will feel radically different. We won’t be racing to cover ground or chasing the illusion of completion. Instead, we’ll practice what the Sages called for: treating the text as if we’re hearing it for the first time, every single time. We’ll move root by root, word by word, until each sentence reveals itself. We’ll learn the tools of radical interpretation that let us understand not just what the text says, but what it’s doing—and how we, in turn, can participate in the ancient project of upgrading our tradition for this moment.

This kind of learning transforms us. It teaches us to sit with uncertainty as the ground of possibility rather than paralysis. It trains us to notice power dynamics embedded in our texts and to read with both critique and love. It shapes us into people capable of building the liberated futures we long for—especially when that requires discerning when to let go of what came before and when to hold on to it. The work is slow, rigorous, sometimes bewildering. But in that bewilderment, in that patient turning, we become like the artists that Viktor Shklovsky imagined: the ones who make the stone stony. In our case, the ones who make the daf daf-y.

If this calls to you—if you’re ready to find home on the daf, to study in community, to dig through the rubble with other seekers—I’d be honored to learn alongside you. We’ll meet monthly on the 4th Wednesday, and SVARA will provide support including learning materials, open yeshiva hours, and access to teachers when we need help getting unstuck. It’s free to participate, but a commitment to seeing the year through together is desired. No prior Talmud experience necessary—just a willingness to show up, to stay curious, and to trust that everything we need is already in the text, waiting for us to uncover it together.

To join the exploration session on January 28th, please contact me at: chava.therubble@gmail.com

Welcome, beloved learners. Let’s turn this daf together.

On January 7, Renee Good used her car to block the street with the uncertain hope that it might slow down or even stop ICE agents from kidnapping people. An agent jumped out, shouting for her to leave. He then quickly drew his gun and fired directly at her head.

The way that Renee showed up to Portland Avenue is exactly the way I wrote about showing up with the launch of the rubble—embracing uncertainty and proceeding to action that may save a life. Renee lost her own in the process.

This murder is weighing heavily on us. The world feels impossible. One of my comrades remarked, “how can we expect people to fight after we fought so hard in 2020 only to find ourselves in worse conditions?” I don’t agree with that political assessment, but I do agree with the emotional sentiment. Our daily conditions feel like they are on a downward spiral with no bottom.

My youngest child had her bat mitzvah the Shabbat after Renee Good’s death. She was being called to the Torah for the first time in her life in a moment of darkness and grief. Like so many Jewish kids before her.

She would make her way to the bimah and chant the words of Parshat Shemot, the beginning of the Exodus story, which begins with the reminder of the growth of the Jewish people against the odds.

וּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל פָּר֧וּ וַֽיִּשְׁרְצ֛וּ וַיִּרְבּ֥וּ וַיַּֽעַצְמ֖וּ בִּמְאֹ֣ד מְאֹ֑ד וַתִּמָּלֵ֥א הָאָ֖רֶץ אֹתָֽם

But the Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them.” (Exodus 1:7).

Against the odds. Against all attempts to destroy us.

From there, I would step up to the Torah and try to find my voice somewhere deep in my belly so I could call out the words our ancestors gifted to us for moments of hopelessness and terror. Those words tell the story of Shifra and Puah, two midwives who refused death and risked their own lives to protect the babies they were ordered to murder.

וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ מֶ֣לֶךְ מִצְרַ֔יִם לַֽמְיַלְּדֹ֖ת הָֽעִבְרִיֹּ֑ת אֲשֶׁ֨ר שֵׁ֤ם הָֽאַחַת֙ שִׁפְרָ֔ה וְשֵׁ֥ם הַשֵּׁנִ֖ית פּוּעָֽהוַיֹּ֗אמֶר בְּיַלֶּדְכֶן֙ אֶת־הָֽעִבְרִיּ֔וֹת וּרְאִיתֶ֖ן עַל־הָאׇבְנָ֑יִם אִם־בֵּ֥ן הוּא֙ וַהֲמִתֶּ֣ן אֹת֔וֹ וְאִם־בַּ֥ת הִ֖וא וָחָֽיָה וַתִּירֶ֤אןָ הַֽמְיַלְּדֹת֙ אֶת־הָ֣אֱלֹהִ֔ים וְלֹ֣א עָשׂ֔וּ כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר דִּבֶּ֥ר אֲלֵיהֶ֖ן מֶ֣לֶךְ מִצְרָ֑יִם וַתְּחַיֶּ֖יןָ אֶת־הַיְלָדִֽים

The king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, saying, “When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birthstool: if it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.” The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live. (Exodus 1:15-17)

Shifra and Puah were like Renee Good, ordinary mothers who rose to the moment with uncertain hope. I wanted their story to boom through the historic temple building and even if my voice wavered, I wanted it to land on the heart of every person in attendance. We must be like Shifra and Puah and Renee—acting with uncertain hope, not knowing if we will save the life or lose our own, but knowing we cannot do nothing. The stakes are that high. Like the midwives who chose life in the face of death, we too must choose—resistance, but also joy.

I have heard Rabbi Sharon Brous speak about “saying yes to the simcha”—even when our hearts are filled with the deepest seas of grief, we need to say yes to the b’nai mitzvah, the wedding, the baby naming. Joy and grief are sisters, born from the same Divine wisdom, traveling a path woven together in the most intricate fashion. Grief can sit in the room while two brides are lifted onto chairs above dancing loved ones. Simcha arrives into the shiva house by way of laughter and storytelling. They are never far from each other, but we have to say yes—not only to joyous life cycle events, but to the fleeting moments of simcha that enliven our days.

This is the joy Rabbi Alan Lew writes about in This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: “When we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain.” Simcha is any feeling fully felt. It is joy that knows intimately what grief tastes like.

Our ancestors grapple with this exact tension in Berachot 30b:

מַאי ״וְגִילוּ בִּרְעָדָה״? אָמַר רַב אַדָּא בַּר מַתְנָא אָמַר רַבָּה: בִּמְקוֹם גִּילָה שָׁם תְּהֵא רְעָדָה

What is the meaning of rejoice with trembling? Rav Adda bar Mattana said that Rabba said: One may not experience unbridled joy; even where there is rejoicing, there should be trembling.

The trembling isn’t a dampening of joy—it’s the recognition that joy and fear, celebration and grief exist together in the same breath. To rejoice with trembling is to hold both at once.

These fleeting moments beg us to pause, even in the street where a woman was murdered days before, and notice that joy continues in this darkness. Hours after Renee Good was killed, people blockaded Portland Avenue, using ordinary items from the neighborhood like trash cans and old pallets and discarded Christmas trees. There was organizing and connection. Tears flowed down cold cheeks and hit the snowy ground, melting small openings. And there was fucking joy. A comrade sent me a photo of his young child, bundled up and smiling while holding a sign: “no more bullies, fuck ice.” This tiny child, not even school aged, knows that bullies have come to their city and intend to hurt people and tear apart families. In the photo of this sweet child, I see their joy alongside the fierce resoluteness that children hold so gracefully.

The Zohar teaches that there is no greater light than the light that emerges from darkness. This wisdom isn’t passive—we have to be willing to see the light, to recognize it, to let it in even when it seems impossible. That light was visible in the temporary blockade of Portland Avenue, a place marred by the loss of life. It was visible in the faces of children, their eyes bright and smiles brighter, and it was visible in the tears of a city brought together by grief and defiance, by loss and deep love for others.

I listened to my daughter give her first d’var Torah. She walked off the bimah to sit next to me, and I burst into messy and joyous tears. It was an ugly kind of simcha—my breath caught in my throat, my face red, tears streaming. When I gave birth to her thirteen years ago in our living room, I drew her immediately up to my chest and wept those same kinds of tears. Tears made of joy, exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, responsibility, elation, euphoria, all mixed together into the most primordial substance–it poured out of me again. She laughed and said, “oh my god, mom, are you crying?” while she drew my face close to her face in a tender embrace.

Renee Good was a poet. An award-winning poet. A writer and mother and queer person who I can see myself reflected in. The kind who gets a rapid response text that ICE is out nearby and just hops in the car, not knowing what she can do exactly, but that she will not do nothing. In her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” she wrote:

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”

Make room for wonder. Say yes to the simcha. In the terror of this moment, we must make room for both.

My daughter spent months talking about what version of Hava Nagila would play during the chair dance. The words translate to “let us rejoice.” The song was written in 1918—the final year of World War I, the beginning of the Influenza pandemic, when pogroms in Lwów and Ukraine left thousands of Jews dead. Let us rejoice.

הָבָה נָגִילָה, הָבָה נָגִילָה
הָבָה נָגִילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָה
הָבָה נְרַנְּנָה, הָבָה נְרַנְּנָה
עוּרוּ אַחִים בְּלֵב שָׂמֵחַ

Let us rejoice, let us rejoice
Let us rejoice and be glad
Let us sing, let us sing
Awaken, awaken brothers
Awaken brothers with a cheerful heart.

This isn’t about forced happiness or pretending everything is fine while fascism unfurls its program of death around us. It’s about refusing to let the enormity of the crisis steal our capacity for those brief, bright moments when we feel fully alive.

With my daughter in the chair above us, smiling and laughing and trying not to fall off, friends and family swirl around her, the room filled to its edges and beyond. I’m grabbing hands and pulling people into the swirl. We’re packed in so tightly, new circles are forming, and everywhere I look faces are beaming with simcha. I know these moments are fleeting, so I hold it close to my chest and try to memorize the feeling as my teacher Rabbi Benay Lappe says. “Memorize that feeling,” repeats in my head over and over as I laugh and the spiral sensations of pure simcha leave me dizzy.

In Shemot, liberation doesn’t begin with a miracle. It begins with a groan, a cry, a people still alive enough to feel their pain fully. וַיֵּאָנְחוּ בְנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, מִן-הָעֲבֹדָה, וַיִּזְעָקוּ / “And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried out” (Exodus 2:23). Maybe that’s where our liberation begins too—in our willingness to feel everything, including the joy that appears unexpectedly, that we don’t deserve, that makes no sense, but that reminds us we’re still here, still breathing, still capable of response.

Lean into the fleeting simcha when it comes. Don’t wait for things to be improved nor resolved before you allow yourself moments of joy. The joy that includes death and pain, the joy that trembles, the joy that emerges from darkness—that joy is not a betrayal of our grief. It’s how we embody and honor it. It’s how we honor Renee and every person lost, be it in death, imprisonment, or deportation. We honor them by continuing to fight and holding simcha near.

Simcha is any feeling fully felt. In our collective grief, may we feel all the feelings fully and may we notice when simcha sidles up to us, inviting us to notice her.

גִּילוּ בִּרְעָדָה / Rejoice with trembling.

Gathering

For years, my writing and teaching have been scattered. An essay here for SVARA. A teaching there for UnYeshiva or Torah Studio learners. Reflections shared in community spaces, textual analysis circulated among friends, Torah that emerged from protest debriefs and kitchen table conversations. The work has always been there—urgent, grounded, refusing to separate ancestral wisdom from revolutionary struggle—but it has lived in fragments, dispersed across platforms and moments.

It is time to bring it home. To gather the work into one place where we can dig together.

Why now? Efshar—it is possible.

My intention for The Rubble is that it becomes a weekly invitation for you to dig. To dig into the rubble of this collapsing world and find, along with me and a community of others, Jewish insights that give us the strength of spirit and mind necessary to continue the process of excavation.

The Talmud in Yoma asks: when a building collapses, do we dig through the rubble on Shabbat to search for life? The answer is yes. Not because we know someone is alive beneath it, but because we cannot be certain they aren’t. We dig because efshar—because it is possible. And possibility itself is a sacred obligation.

Torah for a collapsing world.

I am starting this project because the rubble is real and growing. Because our enemies are waging a literal war against poor people, queer and trans people, people of color, disabled people, people who can become pregnant, and people of conscience. Because our neighbors are being deported, detained, separated from their families. Because the collapse is not metaphorical—it is happening now, in our cities, to people we know and love.

And because in the midst of all this rubble, I keep finding Torah that speaks directly to this moment. Not despite its age, but because of it. Our Sages knew what it meant to live under occupation. They knew what it felt like to watch violence inflicted on their communities. They knew the paralysis of uncertainty and the temptation to close our ears to cries we feel powerless to answer. So they built a tradition that says: dig anyway. Act anyway. Refuse complicity anyway.

Tachlis: Getting to the point.

This newsletter will be a space for Jewish analysis that doesn’t shy away from what’s broken. For creative reflection on Jewish thought, theory, and practice that centers the work of justice. For Torah study that begins with the question: what does this text demand of us now? Not in some abstract future, not in some other context, but in this moment.

You can expect weekly teaching, insight, questions, prompts, and creative work to find its way to your inbox. I want to create a space where we can slow down with difficult texts, turn them until they become strange again, and discover that the strangeness is what makes them speak to us most urgently. Where we can wrestle with Talmudic concepts like safek nefashot—doubt about saving lives—and recognize that we are living inside that doubt every day. Where we can bring in other thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Baruch Spinoza to contemporary revolutionary voices in order to inspire our explorations of Judaism. the rubble is a place we can explore what it means that our tradition structures moral obligation around uncertainty rather than certainty.

This is not scholarship that pretends to be neutral. This is not learning that stays comfortably distant from the struggles of our time. This is Jewish thought that insists we cannot close our ears to the cry of the poor, the detained, the displaced, the occupied. This is Torah that understands that when Proverbs warns us against stopping up our ears, it is describing not divine punishment but moral reality: the world we create through our refusal to hear.

I can’t dig alone.

After years of teaching and writing in various locations, it felt right to pull these offerings into one place. To create a home for work that has always been about finding home—finding home in texts, in tradition, in the practice of showing up even when we don’t know if it will matter. New writing and creative work will arrive right in your inbox, and you can log into the website to read the full archives as they develop.

I need a community for this work. Not an audience, but fellow diggers. People who share the uncertainty and the commitment. People who want to participate—who bring their own svara, their questions, their doubts, their refusal to look away. People who understand that Jewish thought at its best doesn’t offer us easy answers but demands that we show up with our whole selves for the hardest questions.

Why a subscription model?

I want this work to be accessible. No one should be kept from Torah because of money, and no one should be locked out of this community because they can't afford a subscription. If the cost is a barrier for you, please email me—I will comp your subscription, no questions asked.

At the same time, this work requires resources. The study that grounds what I create takes time—hours with dictionaries and commentaries, wrestling with difficult passages, sitting with uncertainty until clarity emerges. The practice of connecting ancient wisdom to contemporary struggle demands both labor and the kind of sustained attention that isn't possible when I'm cobbling together income from scattered sources. Paid subscriptions create the conditions that allow me to do this work consistently and rigorously. They sustain my ability to spend the necessary hours in study, to write thoughtfully rather than quickly, to show up every week with Torah that has been turned and turned until it opens. If you have the means to support this work, your subscription makes all of it possible.

So much to come.

Over the course of the year you can count on weekly newsletters arriving in your inbox. But, I also intend to launch seasonal class offerings and a new podcast. The way to find out about those classes early, receive class discounts, and invitations to special subscriber-only events is to open your weekly editions of the rubble.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn with and from all of you as this project emerges and grows.

With simcha and uncertainty always,

Chava