We are at the end.

The end of the summer, the end of the year, and the end of the book of Sefer Devarim.

In this week’s double portion, Nitzavim-Vayelech, Moshe gathers the Jewish people before him for his final speech. And the Torah tells us exactly who was there: the tribal leaders, the elders, the officers, and then everyone else. Men, women, and children. Stranger and woodchopper.

Rashi is explicit about what the ordering means: החשוב חשוב קודם those of greater importance come first. Everyone that was there entered the covenant. But not everyone there had the same authority.

And then Moshe speaks.

There are five books of Torah, and I am noticing something different in the way I feel learning this last book, the book of Devarim. And of course there is something different about it, because this book is Moshe’s last word, his last will and testament. Ramban describes it as Moshe’s explanation and restatement of Torah for the generation that is about to enter Eretz Yisrael; he repeats what they need to hear again, explains what they need to understand more fully, warns them about what they are going to face.

In discussing the curses in Devarim, the Gemara says that Moshe spoke them מפי עצמו, from himself, in contrast to the earlier curses in Leviticus (Vayikra) which were curses God stated. At the same time, another passage in Sanhedrin insists that we cannot take even one verse of Torah and say that it is merely Moshe’s independent composition rather than Torah from Heaven.

Hearing a Human Voice

Still, there is something about Devarim that has sometimes felt farther from me than Bereishit. In Bereishit, I can forget the problem of transmission. Hashem passed these words down.

In Devarim, I hear Moshe. And Moshe is human: he has sinned, he has failed, he is being punished, and he is standing outside the land knowing that after forty years of bringing these people toward Eretz Yisrael, he will not be the one who takes them in.

Which is why his final teaching matters. Moshe cannot go with them, so he has to teach them how to continue without him. Torah has to become something they can carry.

That is why the commandment at the end of this week’s portion is powerful. Hashem tells Moshe to teach the people the final portion, Ha’azinu and שימה בפיהם—put it in their mouths. The Torah cannot remain only in Moshe’s mouth. It has to enter theirs.

And Moshe tells them:לא בשמים היא. It is not in heaven. And, even more directly:כי קרוב אליך הדבר מאד—it is is very close to you.

I think I used to hear that primarily as reassurance: Torah will make sense to you. Stay close to it. Now I hear something slightly different: sometimes Torah feels far from me because the person teaching it feels far from me.

A rabbi can teach Torah in a way that sounds as though it belongs to a world I do not inhabit. A community can live Torah in a way that feels foreign to me. Sometimes even the Torah my own family preserved has felt far from where I am.

And Moshe says: do not confuse those things. The teacher may feel far from you. Torah cannot be. The tradition may come to you through Moshe, through a rabbi, through a community, through your parents, and every one of those people is going to bring a human voice to it. Some of those voices will have enormous authority. Some will have very little.

But Torah is not therefore theirs. It is close to you.

What is Torah Asking of Me?

That doesn’t mean that we all have equal authority to decide what Torah means. Nitzavim begins by telling us the opposite. Moshe has an authority I do not have. A rabbi may have authority over a community. Parents transmit a mesorah to a family.

But there is also a Torat Miriam: the Torah as it is received, understood, and lived by me, the individual. It has authority over exactly one person: me.

That is not permission to invent Torah so much as responsibility. If Torah is close to me, then I have to ask what Torah is asking of me. I have to be aware of the specific places that I am struggling, where I need to challenge myself to grow, and what I am strong at. I need to stay in the relationship with these words.

And there are people standing farther forward in Moshe’s line who have to ask a larger and harder version of the same question. What does Torah demand of a family, a community, a Jewish people? Those questions require different degrees of authority. But they begin in the same place. Close by.

Moshe is leaving. His work is unfinished. The people will have to continue without him.

So he puts Torah into their mouths. And tells them to carry it.

II. The Authority of a Voice

Once Torah enters human mouths, another question follows: Whose voice has authority?

Nitzavim does not begin by pretending that everyone standing before Hashem is interchangeable. Moshe gathers the entire people into the covenant, but he names them according to rank. Rashi says it plainly: החשוב חשוב קודם—the more important come first. The Kli Yakar reads that hierarchy not merely as honor but as responsibility: those with greater power over the community are first because they have greater responsibility to shape what the community does.

Moshe speaks with authority for the entire Jewish people. A rabbi speaks with authority to a community that has accepted that authority. A family carries a tradition and practice that shapes the people born into it. An individual also has a relationship with Torah, an obligation to learn it, to interpret what she hears, to decide where it is demanding something of her.

But those are not equivalent things.

Torat Miriam has authority over Miriam. Torat Moshe has authority over every Jew.

That distinction is important because Judaism does something more complicated than either suppressing human interpretation or celebrating interpretation without limits. It accepts that Torah will be understood through human beings, and then spends an enormous amount of energy asking which human beings have the authority to decide what follows.

Who Gets to Decide?

The famous dispute between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai captures the problem almost perfectly. The Gemara can say אלו ואלו דברי אלהים חיים—both positions are words of the living God—and then, without hesitation, say that the practice follows Beit Hillel.

And the Gemara’s explanation for why Beit Hillel receives that authority is striking. It is not simply that they were smarter. It says we act according to Beit Hillel because they were willing to teach Beit Shammai’s position alongside their own and even to present Beit Shammai before themselves.

Which suggests: authority in Torah does not require pretending that every other interpretation is false. In fact, one qualification for exercising authority may be the ability to understand the difference between my reading of Torah and Torah itself.

III. What Are We Allowed to Let Go?

If Beit Hillel models a healthy humility about human interpretation, human nature often pushes us in the opposite direction: we want certainty. We want to lock things down. And this is where I get confused, because Judaism is deeply suspicious of this impulse.

Judaism is deeply suspicious of vows. Hazal warn against making them unnecessarily, and Rabbi Natan compares making a vow to building a bamah, a private altar. A bamah wasn’t built to worship idols; it was built by Jews who desperately wanted to serve Hashem, but did so in a way Hashem had explicitly forbidden.

This is why Jews say bli neder—“without making a vow,” whenever making any type of commitment. I may intend to do something, but I am careful not to let that intention become a binding religious obligation.

And yet minhag - customs - have seemingly created hundreds of vows in Judaism. A religious practice consciously adopted by a person or community can become binding. Generations later, people who never chose that practice may inherit it simply as: this is what we do.

There is good reason for that. Judaism exists because people preserved things. Families kept practices. Communities held onto traditions. Rabbis insisted that certain things mattered enough not to lose. But it raises a difficult question: What exactly have we, in the modern world, inherited, and which parts have authority over us now?

The Danger of the Private Altar

The Chafetz Chaim makes this question particularly difficult for me.

The classical restrictions on women’s Torah study were long standing and serious. Rabbi Eliezer gives a severe warning against teaching one’s daughter Torah in the Mishnah. Rambam codifies restrictions, distinguishing between Written and Oral Torah, and the Shulchan Arukh preserves essentially the same framework centuries later.

And the Chafetz Chaim was hardly a rabbi looking for reasons to discard halakha. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan was one of the most important Ashkenazi halakhic authorities of the modern period. His Mishnah Berurah is one of the central works of practical modern Ashkenazi halakha.

And yet when he looked at women’s Torah education, he said the situation had changed.

In earlier generations, he wrote in his Likkutei Halakhot on Sotah 21a, girls absorbed Jewish belief and practice through their families and communities. But families were dispersing, traditional transmission was weakening, and girls were receiving substantial secular education.

Under those circumstances, he said it had become a מצוה רבה, a great mitzvah, to teach women Chumash, Nevi’im, Ketuvim and the ethical teachings of Hazal, because otherwise they could lose their connection to Torah and Jewish belief altogether.

And that danger is still real.

I spoke recently with a young woman who had grown up Chasidish and had since left that community. She loves Hashem. But she was confused about Torah. How much of what she had been taught was actually Torah? How much was the Torah of her community? What was Hashem really asking of her?

I told her that because of how religious she grew up, and the fact that she went to Jewish day schools, she should feel empowered to go back to the texts herself and begin figuring it out. She said: actually, I can’t. I was never taught.

In the ultra-Orthodox girls’ schools she attended, girls were not permitted to study Chumash, the Hebrew Bible. Her community had effectively decided to ignore the Chafetz Chaim. They clung to an older practice in the name of ‘mesorah,’ ignoring the very halakhic giant who warned that this exact mesorah would drive girls away.

So how does a rabbi today decide that his community does not need to listen to the Chafetz Chaim?

There may be an answer. Perhaps he understands the ruling differently, believes his community is different, or follows another authority. But “this is our mesorah” cannot be the whole answer. The Chafetz Chaim is also our mesorah.

And this question is larger than women’s education. We inherit mitzvot, halakhic rulings, minhagim, communal practices and the judgments of great rabbis about the events of their own time. They do not all have the same authority. But over generations those distinctions can disappear. Eventually everything becomes: This is what our rav said. This is what we do. And then nothing can ever really be reconsidered.

The Cost of Flattening Our Inheritance

Which brings me back to the bamah. Hazal compared making a vow to building a private altar. Yet, we say that customs have taken on the force of a vow, and we cannot let them go. So which is it: a bamah we're obligated to tear down, or a vow we no longer have the right to break?

I am not suggesting that we simply let our customs go.“The world has changed” is too easy. But “this is what we have always done” is too easy too.

Before Rosh Hashanah, we perform hatarat nedarim, releasing certain vows. A communal rabbi cannot simply annul generations of communal practice that way. But I wonder what the equivalent cheshbon nefesh should be.

What have we taught people is Torah? Where did its authority come from? Does that authority still require the same thing now? What happens if we let it go? And what happens if we don’t?

Nitzavim places the people with the greatest authority at the front. But it gives all of us a responsibility. For me, approaching Rosh Hashanah, the question may be: What is Torah asking of me? For someone entrusted with a community, that is not enough. They have to ask: What have I told other Jews Torah demands of them? Where have I created distance from other communities in the name of my minhag? Is that distance worth it? Is the impact of my minhag worth it?

IV. Return

That is the weight of standing at the front of the line.

And every year, just as we reach the end of the year and prepare to begin again at Rosh Hashanah, we read these words in Nitzavim:

וְשַׁבְתָּ עַד־ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ וְשָׁמַעְתָּ בְקֹלוֹ
You shall return to Hashem your God and listen to His voice.
— Devarim 30:2

That is the direction of teshuvah. We return to Hashem and listen for Hashem’s voice. Not simply the voice of a rabbi. Not simply a community. Not simply the Torah we happened to inherit. Hashem’s.

And only a few verses later, Moshe says:

לֹא־רְחֹקָה הִוא... כִּי־קָרוֹב אֵלֶיךָ הַדָּבָר מְאֹד
It is not far away... the thing is very close to you.
— Devarim 30:11, 14

That brings me back to where I started.

Sometimes a rabbi’s Torah feels far from me. Sometimes a community’s Torah feels far from me. But that distance does not remove the authority of Torah, and it does not mean that I get to replace Torah with whatever feels closer.

It means I have to learn.

And part of learning is knowing what kind of voice I am hearing.

The Torah itself makes that distinction visible. Devarim is not written like Bereishit. Moshe’s voice is foregrounded. Our tradition still calls this Torah, but it does not erase the fact that it is from Moshe.

That matters.

We need to know when we are hearing Torah, when we are hearing a rabbinic ruling, when we are hearing a communal minhag, when we are hearing a family’s mesorah, and when we are hearing the interpretation of a particular teacher.

All of those can have authority.

But they do not all have the same authority.

Returning to Sinai

As we come to Rosh Hashanah, I want us to love Torah. I want us to love truth. I want us to love what is good, and to be honest enough to keep asking whether the Torah we are living and teaching is bringing us and the world closer to Hashem. Because what we do now becomes someone else’s inheritance.

Think about the Torah you want to give your children. Think about the Torah you want to give your students. Think about whether having this communal divison is worth it, or if maybe we can unify.

And think about your own Torah too.

Moshe tells us:

כִּי־קָרוֹב אֵלֶיךָ הַדָּבָר מְאֹד בְּפִיךָ וּבִלְבָבְךָ לַעֲשֹׂתוֹ.

It is very close to you—in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.

It is already in your mouth.

So use these days for the introspection they demand. Learn. Listen. Be honest about where you are and where you want to grow.

The Torah is not far from you.

As the year begins again, ask yourself:

What is Torah asking of me now?

And then think very carefully about the Torah you are putting into someone else’s mouth.

Wishing you a wonderful Shabbos, and a powerful Rosh Hashana,

Miriam

I think as Jewish people we have, broadly speaking, two ways that we can define ourselves. We can look outward, at the way the rest of the world sees us, at the people who hate us, fear us, revere us, are suspicious of us, or are fascinated by us, and we can understand ourselves through that reflection, as the people who have been persecuted and expelled and murdered over and over again throughout history. Or we can define ourselves through our relationship with Hashem, through this extraordinary relationship with the Divine that the Jewish people have inherited and carried for thousands of years, and through all of the opportunities Judaism gives us to actually live inside that relationship—to talk to God, to thank God, to bring God our joy and our fear, and to take ordinary moments of our lives and share them with the Divine.

I think both of these definitions exist in this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, and reading them next to each other offers us a choice, which path we want to live by.

The latter portion of Ki Tavo contains the tochacha, a long description of the terrible things that will happen to the Jewish people if we abandon our covenant with God. These are not gentle warnings, nor are they abstract. The Torah says, “You will serve your enemies” (Deuteronomy 28:48), and then continues that God will bring against us a nation, “which will show no regard for the old and no mercy for the young” (Deuteronomy 28:50). Later it tells us, “God will scatter you among all the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other” (Deuteronomy 28:64), and that among those nations, “you will find no rest, and there will be no resting place for the sole of your foot” (Deuteronomy 28:65). Your life, the Torah says, “will hang before you, and you will fear night and day, and you will not feel secure in your life” (Deuteronomy 28:66), until finally, “in the morning you will say, ‘if only it were evening,’ and in the evening you will say, ‘if only it were morning,’ because of the fear in your heart and what your eyes will see” (Deuteronomy 28:67).

When the Curses Sound Familiar

It is almost impossible for me to read those verses without seeing Jewish history in them. A people scattered from one end of the earth to the other, living for centuries as minorities among other nations, repeatedly expelled from one country and trying to find refuge in another, sometimes tolerated and sometimes persecuted, and then the particularly horrible image of a nation that has no mercy for the old or the young, of Jews hungry, stripped of everything, unsure when they wake up in the morning if they will make it through the day.

I have grandparents who survived the Holocaust, so of course those words land in a particular way for me, but they do not require the Holocaust to be frightening. We have lived enough versions of this story that when we read the tochacha, we understand what these words can look like when they are translated from a biblical warning into human history.

Rabbi YY Jacobson, in an essay on Ki Tavo called “On the Definition of Jewish Nationhood,” tells a story that Rabbi Shlomo Riskin related about being present with the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam, in Brooklyn in 1952. The Rebbe had survived the Holocaust after losing his family, and when the Torah reader reached the tochacha, which is traditionally read in a lowered voice because of how terrible the curses are, the Rebbe began demanding that he read louder. Louder. Let God hear the curses, the Rebbe said. We have already experienced them; now it is time for the blessings.

I found that story incredibly powerful, partly because it tells me that the association I am making when I read these verses is not some modern attempt to force twentieth-century Jewish history back into the Torah. A man who had actually lived through that horror, whose eleven children and wife had been murdered, heard these words and recognized the history in them too.

We can define ourselves this way. There is certainly enough evidence available. We can tell the story of Jewish history as a history of antisemitism, exile, pogroms, crusades, inquisitions, massacres, the Holocaust, terrorism and the seemingly endless recurrence of people deciding that the Jews are somehow the problem.

There are moments when this definition can even feel comforting, because no matter what disagreements Jews have with each other, antisemitism reminds us very quickly that the outside world is perfectly capable of grouping us together.

But That Is Not Where Ki Tavo Begins

Ki Tavo begins with the words:

וְהָיָה כִּי־תָבוֹא אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לְךָ נַחֲלָה וִירִשְׁתָּהּ וְיָשַׁבְתָּ בָּהּ

“When you come into the land that Hashem your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you possess it and settle in it” (Deuteronomy 26:1).

In other words, this commandment does not belong to a people still wandering through the desert, or even to a people who has just crossed the border into Israel. It begins when they have actually settled down, when somebody has a field that is really his field, and trees that he planted or tends, and he can go outside one morning and see something growing there.

Then the Torah tells him to take מֵרֵאשִׁית כָּל־פְּרִי הָאֲדָמָה, from the first of the fruits of the land (Deuteronomy 26:2). Rashi, the foremost biblical commentator who connects verses to their associated laws, explains that this law applies to the very specific first fruit a person sees growing in their field. He describes the process: a person walks into his field and notices that a fig has begun to ripen, and right then, when he first sees it, he ties a reed around it and says, הֲרֵי זוֹ בִּכּוּרִים, “this is Bikkurim” (Rashi on Deuteronomy 26:2, based on Mishnah Bikkurim 3:1).

The First Fig

I love this image, maybe because I have had some tiny version of this experience. The first time I tried growing my own vegetables and saw an actual tomato beginning to grow from my baby plant, I was so excited. I had put a plant in the dirt and watered it and watched it, and suddenly there was this little tomato hanging there, and there was an overwhelming exciting feeling of look at this! There is a tomato! And the Torah says that in exactly that moment, when you see the first evidence that all of your work is actually becoming something, before you pick it and eat it, which seems like the most natural thing in the world to do, you stop and mark it to give it to Hashem.

Sharing the Moment With God

There is something so beautiful to me about that act. You planted the tree, tended the field, worried about the rain, did all of the work necessary to make something grow, and here it is, the fruits of your labor, and the Torah gives you a chance to share that moment with God. That is what feels so special to me about being Jewish: we have inherited an entire language and structure for being in relationship with the Divine, for taking incredibly ordinary human experiences and somehow bringing God into them. You see the first fig and you are excited, and Judaism says: there is something you can do with that excitement. You can mark the fruit, bring it to Jerusalem, and say thank You. You can share the moment.

There is a small part of this feeling that I experience whenever I pray. I genuinely get excited when I wake up that I am going to sit down and have some private time to be in conversation with Hashem. It is such a gift.

Obviously my concentration is not perfect and my relationship with God is not perfect, because no human is perfect, but there is still something extraordinary about knowing that I get to have one-on-one time with God every morning, that this relationship is available to me at all.

And prayer is only one example. I eat something and I have blessings, a way to stop for a moment and acknowledge God. I experience something joyful and I have a way to say thank You. I am afraid or hurt and I have a way to cry out. Judaism gives us an extraordinary number of opportunities to turn toward God over and over again throughout an ordinary day, and I think that is part of the gift of being Jewish: our lives can be lived in relationship.

A Relationship Larger Than Ourselves

And in this week’s parsha, the person bringing the Bikkurim, that very first fig, goes to Jerusalem, stands in front of the Kohen (Priest), and says something that makes this little piece of fruit part of a story thousands of years larger than itself:

הִגַּדְתִּי הַיּוֹם לַה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ כִּי־בָאתִי אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע ה׳ לַאֲבֹתֵינוּ לָתֶת לָנוּ

“I declare today to Hashem your God that I have come into the land that Hashem swore to our ancestors to give us” (Deuteronomy 26:3).

You are not merely saying thank you to God for the fruit. You are holding it and recognizing that this little moment between you and God is part of a relationship that began generations before you existed. This fruit is evidence of a promise that God made to your ancestors, and somehow you are now standing there living inside the fulfillment of that promise.

The relationship is intensely personal—you grew this fruit, you are holding it, you are the one speaking to God—but it is also much larger than you. You have stepped into a conversation that was already taking place long before you were born.

And then, fascinatingly, the Torah tells us that when we are standing there celebrating the fruit and the land and the fulfilled promise, we should tell the story of our suffering too.

The person bringing the Bikkurim will say our ancestors went down to Egypt, that וַיָּרֵעוּ אֹתָנוּ הַמִּצְרִים וַיְעַנּוּנוּ, “the Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us” (Deuteronomy 26:6), and that וַנִּצְעַק אֶל־ה׳ אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֵינוּ, “we cried out to Hashem, the God of our ancestors” (Deuteronomy 26:7). Then God takes us out of Egypt “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 26:8), and finally:

וַיְבִאֵנוּ אֶל־הַמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וַיִּתֶּן־לָנוּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת אֶרֶץ זָבַת חָלָב וּדְבָשׁ

“God brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 26:9).

And then, immediately after telling that enormous story, from oppression in Egypt through redemption and arrival in Israel, the farmer says: וְעַתָּה הִנֵּה הֵבֵאתִי אֶת־רֵאשִׁית פְּרִי הָאֲדָמָה, “and now, behold, I have brought the first fruit of the land” (Deuteronomy 26:10).

I think this is maybe the most important part for me, because Bikkurim does not tell us that the alternative to defining ourselves by Jewish suffering is forgetting Jewish suffering.

The story we tell while bringing the first fruits actually includes Egypt. We are specifically commanded to remember that we were oppressed, that people hurt us, that we cried out. But that is not where our story stops, and more importantly, the Egyptians do not get to determine what the story means.

Egypt is one chapter inside a much larger story about a relationship between the Jewish people and Hashem. We were oppressed, and we cried out to God. God heard us. God took us out. God brought us to the land. And now, generations later, I am standing in that land holding the first fig that grew on my tree and continuing the conversation.

Who Gets to Define Us?

This brings me back to an insight from Rabbi Israel Meir Lau that Rabbi YY Jacobson shares in his essay. Rabbi Lau points out that the first person in the Torah to define the Jewish people as an עם, as a distinct people, is Pharaoh. Looking at the rapidly growing family of Yaakov, Pharaoh tells the Egyptians, הִנֵּה עַם בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ, “behold, the people of the children of Israel are more numerous and powerful than us” (Exodus 1:9). We become a people in Pharaoh’s eyes because he is afraid of us. He sees us as different, sees us as threatening, and from that definition comes slavery and oppression.

Then, in this week’s Torah portion, Moshe tells the Jewish people:

הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה נִהְיֵיתָ לְעָם לַה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ

“Today you have become a people to Hashem your God” (Deuteronomy 27:9).

Rabbi Lau’s point, as Rabbi Jacobson develops it, is that Pharaoh and Moshe offer us two radically different ways of defining Jewish peoplehood. Pharaoh recognizes us through his fear of us, while Moshe defines us through our connection to Hashem. And what strikes me most in Moshe’s formulation, especially after reading the section about Bikkurim, are those last words: לַה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ, to Hashem your God. We are not merely a people who happen to share a history or a set of laws. We are a people in relationship with God.

I think this choice is always available to us, but it feels especially urgent now. There is real antisemitism in the world, and there are people who hate us, and there are very reasonable reasons to be afraid. The tochacha is in our Torah; we are not supposed to pretend that terrible things cannot happen to the Jewish people, and Jewish history would make that denial impossible anyway.

The Torah very clearly teaches that our choices have consequences, that we can damage our relationship with Hashem and move ourselves farther away from the path we have been given. But I do not want fear to be the primary way that I understand what it means to be Jewish. I do not want Hitler or Pharaoh or Hamas or an antisemite screaming on the street to have more power over the definition of my Jewishness than Hashem does.

That difference feels enormous to me.

Pharaoh can recognize that we are different. Antisemites throughout history can recognize that we are different. The outside world can identify us as Jews, sometimes long after we ourselves have forgotten why that identity matters.

But they cannot tell us what the difference is for.

Moshe can.

A People to Hashem

We are לַה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ, a people to Hashem our God. What defines us is not simply that other people distinguish us from themselves, but that we have this particular relationship with the Divine, this ancient ongoing relationship that each of us somehow gets to enter into and make our own. Judaism gives us a thousand different ways to participate in it.

We get to take a fig and share our excitement with God. We get to make a bracha and turn eating into a moment of acknowledgement. We get Shabbat, when the rhythm of an ordinary week becomes something we share with God. We get prayer and Torah and mitzvot, holidays and mourning rituals, ways of celebrating and ways of crying, and a land in which even farming can become part of a conversation with Hashem.

We have inherited an enormous number of opportunities to notice that we are not alone in the world.

But that relationship gives us responsibilities as well. Because if we are in relationship with Hashem, then what we do matters, and if we are meant to be partners with God in bringing more holiness into the world, then the relationship cannot remain only private or emotional. It should change the way we treat people and the kind of world we try to build. It asks us to bring more compassion, justice, goodness and awareness of the Divine into the world around us. We will obviously fail at that constantly because we are human beings. I certainly do. There are days when I daven and am completely distracted, moments when I know what God is asking from me and do something else anyway, times when I fail to see the person in front of me as I should. But that is one of the extraordinary things about a relationship: failure does not have to end it. The relationship remains available, and we can turn back toward it.

There is plenty to be frightened of, and I do not want to minimize any of it. Jewish history has taught us that antisemitism can become dangerous very quickly, and Ki Tavo itself does not allow us the fantasy that terrible things cannot happen. But I do not want the people who hate Jews to become the people who tell me what it means to be Jewish. I do not want our enemies to be the most important force binding me to the generations that came before me.

I would rather be connected to them through the fig, through the Jew thousands of years ago who walked into his field, saw the first fruit growing and had a way to share that joy with Hashem. Through the Jew who said a bracha over dinner. Through the Jew who woke up and prayed. Through the generations who argued with God and thanked God and cried out to God and sometimes felt incredibly close and sometimes terribly far away, but continued participating in this ancient relationship.

That is the inheritance I want to claim.

And particularly in a generation in which the Jewish people once again have the Land of Israel, I hope we recognize what an extraordinary opportunity that gives us. Not merely to have a place where Jews can be protected when other nations turn against us, although that matters tremendously, but to once again live in the land where the Torah imagined this relationship playing out in every aspect of life. We can grow the fruit. We can work the land. We can build a society there and ask what it would look like for our national life, and not only our private religious lives, to emerge from this relationship with Hashem. What an extraordinary opportunity it is to ask what we can create with the gifts God has given us, and how we can use them to bring more holiness and goodness into the world.

The world will continue to tell us who it thinks the Jews are. Sometimes it will hate us and sometimes it will admire us, sometimes it will fear us and sometimes it will romanticize us, but I hope we do not allow any of those reflections to become our primary definition. I hope instead that we keep returning to הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה נִהְיֵיתָ לְעָם לַה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ, today you have become a people to Hashem your God (Deuteronomy 27:9).

We are a people in relationship with God, and what an extraordinary gift that is. We have been given ways to bring God into our fear and our joy, our food and our fields, our private lives and our national life. We get to see the fig growing and say, Hashem, look what grew. We get to share that moment.

And I hope we continue to choose that relationship, to notice all of the opportunities it gives us, to deepen it when we can and return to it when we drift away, and to use what we receive from that relationship to bring more of the light and goodness of the Divine into the world, until we can finally reach a time of redemption when that love and light can be experienced by the entire world.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, opens with the words that are particularly triggering at this moment, “when you go to war against your enemies,” and it proceeds to give the newly founded Jewish people laws of war. The section begins by reminding the fledgling nation that they do not need to be afraid, for it is God that will fight their wars for them. They may be the vessel of the battle, but it will be won due to a power stronger than any human. Then we are told the exact words the priest should say to encourage the people, followed by the proclamation the generals must make allowing all those who were recently married, or who recently purchased new property, or who remain afraid of the battle, to go home and sit this one out.

Then we are told how to physically engage a country in war. First, a messenger must be sent requesting a peaceful surrender. If they surrender, they will join the Jewish nation financially, paying taxes and participating in national building projects. They must also agree to obey the 7 Noahide laws (no killing, no adultery, no theft, no animal cruelty, no worshipping other Gods, no cursing God, and they must set up and abide by a court of law). If they decline any portion of the peace offer then bloodshed ensues. More specifically, the verse describes a genocide.

As a Jew living in 2026, with grandparents who survived the Holocaust, I found reading about the God sanctioned killing of an entire nation’s men, women, and children, terribly upsetting.

Especially given the claim I have made over and over again that the Torah is the path toward the light, toward a better, more peaceful world. How could it demand this barbarism?

I have spent the last several weeks, as I traveled with my family through Europe and Israel pondering this question. I have read traditional sources, hasidic discourses, modern essays, and tried to understand what the Torah is trying to teach us with these verses. I cannot say with any surety that I have figured it out. But at least I can share what has given me some amount of comfort, and I can leave us with a question as we consider the war that is currently being waged by the only Jewish majority country in the world.

Let’s start with this message from the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Lubavitcher Rebbe lived through the Holocaust, and was becoming a leader of International Jewry as Israel gained its independence in 1948, and then won the battle that unified Jerusalem in 1967. He did not write about war from a hypothetical place of millennia in European exile.

In his sermon, he pointed out there is an extra word in the verse describing going out to war. The verse could have said “When you go to war with your enemies.” which would have only required a single letter, a prefix, but instead, it added the extra word “Al”, that in this verse is most commonly translated as “against’” but literally means “on” or “over.”

In the translation of his sermon, it explains the reason for using the word “over” in the context of war. It is because:

When you’re dealing with someone on the same level, aggressiveness is often stimulated [heightened] and you may feel an urge to destroy or at least harm your enemy. When you’re above, you feel pity and compassion.

That does not mean that you are less thorough in seeking victory, but it’s victory you’re seeking, not vengeance. And once victory is achieved, there is a willingness to elevate and teach the enemy, not to stamp them out.

These concepts are alluded to in our Torah reading which speaks of taking captives in war, i.e., transforming opponents into assets, and of finding a beautiful woman among the captives - i.e., appreciating the positive qualities an enemy may possess - and after a period of transition and conversion, taking her as a wife, i.e., embracing them as part of our lives.

So the Rebbe is saying the Torah demands that we constantly elevate ourselves above our foes, treating them with compassion rather than vengeance. The Torah insists that even in the ancient world, war was never to be a vehicle for human hatred or bloodlust. It was meant to be completely detached from our own motivations or desires to cause harm. Yet, even with this requirement to divorce war from human animus, the idea of carrying out such absolute destruction was so heavy that our tradition immediately shows us a better way: human moral intervention.

Let’s take a look at the history of this commandment, as explained by the sages, who in their close reading of the verses say that they identified three times that Moshe did not do what God had initially commanded, and in response God said: You have taught Me. Here is one example, relevant to the verses we have been discussing:

When the Holy One blessed be He said to him [Moshe]: ‘Wage war with Siḥon even if he does not seek to wage with you; you provoke war with him,’ as it is stated: “Rise, and travel, and cross the Arnon ravine;” (Deuteronomy 2:24). But Moshe did not do so; rather, what is written: “I sent messengers” (Deuteronomy 2:26).

The Holy One blessed be He said to him: As you live, I am voiding My words and fulfilling your words, as it is stated: “When you approach a city to wage war against it, you shall call to it for peace” (Deuteronomy 20:10).

The sages are telling us something shocking. God told Moshe to wage war without any warning, and Moshe decided to instead send messengers, and God liked that plan better, and decided that would be the way the Jewish people should fight wars for ever onward.

Even though the people of Sihon did not choose peace, and the verse tells us God ended up destroying them in the battle, enacting what God had initially sought out to do, still the intermediate step of giving the people a choice and warning was preferred and became the normative practice.

There seems to be an opportunity for God to be influenced toward peace, justice and mercy,

There is another thread of analysis that has been done, that is very clearly laid out in Questioning Belief by Raphael Zarum, that argues a few things. One, that the offer of peace must have been an authentic offer that some tribes accepted, because we have archeological finds confirming that the seven tribes referenced in association with the genocidal command remained in the land for generations after the Jewish people entered Israel.

Additionally, he argues that this command is no longer in effect because it was solely attached to those seven tribes, and after the Babylonian exile, when all the peoples in the land of Israel were intentionally scattered, we cannot know who is a descendent of those tribes, especially because the tribes religious practices which the verse mentions being specifically worried about the Jewish people mimicking, are no longer in practice. Therefore he believes these verses are not active commandments in our era.

While I can appreciate that reading, I still find the words themselves disconcerting. I hope though that this exploration and deep dive, that we are commanded to first seek peace, that the command to first offer peace is a human addition to the Torah, and that we must always seek to have compassion and be “above” anyone we perceive to be an enemy— will be inspiring and important thoughts for us.

I am writing these words from the north of Israel, where there is still active war with Hezbollah, and after spending a week in Europe, being reminded of the terrible genocide that my people suffered only a few decades ago. It has always been hard to be a Jew, but in these moments of stress and difficulty we must remember not to be afraid, that it is God who is in control, and for our actions to always be searching for compassion, peace, and the Good.

Wishing for all the wars to end, and for redemption to reach us speedily, in our days.

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The Demand for Public Justice

The book of Devarim (Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah) is Moshe’s final speech to the people, and he recaps for the people everything that happened in the desert and the commandments they received. He also comments on their past behavior and what he’s worried about for their future behavior. Devarim is Moshe’s highlights of what has occurred and been taught over the 3 books (Shmot / Exodus, Vayikra / Leviticus, Bamidbar / Numbers).

In this week’s Parsha, Shoftim, he reminds the people to set up judges in each of the cities. The judges are then told how they must behave (don’t accept bribes, don’t treat people with different amounts of respect), and certain punishments are laid out. What stood out to me, is that in some cases the punishment is harsh: public stoning, for example, and after the punishment is listed, the reason is listed. And it says so that others will be afraid, and this bad behavior will eradicated from your midst.

When the Secrets Became Too Heavy

Since I was a kid I have been good at keeping other people’s secrets. When I was six years old, my brother-in-law, who owned a video game company, told me the premise of the game he was trying to sell to Microsoft, and I didn’t tell a soul. As I grew older, the girls in my class noticed that I tended to be a non-judgemental listener, that I didn’t repeat what I was told, and that sometimes I even had good advice. They told me I was like a safe for their stories.

Recently, I have had the unfortunate experience of becoming a safe for people’s stories of sexual abuse. Most of the stories I heard happened at home: a parent, a sibling, a close family friend, and all these stories occurred in the homes of ultra-Orthodox Jews. It is true that these types of stories are not unique to Jewish homes, we have seen terrible stories like these take over the news in recent years. But it is also a problem in the Jewish world, and that makes it my problem, because we are told all Jews are responsible for each other.

The truth is, after the first woman shared her story with me, I was horrified that the perpetrator, who is esteemed in my friends community, was not being held accountable, that instead my friend was the one that was alienated. But I hoped it was a one off story. That for her large family, dealing with many different stressors, this issue was too much for them to handle, and it was a one off case. I thought I could do my part by just supporting her.

The Impossible Questions We Face

But then, the stories started rolling in, and I started to panic. Because it was no longer about one family and the ways they handle a difficult situation, it became about many families, hundreds of families, and the systems that support them. What are we supposed to do? It isn’t an easy or straight forward answer. What is a person supposed to do if the perpetrator of abuse to their eleven year old daughter is their thirteen year old son? Do you send him off to boarding school? Will anyone be safer, or might he just find new victims?

What if the person is respected in the community? How do you remove the person from their office, hold them accountable, without hurting the institution they were a part of? Who makes these decisions, and how do we make them?

So Others Will Hear and Fear

In this week’s Parsha Moshe tells the people what happens if a court case is too complicated for their local judges to handle. In that case, they bring the case to the priests, and a decision will be made from within the Temple. Then the verse continues, if a judge aligned with the losing party decides to disregard the decision of the priest, that person will be put to death. And the verse tells us, it is because “the entire nation will hear, and they will be afraid, and they will not act with brazenness again.” (Deuteronomy 17:13)

This declaration of the impact of a punishment is repeated in reference to witnesses that intentionally give a false report to convict someone. If their falsehood is discovered, they receive the consequence, whether it was the death sentence, lashes, or a fine, that they would have had imposed on the victim. And the verse says, “everyone else will hear and be afraid, and they will not continue to do bad things like this in your midst.” (Deuteronomy 19:20)

And then the verse says, “you must not show pity: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (Deuteronomy 19:21).

Refusing to Look Away

There are organizations that are dealing with this issue in different ways. There is Ray of Hope, which offers support for survivors and their families, Zaakah which raises awareness of the issue and advocates for legislative change, and Jewish Community Watch, which publishes the names of predators in the Jewish community. There is also Sacred Spaces, an organization that helps institutions develop policies and procedures to prevent opportunities for abuse and to guide institutions on how to handle the crisis should abuse occur.

I hope you will share the information for Sacred Spaces with the institutions you are a part of, so they can help proactively make the organization one that knows how to handle the crisis before it occurs.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no organization that helps families deal with abuse in their own homes. There has been some research done into the benefits of full family therapy in the case of sibling abuse, rather than isolation of a specific family members, but guidance for abuse happening inside homes remains an issue we must deal with.

These are not easy topics, and discussing them makes me a little uncomfortable, but this week’s parsha reminds us that we cannot look away. We cannot allow bad behavior to remain in our community without consequences.

May we work together to eradicate bad behavior from our midst, and in doing so, merit the redemption, here on this imperfect earth, that Moshe promises in these very parshiot.

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Re’eh, opens with the most succinct possible language, and I hope to mimic it in my most succinct essay to date.

The parsha opens with the words:

See (Re’eh), I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is if you listen to the commandments of Hashem, your God, that I [Moshe] am telling you today
The curse is if you do not listen to the commandments of Hashem, your God, and you depart from the path that I [Moshe] am today giving you commandments for, to follow after other gods that you do not know. (Deuteronomy 11:26-28)

It is stark in its simplicity. At every moment, particularly today, a person should be aware they are being given a choice between blessing and curse. The blessing is following God’s path, and the curse is taking a different path, which the verse states is equivalent to following another God.

At first I was surprised by the juxtaposition, and thought it was too simple. If I don’t do everything God wants, am I automatically following other gods? Couldn’t the verse have said, “if you don’t do all that I am commanding you, you will be punished?” Or “you will garner God’s wrath?” Why does it say if you do not do the commandments, and you stray from the path, you are thereby following other gods?

I think the answer is simple in how straightforward it is.

The Mishna says, “Anyone who does one good deed, it will be good for him and his life will be extended and he will inherit the land.” In the (Jerusalem Talmud Kiddushin 1:9) the rabbis seek to clarify, and strengthen this statement. Rebbi Ze‘ira said,”one who had occasion to commit a possible sin and did not act”, and Rebbi Yose ben Rebbi Abun says, “one who chose one commandment which he never violated in his lifetime,” or one who did “not walk in the council of the wicked it is as if he walked in the council of the just.”

So you can see, the bar for staying on God’s path and inheriting the good is relatively low. If you keep reading in the Talmud you will see the rabbis describe the great lengths God will go to find your good deeds. God isn’t asking for perfection, God is asking for you to stay on the path, whatever that might look like for you. It might just be one commandment you keep for your entire life. Whatever it is, your journey is between you and God.

Since God makes it so accessible to stay on the path, choosing to completely abandon it is an active rejection. It means prioritizing your own, or something else’s, ultimate authority. Which is why straying from the path, believing you don’t have to keep even one commandment, that it doesn’t apply to you or isn’t important, then that is worshipping another god.

And someone that strays from God’s path fully and completely, is it not obvious the path they are on is cursed? Not because of punishment, but because the path of the Torah is a blessed path, and if you step off it, you are necessarily on a path with less blessing. Just as stepping out of the sunlight naturally leaves you in the dark, stepping off the path of blessing naturally leaves you on a path of curse.

In the end, the Torah really is that succinct. Today, and every day, you are offered a choice. Will you serve something other than God on a path that is cursed, or will you take a single step on God’s path, and inherit the blessing?

A few weeks ago I was flying from New York to Florida when a mom and her three-and-a-half year old daughter sat down next to me. Let’s call the little girl Layla. Layla’s father and little brother were sitting in the aisle seat right behind us. 

Traveling with two toddlers on a plane is notoriously grueling, and Layla was pushing boundaries from the start. When her mother asked her to please take the middle seat next to me, Layla refused, taking instead the aisle seat that her mother had planned to use to coordinate with her father and brother. It was surprising, but potentially also a valuable lesson in Layla’s right to personal autonomy, so I wasn’t shocked that her mother acquiesced. 

I was surprised though, that over the entire hour and a half of taxing and takeoff, her mother didn’t lose her patience even once. Because Layla was not only difficult during boarding. She was difficult throughout the flight. I saw her break a toy that her mother had bought for the flight because she couldn’t wait for her mother to get the tray table set up.

Eventually, things calmed down and Layla was falling asleep, head on the aisle armrest, legs curled up near her mothers lap. Just then, the flight attendants came around serving drinks. Layla sat up for a minute, and insisted on a cup of orange juice. Her mother tried to dissuade her. The seats were small, it was crowded, she was falling asleep. But eventually Layla’s mother gave in, and put a full cup of orange juice down on the tray. As soon as Layla saw it, she lay back down and went to sleep. 

What happens next is obvious. Less than five minutes later, adjusting and moving around in her desire to fall asleep, Layla accidentally kicked the tray, and the full cup of orange juice spilled on her mother, me, and our stuff. 

It made me wonder what the “right” way to parent is. When is it a parent’s job to stand firm in their No? Children need love, safety, and generosity, but they also need rules, boundaries, and maybe even consequences. Difficult training mechanisms, it seemed clear to me, can also be necessary.

Which made me start thinking about God.

Divine Parenting in Parshat Eikev

In this week’s parsha we learn that God is like a parent to the Jewish people. 

Parshet Eikev opens:

וְהָיָ֣ה ׀ עֵ֣קֶב תִּשְׁמְע֗וּן אֵ֤ת הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים֙ הָאֵ֔לֶּה וּשְׁמַרְתֶּ֥ם וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָ֑ם

And it will be as a result (eikev) of your listening to these laws, keeping them and practicing them, that God will protect the covenant and kindness She promised to your forefathers.  (Deuteronomy 7:12)

The verse continues, describing all the blessings that will come to the Jewish people if they listen: God will love you, and everything you hope will produce (trees, wombs, animals) will produce rapidly. There will be no diseases and you will not have to fear enemies. (Deuteronomy 7:13 - 7:24) 

But this is only if you faithfully keep the commandments, and do not get distracted by the gods of the nations around you. So Moshe reminds the people: 

“Remember the long way that God took you, these forty years, to test you to know what was in your heart…God subjected you to the hardship of hunger, but then gave you the Mannah to eat… to teach you that a human does not survive on bread alone.” (Deuteronomy 8:2-3) 

The verse is very specific, God tested the people with food, but did not make their life difficult in other ways. For example, the very next verse explains, “Your clothes did not wear out, and your feet did not swell, these forty years” (Deuteronomy 8:4)

And then, ending this section, comes the verse this essay has really been building toward: 

וְיָדַעְתָּ֖ עִם־לְבָבֶ֑ךָ כִּ֗י כַּאֲשֶׁ֨ר יְיַסֵּ֥ר אִישׁ֙ אֶת־בְּנ֔וֹ יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ מְיַסְּרֶֽךָּ׃

You should know in your heart that in the same way a parent disciplines their children, Hashem, your God, disciplines you.  (Deuteronomy 8:5)

Reading these verses, it’s like God raised the Jewish people in the desert, providing them with specific challenges in order to teach the people to depend on God. The forty years in the desert were hard, but they weren’t hard in every way they could have been. Their food arrived one day at a time, like dew in the morning and would spoil by the next day, and that was difficult, but their clothes and shoes did not wear out. 

So of course we must ask, what was the purpose of the specific challenge that God gave the people? Why make their food the difficulty? 

We do not need to look far for the answer, for the verse itself tells us the reason. Why did God need to challenge their food supply? Because:

“A human being does not live by bread alone, but by everything that comes from the mouth of God. (8:3)” 

The Ecosystem of Oral Torah

The classic meaning of this verse is that God wanted to teach the people that even though we think food is what sustains us, really it is God that sustains us, and that can happen through food or anything else that God decrees. 

But when I read it, I understood the verse differently. What are the things that come out of God’s mouth? Words. Commandments. It is through all the commandments that we live. 

Which made sense to me, because the Torah provides us with an entire ecosystem of laws. Some require us to rest, others to create community, or perform acts of service. Taken together these laws create an framework of purpose that support a remarkably happy life, as surveys in Israel have demonstrated.

Secular behavioral scientists have also shown that human beings need precisely these kinds of structures —faith, family, and community— in order to live happy well-balanced lives. In essence, these laws are the guardrails and routine structures that keep us grounded. They provide the kind of loving boundaries Layla needed on the plane to prevent a mess. 

So the Torah is saying you need more than food to survive, you need everything God says. 

The Siftei Kohen (Venice, 1605), read this verse similarly. What is everything that comes out of God’s mouth? “The Oral Torah, which is called the mouth of God.” 

What is the Oral Torah? It is the details of most of Jewish practices. The part of Torah that we read in Synagogues every week is often referred to as “Torah She’Bichtav,” the Written Torah, but there is more that was passed down orally. Eventually all of the oral traditions were documented in the Mishna and Gemara, which is referred to as the “Torah Sh’Baal Peh,” the “Torah of the mouth,” or the Oral Torah. 

The Written Torah tells us to “guard and keep the sabbath,” but the Oral Torah tells us exactly what that means. It describes exactly what counts as work, what time the sabbath starts, and how to sanctify the day with wine and delicious foods. If the Written Torah gives us the broad values of parenting, the Oral Torah is the set of daily household rules that actually keep a child safe from falling over the armrest or knocking over a full glass of juice. Without the Oral Torah, we would be stuck trying to create a lot of ritual from scratch. 

One of the most important differences between the Oral and Written Torah is that Jewish tradition states that the Written Torah came to us whole, from God, while the Oral Torah was meant to stay oral so that it could adapt as necessary to the times. For example translating an ancient prohibition like lighting a fire into modern questions about electricity and technology. In this way, God’s parental guidance wasn’t meant to be a rigid, frozen artifact; it was designed as a responsive, living system to grow alongside us as we mature through history.

The Oral Torah was only written down by the authors of the Mishna out of necessity, due to the Jewish people’s exile and the fear that the Oral tradition would be forgotten. Yet even on the printed page, the Oral Torah never lost its dynamic, human character. Because it reflects centuries of active human partnership with God, it is filled with debate, creative tension, and questions that demand our own engagement to make sense of them.

Barefoot in Shoes: A Rabbinic Mystery

To see what this active, living engagement looks like in practice, consider a debate over a curious detail in this week’s portion.

I was curious when I read the verses describing God making the people hungry, but then making sure their feet didn’t swell. What was the difference? So I looked at what the commentators had to say, starting with Rashi. Rashi is one of the most authoritative rabbinic figures in Jewish history. An eleventh century rabbi, he wrote commentaries on both the Oral and Written Torah, and in both cases his goal was to make the straightforward meaning of the text easier for people to understand. Rashi’s commentary on the Talmud is so influential that if you read the Schottenstein translation, you are, in most cases, reading Rashi’s understanding of the text.

So in this week’s parsha, on the phrase, “your foot did not swell,” Rashi says their feet didn’t “swell like dough, the way feet swell from walking barefoot.” Which is a problem that a seventeenth century supercommentary on Rashi, known as the Divrei David (written by Rabbi David HaLevi Segal, the Taz), points out. 

In a few chapters in Deuteronomy (29:4), Moshe says, “your shoes did not wear out from upon your foot,” and if the verse tells us they were wearing shoes that never wore out, why would Rashi describe them here as barefoot travelers? 

For a moment reading the Divrei David’s question I felt a thrilling sense of intellectual victory: had we caught Rashi’s mistake?

Rashi was a human being. Of course he could be wrong. It is also possible for a line of commentary to have been changed through copying or printing. Jewish tradition does not require us to believe that Rashi was infallible. 

But had Rashi simply forgotten another verse in the Torah? Possible, perhaps. But unlikely.

So before deciding that one of the greatest readers of Torah had made an elementary mistake, the Divrei David did some digging.

He says that he read many explanations as to why Rashi had said this, but none of them were satisfying to him. So he offers something new. 

He says: The Israelites did have shoes. They were just not like regular shoes. They had uppers, but no soles, so their bare feet were in fact touching the ground. 

In this way, both things could be true. They were barefoot, but they were also wearing shoes. Rashi had not made a mistake.

And suddenly, I could picture it. Jewish tradition teaches that the Israelites traveled through the wilderness surrounded by the Clouds of Glory, God’s own protective presence. Maybe, like Moshe, who took off his shoes before approaching the burning bush, the Israelites were meant to be barefoot in order to stand on those Divine Clouds. And over time in the desert they created a new kind of shoe that only covered the upper part of their feet, and those “shoes” didn’t ever wear out, and their bare feet didn’t swell. 

It is an unlikely reading, not one that is widely accepted, and there are explanations that make more sense to me personally. But it demonstrates something important in the way we study Torah. 

Torah Is Not a Museum Piece

The Divrei David’s insistence that Rashi’s words must make sense to him, resulted in him thinking deeply and creatively about this issue until something clicked. And his revelation, then created a revelation for me. 

The Divrei David writes at the end of his explanation, that his resolution “seems right to me, with God’s help.”  

His answer emerged from a combination of confidence and humility. Confidence that the inconsistency could be resolved, and humility about whether his own resolution was ultimately correct. It was his care, his insistence that he had both a right and responsibility to make the difficulty make sense, that really moved me. 

Because I believe that is the care we owe Torah. The whole Torah, the Oral and the Written. To not dismiss it ourselves, and to not dismiss other people’s questions. Just as a loving parent sets firm guidelines out of deep investment in a child’s growth, God gives us the Torah as a living system of discipline—one that requires our active engagement, effort, and care to fully realize. 

And there is another kind of care I want to suggest we give to the Torah this week. It’s one I come back to when I think of Layla’s mother on the flight. 

Because unlike Layla, the Jewish people seem to be suffering some real consequences. And in the coming weeks, as we keep reading through the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) we are going to continue to hear details about what happens when the Jewish people do not keep God’s words, when they stray. It’s serious, hard to read, it reflects a lot of the trauma the Jewish people have experienced, and it is a big part of our tradition. I do not think we benefit from just explaining it away.

But I don’t think we read it as merely a threat, because this week’s Parsha provides another way to see it. “In the same way a parent disciplines their child, God disciplines you.”

Let us see these warnings around us as acts of love from our Divine parent, meant to wake us up, so we can lead each other toward a better world, a more redeemed future.

Without those divine boundaries and our willingness to continuously determine the Oral Torah for our modern age, we risk becoming like a child left without guardrails on a turbulent flight—destined to spill the juice and hurt ourselves in the process. 

This week I hope you will consider how seriously you take both the Written and Oral Torah, the gift and responsibility passed down and protected by all the generations that came before us. I hope we will ask ourselves whether, in this era of sovereignty, we are ready to come together across all our divides to try and put Torah back at the very center of our lives—not as a museum piece, but as a living, evolving compass. 

And I hope we will remember, it is not by bread alone that we live. It is by all that comes from the mouth of God: the words that must be heard, interpreted, argued over, and carried into our lives. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Miriam

Last week I tried to talk about the danger of fear, not just in the physical ways being overly anxious can cause us harm, but in the lack of trust it can sometimes reflect in our relationship with The Creator.

So this week, I want to suggest that the reason “fear” and “awe” are contained within the same Hebrew word, is to remind you when you are feeling scared – the kind of fear caused by something outside of your control – try to turn that fear into awe, to recognize there is a vast powerful Energy that is holding you. See what happens if you think of your fear as a trigger to reflect on the power of the Divine.

What Fear Helps Us See

I came to this realization because in this week’s parsha, the language of seeing comes up again and again. The Hebrew word, “R’eiyah”, which means to see, shares the same four Hebrew letters as the word “Yir’ah,” which means fear or awe. And I wondered what the connection might be.

In the work from the great Chasidic master from Ger, the Sfas Emes (Numbers 23:3), he writes that “fear is an expression of seeing,” because it can create a heightened perception of what is present – including what I am suggesting we allow fear to reveal: a recognition of God’s constant presence.

But awe is not the only thing the Torah asks us to see. Moshe tells the people that if they live by the Torah, something else will become visible: their wisdom, their understanding, and the justice of the society they create.

A Wisdom the World Can See

In this week’s portion, Moshe reminds the people they must keep God’s commandments when they enter into the land. And he says:

“Guard them [the commandments] and keep them, because they will be proof of your wisdom (chochma) and understanding (binah).” (Deuteronomy 4:6)

The Sforno, an important 16th century rabbinic commentator, comments on this verse that the nations will call the Jewish people wise because the laws in the Torah point, unmistakably, toward God. He writes “no other legal code exists purely for justice, designed not for the benefit of the judge or the bureaucrat but for the people that are most vulnerable.” The Sforno, along with a host of other commentators on this verse, say, with confidence, that if people follow these laws, it will create a more just world, and it will be impossible not to notice.

It reminds me of how I feel on Shabbat. If I follow the formula the Torah describes: complete all work before sundown, have all the food ready, the table set, two full loaves of bread, a glass of wine, fish, meat, and all the delicious things, and do nothing but be present for 25 hours. It isn’t something that naturally a person would assume to do, but the instructions, when followed, create peace. I experience it every week. So it is easy for me to understand the Sforno’s promise of what people who follow the Torah can make visible.

Which must mean that when something is not just, and not right, and it does not point us toward the light, then it is something we must dig deeper into, and to ask whether we have understood it fully enough.

A Torah That Is Alive

The Alshich points out that this section starts with Moshe saying, “see these laws that I have taught you.” He asks, why does Moshe use the word, “see,” and not “hear?” Didn’t they hear the laws being taught?

The Alshich explains, leveraging kabalistic ideas, that it is because at Har Sinai, when the Torah was given and God spoke directly to the people, the people were in some way able to see the words spoken.

The words were real, real in a way that is different from a sound that is experienced only through a person’s ears. He writes that they were in some way alive, reaching each individual person that was there and asking to be accepted before sealing themselves into the tablets.

That living quality of Torah helps explain why the passage continues by saying that the people of the world will declare“What great nation has rules and laws as just (tzadikim) as these,” using the word “tzadikim,” to describe the justice of the laws. Tzadik is a word that usually describes people, but here it is being used to describe laws.

The Alshich explains that this is because the mitzvot remain alive. They are living divine powers, not just static rules. Their unique power did not end when the sound at Sinai faded. The words of Torah continues to reach each generation, asking to be received, understood, and lived.

And I think that might be why the verse describes the Mitzvot as both “wise” and “understanding.” Chochma, wisdom, the kabalists explain, is the first flash of inspiration, when an idea first sparks something in your brain, and then Binah, understanding, is the comprehension, the feeling of the idea really taking root and integrating with everything else a person knows, and finding its home in the mind.

The Torah is both those things, it is something we were given, and read and study, it provides that initial spark of wisdom, the Chochma, and it is also something that we dwell on to understand and pick apart and gain new insights from, Binah.

What Tisha B’Av Asks of Us

A letter to the editor I wrote was published by the Sapir Journal this week, responding to an article they had published about Tisha B’av, that had pointed out how divided Israeli society is right now. I suggested in that article that we must come back to the Torah, all of us, Right and Left, secular and religious, to find the truth and justice in our sacred text.

The Torah is what has kept us for generations. It sustained us as a people for all the years we were in exile. It is a powerful inheritance.

If we can all decide to come to it now, with the knowledge that it can be both our wisdom and our understanding, that it is has something to teach at its plainest meaning, and also something deeper for us to integrate and understand, that it is alive and able to speak to this very moment, then maybe we will be able to merit all the blessings it promises. And then, we can offer its wisdom and understanding to the world, our gift to share.

Wishing you a meaningful fast today, acknowledging all the ways our current world is broken, and for those of you for whom the fast is already over, I wish you the power to take the grief of this day and this time into your future - with the commitment to rebuild Jerusalem, not just as a capital city, but as a living center of Torah and justice, creating a light of peace between us, and for the whole world.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught: “A person must cross a very, very narrow bridge, and the essential principle is not to frighten oneself at all.”

But can that really be true? Is all fear wrong? For it would seem fear is a kind of wisdom. A toddler who approaches a fire should be afraid. A person on a camping trip should be afraid of tornado like winds, and the tree branches that might fall. A society or person that ignores danger is not courageous but reckless.

But there is another kind of fear: fear that no longer warns us of danger but begins to govern us. It narrows the imagination and convinces us that we are alone, or that there is nothing that can be done, or that things are much worse than they are. Instead of helping us respond to reality, it makes us hide from it.

This is the type of fear that Rebbe Nachman urges us away from, and it is the fear confronted in this week’s Parsha, Parshat Devarim.

In this entire fifth book of the Torah Moshe is speaking to the people. Before they enter the land he will die, and these are his final words, words of encouragement and warning.

In this portion Moshe recalls the moment forty years prior when the Israelites were poised to enter the Promised Land. The journey from slavery had brought them to the border of freedom. God had led them through the wilderness, fed them with manna, and now Moshe recalls telling them:

“See, the Lord your God has placed the land before you. Go up and possess it, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has spoken to you. Do not fear and do not be dismayed.” (Deuteronomy 1-21)

Here, God is promising the people that they will be effective in their mission, easily, just “go up and possess it.” Yet the people cannot trust the assurance they have been given. Like someone who returns for the tenth time to check whether the stove is off, they seek more information in the hope that certainty will quiet their fear.

The people respond to their fear with a desire for more control. They ask to send spies to the land, to see the route and the people. When the spies return, it is with terror. The land is good, but the inhabitants are strong. The cities are fortified. The obstacles are massive, and now the people are terrified.

Their fear does more than make them cautious; it changes the meaning of everything they have experienced. They say, “Because the Lord hated us, He brought us out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites.”

This is one of the most astonishing reversals in the Torah. The Exodus, the supreme act of Divine love, is reinterpreted as an act of hatred. Liberation becomes abandonment. The God who broke the power of Pharaoh to free them is suddenly imagined to have been conspiring against them all along.

That is what fear can do. It does not merely make us afraid of what lies ahead, it can cause us to misunderstand everything that came before. The danger is not only that we may retreat from the future, but that fear may rewrite our past and distort our understanding of God.

The sages taught that the people wept that night of the spies, on the ninth of Av, and so God responded saying: you have wept without cause; this will become a night of true weeping, throughout the generations. (Bavli, Taanit 29a) Tisha B’Av became the date on which Jews mourned the destruction of both Temples, and many later catastrophes.

This does not mean that every destruction in Jewish history occurred because Jews were insufficiently faithful. But Tisha B’Av reminds us that terrible things do happen. Faith is not the assurance that we will never suffer.

The story of the spies teaches that danger can be faced in two very different ways. We can recognize what threatens us while still trusting that God has not abandoned us and that we remain called to move forward, or we can allow fear to reinterpret difficulty as proof that we are hated, alone, and without a future.

We are living through a time of fear for the Jewish people. There are real threats. There is rising hatred. There is war, grief, and uncertainty. Many Jews no longer feel as safe as they once did. It would be wrong to dismiss that fear or cover it with easy assurances.

Trust in God does not mean believing that nothing bad can happen. It means knowing that danger is not the whole of reality. It means refusing to let fear become the voice that tells us who we are, what God feels toward us.

The first person in the Torah to speak of fear was the first human: Adam.

After eating from the forbidden tree, Adam heard the sound of God moving through the garden, and in response he hid among the trees. When God called out to him “Where are you?” Adam answered,

“I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” (Genesis 3:10)

Before the sin, Adam and Ever were naked and unashamed. Afterward, Adam experienced himself differently. He felt exposed. He feared judgement. His response was to hide.

Yet God’s first words to Adam were not ones of punishment, it was a question: Ayeka? Where are you?

God knew where Adam was physically, the question was existential. Where are you now? What has happened to you? Will you emerge from hiding? Will you speak honestly? Will you take responsibility for what you have done?

Adam did not. He blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. Fear led to concealment and concealment led to blame. Here again, fear does not merely identify danger. It distorts the response to it. Adam’s fear prevents him from meeting God honestly and taking responsibility for what is his.

This pattern remains with us. When we make mistakes, we often fear that honesty will cost us the relationship. We therefore hide, evade, or blame. But hiding can damage trust more deeply than the original failure.

A relationship can survive imperfection, but it cannot flourish without truth.

The same is true of our relationship with God. God does not ask us to pretend we have never failed. The entire architecture of Jewish life assumes that we will fail. We have confession, repentance, forgiveness and return. Judaism is not a faith for those who have never fallen. It is a covenant for those willing to answer when God asks, “where are you?”

Moshe’s command, however, is more radical than merely asking us to behave courageously despite fear. He says: “Do not be afraid.” We may recognize danger, prepare carefully, and do everything that responsibility demands of us without allowing fear to take possession of us. Fear grows when we imagine that the entire outcome rests in our hands. We lose our spiritual footing when we confuse responsibility with control.

This, I think, is what Rebbe Nachman meant when he said the essential principle is not to frighten ourselves. He wasn’t asking us to deny that the bridge is narrow, that life is scary, or hard. He was warning against something else: the habit of making ourselves more afraid. Of telling ourselves stories that make it worse, stories where the water below wants us dead, where the people waiting on the far shore hate us, where God who led us to the bridge has abandoned us halfway across. Crossing the bridge means doing our part, walking forward with open eyes toward what is actually there.

God’s love does not mean we will never experience loss; it means we will never face it alone. But Judaism goes one step further. It promises us that the narrow bridge does not suspend us over a void—it leads somewhere. We are a people possessed by the stubborn, radical faith that history has a destination, and that the final chapter of the human story is one of ultimate redemption.

When we confuse our responsibility with total control, we paralyze ourselves. Faith is the courage to know the boundary between the two: to do what is ours to do today, and to trust God with the grand arc of tomorrow. Even after the collapse of the Temples we mourn on Tisha B’Av, the story did not end. God continues to call us out of our hiding places, asking Ayeka—Where are you?

May we have the courage to answer. May we know what is ours to do and do it faithfully. May we release what was never ours to control. And may our fear lead us not into hiding, but toward greater honesty, responsibility and trust in the God who continues to seek us.

Chazak Chazak v’Nitchazek

This week’s double portion, Matos-Masei, completes the book of Bamidbar, Numbers. So we say together: Chazak chazak v’nitchazek. Let us be strong and strengthened. (Four books of Torah down, one to go, before we start the whole cycle again with Genesis!)

The parsha opens with the laws of vows, including fourteen verses devoted specifically to the vows of women. It moves into the war of vengeance against Midian, the nation that had spiritually attacked the Jewish people two parshiot ago, and describes in detail what happened to their people and property. Then the Torah pulls back into a kind of aerial view: forty years of the journey, every single place the people camped, listed one after another. And finally, it draws the borders of the land of Israel that is to come.

I mapped it. Using OpenBible and Google Earth, I plotted the camping sites in blue, the future borders in red, and the cities across the Jordan (where the war with Midian took place, and where the tribes with abundant cattle asked to settle) in green. You can explore the map here and click on individual points for more detail. Some of it is uncertain. Hazar-Enan, one of the northern border points, has multiple possible locations according to OpenBible, and most of the northern boundary is genuinely contested by scholars.

But looking at the map is still striking. The people camped, almost without exception, near water, tracing a line down the Sinai Peninsula. And the ancient borders, imperfect and disputed as they are, land remarkably close to the actual borders of the modern State of Israel.

Looking at that overlay, ancient promise resting on top of present reality, gave me what people have started calling “Mashiach energy.”

The Energy of the Coming World

Mashiach, the Jewish messiah, refers to an era of utopia here on earth. I’ve written about this idea before. In that era, the prophecies tell us, illness will be healed. Animals will stop hunting each other. War will end. Our physical needs will be met, freeing us to spend our time in the presence of the Divine: studying, creating, being in nature.

It is such a foundational belief that on Yom Kippur, among the sins we confess is “Pashanu,” meaning we grew angry with God, or came to believe God’s experiment in creating the world had failed. Losing faith in the promise of a repaired, redeemed world is itself a sin.

I don’t think we’ve lost that hope, exactly. I think we’ve stopped noticing the miracle already in front of us.

Here is what I mean by Mashiach energy: it is a radical approach to boundaries. On a map, borders are meant to keep people out or lock them in. But Mashiach energy uses boundaries as a baseline for radical trust, rooted in the clarity that a relationship with Hashem looks different for each person.

At Sababa this summer, there was a mechitza dividing men and women’s prayer in the center of the room. The majority of people were gathered together dancing in circles in these single-gender spaces. But at the same time, along the outskirts, people stood mixed together in configurations of all kinds. No one was watching to judge where anyone stood. There was no panic that the boundaries were collapsing; there was only trust and love, because Hashem’s presence felt too clear and too close to be diminished by our differences.

A Pool in Saudi Arabia, a Park in New York

A couple weeks later I was at a different camping festival, but this one wasn’t specifically Jewish. And standing next to me in the only shaded portion of the pool was a proud Lebanese man, who grew up in Saudi Arabia. He told me, in the same tone I might use to tell someone I grew up religious, that he had grown up antisemitic. It was just a fact of life for his family and community. He had never met a Jewish person, and Sinai, after all, borders Saudi Arabia.

His perspective on Jews changed for him in high school, at a boarding school where thirty percent of the students were Jewish. He became close with one Jewish student, whose family took him in like he was their own son. That relationship rewrote what he thought he knew about his Abrahamic neighbors.

There are fifteen million Jews in the world, and eight billion people that do not identify as Jewish. Which means every interaction we have with the wider world carries weight far beyond itself. It means we have to take seriously whether our actions are a light unto the nations, because for many people, we might be the only light they ever see up close. If our actions are publicized, they become reflections of the Jewish people as a whole, which is an embarrassment to God, not just to us.

I was sitting outside my house considering this idea, when I noticed three Muslim women walking by, two of them in niqab. And I felt afraid. I immediately assumed they hated me. I assumed if more people that dressed that way moved into the neighborhood, I would be unsafe.

And then it clicked: I was doing exactly what that man in Saudi Arabia had done. Building fear and anger out of appearance and absence of contact. So I went and talked to them.

They were warm. One of the women, maybe twenty years old, was there with her mother and aunt. Her name, her mother proudly told me, means “intelligent.”

They told me they choose to wear the niqab. It makes them feel safe, modest, correctly aligned in their relationship with God. We ended up talking about faith, about the personal search each of us is on, guided by our own inherited texts.

I mentioned a friend of mine who converted to Judaism, and how she gets frustrated when people, meaning well, ask her at their tables why she’d choose something so demanding. If she’d had a choice, they often say, they might not have chosen this. Except she did choose it, deliberately, knowing exactly how demanding it would be.

The young woman was surprised. She hadn’t known conversion to Judaism was even possible. I explained that you have to learn Jewish history, and then choose to take all the commandments on yourself. She said, “That’s a lot of work.” And then she wanted me to understand something about her: she isn’t forced into the niqab. Nobody makes her wear it. She chooses it. “We’re not oppressed,” she said.

Hearing her say ‘we are not oppressed’ hit me like a physical blow. Here she was, walking in a society that often misunderstands her, feeling completely free in her faith—while we, the Jewish people, are still carrying the heavy psychological trauma of our own oppression even when we are safe.

We are supposed to be a light to the nations. We are supposed to be the ones bringing the messianic era closer, not just believing in it. I think of the moment in 1967 when Israeli soldiers stood on the Temple Mount for the first time in nearly two thousand years, and the decision made within days to hand administrative control back to the Waqf. I understand the security logic. But I keep thinking about what it would mean to hold something that sacred and choose caution over claiming it fully, the same caution that kept me frozen on my own sidewalk until I made myself walk over and talk. We have sovereignty now, for the first time in two millennia, to live by the Torah as a nation and not only as individuals. And still, so much of that is deferred, tabled, handled carefully so as not to disturb anyone. Maybe that carefulness comes from the same place my fear did. Not malice, just old muscle memory, flinching before we even know what we're flinching from.

Still, when the world looks at us confused, or angry, those feelings are fair. We promised to carry the vision of the messianic age forward and we keep setting it down.

The Mountain for Everyone

Isaiah gave us this vision twenty-five hundred years ago:

“In the days to come, the Mount of God’s House shall stand firm above the mountains... and all the nations shall gaze on it with joy. And the many peoples shall go and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the Mount of God... that She may instruct us in Her ways.’

Thus [God] will judge among the nations And arbitrate for the many peoples, And they shall beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up Sword against nation; They shall never again know war.” (Isaiah 2:2-4)

We can choose to make this prophecy a reality—to consider our texts and God’s vision for our holiest sites anew, and ask the world to join us. We are in the Three Weeks of mourning for the Temple, but this year we can start a different project. We can make this the very last year that we ever have to fast on Tisha B’av.

“The fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth month, the fast of the seventh month, and the fast of the tenth month shall become occasions for joy and gladness, happy festivals for the House of Judah; but you must love honesty and integrity.” (Zechariah 8:19)

It is incredibly easy to use external markers—a black hat, a long beard, a meticulously kosher kitchen—as a shield against the world, a fortress built out of exilic fear. We often use outward compliance to hide from the harder, internal work of authentic relationship and responsibility. But nice clothing is not enough. Tznius is not enough. Keeping Shabbos or studying Torah all day means nothing if it is just a uniform meant to keep the outside world at bay — or to keep God’s wrath at bay. To merit this redemption, our internal reality must match our external posture. We must love honesty and integrity.

If we can do that, then:

“In those days, ten people from nations of every tongue will take hold, they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of their cloak and say, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’” (Zechariah 8:23)

Or we can continue to live in exile.

God has done God’s part – now it is up to us. To seriously study the parts of the Torah that have been ignored, to take responsibility for our holy land, and to stop all dishonesty in our midst.

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Tomorrow, Thursday, July 2, 2026, is the Fast of the Seventeenth of Tammuz. It is the first ritual of the Three Weeks mourning, which culminate on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. But the mourning in between doesn’t sit flat. It climbs in stages.

On the seventeenth of Tammuz, weddings stop, haircuts and shaving stop, live music stops. Then, on the first day of the month of Av, ten days before the fast, a second stage begins: no meat, no wine, no laundering, no bathing for pleasure. In the final week, the week Tisha B’Av actually falls in, the restrictions tighten again: no laundry at all, court cases and home renovations postponed. By the time the fast itself arrives, we are sitting on the floor or on low stools, not wearing leather shoes, not greeting each other with a cheerful hello.

Three weeks of a slow, deliberate withdrawal from comfort, aimed at a single day of total mourning. The ritual doesn’t just mark the loss. It makes you feel the loss get closer as you approach it.

The Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:6, 200CE) lists five calamities believed to have happened on the seventeenth of Tammuz: Moses broke the tablets, the daily offering in the Temple stopped because there were no more sheep to bring, the walls of Jerusalem were breached, a Torah scroll was burned, and an idol was placed in the Temple sanctuary. Five wounds, stacked onto one day. And we don’t forget and move on. We mourn.

We mourn the Temple. We mourn the exile that followed it, the two thousand years scattered across every continent, speaking every language, building Jewish life again and again in places that were never home. And we mourn something harder to name: the distance. The sense that God’s presence, which once had an address, is now hidden from us, present but concealed.

A ritual, not just a mood

But here is what I think we get wrong every year, myself included: we treat the fast as if grief were the whole point. As if the mitzvah were simply to feel bad, for one day, or three weeks, about something that happened a very long time ago. The Rambam, Maimonides, does not let us off that easily. In the laws of Fast Days, he writes:

There are days when the entire Jewish people fast because of the calamities that occurred to them then, to arouse [their] hearts and initiate [them in] the paths of repentance. This will serve as a reminder of our wicked conduct and that of our ancestors, which resembles our present conduct and therefore brought these calamities upon them and upon us. By reminding ourselves of these matters, we will repent and improve [our conduct], as [Leviticus 26:40] states: “And they will confess their sin and the sin of their ancestors.” (Hilchot Ta’aniyot 5:1)

The fast exists to arouse the heart toward repentance, because the conduct that caused the destruction resembles our present conduct. Resembles. Present tense. The Rambam is not asking us to mourn a closed case. He is asking us to look for the version of that same failure alive in us right now.

So the real question of tomorrow is not only “what happened to us.” It is: what is the wicked conduct of our own generation that echoes theirs, and what are we going to do about it?

The part we are not even noticing

Here is what I think we are failing to notice at an even more basic level. We are so focused on what we lost that we have stopped noticing what God has already given back.

Zechariah, the prophet, speaking after the return from Babylonian exile, delivers this promise:

Thus said GOD of Hosts: There shall yet be elderly men and women in the squares of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the squares of the city shall be crowded with boys and girls playing in the squares.

Go to Jerusalem today. That is exactly what you will see. Old men and women sitting in the squares. Children playing in the streets. There is a phrase for this moment: ikvot meshicha, the footsteps of the Messiah. Not the arrival. The footsteps. The stage where the promise is already underway and still deniable, where you can point at the old men in the squares and call it Zionism, or point at ten nations grabbing our sleeves and call it tourism.

We are living inside a promise that once sounded like fantasy, and we walk past it the way we walk past foreign delicacies delivered to our door from Amazon, the way we walk past cataract surgery restoring sight and cochlear implants restoring hearing, as if that was always the case, as if those ailments were always healed, and not a healing that was promised.

We are living a prophecy that Zechariah wrote for people who could not even imagine it. But we seem to be so far past it that we’ve forgotten it was ever a prophecy at all.

And when we do notice the miracle of this moment, we don’t credit the Source. We say it was Zionism, or the IDF, or Israeli ingenuity, or a well-timed moment in history. All of that is true on the surface, and none of it is the whole story. It was God who returned us, God who has kept us, and God who will keep keeping us.

Do you not instead dream of this, do you not already, in some circles feel it happening?

In those days, ten people from nations of every tongue will take hold, they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of their cloak and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

So I want to ask you something directly, and I want you to actually sit with the answer instead of moving on to the next paragraph.

Do you really mourn that the daily offering stopped? Do you feel in your bones, that particular distance from God?

And on the other side: do you believe the promise that the nations of the world will one day come stream toward Jerusalem to seek God alongside us? Do you crave that, or does it just sound like poetry?

You will sit tomorrow and mourn that the daily offering stopped two thousand years ago. Then you will go home Thursday night, and Friday you could fly to Jerusalem and pray at that same spot, and most of you will not, and next Tammuz you will mourn it again. That is not grief. That is a habit wearing grief’s clothing. We have gotten so good at mourning the Temple that we never notice we are standing in the aftermath of an answered prayer.

That gap, between what we say we mourn and what we actually feel, between what we say we hope for and what we actually crave, might just be the wicked conduct the Rambam wants us to notice. Not idol worship. Not golden calves. A kind of spiritual sleepwalking, mourning by rote and hoping by rote, neither one actually touching us.

We have lost our curiosity. We open our sacred texts looking for comfort, or history, or an escape from the present. We treat prophecy like ancient poetry instead of a map of the room we are currently standing in.

What if we looked back at our texts with a radical, urgent curiosity? What if we read Zechariah, Isaiah, or the Talmud not to remember the past, but to decode the present? If we look closely, the texts are telling us exactly where we are: we are in the messy, fragile threshold where the promise is unfolding, waiting for us to notice.

But noticing is only the first step. The texts aren’t just describing this moment; they are dareing us to finish it. God didn’t bring us back to Jerusalem so we could sit in the squares and read about the past. She brought us back to build the future. The prophecy isn’t a script that plays out automatically while we watch from the audience.

Where the promise ends

Zechariah tells us that the fast day that begins tomorrow, the fast of the fourth month, is not a fast day that is meant to continue for all time. Eventually it will be retired, along with all the other fasts of mourning.

“The fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth month, the fast of the seventh month, and the fast of the tenth month shall become occasions for joy and gladness, happy festivals for the House of Judah; but you must love honesty and integrity.” (Zechariah 8:19)

“In those days, ten people from nations of every tongue will take hold, they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of their cloak and say, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’” (Zechariah 8:23)

The fast becomes a feast on one condition, and it will not be as a reward for spending the day hungry. It is a natural consequence of following the light of God, of honesty and integrity in God’s holy land.

God has done Her part. She brought us back. She filled the squares of Jerusalem with old men and women and the streets with children playing.

Ours is the part still sitting undone. A country built from Torah. From truth and integrity, the way Zechariah asks. The mitzvot and the commandments that are meant to govern a people living in its own land, not just a people surviving in exile.

The prophecy of a rebuilt Temple isn’t a script that plays out automatically while we watch from the audience. It is an invitation to co-create that closeness again. To stop being terrified of what it would mean to have God that close, and to actually start building the physical and spiritual home for Her presence.

Let’s recognize that this moment is sacred, and be honest about what it’s still missing. We must also remember that our sacred relationship with the Divine was never meant to stay ours alone. It was always meant to be shared, until the peoples of many cities are the ones saying to each other, let us go up and seek God together.

That work starts tomorrow, with this fast. So the question tomorrow isn’t only whether we’ll fast. It’s whether we’ll notice, for one day, that we are already living in the middle of the miracle we’re pretending to still be waiting for.

My hope, my actual prayer, is a simple one: may this be the last seventeenth of Tammuz we spend fasting. May next year, this exact day, be a day of joy and gladness instead.

Wishing you a meaningful fast,

Miriam

The Ritual That Resists Explanation

This week’s Torah portion is a double: Chukat and Balak.

Parshat Chukat opens with one of the strangest rituals in the Torah: the parah adumah, the red heifer.

It is not just any cow, because for one, it has to be completely red. It also cannot have any blemish. It cannot have been used for field labor. It has to then be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in the presence of the priest.

When the animal is dead, the priest dips his finger in its blood and sprinkles it seven times toward the Tent of Meeting, toward the place where God’s presence dwells.

Then the cow is burned. It is not divided into pieces first, the way it is done for other offerings. In this case, the whole thing is burned: the hide, flesh, blood, even dung. And while it burns, the priest throws cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson thread into the fire.

Then the people involved wash their clothes and bathe, and are allowed back into the camp. Still, they remain impure until evening.

A third person then gathers the ashes and places them outside the camp, in a pure place. Those ashes are saved and mixed with water, becoming what the Torah calls mei niddah, the waters of sprinkling, used to purify someone who has come into contact with death.

And then the Torah tells us why this matters so much:

“Whoever touches a corpse and does not purify themself defiles the Mishkan of God; that person shall be cut off from Israel.” (Numbers 19:13)

It is a harsh sentence.

The Impurity of Death

Because we are not talking about sin, exactly. A person can become impure through burying someone, through caring for the dead, through being in the same enclosed space as a body. And of course, this is not a moral failure. On the contrary, burying a dead body is one of the most selfless gestures a person can do.

Still though, it is contact with death. And the Torah says: if you have come into contact with death, part of that death stays with you.

In Judaism, death is a spiritual impotence. The soul has left. And while the body is of course still respected and valued, it can no longer progress, it can’t grow, or learn. It can’t create any of the change that a living person, body with a soul, can do.

Some of that spiritual blockage rests on the living people that have come in contact with it. We might not understand the mechanics of why it happens, but the Torah is clear: left unchecked, this residue of death begins to crowd the spaces meant for God’s presence.

That’s why it must be reset, so that we can clear all the spiritual blockages and be able to once again connect directly to the divine, without any barriers.

The Tested Path to Connection

When I read this week’s parsha, I was coming down from a spiritual high like I have very rarely experienced.

I had spent the weekend at Sababa, a Jewish music festival, surrounded by more than a thousand Jews from every possible background. The connection I felt to the people around me was deep, full of love and incredibly special. There were people who looked like me and people who did not look like me at all. People whose Jewish lives probably overlap with mine in a thousand ways, and people whose Jewish lives might look almost nothing like mine. And still, for that weekend, we felt like one.

And when the sun started to set on Friday night, I was outside, sitting on the floor on a beautiful Moroccan rug, under rows of twinkling lights, singing Lecha Dodi, “Come, my beloved, let us greet the bride,” welcoming Shabbat as she entered the world.

And I felt it.

I felt Shabbat coming.

Not as an idea. Not as something I knew from school or camp or a song I have sung a thousand times. I felt Shabbat arrive. I felt the air change. It felt like the angels my tradition promises come on Friday night, were walking through the camp.

I have never felt Shabbat come into the world like I did that night.

And this is what clicked in that moment: the transcendence came through the tested path, not in spite of it. The words I was singing had been given to my people. The timing was ancient. The structure of Shabbat, the fact there is a spiritual door that opens and closes once a week at a specific moment that we can tap into—these are not obstacles to the experience. They are the vessels that hold it. They are what made it possible.

The whole Shabbat I kept thinking about our relationship with God, and the laws that She gave us. On one end of the spectrum, there is acceptance, bliss, total openness, the feeling of being loved without any conditions at all, a world where we do not need the rules at all. On the other end, there are the commitments, structures, boundaries, and rules (check twice-a-day for 7-days, and start over if you see anything you shouldn’t.)

But I was realizing: calling them “opposite ends” isn’t quite accurate. The bliss I felt came because I was walking a tested path. The angels came because it was Friday night. The door opened because that is when the door opens. And for those ready to greet Shabbat, we had words to say. Not because we couldn’t have said our own words, but because our people have written poetry and passed them down. We have been given a path. A process toward spiritual experience with all the instructions.

And then on Monday morning, still high from my spiritual experience, I opened this week’s parsha. And there was a red cow.

A cow.

A death.

A fire.

Ashes.

Water.

Another death.

A ritual so strange that the Torah introduces it with the words זאת חוקת התורה, “this is the chok of the Torah.” A chok is usually understood as a law whose reason is not fully available to us. There are mishpatim, laws that make intuitive sense, often civil laws we might have come up with on our own. And then there are chukim. Laws that we do because God commanded them, even without explanation.

And the red heifer is the classic chok.

Why This Way?

So I wondered: why?

Why is this the ritual that brings someone back to purity after contact with death?

Why does the process purify the person who is impure, while the people involved in preparing it become impure themselves?

And more than that: why is this the thing that allows a person to move from distance back toward closeness? From outside the full life of the camp back toward the Mishkan, toward the place where God’s presence dwells?

The most basic answer is: we do not know. But we don’t have to know. Because it is a recipe. A recipe for divine closeness.

Except that we can’t do this anymore. The parah adumah stopped when the Temple was destroyed. We no longer have the ashes. We no longer have the path. Someone who touches a corpse cannot be purified by the waters of sprinkling, because there are no waters of sprinkling.

So we live without it. We remain impure, spiritually impotent, a little distanced from God.

And I wonder: why doesn’t anyone seem worried about this? Why aren’t we begging and crying for the path back to spiritual closeness to be made clear? Why don’t we ask when we’re going to get it back?

Maybe part of what we need to do now is to notice what we’re missing. To feel the absence. To let ourselves want that relationship again, that specific holiness, and to ask: how do we bring it back?

We light Shabbat candles. We say Lecha Dodi. We try to follow the paths we have. But some doors are still closed. And maybe the first step toward opening them is to ask the question it feels like many have stopped asking.

My hope for this week is that each of us will wonder: do I want redemption to come? And if not, why not? And if yes, what can I do to bring it?

Wishing us a powerful week, full of Divine closeness,

Miriam

A note for new readers: the Torah is divided into weekly portions called parshiot, read on a cycle throughout the year. This week's portion is Korach (Numbers 16-18). Last week's was Shlach (Numbers 13-15).

Boundaries Are the Love Language

I spent a recent 24-hour period caught between two completely opposite worlds.

On a Wednesday night, I was at a concert with a few friends. One of them is married, non-monogamous, and holds the firm belief that every relationship exists on a fluid spectrum between the platonic and the romantic — and can evolve at any point.

After our night out, I realized she had been flirting with a friend I had just introduced her to. I gently let her know that the events I invite her to are meant for developing purely platonic relationships. She admitted she was not sure she could be in an environment that strictly demands platonic interactions. It simply is not a boundary her worldview or experience naturally recognizes.

The next day, I arrived at the Sababa Music Festival in the Catskills — a weekend of Jewish music surrounded by over a thousand Jews in what is historically the largest bungalow colony in New York State. There, the social landscape flipped completely.

Every time I was introduced to a new mixed-gender group, someone would ask: “Are you shomer negiah?” or “Do you shake hands?” Before physical touch occurred, an explicit consent question was asked. No one assumed that friendliness meant access to someone else’s body. No one assumed that warmth required touch. The question came first. The baseline expectation was absolute no-contact.

It felt dizzying. Within a single day, I had stepped from an ecosystem of infinite, boundaryless relationship fluidity into one of rigid, highly structured boundaries.

As it turns out, this exact tension mirrors the profound spiritual drama found in the Torah portions we read back-to-back: Parshat Shelach and Parshat Korach.

Two Sins, Two Extremes

In both parshiot, the people of Israel sin grievously and face devastating consequences.

First, the spies return from scouting the Land of Israel and stoke panic among the people. They claim the land “eats its inhabitants.” As punishment, God decrees that the adult generation will not enter the land. Instead, they will wander and die in the desert over forty years.

Immediately following this, Korach — a close cousin of Moses from a powerful Levite family — launches a rebellion. He claims, “The entire congregation is holy, all of them, and God is in their midst. Why do you lift yourselves above the congregation of God?” The earth opens its mouth and swallows the rebels alive. A subsequent plague takes 14,700 lives.

Rabbi YY Jacobson, drawing on Lubavitch Hasidic thought, teaches that these two historical failures sit at opposite ends of a relational spectrum.

The spies represent intimacy without responsibility. Korach represents commitment without relationship.

The Spies: Closeness Without Obligation

The Hasidic masters teach that the spies’ fear of being “eaten” by the land was not only physical. It was emotional and spiritual.

They dreaded the grueling labor of conquering a physical country, farming the soil, building a society, and navigating the mundane mechanics of statehood, not because it would be difficult, but because they craved the spiritual womb of the desert: protected by clouds of Divine glory, studying Torah, and eating manna. They wanted to stay cocooned in a purely spiritual experience, where the food provided for them didn’t create any physical waste.

They did not want God that asked for harvest, government, conflict, and responsibility.

But escaping into pure spirituality misses the entire goal of Judaism. As Genesis teaches, humans were placed on earth to “work it and protect it.” We are here as stewards, partners in the ongoing work of creation.

In Jewish thought, intention is beautiful, but action is paramount. You can meditate deeply on freedom during Passover, but if you do not actually eat the matzah, if you do not physically ingest the unleavened bread of poverty, you have not fulfilled the mitzvah (commandment).

The spies wanted intimacy with God without the demands that relationship creates. They wanted to remain close, and spiritually elevated, but they did not want to do the work of the real world.

It is a very human temptation.

We may know people who are so spiritually connected, so attuned to feeling, energy, possibility, and inner truth, that they struggle to anchor themselves in the practical needs of the human being standing in front of them. They can speak beautifully about love, but forget to wash the dishes. They can feel deeply connected, but resist the commitments that make connection safe and real.

Korach: Holiness Without Relationship

Korach makes the opposite mistake.

Korach does not reject the system of holiness. He uses it. He knows its language. He invokes its values. He argues, “We are all holy.” And he is not wrong. The entire people did stand at Sinai. The entire people did receive the Torah. The entire people do have access to mitzvot, holiness, and God. In fact, in Moshe’s final speech to the people he will use these exact words when reminding them to faithfully keep the Torah!

But Korach looks at the structure of holiness and sees only the external system. He sees commandments, roles, garments, offerings, leadership positions. He sees the mechanics of religious life and concludes that if everyone has access to the same system, then no one should need Moses.

In other words: we all do the mitzvot. We all have the Torah. We all know the rules. What does Moses add?

But Moses’ leadership is not about power. It is about intimacy.

Moses does not lead because he wants control. He leads because he is in relationship with God. He argues with God, pleads with God, listens to God, resists God, and ultimately surrenders to God. His authority comes not from ambition, but from closeness.

This becomes most obvious when Korach’s co-rebels, Datan and Aviram, cynically accuse Moses: “You brought us out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness, and now you also want to rule over us?”

Moses is shocked. He responds, “I have not ruled over even a single of their donkeys.”

And he is telling the truth. Moses never wanted power. He tried to turn down the job at the burning bush. He happily shared leadership with Aaron from the beginning. Just a few weeks ago, he begged for seventy elders to help him carry the burden of the people.

Moses does not want exclusive access to God. He wants everyone to have closeness with God.When two men begin prophesying unexpectedly in the camp, Joshua is upset on Moses’ behalf, but Moses is not threatened. He says, “If only all of God’s people were prophets.”

That is exactly what Korach cannot see. Korach sees Moses’ role, but not Moses’ relationship with the Divine.

The tragedy of Korach is that he turns holiness into rules, and he misses the closeness the rules can provide.

What a Relationship Actually Requires

To understand the difference between these two failures, think about a marriage.

Imagine a partner who wants only emotional closeness. They want the late-night talks, the cuddling, the feeling of being deeply known. But when their spouse asks them to do something concrete — pick someone up from the airport, wash the dishes, make the phone call, carry the burden — they refuse.

“But I feel so close to you right now,” they say. “Why would I leave this room?”

That is the mistake of the spies.

They wanted the intimacy of the desert without the responsibility of the land. They wanted the feeling of closeness without the obligations that closeness demands.

Now imagine the opposite partner.

They do everything technically right. They pay the bills. They take out the garbage. They show up where they are supposed to show up. They perform every task on the list.

But there is no warmth. No tenderness. No humility. No curiosity. No sense of actually wanting to share experience with the other person.

And this is where these two parshiot speak to each other. One side says: I love God, but do not ask me to do much because of it. The other says: I do all the right things, but do not ask me to open myself up to the feelings that can happen when I do them.

Both are broken forms of relationship.

Boundaries That Serve Love

Moving from that boundaryless concert to the structured world of Sababa made me realize that a boundary is not the opposite of intimacy—it is what allows intimacy to survive. A mitzvah is not the enemy of spiritual feeling; it is spiritual feeling embodied.

Take Shabbat: if you only look at the surface, it reads like a list of cold restrictions—don’t cook, don’t turn on the light, turn off your phone. But look at the impact of those boundaries. By shutting those things out, you are bringing a sanctuary into existence. Without the distractions of a to-do list, there is room to fully enjoy the bounty: a table full of food, a glass of wine, and the gift of being entirely present with God and the people around you.

This week, where do you find yourself? Are you hiding in the desert, clinging to spiritual comforts while avoiding the real work God asks of us? Or are you standing with Korach, performing holiness while quietly resenting the vulnerability and surrender that true intimacy requires?

The Torah gives us these stories back-to-back because a real relationship with God lives in the tension between them: action and feeling, structure and closeness, mitzvah and love.

May we have the courage and strength this week to recognize God’s presence in everything around us, and find the ability to turn all of our actions into embodiments of that relationship.

Shabbat Shalom,

Miriam

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A Note on Language

I use She/Her for God. Genesis 1:27 teaches that humans, male and female, were BOTH created in God’s image, which means that God’s image contains the feminine. My experience has been one of forgetting that, so my pronoun choice is one attempt to help us remember.

I was reading through this week’s parsha, Parshat Shlach, and amidst all the drama of the spies, the people’s fear, and God’s threat of punishment, I noticed something I was not expecting: a description of God.

The people have rejected the land. They have cried that they would rather go back to Egypt. God is exasperated, and says (Numbers 14:11) “How long will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the signs that I have performed in their midst?” Then She says (Numbers 14:12), “I will strike them with pestilence and disown them, and I will make you a nation far more numerous than they!”

And Moshe, trying to save the people, turns to God with words that sound familiar to anyone who has been to synagogue on Yom Kippur: Hashem is slow to anger, abundant in kindness, forgiving of sin and transgression. (Numbers 14:18)

Moshe does not begin by saying that the people are innocent. (They are not innocent.) He does not say that nothing happened. (Something happened.) He does not even say that there should be no consequences. Instead, he describes God back to God. And I started to see God more vividly. Not just as a force behind the story, but as a full character. Someone I wanted to understand.

The words Moshe used to describe God are the very words God uses to describe Herself, back in Exodus 34, after the sin of the Golden Calf, when Moshe asks to “see God’s glory”. These are the same words repeated over and over again on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, as part of the liturgy asking to be forgiven.

I found myself wondering: Why is a description of God placed so centrally in this moment of rupture? Why is Moshe’s best argument for mercy a reminder of who God is? And why does Jewish tradition return these words year after year when we are trying to be forgiven?

The Talmud shares an easy answer that we will dive into deeper, but the important thing to know is that these words are not just a description, they are a way to bring God’s presence into the world.

And before we try to unpack what that means, I wanted to share with you my experience with God.

The Time God Booked Me a Flight to Florida

A few years ago, I was lying on the couch with my husband when I got an email confirmation from Expedia, for a Jet Blue flight to Florida.

I had not booked a flight to Florida.

Yes, my mother lives there, but we were not discussing a visit. Still, I thought maybe she was surprising me with a little pressure to come see her.

So I called her and asked, “Did you book me a trip to Florida?” She had not.

I asked my husband. He had not.

I texted a friend who had recently booked our group’s flights for a bachelorette party. Maybe she had accidentally used my information for a trip she was planning? She had not.

I could not figure out who booked it, but the ticket was real. It was booked for Sunday to Wednesday, which, while potentially strange days to go to Florida, were actually good days for me to visit my mother. And I did not see much risk in going to the airport and seeing what happened.

When I went to board the flight, the gate agent scanned my ticket. Instead of lighting up green and letting me on, it beeped. According to the system, I had already boarded. But of course, I had not. The gate agent was confused, but he just assigned me another seat, and I got on the plane.

At first, it was a regular trip. My mother and I went to the gym (Pilates). We went out to eat (at a bakery). We probably did some crafts. And then, on my second day, she started to feel sick. She ended up in the hospital that night. My mother, thank God, had been perfectly healthy before that (and is healthy today!). Her illness was totally out of the blue. And through something I cannot explain, I was with her, across the country, on the day she needed me.

After that, I started telling people that God booked my trip to Florida.

I know that not every crisis comes with a mysterious plane ticket and a hidden rescue plan. But that one happened. Whatever the technical glitch or mix-up might have been, the timing was undeniable, I was where I needed to be.

The Quieter Ways God Shows Up

Still, God does not usually show up for me as dramatically as that. Most of the time, my experience of God is much quieter. It is closer to what Sarah Hurwitz describes in Here All Along, when she writes about talking to God, alone in a forest, on a meditation retreat and feeling, in her body, the kindest and most comforting response she could have imagined. She was told to talk to God, and in a quiet, felt sense, it seemed like maybe God had answered back through those very kind thoughts. That feels familiar to me.

Most of the time, God is something I notice. A comfort.

Rabbi David Aaron on the 18forty podcast described his experience of the Divine as “a pull upward, toward goodness.” He says that the best way to teach people about God is to help them experience Her, by facilitating moments of awe, like a trip to the Grand Canyon. He remembers feeling God’s presence after he became a father. Holding his newborn baby sleeping in his arms, watching his little chest move up and down, and feeling overwhelming gratitude. That, he says, is a God moment. It’s a moment, “where you feel a sense of gratitude and you feel uplifted to want to be a better person.”

That is the experience of God that I want to share with you all. That I want you to try and feel in your life. Maybe you have had that experience, and didn’t know that people all around the world call that pull God.

Why These Words Bring Forgiveness

Still we have the question, why does describing God enable forgiveness?

There are two reasons, sourced in the very same sentences in the Talmud.

In Talmud Rosh Hashana (17b) the Rabbis quote God as saying: “Whenever Israel sins, let them perform before Me this order [i.e. recite the 13 attributes], and I will forgive them.” and then, Rav Yehuda adds, “A covenant was made with the Thirteen Attributes that they do not return empty-handed.”

On the most basic level, we return to these words because the Talmud presents them as words God gave us for this exact purpose: to awaken mercy after sin. They are presented as uniquely powerful, that if someone says them in their order, they will be forgiven.

Says Rav Ezra Bick from Yeshivat Har Etzion, “Normal prayer does not guarantee a response... but a prayer involving a covenant demands a response... The thirteen attributes differ from all other prayers in that a covenant has been established that they will never be ineffective.”

Which means, the 13 Attributes are not merely a description of God. They are the words God gives human beings to call divine mercy back into the world. And more than that, Rav Bick, emphasises that saying these words are a Jewish responsibility. He writes, “A covenant is not a promise; it is a two-sided agreement. It creates something which exists only in partnership… God’s presence in the world will depend on the free-willed calling of humans.”

Human beings are entrusted with bringing God’s presence into this world. So if we want to live in a more merciful and compassionate world, we can do that by reciting the 13 attributes of the divine.

Not Magic, But Practice

And there is a deeper reading. The Alshich, a Kabbalist and sage that lived in Safed in the 16th century, struggled with the idea that just saying the thirteen attributes could bring about such a powerful state, and he wrote, “For this very reason, it does not say: recite this service, but rather: “Perform this service” – implying that [forgiveness] is not dependent upon speech alone, but rather upon performance… If you emulate these attributes, you will not return empty-handed.” In fact, a generation later, his student Rabbi Moshe Cordovero wrote “Tomer Devorah,” a book that teaches a person how to embody these thirteen characteristics.

Which means the words are not magic, they are a path.

And it is the path that Moshe used in this week’s parsha.

He does not deny the sin of the people. He does not pretend their actions did not have consequences. He does not say that God should simply erase everything and move on.

He asks God to meet the people through God’s own mercy.

Says Rav Bick, “There is a rule in Judaism: the revelation of the divine glory in the world takes place upon a human chariot. The Almighty appears and bestows His Shekhina upon the world to the extent to which human beings call to Him. In other words, the Shekhina resides in the space that human beings make for it.”

Becoming the Mercy We Ask For

The thirteen attributes are not theology. They are a covenant. When we embody them, when we forgive, when we act with kindness, when we accept people that have made mistakes, we bring God’s presence into the world. We bring goodness into the world.

Moshe stood in a moment of crisis and described God back to God. Maybe that is because through creating space for the Divine, he created less room for the opposite. But it is also because in reminding God who God is, we are reminding ourselves who we are supposed to become.

I hope that this meditation on God and what it means to experience and feel God will enable us all to bring God’s presence into this world, to tap into the infinity that is available to us, and hastily bring the redemption, and only goodness for the entire world.

Shabbat Shalom,

Miriam

PS - Here are the full 13 attributes for those who are curious!

1. ה׳ (Hashem): God’s mercy before a person sins.

2. ה׳ (Hashem): God’s mercy after a person sins and repents.

3. א-ל (El): Mighty in mercy; divine power used compassionately.

4. רחום (Rachum): Compassionate.

5. וחנון (Ve-chanun): Gracious; gives even when undeserved.

6. ארך אפים (Erekh apayim): Slow to anger; patient, long-suffering.

7. ורב חסד (Ve-rav chesed): Abundant in kindness/lovingkindness.

8. ואמת (Ve-emet): Truth; faithfulness; reliability.

9. נוצר חסד לאלפים (Notzer chesed la-alafim): Preserves kindness for thousands of generations.

10. נושא עון (Nosei avon): Bears/forgives iniquity.

11. ופשע (Va-fesha): Forgives rebellion/transgression.

12. וחטאה (Ve-chata’ah): Forgives sin/error.

13. ונקה (Ve-nakeh): Cleanses/acquits/pardons.

Parshat Beha’alotecha opens with the Menorah.

God tells Aharon to kindle its lamps so that the seven flames face forward, toward the center. The Torah describes the Menorah as mikshah zahav, hammered gold, formed from a single piece. One central shaft. Six branches extending outward. Each branch distinct, each flame its own flame, and yet all of them turned toward the same light.

I have been thinking about that image all week. We are a people of distinct branches. Different communities, different practices, different readings of the same texts. How do we know we are all pointing toward the same light? How do we know, in any given moment, which direction is the center and which direction is away from it?

And I keep wondering: what happens when one branch believes another has turned away from the light?

Even If It’s Wrong

You may not know this about me, but I volunteer a lot of my time helping start-up Jewish communities build structure and strategy. A few weeks ago I was working with a founder whose stated goal is the same as mine: to give people a safe, warm, and inviting place to practice and express their Judaism. When I shared my perspective on women’s inclusion in ritual spaces, he said, “I do not want to get anywhere near that.” He stopped wanting to collaborate.

I want to be fair to him. In traditional Orthodox synagogues, men and women are separated, and only men are called up to the Torah or invited to lead services. This is rooted in something real: men are halachically obligated to pray in community three times a day, and women are not. From that uneven distribution of obligation, many communities have drawn the line about who leads. I understand the logic.

But I also know our texts. The Tosefta (Megilla 3:11), one of the oldest layers of halachic literature we have, states that women are permitted to be called up to the Torah. The practice of excluding them became normative over time, but it is not the only reading the tradition offers. When I explained this, when I said that I spend my days in the sources and that my position is not a rejection of Torah but a different position within it, a position whose goal is to bring the Geula, the promised redemption, he said: “Even if it’s wrong, this is what we are going to do.”

I keep turning that sentence over. Even if it’s wrong.

I want to be careful with that sentence. I do not think he meant, cynically, that he was willing to do something wrong. I think he meant something more complicated, and maybe more revealing. That even if there is a real halachic argument here, even if the sources are more complex than the communal practice allows, he is not the person who can decide that. Someone has to hold the walls. Not every wall-holder can also be the person asking whether the walls are in the right place.

And maybe that is fair. Maybe not every community builder is supposed to be a decider in the future of Jewish practice. Maybe someone trying to hold a fragile community together is not the person that is going to open a conversation on the boundaries of ritual life.

But then who is?

Who Gets to Name the Center?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in his book One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity, writes about the Chatam Sofer, an influential rabbi during the enlightenment and the rise of the Reform movement:

Rabbi Sofer’s perception seems to have been that in an age marked by flight from tradition, small deviations heralded major breaches. The new, if not in itself forbidden, would in the end lead to acts that were.

He was the person that coined the phrase, “the new is biblically forbidden.”

Rabbi Sofer’s name is nearly synonymous with the idea of holding the line. And yet Sacks notes that the Chatam Sofer signed on to an Orthodox response condemning reformers for removing references to the gathering of exiles in Jerusalem from the prayer book. Sacks writes

The return to Zion was affirmed by the traditional rabbinate as central to Jewish hope. One of the contributors to the volume, Rabbi Sofer was an enthusiastic supporter of Jewish settlement in Israel and was seen by some, in retrospect, as one of the early inspirations of the Zionist movement.

Which means, the man who said never change helped spark the most radical change in two thousand years of Jewish history.

I do not raise this to score a point. I raise it because I genuinely do not know what to do with it. If the Chatam Sofer could be both the guardian of tradition and an unwitting revolutionary, then the lines we draw are less stable than we think. The fires we are certain we are supposed to light, and the ones we are certain we are supposed to extinguish, may look very different from a distance of two hundred years.

And I found myself asking a question I did not expect to be asking: Is the devout founder of a Jewish community right to stay far away from me? Am I dangerously close to the edge of the camp?

The fire at the edge of the camp

Because in this week’s parsha, the edge of the camp is not a safe place to be.

The Menorah appears at the beginning of this parsha, whole and luminous. But then, a few verses, later, the fractures begin.

The Torah says the people were kemithonenim, grumblers, complainers. The Ramban reads this as the bitterness of people suffering under duress, terrified of what the journey through the desert would require of them. The Sforno says they had nothing real to complain about. They complained anyway. So God punished them, bringing a fire that burned biktzeh hamachaneh, “ the outskirts of the camp.”

The sages ask: who did the fire burning at the edge of the camp impact? And offers two readings. The first, is that it was those that weren’t really religious. The people on the literal margins who did not quite belong. The second, is that it was the ketzinim, the officers and leaders, the people who failed to guide the nation well.

And I wonder, who is at the edge of the camp today?

Why should we be left out?

Earlier in the parsha, before the complaining, a different energy appears.

A group of individuals come to Moshe. They were ritually impure on the day of the Passover offering, so Jewish law prevented them from bringing the offering. Instead of accepting that exclusion, they asked a question: Lama nigara? Why should we be left out? Why should we be diminished?

They were not asking to dissolve the rules. They were asking for more, for a deeper stake in the collective story. God’s response was to issue an amendment. God introduced Pesach Sheni: a second Passover, second opportunity to bring the sacrifice a month later, for those who were distant or impure.

I hope the energy I am carrying is the one of the people asking for Pesach Sheni. I believe the women I know are asking lama nigara. The that want to be counted in a minyan, to read from the Torah. I think they are asking: Why should we be left out?

And maybe what hurts is that they are not being told: let us ask God. Let us return to the sources. Let us see whether there is a way for your longing to live inside the covenant.

They are being told: no, because this is what we did before.

More Spirit, Not Less

Moshe’s despair in this parsha hit very close to home this week. He hears the people complaining about not having cucumbers or fish to eat, and he cries out to God, saying “I cannot carry these people alone,” telling God he would rather die than continue in this way.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks reads Moshe’s crisis in this parsha as a crisis of adaptive leadership: Moshe sees that a people can witness revelation and still resist the responsibility freedom requires. They had stood at Sinai. They had built the Mishkan. They had seen incredible miracles, and God’s physical presence. And still, after all of it, they were crying over meat.

That broke him.

And God’s response was not to change the people. God gathered seventy elders and placed Moshe’s spirit upon them. When Moshe saw Eldad and Medad prophesying in the camp, Yehoshua wanted them stopped. Moshe said:”Would that all of God’s people were prophets.”

God’s answer to Moshe’s despair was not less voice, but more. Not a narrower center, but a wider distribution of spirit. Moshe’s greatness in that moment was that he did not treat unexpected prophecy as a threat to his authority. He could see another person’s flame and not mistake it for the extinguishing of his own.

One light does not become weaker because another is kindled. One branch does not threaten the center simply by burning. The Menorah already tells us there will be many flames. The question is whether those flames can illuminate one another while still belonging to one vessel.

At least that’s what hope for.

Separate Lamps, or One Menorah?

When I called a friend of mine this week, dejected, she suggested that maybe the vessel itself is the problem.

She said: I think we need to stop thinking about a single Jewish community and start thinking about multiple Jewish communities. That way we will not get so worked up when one community does something another does not, or believes something different. We can accept that they are each their own thing.

Maybe separate communities are the only practical answer. But if that is true, I want us to at least admit what we have lost.

Because what happened with that founder did not feel like an acknowledgment of different paths toward the same light. It felt like someone saying: your light is dangerous to mine. It felt like being told that the only way to preserve the vessel was to keep some of its branches far away from the center.

But I was raised to believe that all Jewish people are, spiritually, one living body. If one part of the body is in pain, the whole body limps. We are not supposed to be separate lamps, each burning in our own corner, indifferent to the direction of the others.

If one part is in pain, that matters.

And the deepest hurt doesn’t come from the reality of boundaries, or the truth that not every longing can become law. It comes from the fact that sometimes, the people guarding those boundaries seem to answer before the question has even been asked.

And I know that asking is not costless. Pesach Sheni was not only a second chance; it became an obligation. Once God made room for those people to bring the korban, they were responsible to bring it. The door opened, and with it came duty.

I want the Menorah

So yes, if women are counted, women have to count. If we say we want to be part of the minyan, then we have to show up for the minyan. If we say we want access to sacred responsibility, then we have to become responsible for sacred life. Not occasionally, not sentimentally, but with the seriousness that obligation demands.

Maybe we are not ready for that. Maybe some of us are not. Maybe our days would have to change in ways we are not yet ready for.

But do not tell me we cannot.

Do not tell me that women’s desire to come closer is a threat. Because we have already lived through this once. There was a time when many people were afraid of women learning Torah. The 95 year old woman who works at the kosher bakery on my street never learned how to read Hebrew. There was a time when women’s sacred literacy itself felt dangerous to parts of the Jewish world. And now, after Bais Yaakov, after generations of women educated in Torah, after a world built in part by learned Jewish mothers and teachers and leaders, almost no one wants to return to the version of Jewish life where women were kept illiterate for the sake of preserving the past.

We know that women’s Torah is not darkness. We know it has strengthened the vessel.

So maybe the question is not whether women are trying to turn toward the light. Maybe the question is why some of us are still so afraid to recognize that light when we see it.

We can love the people who held the line and still ask which parts of the line were drawn by exile. We can honor the communities that preserved the flame and still worry when preservation becomes a refusal to see new light. We can appreciate what different branches have given us and still admit that every branch has edges that need smoothing.

I do not want seven separate lamps. I do not want each community burning alone in its corner, calling separation peace and fearfulness fidelity.

I want the Menorah.

One vessel. Many branches. All of our flames turned toward the center. Not sameness. Not chaos. A people willing to ask, again and again, whether we are helping one another turn toward the light, or whether inherited fear, hardened boundaries, and exile-shaped habits are getting in the way.

Because if they are, then maybe we are not guarding the center as carefully as we think. Maybe we are standing at the edge of the camp, projecting our fear as other’s faithfulness. Maybe, without meaning to, we are on the final march to Israel, asking for the cucumbers and fish of Egypt, longing for a smaller world simply because it is the one we already know.

May we be blessed with leaders who know how to bring a real question before God, and with communities willing to accept the responsibility that comes when Torah makes room.

May we be blessed to recognize light where it appears. And may all of our arches, the whole Menorah, aching and unfinished as it is, turn together toward the center.

Shabbat Shalom.

A Strange Jumble

Parshat Naso is the longest parsha in the Torah. And it is, on its surface, a strange jumble of things.

We have the final accounting of the Levite families and their responsibilities for transporting the Mishkan through the desert. We have the Sotah ritual, the unsettling process by which a husband who suspects his wife of adultery brings her to the Temple. She is publicly embarassed, God’s name is written, dissolved into water, and given to her to drink. If she was guilty, her body would explode.

We have the Nazir, a person, man or woman, who voluntarily takes on a set of bodily restrictions: no wine, no cutting the hair, and nothing made from grapes, in order to achieve a heightened holiness, similar to a Priest, a Kohen, actually similar to the High Priest (Kohen Gadol), for a chosen period of time.

We have the Priestly Blessing, those ancient words Kohanim still use to bless the people today.

And then we have the gifts of the Nesiim, the chieftains of the twelve tribes, for the inauguration of the Mishkan’s altar.

That last one makes up a huge portion of the parsha.

Each chieftain brings the exact same gift: a silver bowl, a silver basin, a gold pan, a burnt offering, a sin offering, and a peace offering. Twelve chieftains, twelve identical gifts, twelve times the Torah writes out every single item in full. Nothing is summarized. Each gift is recorded in its entirety, twelve times over.

Why?

Shalom as Wholeness

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asks what all these disparate topics could possibly have in common.

His answer is simple: Shalom.

Peace.

And once he says it, you can see it everywhere.

It is there most explicitly in the Priestly Blessing. The Kohanim bless the people that God should protect them, shine toward them, lift God’s face toward them — and then the blessing reaches its final phrase, “May God lift God’s face toward you and grant you peace.” The blessing moves toward peace. Protection, grace, closeness, Divine attention — all of it culminates in God bestowing peace.

Peace here means something much bigger than the absence of conflict, but it is more than that. The Hebrew root of shalom is shalem: wholeness. Completeness. A world where every part is held and seen, and nothing is left broken or excluded.

Let’s look again at each topic through that lens.

The Sotah ritual is disturbing. A husband is jealous. Trust has collapsed. A marriage is fractured.He believes she has cheated, but he has no proof. So what does he do? He takes her to the temple for a painful and troubling ritual. I wrote all about it last year, and explained that the Torah frames it as a response to a household where uncertainty has made peace impossible.

God allows God’s own name to be erased and dissolved into water because the opportunity to restore peace in that household matters more than the preservation of a the Divine name. If she has cheated, she will supernaturally die. Otherwise, she will go home, fertile. The visible, undeniable nature of the ritual’s results gives both husband and wife something they can trust. Whatever the outcome, the uncertainty is over. The possibility of peace can begin.

The Nazir path exists because not everyone is born a Kohen. Which means, without the role of Nazir, a person, a man or woman, who feel a calling toward a deeper holiness might have no formal path to it. Resentment could grow from that gap. God recognized that and created the Nazir practice which says: you are not locked out. Anyone, from any tribe, of any gender, can choose this level of holiness. The path is not exclusive.

And then the Nesiim, the chieftains.

The Chieftains Who Refused to Compete

Each of them could have tried to distinguish himself. To bring something slightly more impressive, slightly more elaborate. They were powerful men, leaders of entire tribes. But they brought the same thing. Exactly the same thing.

Their unity was a choice.

The absence of competition was an act of communal love.

And God responds to that unity in kind. The Torah records each gift individually, in full, twelve separate times. Not because any information changes between the accountings. It does not. But because each person, each chieftain, each tribe, deserved to be seen.

No one’s offering was subsumed into a generic list.

No one was lumped in.

Every individual is called by name.

How God’s Presence Returns

Rav Menachem Leibtag of Har Etzion points to a verse at the very end of the parsha that seems to appear from nowhere. After the long tallying of the Nesiim’s gifts, after the summary pasuk that wraps it all up cleanly, the Torah adds one more line: that God spoke to Moshe from between the Keruvim above the Ark in the Ohel Mo’ed.

It seems superfluous. We already knew that. It was described in Parshat Terumah and again at the opening of Vayikra. Why repeat it here?

Leibtag explains that this was actually not a repetition. This was an event.

After the sin of the Golden Calf, God had withdrawn the Shechina from the camp. The Ohel Moed, the tent of meeting was moved outside, far from the people, a constant and visible reminder that they were not yet worthy of God’s presence dwelling among them. The Mishkan was built specifically to bring the Shechina back. And throughout the Torah, the return of the Shechina is marked three distinct times.

Once when Moshe assembled the Mishkan, it came in cloud and fire.

Once when Aharon offered his korbanot on the altar, fire descended from heaven.

And now, a third time, through the Nesiim: God spoke again to Moshe from within the camp.

Each return of the Shechina was through someone different.

Through Moshe’s leadership.

Through Aharon’s priesthood.

And then through the unity of the twelve tribal leaders.

It was the Nesiim’s choice to show up the same way, as equals, with humility, without competition, that made the people worthy of God’s presence returning a final time.

As Leibtag puts it, “It is this nature of a collective effort, where everyone must be alike and work together towards a common goal, yet at the same time keep his own identity and shine as an individual, that makes room for God to ‘join along’ as well!”

Shalom is not just a nice outcome.

It is the precondition for holiness.

When Difference Comes Through Pain

I thought about this this week while reading Raphael Zarum’s Questioning Belief: Torah and Tradition in an Age of Doubt, a book I want to recommend. It is brilliant, and I think many of you will love it.

Among many other things, Zarum writes about evolution and how it can be understood within Jewish thought. The six days of creation, he argues, were not meant to function as a scientific textbook. They were meant to teach theological and philosophical truths that stand on their own terms. He goes into details on several aspects of his perspective, including an analysis of evolution, and “survival of the fittest”.

One of the things he points out about evolution is that life moves forward through difference. Random mutations. Unexpected variations. Through changes that may look, from the outside, like accident or disruption, but later become part of the unfolding of life itself.

And I kept thinking about Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks was a young Black woman who died of cancer in 1951. Her cancer was aggressive and devastating. Her body was overtaken by illness. She died at only thirty-one years old. And yet, from that terrible sickness came cells unlike any scientists had seen before. Her cells, known as HeLa cells, could survive and reproduce indefinitely in a lab. They have became essential to the polio vaccine, cancer research, genetics research, and countless other medical breakthroughs.

I do not know how to speak about that without trembling.

The tragedy was real.

The sickness was real.

The loss was real.

And still, somehow, through that brokenness, life came into the world for millions of other people.

That does not make the suffering good. It does not make the tragedy simple. It does not mean we can explain why this woman had to suffer and die so young. But it forces us to confront something very hard and very true: sometimes what is broken, what is different, what emerges seemingly randomly, from pain, becomes part of a larger story we could never have seen at the beginning.

And I found myself thinking about the Jewish people this way too.

Our diversity is beautiful now, but it was not born only from beauty. It came through exile, destruction, migration, displacement, argument, rupture, and survival. Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Hasidic, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, secular, traditional — these are not just charming varieties in a single community. They are the living record of a people that has been broken apart again and again and still found ways to keep carrying Torah.

So maybe the question is not only why we are so different.

Maybe the question is: if God allowed the Jewish people to become this different, what are we meant to do with that difference now?

The Future Is Sephardic

That is why Mijal Bitton’s essay in Sapir, “The Future Is Sephardic,” struck me so deeply.

Bitton draws a distinction between two different American Jewish dreams. Ashkenazi Jews came to America from Europe carrying the unfulfilled promise of emancipation, the dream of social acceptance and integration. MENA Sephardic Jews, those who came from Morocco, Syria, Iran, and across the Arab world, came with a different history and a different aspiration. They did not come seeking transformation. They came seeking continuity.

The dream was not to be accepted by America. The dream was to preserve what they had built across centuries in their countries of origin: civilizations with their own liturgy, their own legal traditions, their own music, their own family structures.

After 1948, many of those civilizations were uprooted. And in America, Sephardic communities have been fighting ever since to keep their cultures alive, distinct, and not absorbed into the dominant frameworks of Ashkenazi Jewish life.

Bitton’s central argument is that the American Jewish future needs to learn from the Sephardic model. Not because the Ashkenazi contribution was not real. It was extraordinary. But because the integrationist dream has become fragile. When Jewish identity depends on external acceptance, it is easily destabilized. The Sephardic model offers something sturdier: an identity rooted in family, in peoplehood, in the understanding that we are not a movement or an ideology but an extended family with bonds of mutual obligation.

As she writes: “For us, diversity has never been a problem to solve; it has been the lifeblood of Jewish strength.”

That sentence feels like the heart of what Parshat Naso is trying to teach.

All of It Is Needed

Think of how much the Hasidic world has contributed, with its depth of spiritual intensity, its emphasis on joy and presence, its fierce specificity about practice. It’s volunteer services, like Hatzala and Chaverim.

Think of what Reform and Conservative Judaism have brought, the ways they have expanded who gets to participate, the questions they have forced the community to take seriously, not to mention Hollywood, and Broadway.

Think of the Sephardic contribution, centuries of civilizational wisdom that we are still only beginning to recover and appreciate.

Think of the Jews whose identities do not fit neatly into any one box, and the ways they too carry Torah, memory, loyalty, longing, and love.

All of it is needed.

The diversity is not a problem.

It is what God intended, or at least what God has allowed history to make of us. And if that is true, then we are responsible for what we do with it.

Twelve Tribes, One Mishkan

This is what I hear in the Nesiim’s story.

Twelve tribes. Twelve distinct lineages, histories, temperaments. And yet they all brought the same gift. Not because their differences were not present. Not because they were secretly all the same. But because they understood that in this moment, what mattered was unity.

What mattered was showing up the same way, as equals, without competition, without resentment, without anyone trying to be more than the others.

And God saw each of them individually.

God did not say: the chieftains collectively brought these items. God said: here is Nachshon ben Aminadav of the tribe of Judah, and here is what he brought. Here is Netanel ben Tzuar of Issachar, and here is what he brought. Each name. Each tribe. Each offering. Held fully.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that even though the offerings looked identical, they were not actually identical. Each offering was brought by a different person, from a different tribe, with a different spiritual intention and a different role within the Jewish people. The same object can mean something different when it comes from a different soul.

And still, they each humbled themselves to offer the exact same thing.

They did not take that moment as an opportunity to outdo each other. They did not turn their distinctiveness into competition. They did not say: my tribe’s contribution must be bigger, brighter, more original, more visible.

They brought who they were.

And they brought it toward the same Mishkan.

What We Do With Difference

That is shalom as wholeness.

Not sameness.

Not bland agreement.

Not the erasure of difference.

Shalom is the mutual recognition that every part belongs, every part is seen, and every part is responsible to the whole.

It is the ability to say: my tribe has a name, a history, a gift, a wound, a song, a way of serving God. And so does yours. And neither of us can build the Mishkan alone.

That is what allows God’s voice to be heard again from between the Keruvim.

And it is what we need right now.

The Jewish world is fractured in so many directions. Internally, we argue about who counts, who belongs, what is authentic, whose Torah is real, whose pain matters, whose contribution should be centered. Externally, we are navigating a moment that tests us in every way.

Parshat Naso does not ask us to pretend those differences are not real. It does not ask us to collapse every tribe into one generic community. The Torah does the opposite. It writes each name. Each tribe. Each offering. Again and again and again.

But it also asks us what we are doing with our difference.

Are we using it to compete?

To rank?

To resent?

To prove that our tribe is the one that really matters?

Or are we willing to do what the Nesiim did: bring our own name, our own history, our own pain, our own beauty, our own offering — and still place it in service of one shared Mishkan?

The Peace That Holds Us Together

The Torah writes out those twelve identical gift lists because Judaism needs all twelve tribes. We need every lineage, every melody, every argument, every form of longing, every way Jews have learned to survive.

But we also need to remember that we are one people.

If our diversity came through rupture, then our task is to turn it toward wholeness.

If our differences were born through exile, then our task is to bring them home.

If every tribe has something only it can give, then the work of Jewish life is not to erase those offerings, and not to weaponize them, but to bring them together before God.

That is the peace that holds us together.

Not a fragile peace built on avoiding difference.

A deeper peace.

A peace made of every tribe, every name, every offering, every wound, every gift, brought together toward the place where God’s voice can be heard again.

And through this work, may we merit the final blessing of the Kohanim: May God grant us peace.

Wishing you a beautiful Shabbos, full of love for your fellow Jew and for the universe that Hashem created.

Warmly,
Miriam

Shabbat Shalom.

If this newsletter resonated with you, please consider sharing it! With a group, or community you are part of or with anyone you think might enjoy it.

A Note on Language

I use She/Her for God. Genesis 1:27 teaches that humans, male and female, were created in God’s image. Genesis Rabbah 8:1 teaches that the original human was both; Eve was the feminine part separated out. My experience has been one of forgetting that God’s image contains the feminine. This essay is one attempt to remember.

As always, take what resonates, leave what doesn’t, come back when you’re ready.

And a note: I use She/Her pronouns for God because Genesis 1:27 tells us the feminine was always part of the image, and sometimes it feels like we have forgotten that.

For a printer friendly version, click here.

This week, I found myself looking at a pattern—a cold, recurring piece of data in my own life, and realizing I might need to change.

It has happened three times now, in entirely different environments, with completely different people, but the script is so identical it’s embarrassing.

Here is how it goes: I enter a room with a magnificent vision. I have strong opinions on exactly how a project should unfold, and I know the absolute best way to make it happen. But the moment the group decides to take a detour—the moment someone suggests doing it a different way—a tiny, dramatic switch flips inside my brain. I throw my hands up. I walk away.

And as I’m stomping off, I paint myself as the tragic victim of a hostile takeover. They don’t want to do it, I tell myself. They don’t value my time. They don’t respect me. It is a beautiful, deeply comforting narrative that allows me to quit a project while keeping my sense of superiority entirely intact. But by the third time, even I couldn’t buy my own garbage.

I finally sat down with a rabbi and confessed. “I think my pride is hijacking my life,” I said. “How do I fix this?”

When I told him this, expecting perhaps a conceptual lecture on self-effacement, meditating on the idea of being “dust and ashes,” he offered something far more grounding. “I have experienced the exact same thing,” he said. And then he shifted the center of gravity. He told me that the remedy is to remember what you are actually trying to accomplish—to look at the grander movement of the world you want to bring about, to focus entirely on that destination, and to refuse to place yourself at the center of the frame. It was exactly what I needed to hear.

Naturally, because the Divine helps us when we take steps forward in our journey of growth, the moment I opened the door to admitting I needed help, I was gifted with texts and lectures that directly addressed my pride. And it turns out that right before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the holiday when the Jewish people celebrate receiving the Torah, is the perfect moment to learn humility.

Dignity & Humility

The Rambam—Maimonides, one of the great architects of Jewish law and thought—makes a surprising distinction about leadership. Public roles sometimes require public dignity. A king, judge, or teacher may need to carry themselves with honor, not because their ego deserves it, but because the role itself represents something larger than the individual.

But he is careful to note that this honor does not belong to the individual; it belongs to the institution they represent, for it is part of a collective framework that holds a society together. Inside the skin, behind the robes, the leader must remain utterly humble. As he writes about kings, “at all times, his conduct should be marked by a spirit of great humility.” (Laws of Kings 2.1-5)

When he shifts to Hilchos De’os (The Laws of Character Traits), his psychological diagnosis becomes even sharper. For most human traits, he advocates the famous Aristotelian golden mean—the middle path. But for two specific distortions of the spirit, he demands an extreme, total departure: anger and pride.

“Pride,” he writes, “is akin to forgetting God.” Anger, he quotes the sages as saying, is like worshipping idols.

Why are they categorized as forms of heresy? Because both pride and anger rest on the same theological illusion: the belief that I am the one who ultimately matters.

When I throw my hands up and walk away from a project because it isn’t unfolding according to my design, I am committing a small, quiet act of idolatry. I am treating my ego as the ultimate arbiter of reality. I am forgetting that there is a Source greater than myself, and that I am merely invited to participate in its unfolding.

The Channel of the Infinite

This brings us to Moses, who is the absolute undisputed heavyweight champion of humility. We sometimes think humility means walking around with your head down, pretending you’re nothing, a nobody, only bad at things. But to pretend you do not have gifts, resources, or power is not humility; it is a distortion of reality, an existential dishonesty.

The archetype of humility, Moses, didn’t do that. He kept an incredibly accurate inventory of his own strengths. He knew he was a genius, he knew he was a leader, and he knew he had a direct line to the Creator of the universe. His humility didn’t come from denying his gifts; it came from a radical understanding of ownership. He didn’t own his gifts; he was just entrusted with them.

Here is the real litmus test of his humility—the psychological guardrail that kept him humble through all the impact he had: he understood that possessing a gift is easy, but using it correctly is the challenge. Moses looked at his own immense talents and recognized the constant truth: if anyone else in the desert had been handed his exact brain, gifts, and resources, they might have done a much better job with them than he did.

That is how you stay humble when you know you’re good at something. You don’t pretend you’re untalented. You just recognize that you didn’t manufacture the tool, you’re just the custodian on duty, and it is up to you to maximize its use for the benefit of the world.

Eavesdropping on God

Once you make that mental shift—once you stop trying to hijack the source and claim it as personal property—something incredible happens to your brain. Your creative drive gets completely unlocked.

When you remove your ego from the room, you stop worrying about whether the project is “yours” or whether people are validating your genius. You become a channel, a pipeline.

Creativity, in this sense, is really just the art of eavesdropping on God. – YY Jacobson

When you are genuinely eavesdropping on the Infinite, your ideas don’t dry up, because you aren’t drawing from the shallow, muddy puddle of your own self-regard. You are plugged into an endless current.

The Back Row of the Lecture Hall

There is a story in the Talmud (a core text of Jewish law and stories dating to ~500CE) Menachot page 29b, that captures the ultimate case of imposter syndrome.

God gives Moses a time-travel ticket to the future to sit in on a lecture by a Torah master, Rabbi Akiva. Moses walks into the academy and sits in the very back row, sweating through his robes, and realizes he has absolutely no idea what Akiva is talking about. The man who literally received the law at Sinai is totally lost in the advanced seminar. He is completely demoralized.

But what is actually breaking Moses isn’t just the confusion. It’s a deeper anxiety about the nature of ego and creativity.

Akiva was a man of constant reinvention. He came from a family of non-Jewish people. He didn’t learn the Hebrew alphabet until he was forty. He built an academy of twenty-four thousand students, watched them all die in a plague, and then dusted himself off and found new students, to help shape the tradition that would be carried forward for every generation. At every stage, he had the courage to rise. His mind never stopped pulsating. He was always seeking, always birthing new ideas, always flowing.

The Sages capture his approach through a beautiful image from Proverbs: your springs will gush forth in public squares. Not a cistern, which holds still water, collected and stored. A spring, which is alive because it is moving, and moving because it comes from somewhere. Living water has a source. It flows from that source, through the earth, toward whoever is thirsty.

We all know the difference between someone who is brilliant and knows it, and someone who is brilliant and somehow makes you feel like you could be brilliant too. Akiva was the second kind. That’s what living water feels like—it doesn’t collect in one place, it moves toward you.

And that is the test of all real creativity: does the water know where it comes from? Does a brilliant person remember that their brilliance is not self-generated, but received? Moses could see Akiva’s dazzling originality. What he needed to hear was whether Akiva still knew the Source.

The punchline of the story arrives when Akiva’s students ask him, “Rabbi, how do you know this law is true?” And Akiva answers, without hesitation: It is a law given to Moses at Sinai.

Moses exhales.

Because in that one sentence, Akiva revealed what mattered. All of the creativity, all of the reinvention, all of the living water—it was all coming from the Source, from Torah. Akiva knew the ideas were never his, he was just eavesdropping on God. Every idea he generated was not a performance of his own genius; it was his way of saying, I heard the voice, and I am passing it on. The fountain was flowing, yes. But he was not the spring. He was the channel the water traveled through so it could reach the people.

This is the danger in any spiritual or creative work: even God can become material for the ego. We can turn learning, leadership, and even service into a stage for our own brilliance. The question is whether our gifts keep leading us back to the Source, or only back to ourselves.

Bringing the Lessons Back to the Room

This, I realize, is exactly how I fix the identical, embarrassing script playing out in my own life. The next time I enter a room with a magnificent vision, and the group decides to take a detour, I have to choose a different response. Instead of flipping that dramatic switch, throwing my hands up, and walking away to nurse a comforting narrative of victimhood, I have to step out of the center of the frame.

I can choose to lay down the project of being the main character, and become instead what we were always meant to be: a vessel for a light we don’t own, tuned to a frequency that has been broadcasting since Sinai. If the project shifts direction, it doesn’t mean they don’t value my time; it just means the water is flowing through a different path, and my job is simply to help it reach the destination.

The path of the righteous, as Maimonides writes, is to accept slights without slighting others, to hear criticism without answering back, to act from love and find joy even in difficulty. “And those who love God,” the versein Judges says, “are like the sun when it comes out in its strength.”

When we remove our ego from the center of the room, we don’t disappear. We become radiant. We become a channel of warmth that lifts up everyone around us. We become a pipeline for a light that doesn’t belong to us, but is desperate to be shared.

May we never lose the awareness that the Truths we discover are a deeper Voice speaking to us, directly and personally. And may the simple act of listening—really listening, with the cup emptied and the agenda set aside—be enough to bring us back into alignment, tapped in, heart open, and ready to shine.

Have a wonderful Shavuot,
Miriam

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, but for all intents and purposes, to the modern, secular mind, the story of the “Messiah” has died. The word has become a relic of a superstitious past, a punchline, or a reminder of some wacko who attempted to commit murder with kool-aid. We don’t believe in a Messiah because we don’t believe in magic.

But in the Jewish intellectual tradition, the Messiah—the Mashiach—was not a fairy tale. It was a principle. It was the core promise that the Divine Source would one day bring heaven to earth, not through the suspension of nature, but through nature’s perfection. Jewish belief in a Messiah held the conviction that history has a direction, and that the “end of days” must not be a catastrophe, but a culmination. It is the belief that a world of justice, peace, and direct communication with the Source is not a fantasy, but a destination we are meant to build towards.

The tragedy of our current moment is that we are standing at the threshold of that destination, holding the keys in our hands, and we are choosing to ignore the lock.

The Architecture of the Curse

Look up. There is a certain cold reality to the sky over Israel in 2026. We see a canopy of interceptors that track rockets and respond to them with fire. We call it the Iron Dome, and we speak of it with a justified, secular pride. It is a masterpiece of human engineering, the ultimate proof of our ingenuity and will to survive.

But what if we looked closer? What if the Iron Dome is actually the Divine Source wrapping Her holy home in protective materials? Imagine the Shekhinah, seeing Her children in a state of fractured vulnerability, swaddling the land in a layer of Divine Glory to ensure we aren’t shattered. It is an act of profound, motherly grace. She has used our own engineering—our own “fingers’ work”—to build a temporary sanctuary in a violent world.

But no one wants the rockets. No one wants the iron. And there is a chilling irony here that we have chosen to ignore. In the closing warning of Sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus, in a section called Behar-Bechukotai, the Torah describes the physical manifestation of a broken covenant. It describes a people who have lost their way, and it promises that God will bring punishments to the land, as a warning. Hoping that the people will change their ways. One of those punishments is a sky that reflects the spiritual state:

וְנָתַתִּ֤י אֶת־שְׁמֵיכֶם֙ כַּבַּרְזֶ֔ל וְאֶֽת־אַרְצְכֶ֖ם כַּנְּחֻשָֽׁה “I will break your proud glory. I will make your skies like iron.” (Leviticus 26:19)

We have become so brilliant, so survival-focused, that we have forged the iron and pointed it at the stars, but we have forgotten that needing iron in the sky is itself a heartbreak.

Since the catastrophe of the Holocaust, God has performed incredible miracles, masked them in nature, and we cannot keep ignoring them.

We live under a dome of our own making and retreat into bunkers beneath the earth—trapped between a ceiling of iron and a floor of stone. We are living the literal architecture of the curse described by the prophets: a people hiding in the holes of the rocks because they are too afraid to stand under an open sky.

Some people think this a win. Celebrating the fact that we have optimized our own isolation. We are managing the mechanics of the curse so perfectly that we have forgotten to ask what the blessing was supposed to be, or why the sky might be filled with iron in the first place.

The Overlooked Blessing

Reading just a few verses earlier in Behar-Bechukotai, we find those blessings—the promise of what happens when alignment with the Divine is maintained. When we act in the ways the Torah asks us to. The verse describes an abundance so overwhelming it borders on the surreal:

“Your threshing shall overtake the vintage, and the vintage shall overtake the sowing; you shall eat your bread to the full and dwell in your land securely.” (Leviticus 26:5)

For our ancestors, this was an impossible dream. It was the vision of a world where the cycle of labor is so blessed that the harvest never ends. And yet, we live in that world today. We live in a world of such profound surplus that we throw out food simply because we are “not in the mood” for it. We toss away “perfectly good” leftovers, an act that would have been unthinkable to any generation before us.

We are living in the literal fulfillment of the blessing promised, yet because it arrived in the form of a supermarket and a supply chain, we refuse to see the hand of the Divine in it.

The Prophecy in the Laboratory

But this erasure of scarcity is not limited to the pantry; it has moved into the bone and the blood. We have moved from mastering the earth to mastering the flesh, and in doing so, we have accidentally literalized the ancient poetry of Isaiah.

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then the lame man shall leap as a deer.” (Isaiah 35:5-6)

To an ancient audience, these verses read as pure miracles. God coming down to earth, waving a magic wand, and allowing the blind to see. And all the rest.

But today, to a modern doctor, they read like a surgical schedule. We have cochlear implants that allow the deaf to hear the music of the world. We have laser surgery that peels away the darkness from the blind. We have robotic, bionic limbs that allow those who were “lame” not just to walk, but to run and leap.

The tragedy is that we look at a person walking on a prosthetic limb and we see “engineering.” We don’t see the fulfillment of a 2,700-year-old promise. We see medical success; we fail to see the Mashiach in the machine. Because these things came through the laboratory and the farm rather than a thunderbolt from the clouds, we have convinced ourselves they aren’t miracles.

We have become so accustomed to our own brilliance, that the Messianic era has arrived, and we are simply too caught up to notice.

The Natural Redemption

Our tradition has long demanded that we look for the hand of the Divine not in the clouds or the magicians, but in the gears of history and nature. Maimonides—the Rambam—the twelfth-century philosopher and rabbi who codified the entirety of Jewish law, not just the pieces practiced today, refused to let the Messianic idea descend into magic. He documented the laws of the Torah as a complete system, including those intended for a sovereign state we hadn’t seen in a millennium. In his final chapter on the Laws of Kings, he is unsentimental:

“Do not presume that in the Messianic age any facet of the world’s nature will change.” (Hilchot Melachim 12:1)

The Rambam was telling us that redemption will not look like a shattering of reality; it will look like the logic of history. It will feel, to the people experiencing it, entirely natural. He couldn’t describe the technology of our era, but he promised that it would follow the “custom of the world.” Turns out, he was right.

The Jewish intellectual tradition speaks of two distinct stages to this process: Mashiach ben Yosef (the Messiah son of Joseph) and Mashiach ben David (the Messiah son of David). Joseph, in the book of Genesis, was not a miracle worker. He was a bureaucrat, an economist, and an architect of survival. He read the lean years in a dream and responded by building a national infrastructure of grain storage. He didn’t wait for God to rain bread from the sky; Joseph built the granaries.

We are living in the era of Joseph right now. My rebbe, Rav Chaim Pollock—the head of Michlalah, the Jerusalem seminary I attended—reminded me of this through the teachings of his own teacher, Rav Aharon Soloveichik ZTL. Rav Soloveichik spoke of Mashiach ben Yosef often, specifically in the context of loss and the labor of building. He referred to specific people during their eulogies, as “Mashiach ben Joseph.” These were people who passed away too soon, but gave their lives in service of the Jewish people’s redemption in this era.

Joseph’s work was to create the system. He built the processes, the government, that would have enough food to feed a starving region for seven years.

In Israel today, we have the state. We have the military. We have the high-gloss success of the “Start-up Nation.” But we have yet to perform the pivot from a purely secular government to a sacred one. We are, quite rightfully, terrified of the prospect of religious coercion—the heavy hand of the state enforcing the private soul. But that cannot be what God is seeking. Redemption must be then a slower, more rigorous thing. The patient translation of Torah ethics into the mechanics of governance, asking difficult questions, together, to implement a system where justice for all is not an accident of policy, but the blueprint itself.

I know this sounds like a tall order, but imagine a system designed to prevent the food waste we currently ignore, an infrastructure that stores our surplus for Shemitta so that the land can actually rest without the nation going hungry. That is the work of Joseph: taking the vision of the Torah and turning it into a policy, a granary, a supply chain.

The era of Mashiach ben Yosef is not a free pass to wait; it is a mandate to build. We are letting the moment pass because we are still looking for a “white unicorn” to arrive and fix the world with a snap of its fingers. We are ignoring the fact that the tools to make the Torah real—to build a society of radical justice and sustainable peace—are already in our pockets. We have the sovereignty. Now we need the systems.

The Mountain vs. The Wall

Tomorrow, Friday, May 15, 2026, is Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, and it is a holiday that marks the 58th anniversary from when a Jewish led army won sovereignty of the Temple Mount.

The Temple Mount is the holiest place in Jewish tradition. It is the very spot we are told that God’s presence reaches the earth and can be directly interacted with. It is, quite literally, the intersection of the finite and the infinite.

It is no wonder that so many nations have found spirituality, and wondrous events, there.

But no other religion was asked to carry the laws of the Temple Mount. We spent the entire book of Vayikra (Leviticus) describing the commanded service. It is very specific. Only one man is permitted to go into the holiest place, and only on the holiest day, and only wearing specific clothing, and in order to do one specific action. Interacting with God in this way is not something done lightly.

Here is the 2500 year old prophecy, from Isaiah, about the Messianic Era, and this mountain.

“In the days to come, the Mount of God’s House shall stand firm above the mountains... and all the nations shall gaze on it with joy. And the many peoples shall go and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the Mount of God... that She may instruct us in Her ways.’” (Isaiah 2:2-3)

The vision of the service being done on the Temple Mount was never an exclusive one; it was a universal invitation to the nations to step out of their own tribal noise and into a singular clarity. And on Yom Yerushalyim, God gave us a pathway to bring that service back.

Yet, in the very moment God granted us a miraculous success in the war for Jerusalem, a war we won while being attacked on three fronts, in that very moment we had a profound failure of the imagination. We made no attempt to discuss the significance of the place—not just for ourselves, but for the entire world.

We returned the keys to the administration of the mount almost immediately, but more tragically, we returned the idea of it. We ignored its holiness and retreated to the Kotel (the Western Wall), acting as if we were still in exile, clutching a retaining wall—a fragment of a ruin—because ruins are easier to manage than revolutions.

At the base of those stones, we have fractured into fifty different customs, fifty different ways to argue over our local, tribal identities. We stay at the Wall because the Mountain is too demanding. The Mountain requires a conversation with the world that we have been too afraid to start.

We never had the conversation of what God wants the people of Jerusalem to do with the Temple Mount. We have never stood before the nations and said: This place is exceptionally holy. We have carried the memory of it through every fire and every exile for a hundred generations, not to keep it for ourselves, but to offer it as the place where you, too, can connect to the Source. We handed back the keys and didn’t even attempt to bring this type of peace to the world.

We settled for the security of an Iron Dome while ignoring the architecture of the Mountain, which Isaiah promises is the only thing that will finally bring peace:

“Thus [God] will judge among the nations And arbitrate for the many peoples, And they shall beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up Sword against nation; They shall never again know war.” (Isaiah 2:4)

If we could return to the holiness of the mountain, if we could return to having direct communication with the Divine, our tradition promises that wars will end. That the Divine will arbitrate and there will be no need for weapons.

To the modern ear, this sounds absurd, a poetic hallucination. But we must remember: to a person living a century ago, the idea that the blind could see or the deaf could hear through the work of human hands was equally “insane.” We have already accepted those miracles because we call them science. Why are we so afraid to accept the potential miracle of the Mountain?

What if we let our sense of shock or our cynical awe be dispelled for just a minute?

What if we stopped clutching our fifty different customs at the Wall and actually told the world that there is a place where we can all talk to the Source?

We have sovereignty. We have the keys. We just haven’t had the courage to open the door, for even a conversation.

The Idolatry of Ingenuity

Isaiah, just a few verses after describing the promise of the Temple Mount, writing with the sharp, unsentimental eye of a witness, describes a society that looks startlingly like our own. He writes”

“Their land is full of silver and gold, There is no limit to their treasures;
Their land is full of horses, There is no limit to their chariots.
And Their land is full of idols;
They bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have wrought.” (Isaiah 2:7-8)

This is the crisis of the modern age. We worship our technology. We trust our interceptors more than our Covenant. We have become so enamored with what our “own fingers have wrought” that we have stopped expecting anything from God. We think we saved ourselves. But Isaiah warns that “human haughtiness” will be humbled. We can choose to be humbled by the awe of the Mountain now, or we can wait to be reminded of God’s power when we are being punished.

Why would we wait for the moment where we are forced to hide in the rocks in fear? Why can’t we open our eyes to the miracle we are currently standing in?

The Grace of the Empty Hand

This week’s Torah portion enters the book of Bamidbar—the Wilderness.

The desert is the place where the story of our own importance dies. The wilderness is “ownerless,” and our sages teach, why did we receive the Torah in the desert, it is because to receive the Torah, one must become like the desert: empty. You cannot receive a new transmission when your hands are full. The forty years in the desert were a long, slow “emptying” of the slave mentality, preparing the people to receive a vision of a perfected world.

We are currently a people who are too “full.” But unlike the generation of the desert, we are full of our own cleverness.

The invitation of the Bamidbar, of the wilderness, is to allow ourselves to be humbled. To allow ourselves to start fresh, and accept the Torah anew.

The paradox of our current moment is that we are a sovereign people still reading the map of an exile.

For two thousand years, Jewish law—the Torah—was a survival manual. It was designed to keep a people intact while they were scattered, a portable homeland made of ink and memory. We became experts in the laws of the kitchen, the laws of the Sabbath, the laws of how to remain a Jew when the world around you is hostile. We mastered the Torah of the ghetto and the shtetl, and we did it so well that we survived.

But we are no longer there. We are in the State of Israel. We have the land, the language, and the sovereignty. And I believe we are now being called to expand our vision. We can no longer afford to let the laws of a sovereign society—the laws of the Mountain, the laws of a sacred economy, the laws of the Temple—lie dormant on the shelf, covered in the dust of centuries.

I believe we are ready to make that part of the Torah alive again. We need a new rigor, a debate as fierce and as public as the ones that built the Talmud, but focused on the weight of being a nation. We don’t have to wait for permission to exist anymore; we have the keys. Now, I believe we must find the courage to treat the Torah not just as a manual for survival, but as a blueprint for the perfected world Hashem promised us.

If we can find the courage to do that—to take the devotion we’ve poured into our local customs and offer it toward a shared national destiny—we might finally see the vision that Isaiah described.

I hope we might finally look to the Mountain and see not a source of conflict, but a source of peace so radiant that the “swords” of our modern world become obsolete.

We are standing in the wilderness of our success, waiting for a sign. But the invitation has already been issued. It is a call to step out of the shadows of our exile and into the clarity of our destiny.

בֵּ֖ית יַעֲקֹ֑ב לְכ֥וּ וְנֵלְכָ֖ה בְּא֥וֹר יְהֹוָֽה׃

O House of Jacob! Come, let us walk by the light of GOD.

• Isaiah (2:5)

Shabbat Shalom,

Miriam

A note on language: I use She/Her for God. Genesis 1:27 teaches humans, male and female, were created in God’s image. Genesis Rabbah 8:1 teaches the original human was both; Eve was the feminine part separated out. My experience has been one of forgetting that God’s image contains the feminine. This essay is one attempt to remember.

If you liked this essay — please share it. (Also, like and comment!)

A note on language: Throughout this essay, I use feminine pronouns (She/Her) when referring to God. In Genesis 1:27 we are taught that humans, male and female, were created in God's image. The Midrash Genesis Rabbah 8:1 teaches that the original human was both male and female, and that Eve was the separation of the female part from the male part that remained as Adam. My experience has been one of forgotting that the image of God contains the feminine. This essay is one attempt to remember.

A Case for Running Shemitta as a Modern Test

There is a law in the Torah so economically disruptive, so structurally equalizing, so hostile to the logic of capitalism, that it is shocking secular revolutionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries missed it.

Revolutionaries invented socialism. They created communism. Their motivations were often good. They were not asking the wrong questions. They were asking urgent human questions: Is there a way for debt not to accumulate forever? Could there be a world where food belongs, in some meaningful way, to everyone? Can land be used without being absolutely possessed? Can a society build rest into the structure of its economy?

These are good questions. They are also Torah questions.

And the Torah does not merely ask them. It gives us a framework for approaching them

The approach is called Shemitta.

What Shemitta Actually Says

Every seven years, the Torah commands the land of Israel to rest.

Not people. The land itself.

כִּי תָבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי נֹתֵן לָכֶם וְשָׁבְתָה הָאָרֶץ שַׁבָּת לַה׳

When you enter the land that I am giving to you, the land shall rest, a Shabbos for Hashem (God).

שֵׁ֤שׁ שָׁנִים֙ תִּזְרַ֣ע שָׂדֶ֔ךָ וְשֵׁ֥שׁ שָׁנִ֖ים תִּזְמֹ֣ר כַּרְמֶ֑ךָ וְאָסַפְתָּ֖ אֶת־תְּבוּאָתָֽהּ׃ וּבַשָּׁנָ֣ה הַשְּׁבִיעִ֗ת שַׁבַּ֤ת שַׁבָּתוֹן֙ יִהְיֶ֣ה לָאָ֔רֶץ שַׁבָּ֖ת לַה׳ שָֽׂדְךָ֙ לֹ֣א תִזְרָ֔ע וְכַרְמְךָ֖ לֹ֥א תִזְמֹֽר׃

Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in its yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath for God: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.

Every seven years, ordinary ownership is interrupted. The land still has an owner in the legal sense, but the owner’s usual powers are radically limited. She may not work the land in the ordinary way. She may not treat its produce as an ordinary private commercial asset. She may not keep others from eating what grows on its own.

The field remains hers. But the produce no longer behaves like private property.

A farmer may bring food into her house for her family and for her animals, but not as a hoarder, not as an owner extracting profit, and not in a way that cuts the poor or the stranger off from the field. Whatever grows on its own can be eaten by anyone.

The Torah is explicit that the produce grown should be equally available to the maidservant, the hired worker, the stranger, and the owner, with equal availability for farm animals, and the wild beast of the field.

This is not charity.

Charity preserves the hierarchy between giver and receiver. Shemitta disrupts it. When you stand before a garden of fresh fruit or vegetables that are available to be picked and eaten, it causes excitement and wonder. It is different than being handed something by a benefactor. The landowner is not being generous. She is being reminded that it doesn’t really belong to her.

This is not metaphor.

It is law.

And Shemitta also has a financial dimension. At the end of the seventh year, outstanding loans between Jews are released. That institution, Shemitat Kesafim, is its own radical interruption of economic accumulation. The Torah imagines a society in which debt does not simply roll forward forever, generation after generation, until some families become permanently trapped and others permanently enriched.

Human ownership is real. But it is never absolute.

Today, there is no Shemitta

In practice, the overwhelming majority of Israeli agriculture does not observe Shemitta. During sabbatical years, most farming continues as usual through a legal mechanism called heter mechira, in which Jewish-owned land is nominally sold to a non-Jew for the duration of the year, allowing all ordinary agricultural work to proceed.

The heter mechira was introduced in the late nineteenth century, when early agricultural settlements faced genuine survival questions, and it has been relied upon ever since.

A small number of farmers do observe Shemitta fully, at real personal cost, but they are the exception.

For most of Israeli society, the sabbatical year passes without any meaningful economic or agricultural disruption. The commandment is on the books. It is not, in any serious sense, being tested. The question is whether we are still in the emergency that justified the workaround, or whether we now have the resources, the knowledge, and the sovereignty to begin asking what Shemitta might look like if we actually ran it.

The Objection to Shemitta, and Its Answer

The obvious objection to realizing Shemitta is practical, and at the root of the heter mechira.

If no one farms for a year, what does everyone eat?

The Torah anticipated this question with striking directness. The Torah does not say: trust the system and figure it out. Instead, God makes a promise:

“I will provide My blessing for you in the sixth year, and it shall yield produce for three years.”

The sixth year will produce enough. The land will compensate in advance.

Two Inheritances, Both Incomplete

Modern Jewish history gave us two inheritances, each powerful but both incomplete.

The secular Zionists and socialists understood that Jewish return to the land must not merely reproduce European inequality in Hebrew. It asked real Torah questions, even when it no longer spoke in Torah language: how do we prevent land from becoming the possession of the powerful few? How do we make food, labor, and dignity available to everyone? How do we build a society not governed only by accumulation?

The tragedy is that many Jews who asked those questions no longer experienced Torah as a place where those answers could be found.

But perhaps that was not only because they had rejected Torah.

Perhaps it was because the Torah they encountered had already been narrowed by exile. It had passed through centuries in which Jews lacked sovereignty, lacked land, lacked safety, and sometimes even lacked uncensored access to their own books. A national Torah had been preserved under non-national conditions. It is not surprising that many modern Jews could no longer see its political imagination.

A Jew looking at that version of Torah could understandably feel that it did not contain the tools for building a just society, feeding the poor, organizing land, managing debt, or imagining sovereignty. So she went elsewhere. She reached for socialism, nationalism, liberalism, revolution, and European political theory.

But what if some of what she was looking for had been in Torah all along?

The Orthodox world preserved the Torah itself. It carried the texts, laws, arguments, and practices through exile with extraordinary fidelity. That achievement should not be minimized. Jews guarded commandments they could not fully practice, studied national laws without national power, and preserved books that hostile governments sometimes censored or suppressed.

But preservation has its own danger. There are places where censorship, exile, and political powerlessness shaped the way texts were printed, studied, emphasized, and understood. Sometimes we inherited not only the Torah, but habits of reading formed under constraint.

We must consider that a people that survives by putting its head down can forget, after a while, to look up, to use fresh eyes. A temporary accommodation becomes part of the canon, passed down. A feeling shaken off.

That is the question Shemitta now places before us.

The Proposal

This is what I propose. The next shemitta starts in September 2028.

What if, over the next two years, we gathered operations experts, agricultural scientists, food-distribution leaders, philanthropists, and rabbinic authorities to ask what it would take to run a serious, documented Shemitta at scale?

Not as a symbolic gesture.

Not as a workaround.

With genuinely good intention.

Is there a way to harvest the food and distribute it for free to grocery markets (shuks), so that everyone around the country has access to free produce distributed according to Shemitta principles. It might look like partnering with organizations, like Keren Hashviis, that are already helping farmers keep Shemitta.

But it would also need to be a spiritual experiment. What happens to a farmer who spends a year relating to their land not as a possession to be maximized, but as a trust from God? What happens to a community when food is encountered not only as a commodity, but as blessing? What happens when rest, restraint, faith, and shared dependence become visible in public life?

The next Shemitta year begins in September 2028. That is close enough to be urgent and far enough away to begin, and it is not beyond modern logistical capacity. We coordinate food banks, international aid shipments, supermarket supply chains, and agricultural exports. A networked system of Shemitta farms with partnered distribution organizations could generate real data.

• Does fallowing the land increase yield in future years?

• What are the actual economic costs?

• What forms of advance planning reduce the burden on farmers and the state?

• Can Shemitta produce be distributed with dignity?

• Does open access to food reduce food insecurity in nearby communities?

• What does a year of agricultural rest do to a farmer’s relationship with her neighbors, workers, and surrounding society?

We do not need to be certain of the answers before we begin.

That is the point of running an experiment.

American Jews, who remain among the most significant sources of financial and political support for Israel, have largely accepted the political Zionist framework as the only available one. But it is not the only one. The Torah offers a framework that is not right-wing or left-wing, not religious-coercive or secular-dismissive. She is older than any of those categories, and She is remarkably specific.

Rather than debating the theory forever, we could simply try a piece of it and see what we learn.

The Only Way to Know

Every serious social experiment in history required people willing to go first, not because they were certain, but because they were curious and faithful enough to find out.

The kibbutz founders were willing to go first. They did not know it would work. They tried, documented, adjusted, and built evidence.

There are American Jews with the resources, passion, and Israel connections to begin this experiment now. There are Israeli farmers who have quietly observed full Shemitta for decades, at real economic cost, and have not starved. There are agricultural scientists who could document what actually happens to land when it rests. There are food distribution organizations that could track how Shemitta produce moves through a community. There are rabbis who could help determine what can be done seriously, faithfully, and without fantasy.

What we do not yet have is a serious, modern, publicly documented attempt to run the experiment at scale.

Shemitta was preserved in exile as sacred law and managed in modern Israel through legal accommodation. The next stage is not to condemn either move, but to ask whether Jewish sovereignty now allows, and perhaps obligates, us to attempt Shemitta as a real social, agricultural, and spiritual experiment.

The next Shemitta year begins in September 2028. That is not abstract. It is a date on a calendar.

We have spent generations asking whether Torah can speak to Jewish sovereignty. Shemitta is one of the clearest possible tests. Not a slogan. Not a fantasy. A law, a land, a people, and a year.

I do not have a program to offer. I have a question I cannot stop thinking about. And I think it deserves more people thinking about it.

If you are one of them, I would love to hear from you.

Wishing you a wonderful, thoughtful Shabbos,

Miriam

A note on language: Throughout this essay, I use feminine pronouns (She/Her) to refer to God. At the very beginning of the creation story, the Torah says that on the sixth day humanity was created in God's image, male and female, 'zachar u'nekeva,' God created them (Genesis 1:27). God contains multitudes, and part of that multitude is the feminine, which I believe has been forgotten.

This is how I write my parsha essays. On Sunday, I read the parsha in Hebrew, try to translate it into English, use Rashi and other commentaries for help, and aim to understand the text in its simplest form. I write down a list of questions, and try to answer them throughout the week. Like, why are all the Jewish holidays listed after a description of blemishes permitted as part of an offering to God?

Last year, the parsha’s focus on blemishes was enough to inspire me. (For my essay from last year on Parshat Emor, see here.)

Recently, I added another step in preparing my essay: I listen to at least two parsha podcasts. I always listen to the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem’s podcast from this year, sometimes the one from last year too, and lately I have been studying Chabad Lubavitch Chassidus, the Chassidic approach to Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. (I grew up in that world, and never learned it properly. It is so powerful.) For the last several weeks I have been learning the Tanya, a foundational Chassidic text, taught by Rabbi YY Jacobson, and listening to at least one parsha essay on theyeshiva.net. As this is happening, I’m trying to integrate what I’m learning, pulling together the ideas that resonate.

This week, a few things grabbed me.

From Pardes, I learned: Jewish holidays are meeting times with God.

From Chabad, I was reminded: God works through the ordinary, and we can choose to see it.

We Send the Invitation

The holidays are all listed in this week’s parsha. The entire biblical Jewish calendar, in chronological order from Passover to Sukkot, including Shavuot and the high holidays. All of it.

In this week’s parsha, the holidays are called “mo’adim.” Rabbi Rafael Polisuk pointed out that a mo’ad does not merely translate to “time” or “holiday,” it also translates to “meeting.” Like the “Ohel Mo’ad,” the tent of meeting, the place in the desert where God’s presence rested and where people went to speak with God. The Ohel Mo’ad was a place to meet God. The mo’adim are times to meet God.

Here is the verse that introduces them:

Mo’adei Hashem, asher tikr’u otam mikra’ei kodesh, eileh hem mo’adai. The meetings of God, that you will call holy, these are My meetings. (Vayikra 23:2)

The word “mo’ad” is repeated twice in this verse. The ancient commentators ask: why the double language? “Meetings of God” at the beginning of the verse, and “My meetings” at the end. Why say it twice?

They answer is because the Jewish people set the calendar, and each time the word 'meeting' is repeated, it teaches us a different way we influence when the holidays arrive. The first indicates that we decide when the leap year will be, whether to add an extra month to the calendar. The second is because we determine the start of each new month. God commanded us for part of it, but we choose the final dates. We send out the final invitation. And then God says: these are My meetings, too. I will be there.

Look closer at that phrase sandwiched in the middle of the two declarations of meeting. “The meetings of God, that you will call holy.“ Not “that are holy.” Not “that I have made holy.” That you will call holy. It is an assignment. It is up to us. We are the ones who make these times sacred.

If we do not set the calendar, God will not come. The holidays are not merely decrees handed down from on high. They are appointments that we partner to make happen, with the Divine. She gave us the agenda. We send the final invitation and set the table. And She will show up.

She Is Already Here

That was all theology. Now let me tell you what I felt.

I had a chaotic day getting home from Boynton Beach, Florida on Wednesday. I was scheduled on a 12:30 flight so I could be with my mom for my nephew’s bris, but still make it back to New York in time for a Jewish women’s networking dinner.

On my way to the airport, at 10:30am, I got a notification: my flight had been delayed by six hours. The airline had no other flights leaving from that airport that day, so I was going to miss the dinner.

As I was waiting in the airport, I talked to another passenger who learned the reason our flight had been delayed. It was because a flight attendant and a gate agent had a miscommunication and the emergency slide deployed, and it was going to take the rest of the day to do all the safety checks on the reinstall. That’s when I got another notification: the flight was now delayed until 5am.

I panicked, booked a flight on another airline, and made it home. I even made it to the dinner.

But here is what I kept thinking about. Everyone involved with my flight: the stewardesses and the pilot, the cleaning crew, the gate crew, the ground crew, the engineers who built the plane, the people who refined the fuel and traveled halfway around the world to get it to the runway. The amount of global collaboration required is almost magical.

And somehow we think it all just happened?

That our ability to get from Miami to New York in a moment notice it not God, flying us on the wings of eagles?

My niece had chassidus homework this week, and she needed help understanding the themes in a poem about a little caterpillar. (The Yiddish song, “Di Bletele”, by Yom Tov Erlich z”l)

A caterpillar was sitting on a leaf in a tree, and the sun was blaring down on it, giving it blisters, and it was in pain, crying. And it cried out to God, to Hashem. And Hashem tapped an angel on the shoulder and said, “Please tell the wind to blow down that leaf.” And the wind blew, and the leaf that the caterpillar was on fell to the ground, and into the shade, and the caterpillar was safe.

But the leaf did not understand what had happened. And it started to cry, because it missed being part of the big tree.

And a rabbi picked up the leaf and asked it: little leaf, why are you crying? And the leaf said, because I fell from the tree and I don’t know why.

Take a beat with that.

This is a story of a God who heard the cry of a caterpillar, and sent a messenger, and moved the wind, and brought the leaf to the ground so the caterpillar could be safe. That is how She works. Through ordinary wind. Through ordinary falling.

God is always here. In the fuel that crosses the ocean. In the wind that moves the leaf. She does not need to part a sea for us to know She is present. She just needs us to notice.

The Verse I Cannot Stop Thinking About

There is a moment later in the parsha that I cannot let go of.

Ki tavo’u el ha’aretz asher ani notein lachem. When you enter the land that I am giving to you. (Vayikra 23:10)

When you enter the land. Not “when I bring you” into the land. The Torah has language for that. When God took the Israelites out of Egypt, it says it plainly: “v’hotzesi etchem me’eretz Mitzrayim,” I took you out from Egypt. Unmistakable. Miraculous. No room for confusion.

But here, it does not say “when I bring you into the land.” It says: when you enter. Through people. Through ordinary means.

And look at the language of when God will give the land. The word is - Notein - present tense. God is giving the land. Not “gave.” Not “will give.” Giving. Constantly. At this moment, whenever we are ready.

And the verse continues: when you harvest your first harvest, you will bring the Omer, the first sheaf, to the priest to be raised.

God gave us the land. She gave us the calendar. She told us what to do when we got there. And the verse tells us: it may not come through miracles. It may not look like the exodus from Egypt. It might look ordinary. It might even look like something we did ourselves.

We have sovereignty in the land of Israel for the first time in two thousand years. That is not a small thing. That did not “just happen.” It is the condition this verse is describing. “When you enter the land.” We are in the land. We cannot look away from that.

We all have our opinions about what this moment means. But the moadim teach us something: the whole point is to meet. We have one Torah. Can we come together around what it is asking of us?

Because that is what the moadim promise. When we show up, when we call the time holy, God will meet us there.

Will you notice? Will you wake up and ask what this moment needs from you?

If this resonated, share it with someone you want to meet at the table this Shabbat.

And have a wonderful Shabbos,

Miriam

A printer-friendly version of this essay is available here for your Shabbat table.

A note on language: I use feminine pronouns for God (She/Her) throughout my writing, reflecting the feminine Divine Presence, the Shekhinah, and the idea that God contains multitudes.

The Holiest Day, the Holiest Place

This week’s portion Achrei Mot-Kedoshim opens with the convergence of three powerful forces. The holiest time, Yom Kippur, the Shabbat of all Shabbats. The holiest place, the Kodesh Kodeshim, the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the Temple in Jerusalem. And the holiest person, the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest.

Only on Yom Kippur could the High Priest enter the Kodesh Kodeshim, and in order for him to do that, to perform the Yom Kippur service, the High Priest had to be married. Why?

Rabbi YY Jacobson, teaching a sicha from the Lubavitcher Rebbe on Masechet Yoma, asks the obvious question in an even stronger way. On Yom Kippur, the Cohen Gadol, cannot be physically intimate with his wife. In fact, he must separate from her seven days prior to Yom Kippur to make sure he is pure, without distractions, and ready to perform the service. So what is it about being married that matters for his role on this day? What does it actually do for him?

The answer isn’t about a legal contract; it’s about what a “home” does to a human soul.

What a Home Does to the Soul

Reb Yosi, in the Talmud, called his wife “my home.” He said, “I never once called her ‘my wife.’” Not because the word was wrong, but because it was too small. She was not a person standing next to him. She was the space he lived in. She had taken the raw material of his life and transformed it into something he could not have built alone. And to allow someone to shape you, to influence you, takes vulnerability, and courage.

That is what the Cohen Gadol needed in order to enter the Holy of Holies.

He needed to be someone who has accepted the vulnerability of being influenced and shaped by another person. Someone whose existence contains more than just themself.

Because the work for the high priest on Yom Kippur is not just ritual precision. It is the willingness to carry the entire people on his shoulders. To hold their failures. To take their distance from God, and bring all of it into the most sacred space in the world and ask for it to be made clean.

You cannot do that from a place of ego. You cannot do that if you have never let another person change you. If you have never been vulnerable enough to say I have not lost myself with you, I have become more.

Holiness Begins at Home

Marriage is the first place a person learns to move beyond the self. It is one of the first places where you are asked, in a deep and ongoing way, to make room for another person. To give up your independence and choose partnership. And you do it, so you can build something that could never exist with you alone.

It is through this union that life is brought into the world. Each partner contributes something irreplaceable, and together they make a person. And the love that is generated, the desire and willingness to give everything you have for your family, that too is Divine. That is the generosity sourced in love that Hashem is constantly bestowing on us.

In that sense, marriage is one of the clearest ways a human being imitates the Divine: by making room, by giving, by helping life emerge and endure.

So the Torah’s instruction is not only about entering a sanctuary. It is about becoming a person who can carry holiness. And holiness must begin somewhere humanly possible. It begins at home, in the slow disciplines of love, vulnerability, responsibility, and making room for another life beside your own.

But the parsha insists that holiness cannot remain enclosed there. What is learned in the intimacy of home must widen into the rest of life: into family, into community, and finally toward the stranger. That is the arc of this double portion. Achrei Mot begins with Aaron, the priests, the inner circle. Kedoshim opens outward: “Speak to the entire congregation, and say to them: You shall be holy.”

Kedoshim and the Work of Everyday Holiness

The work of holiness belongs not only to the few who enter sacred spaces, but to everyone who must learn how to live with other people.

And what does that holiness look like?

Not ecstasy. Behavior.

Rabbi Dr. Meesh Hammer-Kossoy, on the Pardes Institute Podcast, teaches that holiness means learning to become similar to God. And to become similar to God is to become a source of love and generosity in the world.

But the parsha does not leave love as a beautiful abstraction. It gives us a curriculum.

It begins with the large principles: do not worship other gods, honor your parents, guard the Sabbath.

But holiness, we learn, is not only in the large principles. It is in the details.

Do not gossip. The sages expand this: be loyal.

Do not place a stumbling block before the blind. This also means: do not give bad advice. Do not enable someone to do something that will harm them.

Do not hate your brother in your heart. It means what it sounds like. You are not allowed to hate.

And then, right next to it: “You shall surely rebuke your fellow.” If something is wrong, speak about it. Have the difficult conversation. Rehabilitate the relationship. Not only when the person has wronged you personally, but when their behavior is harmful at all. You still need to raise it. To talk it out. To listen.

And when you do rebuke, do not carry their guilt. Rashi explains: do not embarrass them while rebuking them.

Do not take revenge. Do not hold a grudge.

Pay people on time for their work.

Leave the corners of your field unharvested so the poor can come and eat.

These are not random rules. They are the instructions for how to live with other people in a way that challenges you to build something. Each one is a soft skill that the rabbis take and expand, not into something you can check off a list, but into a way of being. A constant demand on how you speak, how you see, how you give.

“Love your fellow as yourself.”

Love your fellow as yourself

That sounds simple. It is not.

Because your fellow, your re’echa, is not your spouse. Not your child. Not someone you naturally feel bound to. This is the person you work with. The person who annoys you. The person you compete with. The person you misunderstand.

And the parsha is challenging you not to see them as a competitor at all. Competition is about seeing people in terms of winners and losers. But this vision says: my fellow is not my rival. We are part of the same body. The great Kabbalist Moshe Cordovero, and the Chasidic tradition after him, describe all of Israel as sharing one soul. If we are all part of the same organism, then hurting your fellow is hurting yourself. And loving your fellow, wanting to give them all the good you possibly can is wholeness. It is what it means to be like God.

From Fellow to Stranger

And if you can do that, if you can begin to stretch your capacity for love and responsibility outward from your spouse, to your family, to your community, then the parsha pushes one step further.

כְּאֶזְרָ֣ח מִכֶּם֩ יִהְיֶ֨ה לָכֶ֜ם הַגֵּ֣ר ׀ הַגָּ֣ר אִתְּכֶ֗ם וְאָהַבְתָּ֥ לוֹ֙ כָּמ֔וֹךָ (Leviticus 19:34)

“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you like a citizen among you, and you shall love them as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:34)

These are almost the same words as before, but with one decisive change. It is no longer only your fellow you must love. It is the stranger.

Our “fellow” still belongs, in obvious ways, to your world. They know your language. They share your assumptions. The stranger does not.

Architecture of love

This is the architecture of the parsha.

From self, to spouse. From spouse, to family. From family, to community. From community, to the stranger.

Each step asks for a wider heart than the one before.

It is natural to take care of yourself. Less natural to make enduring room for a partner. Harder still to sustain the obligations of family. Harder again to live ethically inside a community when it costs you something. And perhaps hardest of all to extend that same care to the stranger.

That is why the Torah does not only command love. It teaches us practice.

Because generosity is easy to romanticize and easy to distort. It is easy to gossip and call it connection. Easy to avoid difficult conversations and call it peace. Easy to tell ourselves that our habits are harmless when, in fact, they protect only our own comfort.

The parsha is not fooled by any of that. It gives us a blueprint.

Holiness is not a feeling

Holiness is not a feeling.
It is the repeated work of building generous relationships.

The Torah does not ask us to wake up tomorrow and love the whole world perfectly. It asks us to begin closer in. To go home and love our partner better. To honor our parents. To pay fairly. To speak honestly. To stop ourselves from tripping up a friend. To leave something at the edge of our field for someone else.

Holiness is not a bolt of lightning. It is the quiet, stubborn labor of making room for other lives.

We start at the kitchen table. We practice there the kind of care that keeps those closest to us from stumbling. We build a home sturdy enough to hold fire without being consumed by it. And then, having learned to love in small and faithful ways, we take our love outside, growing our heart until we find that we have widened enough to love the stranger too.

The Torah teaches that holiness does not begin in heaven. It begins at home. And from there, our love can become larger than we ever imagined.

Wishing you a beautiful Shabbos,
Miriam