Then comes Chapter 5, the final chapter. It still has 22 verses, but the acrostic disappears.

That made me wonder: is the missing alphabet truly gone, or simply hidden?

Working with Yochai, Lightning Studios’ new AI chevruta, I calculated the gematria of the first letter of each of Chapter 5’s 22 verses. The total is 1,265.

Here’s the remarkable part: 1,265 ÷ 5 (for the fifth chapter) equals 253 exactly. And 253 is the sum of the entire aleph-bet (1+2+...+22. The numerical value of one complete alphabet.

In other words, the one chapter where the alphabet seems to disappear contains, numerically, five complete alphabets hidden beneath the surface…one for each chapter of Eicha.

Whether this pattern was intentional or not, I found it to be a beautiful way to read the final chapter of Eicha. Visible order may give way to apparent chaos, but if we continue to look for it, you can still find meaning in that chaos.

And a quick shout-out to Yochai, Lightning Studios’ AI chevruta. I would not have stumbled onto this without exploring the text together.

What Sheeran was showing the jury is that the basic structures of music are communal. The chords, scales, time signatures, and harmonic patterns belong to everyone. Genius comes not from inventing sound from scratch, but from interpretation…from variation within inherited form.

Pablo Picasso said it well: “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”

Before Picasso broke perspective into Cubism, he spent years mastering classical technique. Before jazz musicians improvise, they learn scales. Before great writers play with language, they read it obsessively. A great artist does not reject the tradition. He builds on it.

Shavuot is a celebration of that same idea.

On Shavuot we celebrate God giving the Torah to the Jewish people at Sinai. The traditional view is that God gave Moses both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah together, as the Talmud in tractate Brachot records:

And Rabbi Levi bar Ḥama said that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: God said to Moses, “Ascend to Me on the mountain and be there, and I will give you the stone tablets and the Torah and the mitzva that I have written that you may teach them” (Exodus 24:12)...

The “tablets” are the ten commandments. The “Torah” is the five books of Moses. The “mitzva” is the Mishna. “That I have written” refers to the Prophets and Writings. “That you may teach them” refers to the Talmud. This verse teaches that all aspects of Torah were given to Moses from Sinai.

Not everyone agrees. Some hold that only the Written Torah was given at Sinai, and that the Oral Torah took shape gradually through centuries of rabbinic interpretation and communal practice. All views share something: revelation did not end the conversation. It started one.

The Torah did not stay frozen at Sinai. It grew. Midrash. Commentaries on top of commentaries. Rashi interpreting the Talmud. Tosafot pushing back on Rashi. Rambam systematizing law. Later authorities argued with the Rambam. Across centuries and continents, Judaism became a vast, living architecture of interpretation.

From the outside this can look chaotic, a civilization built from endless argument. But the argument strengthened the tradition rather than weakening it. Each generation inherited real constraints: texts, language, methods, standards of rigor. New ideas had to be grounded in what came before. The result was not fragmentation. It was continuity.

We are in a moment of staggering content overload. AI tools can produce essays, opinions, summaries, and interpretations in seconds, fully formed, with no learning or struggle behind them. Some people call the worst of it “AI slop,” content that looks like thought but has none of the work that real thought requires.

The Talmud grew slowly because mastery came before participation. Today that sequence is gone. Output comes first. Understanding may never follow.

Ed Sheeran could play those chords in court because he had spent his life learning them. Rashi could challenge the Talmud because he had lived inside it. Picasso could break the rules because he had earned them.

Without a canon, there is no real conversation. Without real learning, there is no originality.

Shavuot is a reminder that lasting things are not built on ideas alone. They are built on serious relationships with ideas. On study before innovation. On inheritance before reinvention.

Sinai was a revelation. But Judaism became Judaism through interpretation, through generations of people who loved the tradition enough to wrestle with it, challenge it, refine it, and hand it forward without letting go of the source.

That feels like the right lesson for right now. In a world drowning in words, the advantage may belong not to those who can produce the most content, but to those who still know which words are worth building on.

Chag Sameach.

In a strange way, that’s how a lot of us have been feeling about Jewish history. We knew what could happen even if others did not fully understand.

As a kid growing up in the ‘90s, Jewish history felt like a thing of the past. It was something we studied. Something we learned. Something we commemorated. It did not feel like something we would live. And yet we had a sense of history. We were aware enough to know we were living in a special time.

Since 1948 we have built a state in Israel and fortified our roots in the United States. We tended to both carefully, fully aware of what history had wrought, though with each passing year it felt less and less likely that it could return. For a while it seemed like the arc had bent in a stable direction. Israel was strong. American Jews were secure. Antisemitism felt like something that lived in black-and-white photographs.

But things seem to have changed in the last few years. It increasingly feels as though we were living inside a historical blip, and that the curve of Jewish history has begun to bend again.

It is usually hard to recognize inflection points while we are living through them. The moments we inhabit feel permanent.

Take the night sky. On a clear evening it feels eternal. The same constellations our grandparents saw are still there. The same North Star that guided travelers centuries ago still hangs in place. The heavens appear still and dependable. But the sky is moving. Stars drift slowly across enormous distances. Constellations are temporary alignments. Even Polaris will not always be the North Star. What feels fixed is actually motion unfolding at a speed we cannot perceive.

History can feel the same way. When we look backward, we imagine the story unfolding in clean chapters. But those chapters exist mostly because we decide where the story begins.

Graham Greene once wrote that a story has no beginning or end — only the point at which the teller chooses to start. He meant it as a confession of arbitrariness. Every story could begin earlier. Every origin has its own prehistory.

The Haggadah understood this long before Greene did. And unlike Greene’s narrator, it doesn’t choose its starting point arbitrarily. It chooses it on purpose.

“Mitchila ovdei avodah zarah hayu avoteinu. In the beginning, our ancestors were idol worshippers”.

Mitchila ovdei avodah zarah hayu avoteinu. In the beginning, our ancestors were idol worshippers. This line appears in the Maggid near the start of the seder, and it is easy to rush past. But the Haggadah is doing something deliberate here. It is instructing us to begin the story of Jewish peoplehood not with Abraham’s call, not with the descent into Egypt, not with slavery or plagues or exodus — but with Terach, Abraham’s father, who worshipped idols in Mesopotamia. Before there was a covenant. Before there was a people. Before there was anything. The rabbis who structured the seder wanted us to feel the full length of the journey. You are not just celebrating a single night of liberation. You are a node in a transformation that began in a place of total spiritual darkness, among people who had no idea what was coming — and whose endpoint, if there is one, remains somewhere none of us can see.

You cannot understand a bend in the curve if you only know the last few feet of the line.

Imagine being an Israelite on the eve of Passover. For hundreds of years your ancestors were slaves. You could not have perceived the historical pivot beneath your feet. But you probably sensed something beginning to shift. You had just watched the ten plagues unfold. The old world had begun to crack, but the new one had not yet formed. Pharaoh was still on the throne. Egypt was still the center of the world. And yet something had clearly changed. History had begun to move again.

This is precisely why the Haggadah starts where it does. Not with Egypt. Not with slavery. But with the long view — the arc that stretches back before any of us could see it clearly.

The decades many of us experienced as stability may not have been a permanent condition. They may have been a rare and fortunate pause in a much longer story. But pauses matter. During that time the Jewish world rebuilt extraordinary foundations. Israel grew strong. Jewish communities built schools, institutions, and networks that earlier generations could only dream of.

For the first time in nearly two thousand years the demographic center of Jewish life is shifting again. Roughly half of the world’s Jews now live in Israel. Demographers project that within a generation a majority may once again live there. That would mark a turning point few previous generations could have imagined.

The last few years have reminded us that Jewish history does not move in straight lines. The themes return. An arch enemy. Miraculous winds. Devastating days. And the persistent belief that somewhere ahead there is light.

Greene chose where to begin his story. The Haggadah chose where to begin ours — earlier than we expected, further back than feels necessary, all the way to a time before we were even ourselves. It does this so that when we arrive at the seder table, we understand what we are actually part of. Not a moment. Not a generation. A curve that has been bending for a very long time.

B’chol dor vador — in every generation, we are obligated to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. Not because the story is the same each time. But because the arc is always longer than we think, and we are always somewhere in the middle of it.

Chag Sameach.

Passover begins with Israelites huddled in their homes as the Angel of Death passes over.

Purim begins with a decree of annihilation hanging over an entire people.

Chanukah begins with desecration, humiliation, and the slow suffocation of Jewish practice.

And yet, our prayers remember these moments not primarily through the lens of danger, but through the lens of relief, joy and gratitude: Al HaNisim, Shehecheyanu, Maoz Tzur.

We sing of miracles — not because the danger disappeared, but because danger loosened its grip.

In each case, the joy does not come after total safety. It comes after relative safety, a shift, a reprieve, a breathing space large enough to fit a song.

Rav Kook describes “The holy lights which burst forth at specific points in time and space”. This light, Rav Kook explains, travels in secret passageways under the surface of history waiting for their moment to shine. They are already there, we just don’t always see them.

We have been here before and we’ll be here again.

Today, in a world reshaped by October 7th, we are living in that same liminal space.

Hostages have come home but our enemies are still loud. Our politics are still hostile. The campus antagonist-of-the-week will never love us.

But the Jewish story has never demanded perfect conditions for joy.

Chanukah teaches us that miracles are rarely decisive endings. They are openings.

The oil burns for eight days — but the war isn’t over. The Temple is reclaimed — but the empire around it still dominates.

A small light appears — and that is reason enough to gather, to bless, to sing.

So the question is not: Are we finally safe?

The question is: Are we allowed to feel the relief, the gratitude, the flickers of healing that are already here?

Jewish history answers: Yes. Without hesitation.

Because Jewish joy has never been naïve. It celebrates the crack in the darkness and calls that crack a miracle.

This year, when we say Al HaNisim, we do not pretend the threats have vanished. We simply acknowledge that even in today’s world, something sacred has shifted and in our tradition, that has always been enough to light a candle.

The Torah opens with the chaos of creation, then the chaos of the destructive flood, then the chaos of unity at Babel.

At first, it sounds good—the Torah says “the whole earth had one language and one speech.” Imagine that: no arguments, no divisions, everyone on the same page. But the Torah doesn’t celebrate that. It sees danger in it.

Because when everyone thinks the same, no one really thinks.

When everyone speaks the same, no one really listens.

Babel becomes a cautionary tale—of what happens when unity hardens into uniformity.

And so God scatters them. Not to punish, but to liberate. To make space for difference, for growth, for individuality. Out of the rubble of Babel rises something new—Abraham. The first to walk alone. God instructs Abraham to lech lecha, Rashi says it literally means to “go for yourself.”

Abraham’s story begins not with a crowd, but with a calling to separate.

In our world right now, it’s hard not to see Babel all over again.

So many voices repeating slogans, terrified of nuance, suspicious of difference.

It’s a kind of moral monoculture.

And maybe that’s why Abraham’s story matters so much right now.

Because he doesn’t rebel for rebellion’s sake, he questions with purpose.

He’s the reminder that clarity is found in the individual’s perspective, in the capacity for people to fight for what is right even if the odds are against them. It’s the reason Abraham fights for the righteousness of one town, while Noah doesn’t even fight for the righteousness of the entire world.

But Abraham’s journey isn’t just about standing apart—it’s about learning how to walk together without losing ourselves. He teaches us that true greatness isn’t found in isolation, but in the courage to be distinct while still being part of something larger.

And when we look at what’s happening in Israel, we see that same lesson: people from every background, every perspective, coming together—not because they are the same, but because they share a purpose, a hope, a prayer. That’s the power of our people: unity without erasing difference.

That balance—of being close, but not identical; united, but not uniform—reminds me of a natural phenomenon I recently learned about called Crown Shyness.

Crown Shyness is the natural phenomenon where the tops of trees grow close together but never touch. Each tree stretches toward the sun but leaves space for light, for air, for the other.

That, to me, is the Jewish ideal.

A forest of difference that still moves in the same direction.

Independent but united. Rooted in a shared soil.

I think perhaps the idea of crown shyness is built into the very architecture of the sukkah. Halachically, the walls of a sukkah do not need to touch each other, the ground, or the roof. This is accomplished through a principle called Lavud, which states that a gap smaller than three tefachim (about 9-10 inches) between two objects is considered as if the gap were closed, or “joined”.

The sukkah gives the illusion of unity without requiring uniformity.

May we continue to find strength in our differences, hope in our togetherness, and light in the spaces we create for one another—just as we saw this week, when the prayers of so many, so different, brought our brothers and sisters home.

“Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.”

The article was called *“The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics.’” Even physics, it seems, isn’t safe.

How exhausting is that?

This is the world our children are growing up in: a world where nuance is absent, and where suspicion often takes the place of conviction. A world, I fear, that risks raising them to prefer ambivalence over ambition.

And which subject is more vulnerable to this “near-insurmountable burden of proof” than Israel?

As we head into the High Holidays, I find myself wondering: how do we teach our children to love Israel—not as a political football or a flashpoint in the news cycle, but as something so essential to their Jewish being that their compass always orients east?

Jewish liturgy, law, and lore have been answering that question for millennia. Some references are overt, others more subtle, but Israel has always been woven into the fabric of Judaism.

I often think about how fantastical those constant allusions must have sounded to Jews across history. Israel was as distant as a fairy-tale land—like Narnia or Oz—yet it lived in their mouths daily. What they longed for wasn’t just geography. It was sovereignty, dignity, kedusha.

That longing runs straight through the High Holiday prayers. Consider the Musaf Amidah of Rosh Hashanah, structured around three great themes: Malchuyot (God’s sovereignty), Zichronot (God’s remembrance), and Shofarot (verses of the shofar).

The Shofarot, which has become the most emblematic, is nothing less than a call home:

Our God and God of our fathers, sound a great shofar for our liberty and raise a banner to gather our exiles. And bring near our scattered people from among the nations, and gather our dispersed from the ends of [the] earth. Bring us to Tziyon, Your city, with joyous song,— to Yerushalayim, House of Your Sanctuary, with eternal joy.

At the very climax of the holiest of days, the rabbis could have placed any prayer. They chose a call to Jerusalem. And from that center of gravity, the Jewish world has spun for thousands of years.

My fear is that this pull is weakening. The centrality of these prayers is easily overlooked. The stories are less often retold, the melodies less often sung. If the scaffolding built by sages and poets proves too thin for this generation, what will keep our children from drifting into ambivalence—or worse?

I’d like to offer a reading of a verse in Deuteronomy that I found comforting:

“I led you through the wilderness forty years; your clothes did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet.” (Deut. 29:4)

On the surface, the verse reminds Israel that God provided materially in the desert — their clothes and shoes miraculously endured.Many commentators (Rashi, Ramban) emphasize divine providence, that the people never lacked what they needed on the way to the land throughout their treacherous 40 year sojourn.

I’d like to suggest another reading. Maybe this verse is meant as encouragement—a rallying call. Perhaps God is reminding us that even when the road feels endless, even when a generation faces a task as daunting as crossing a desert for forty years, they will endure. They will know the way forward. They will find the strength to persist—because they are already equipped with shoes that will not wear out.

So too with us. Even in an age when faith in institutions collapses, even when Israel is met with disdain and suspicion, our shoes have not worn out. The Jewish compass still points home. Our task, this season and always, is to make sure our children hear the call of the shofar—not as politics and not as conflict - but as a reminder that our compass perpetually points east.

Seasoned leaders love to preach the power of saying no to protect what matters. They run large organizations, sit on for-profit and nonprofit boards, and can snag summer internships for friends’ kids. What we don’t always hear is the missing clause: do you know how many times I said yes before I earned the right to say no?

I’m living in that in-between—wanting to say yes broadly while also guarding my calendar for the highest-impact work. So I’m updating my rules of engagement: who gets access, and for what.

• “Hi Alex! Can you chair this event, attend endless planning meetings, text your entire network to come, and line up raffle vendors?”
  Used to be yes every time. Now it’s no every time.

• “Hey bud, my job stinks. Can we grab coffee for advice?”
  Still yes for my closest circle. Phone call for the next ring out. For everyone else: email me and I’ll try to point you somewhere useful.

That’s the tactical shift. The strategic question is bigger: What kinds of asks do I want in the future—and what should I be saying yes to today to make those asks show up?

Want to mentor? Sit on boards? Write big checks to charity? Be a community builder? Be the best friend/parent/spouse/child you can be? You may not know yet. Early on, say yes to a lot. Explore. Then start saying yes to the things that ladder up to the requests you hope to get later.

You have to start somewhere, and it usually isn’t glamorous.

A practical tool: Jesse Itzler’s “Big Ass Calendar”—the whole year on one page. Block your non-negotiables (milestones, religious holidays, family moments). Layer in work. What’s left is the time you have for others. It’s a useful, honest view of how much time you actually have and how you want to use it.

Early in your career, you have less control over how people see you, so when chances to learn, stretch, or give back appear, you take them. As you progress and your skills and resources compound, you can get pickier—and some of those contributions become non-negotiables.

I’m making assumptions, but I believe the highest performers are great plate-spinners. I once heard Malcolm Gladwell make a related point: ambitious people should invest their time in multiple ways so if one bet underperforms, others sustain your momentum and satisfaction.

So how does an ambitious young person become a high-performing plate-spinner?

1. Get good at something.

2. Replicate it until it scales.

3. Watch for the moment your first priority starts to suffer—that’s the signal you’ve gone too far; pull back to equilibrium.

4. Add (or decline) one more plate and reassess.

In other words, you eventually earn the judgment to know when to say yes and when to say no.

You can finish a great book or series, and that often feels like a sense of accomplishment. But if the author is alive, there's always the possibility of a prequel or sequel or spinoff emerging years later, expanding the universe or changing the rules. The "completion" proves provisional.

Anyone who has studied anything serious can tell you that the more you learn, the less you feel like you know. This is certainly true for the study of Talmud, itself structured as an endless cycle. Even the most learned Torah scholars are deeply humbled by the sensation of never being able to complete their studies. Knowledge reveals its own incompleteness.

I did, however, get a glimpse of what genuine completion feels like: I have taught all three of my kids to swim.

Watching my youngest confidently execute a cannonball off the diving board into ten feet of water was incredibly satisfying. He trusted me and himself to do something that had seemed impossible just weeks before, even though he had watched his sisters do it countless times. Now he knows how to swim, and will always know how to swim for the rest of his life. All three of them. Done. Check.

But why swimming specifically? My children can walk and talk and will eventually all learn to read. They're bilingual and enjoy a good steak off the grill. These are all things I've had a hand in teaching them, right?

The Talmud, in tractate Kiddushin, provides insight into this question. It states that a father has specific obligations to his son: "A father is obligated with regard to his son to circumcise him, and to redeem him if he is a firstborn son who must be redeemed by payment to a priest, and to teach him Torah, and to marry him, and to teach him a trade. And some say: A father is also obligated to teach his son to swim." (Kiddushin 29a)

Again, why swimming?

The Rabbi’s emphasis on swimming makes sense when you consider what it represents among the father's obligations. The bris and pidyon haben are one-time ritual completions. Torah and trade are lifelong pursuits—you never truly finish learning Torah or perfecting your craft. But swimming occupies a unique middle ground: it's a skill with lifelong utility.

What the ancient sages understood is that swimming represents something fundamentally different from most human learning: an irreversible threshold. Once your child moves from "cannot swim" to "can swim," that transition is permanent in a way that few human achievements are.

The sages chose swimming because it embodies a particular kind of mastery—one that, once achieved, fundamentally changes your relationship with the world. It's not just about survival; it's about a permanent expansion of capability and confidence.

In a world where so much feels provisional, cyclical, or incomplete, there's something profound about achievements that are genuinely final. Swimming is one of those rare human experiences where you can actually check something off your list and mean it.

Proud of that 10/10 cannonball.

I think I can trace my love of the weekly ritual to Rabbi Eliezer Rubin, who was my principal from 1st-12th grade and who also loves to teach the Parsha. (We’ve since both moved to the ‘burbs - I hope he still inspiring future parsha readers). I can remember Rabbi Rubin approaching each week with enthusiasm, curiosity and dad jokes. I even remember that he has a particular interest in the teachings of Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (Netziv). But, even Rabbi Rubin couldn’t make the boring parts of Tanach engaging…like most teachers, he just skipped them all together.

This is where I think AI can change the game.

This week’s parsha, Chukat, has some iconic scenes: The red heifer, death of Miriam, Moses hitting the rock/losing access to Israel, and Aaron’s death. However, it also has some portions that are as hard to grasp as the early episodes of Game of Thrones. Kings and towns and roads and serpents and treatise and wars.

So where does AI come in?

One challenge I have when I encounter these “boring scenes” is visualizing the journeys described in Tanach… “and from Bamoth to the valley that is in the country of Moab, at the peak of Pisgah, overlooking the wasteland."

So this morning, I asked Claude.Ai “can you map of all the places the Israelites went to in parsha chukat?” And check this out

In a matter of minutes I had a clear visual. I then asked it to overlay a modern map so that I can better contextualize the journey in today’s terms. Now we can have an interactive companion to our study, unlocking endless verses (think family trees) that were otherwise hard to understand or visualize…imagine what Rabbi Rubin could do with this!

I think this is just the tip of the iceberg, but I was excited to share.

I have been feeling this way lately. In fact, I’ve recently told a few friends that I don’t have the energy to argue anymore.

However, the Jewish operating system isn’t built to reboot every time there is a bug in the code. It’s built to persist, to unravel each virus it encounters.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in the name of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, captures this idea when contemplating this week’s Parsha (Shelach). He asked, why were the 10 spies afraid of what they saw in the promised land? They had just seen, with their own eyes, God perform unthinkable miracles against the world’s most advance nation in ancient Egypt!

Rabbi Sacks goes on to say something powerful and resonant:

“The questions are straightforward. But the answer the Rabbi gave is utterly unexpected. The spies weren't afraid of failure, he said.

They were afraid of success. Never had a people lived so close to God as they were living right then. If they entered the land, their lifestyle of camping around the sanctuary, eating manna from heaven, living in continuous contact with the Shekhinah would vanish.

They'd have to fight battles, maintain an army, create an economy, farm the land, worry about weather and their crops and all the other thousand distractions that come from living in the world.”

This is the world we live in today. We’ve inherited the success they feared.

A world where we maintain an army and an economy. A world where we have an endless number of distractions.

But, the lesson of the spies is not to fear the responsibility that comes with the success. The lesson of the spies is to remember that though there seems to be an endless number of challenges, we have the responsibility to prevail with our heads up.

Each time we experience one of these shocking, but not surprising, moments we feel more isolated. Our instagram feeds are fired up by the same people who reacted last time, no new names, no new faces. We know which of our friends feel the need to say something to react - not only on social media, but within traditional media or even through a text message.

Yet, we continue on with a childish sense of optimism. Almost as if we understand what is going on, but we choose not to fully internalize it.

I took solace in a verse from this week’s Torah portion that I had never noticed before*:

וְרָדְפ֨וּ מִכֶּ֤ם חֲמִשָּׁה֙ מֵאָ֔ה וּמֵאָ֥ה מִכֶּ֖ם רְבָבָ֣ה יִרְדֹּ֑פוּ וְנָפְל֧וּ אֹיְבֵיכֶ֛ם לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם לֶחָֽרֶב׃

Five of you shall give chase to a hundred, and a hundred of you shall give chase to ten thousand; your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. (Leviticus 26:8)

At first glance, it seems like the ratio of Jews to the people who don’t like Jews is off by design. For every 5 of us, there are 100 enemies. However, if you examine the sentence more carefully, you notice that the math is wrong…5/100 does not equal 100/10,000. The ratio is off by design.

The commentators on the Torah all pick up on the wonky math and a beautiful idea emerges. Namely, the strength of the Jewish people isn’t linear, but rather exponential. Five Jews coming together to fight for the cause is mighty, but if 100 Jews come together it compounds and the might grows exponentially.

The common notion this week was, that could’ve been me. My friend Jacki Karsh said it best:

So where do we go from here?

The answer isn’t that we each go home, one by one. No, we show up in bigger numbers. We come together because together our strength grows in ways that aren’t easily measured.

There is beautiful idea in Judaism “b'rov am hadrat melech /ברב עם הדרת מלך” , which comes from Proverbs 14:28:

“A numerous people is the glory of a king;
Without a nation a ruler is ruined.”

One application of the idea of b’rov am, is that the more Jews come together the more God’s honor is increased, particularly when singing songs of praise. But how can this be? What does it matter to God if more people come together? I’d like to suggest it doesn’t matter to God, but rather to those who come together in the name of His values.

Perhaps, a numerous people is the glory of the king in the same way that children getting along is the glory of the parents. As an example, last summer we received exactly one letter home from sleep away camp, and it was addressed to one of our daughters from her older sister. As a parent, there was no greater joy. I don’t need the letter to know you are ok, but knowing you wanted to speak to your sister told me the system was working — and that is where the exponential strength lives.

That letter home tells me that my children’s kids will play together one day. They will get a long, a small number amplifying the value system we hoped to perpetuate.

So though we feel as 5 being pursued by 100, we know that as 100 we can take on 10,000.

Lets move into shabbat together with the confidence of strength in small numbers.

* My favorite part of weekly Torah study is noticing things I haven’t seen before, thinking of starting a weekly study group…more to come on that.

Hennessey’s perspective really resonated. He asked when was the last time people restrained themselves from lashing out when they lost, or when things didn’t go there way, or when someone just disagreed with them?

He goes on to say, “Yes, kids, there was a time when prominent people were expected to exhibit grace.”

Is he a curmudgeon from a bygone era? Or, is he rebooting a fundamental idea rooted deep in Jewish values?

It would seem from the current landscape that Hennessey, and those who “exhibit grace” are relics. Dinosaurs to take selfies with in a museum or sitting ducks ready to be skewered on TV or social media.

I believe, however, that this idea of restraint, class, grace, is exactly what the Torah is referring to in this week’s Parsha: Kedoshim.

The opening line from the weekly portion reads:

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְהֹוָ֖ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃

יהוה spoke to Moses, saying:

דַּבֵּ֞ר אֶל־כׇּל־עֲדַ֧ת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל וְאָמַרְתָּ֥ אֲלֵהֶ֖ם קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, your God , am holy.

Ramban (Nachmanides), an important 13th commentator on the Bible, reflects on what God means when he commands the people to be “holy”. Ramban concludes thats the Torah is referring to something rather profound, which he calls: נָבָל בִּרְשׁוּת הַתּוֹרָה. Which translates roughly as someone being a morally corrupt person within the permissible realm of the Torah’s laws. In other words, being holy means having class, restraint, grace.

Meaning, the Torah has to say “be holy” because one may think that holiness is the letter of the law, but in fact holiness is found in the spirit of the law.

Perhaps holiness means that facts do care about your feelings. Sure you might be right, but that doesn’t give you a hall pass on manners, on holiness.

I’ll conclude with Hennessey’s words:

“This may not be our finest moment, but the pendulum always swings. Class will make a comeback. When it does, maybe try and show some respect.”

Shabbat shalom.

I often refer to the Jewish soul as a compass weighted towards Jerusalem. Our prayers, holidays and songs are focused on the ancient capital.

For many of our ancestors, Israel was a mythical place. One they hoped that future generations would see and experience. They heard legends about the land flowing with milk and honey. They read tales of prophetic heroes and warriors. They sat as strangers in a strange land wondering what it would be like to glimpse their homeland.

Today there is nothing mythical about Israel. It’s home for 10M people, 7.7M of whom are Jewish (45% of the global Jewish population). It’s a place where people raise their families, pay their WiFi bills and open new businesses.

It’s also a place we often debate about. Within and externally. We defend. We decry. We mourn. We celebrate.

In מולדת, a song written shortly after 10/7, Hanan Ben Ari sings:

You are the special only one

you will always be my homeland

even on the edge of the abyss

even inside Gehenom itself

you are the Garden of Eden

He reminds us that Israel is a blessing in our time. Something most of Jewish history could only dream about. So today let’s remember that dream and delay the urge to pinch ourselves.

Live the dream.

This is a question I have found myself asking about the Jewish community.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that it is the local nature of Judaism that has given us the tools to react. Otherwise put, since we have no centralized authority, we are pre-conditioned to react as a community -- bottom up.

In fact, Judaism has been local by design since the destruction of the Temple two thousand years ago. And, while the edifice of the Temple in Jerusalem was replaced by the synagogue around the corner, the Jewish compass remained affixed on the ancient capital.

I’d like to suggest that our Seder is the greatest expression of this tension, the tension of our local flavors and the centrality of Jerusalem. The Haggadah in particular, of which over 4,000 different versions have been published, is clay easily molded to the right shape by each community. Though the core text remains the same, different communities throughout time have found ways to make the seder their own, enabling them to see themselves as though they were the ones leaving Egypt.

The differences in the seders and Haggadot that are produced by the various communities around the world vary in severity. Some variations are subtle, like the tunes we sing or the marginalia (fancy word). Others are profound, like the texture of the matza or the vegetables we eat.

Each Haggadah is reflective of that community’s experiences and the creation of these Haggadot is enabled by the fact that there is no central authority telling us exactly how the seder should look or sound or taste.

There is a subtle textual variation between the typical Haggadah we use today and the version that Maimonides used. This subtle difference brings into relief how we think about authority, or leadership more generally, in Judaism.

In our Haggadah, the name "Moses" is mentioned only once, whereas in Maimonides' Haggadah, it is not mentioned at all. This limited reference to Moses reflects a common position that emphasizes the divine nature of the redemption from Egypt, focusing on God's role over that of Moses. At first glance, this perspective seems to answer the classic question as to why Moses plays such a diminished role in the retelling of the story - a phenomenon observed in both our and Maimonides' versions.

However, what I find even more intriguing is not just the presence or absence of Moses' name, but rather how he is presented in our Haggadah:

“And the Jewish people saw what the great hand of Hashem did to the Egyptians and the nation feared Hashem and they trusted in Hashem and Moshe His servant.

While Maimonides chose to fully focus on the divine nature of the redemption, the author of our Haggadah takes a brief detour to reflect on the nature of how Moses acted as a leader.

While exploring this concept, I made a surprising discovery: Moses is not only scarce in the Haggadah, but also in Tefilah (Jewish prayer) as a whole. Moreover, when he does appear, he is often accompanied by the descriptor "his servant". It seems that the author of our Haggadah was tapping into a broader trend.

A closer examination of the various versions of the Amidah reveals that Moses is mentioned only twice, and in both instances, he is referred to as "God's servant", just like in the Haggadah (specifically in the Shabbat Morning Amidah and Festival Mussaf).

Notably, Moses is absent from our daily Amidah, despite the fact that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David are mentioned three times a day, every day.

So what is it about Moses and his servant nature? What can we learn about leadership, community and being self-starters?

Let us take a brief tangent into nature.

In a remarkable demonstration of collective shared responsibility, honeybees engage in a collaborative decision-making process when selecting a new location for their colony. This phenomenon, first observed by Martin Lindauer, involves scout bees venturing out to identify potential sites and then sharing their discoveries with the colony through a distinctive "waggle" dance.

What stands out in this process is the nature of the decision-making. The queen bee, while present, holds no more authority than any other member of the group. Her primary role is to maintain social cohesion within the hive, ensuring the smooth regulation of daily activities. This collective approach highlights shared responsibility without a central authority figure.

I think the queen bee experience may shed light on what made Moses an exemplary leader.

Moses, like the bee, sends out delegates (spies and courts) and keeps social order. He leaves with his people to find a new home, but it is not his decision as to where they go.

Moses leads as a servant, both to God and to his people, and this gave him joy. As the Amidah for shabbat states (1 of 2 times he is mentioned): Moses rejoiced in the gift of his portion, for "trusted servant" You called him. He was happy because he got to serve.

Perhaps this is what is meant when the Torah says that the Jewish people are a kingdom of priests – the priest is there to serve. Serve in the temple, serve as a representative, serve as a leader.

We lead through service. We show up because we know our people need us. Not because we get to decide the direction or because it grants us power.

The Haggadah, in all it’s varying forms, reminds us that there is no one right way to retell our story or set out our vision. We know Jerusalem is the goal but we all might get there differently. There isn’t one voice that tells us how to sing or what to eat, but through a greater sense of purpose we still set out in the same direction. The destination is likely not something we will reach, but just as Moses didn’t reach the promise land, it doesn’t prevent us from serving.

On the night of the seder we retell our story to the next generation, with the hopes that when they leave the hive, they too will know our story and carry on in the right direction.

Rabbi David Fohrman explains, using textual proof from the Torah, that the two whys mean different things:

מדוע = what happened to make this occur? Why did this happen?

למה = to what end? ל - מה? Why did this happen and what should I do now?

I think it’s a framework for thinking about why we show up for our community. We can watch the world around us and ask מדוע? Why is this happening to us. Or we can see what’s happening and ask למה? Ok, what should I do now?

I personally prefer the למה model, especially when it comes to antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric. We can ask מדוע and never find a satisfactory answer or we can ask למה and find ways to bring our community together with joy, confidence, pride.

But, no one would tell you that Achashverosh is the main character. His endless power and wealth are merely the back-drop for thoughtful lay leaders to advance their agenda.

Mordechai and Esther paid close attention to the politics of their age and realized an opportunity. The Jewish people, they must of have thought, need to stand up for themselves. The survival of the Jewish people, they likely feared, was at the whim of power hungry advisors (who wear funny hats everywhere they go).

Moredechai, a name that stems from the Babylonian deity -Marduk, is no stranger to the culture in which he lives. In fact, it is possible he chose to live in Persia over the land of Israel (potentially an option at that time). Perhaps things were good for Mordechai and he just wanted to keep them that way. Same with Esther, who worked her way to the most inner court. Dining with those in power and being amongst the most beloved by the King.

But, they stuck to their plan and maybe they even pandered. But, they kept their Jewish identity and values at the core of their being and mission. They realized that power can be used as a means to an end, and isn’t meant to be the goal itself.

Let this Purim remind us that it is lay leaders with good values and a finely tuned compass who make history.

Increasingly, I am afraid, the qualifiers we use to describe ourselves have less to do with our Jewishness and more to do with our politics.

This worries me because it’s an indication that our value system is being supplanted by an alien system. A system that is less well rounded, more feebly formulated and just not Jewish.

Judaism, as a peoplehood and a values system, is older, wiser and transcendent. It outlives empires, technology revolutions and moral revolutions.

There are certainly moments when one party’s politics seem to better align with the practical needs of the Jewish people, and politics is a powerful tool for achieving your goals. I am firm believer in the value of participating in the civic process. But, let’s not be fooled into thinking that they’ve taken on our system in toto. No, they are borrowing aspects of it.

There is a great moment in Natan Sharasnky’s Fear No Evil, in which he laments how American Jewish organizations were competing to save Russian Jewry. He looks back at in with amusement, but imagine his anguish at the time.

We are living in a time when we are being told we have to choose sides. So let’s choose people over party or more importantly Peoplehood over Politics.

That means that for every 10 Jews you see at work this morning, only 3 of them will admit how hard of a day they are having today.

The global Jewish community woke up this morning to read the heart wrenching eulogy of Yarden Bibas for his wife and 2 young children. We watched as a 4 year old placed a drawing at the grave of his best friend.

But we won’t show it. We will come to work and deliver.

If you are reading this, know that there is a small but strong community who gets it. Look for the knowing nods and uncertain smirks.

🧡

Allie was at home in NY with our kids — I had called on Shabbat, something we usually don’t do, to let her know I was ok and felt safe (whatever that means).

That evening brought on feelings of immense unity and intense solitude.

The feeling of unity came from the fact that everyone was in it together. People on the ground, a collection of the greatest militaries in the world, friends & family refreshing their feeds with disdain and disbelief.

The feeling of solitude came from the challenge in articulating how I felt. In fact, I am still struggling with that. I was watching a war, with my own eyes, in real time. There was someone in the world who wanted to hurt me, physically and psychologically. My family was thousands of miles away.

The feeling of solitude also came from the fact that I knew I was leaving Israel a few days later. Knowing I was leaving the main stage of Jewish history behind, someone else’s heartache, someone else’s sleepless night.

Incredibly I fell asleep at around 4am and when I woke up close to 10am, the darkness seemed to have figuratively subsided as the sun came up.

I woke up thinking of the verse from Psalms 92:

“It is a good thing to give thanks to God…To declare loving kindness in the morning, and faithfulness in the night.”

It is, indeed, the night that calls for faith. Darkness breeds doubt, light enables love.

Perhaps this is the role darkness plays in the narrative of the Exodus story.

Let’s look more closely at the text:

Then God said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the sky that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be touched.”

“Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days.”

“People could not see one another, and for three days no one could move about; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings.”

We see here that a key feature of the darkness experienced by the Egyptians was that “one could not see another” — more literally, a “man couldn’t see his brother.” Whereas the Israelites had “light in their dwellings” — they could, it seems, still see their brothers.

Imagine the Egyptians had just gone through nine terror inducing plagues and yet they still couldn’t see one another. The first eight plagues didn’t develop an intense sense of unity amongst the Egyptians but rather drove them further apart.

The Israelites had endured centuries of slavery and dehumanization, yet they had light, they had the capacity to see their brother, they developed a stronger sense of unity.

I woke up Sunday morning and grabbed a taxi from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Was I supposed to acknowledge the events of the night before with the driver? I didn’t want to sound like a foreigner, like someone who didn’t know how to deal with these things. We made the usual small talk. He then asked my brother and I if we were afraid — I responded with the lyrics of a famous Hebrew song: “The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”

We then sang the song together. And kept singing songs of hope for nearly half the ride to Jerusalem.

In truth, I had a sense for the playbook. I knew what Judaism said about waking up the next morning with more unity, more hope, more loving kindness. I knew the lyrics, I just hadn’t really ever had to sing them.

After the ancient Israelites left Egypt they went on to lead extraordinary lives. They became the Jewish people. They continued to face adversity and triumph. They learned to not only cope with trauma but to grow from it. They put safeguards in place to make sure each generation, B’Kol Dor v’Dor, knows it’s part of something larger — we’ve seen this trauma before and we’ve prevailed. We too were slaves in Egypt and we went on to build families, a strong set of values, and an amazing people.

What I hadn’t mentioned was that I was in Israel on April 13th to celebrate a wedding. Family and friends from around the world joined the bride and groom in Israel, knowing it was a time of great unrest. They did so because they know that the greatest manifestation and symbol of hope is a Jewish wedding — it’s the cornerstone of the families and values we are so set on building.

His mission? To bridge the broadening gap he perceived in Israeli society. He believed this would take him 30-40 years.

Then the issues began to accelerate in the Fall of 2023.

It was Yom Kippur 2023, the height of the judicial reform protest in Israel, and Rabbi Granot and co. had been stopped by protestors from attending their Yom Kippur prayers. For Rabbi Granot, nearly a decade into his work, the tension was unbearable.

He insisted on a tikkun, a way to repair this division, on a faster timeline. So he approached this same group of protestors asking them to join him on the eve of simchat torah to dance in streets. They resisted and he went to sleep that night in despair.

The next morning he woke up and it was October 7th, 2023.

He knew, deep in his heart, that this was his opportunity to continue to build unity.

On October 15th, 2023 Rabbi Granot’s son, Amitai, was one of the first soldiers killed by Hezbollah.

Yet, his mission continued, centered not on words but on melodies, because often melodies (niggunim) allow us to express ourselves in ways that words cannot.

The next year, he sang his melodies with 3,000 people at the same site of the protest, but this time they were joining him for Yom Kippur services.

I had the privilege to sing and be inspired by him last night, at the end of a day in which words just wouldn’t suffice.