Pitchu Li- Open the Gates of Righteousness, performed by the Diaspora Yeshiva Band, is an upbeat way to welcome Shabbat. In Torah, we are at the gates of the Promised Land. Let us remember and celebrate.
Shabbat Shalom
Masei – What do we owe the person who broke something they never meant to break?
Masei spends its final chapters on legal architecture, tribal borders, and inheritance rules. But it also includes the law of the arei miklat, the cities of refuge, built for the person who kills b’shogeg by accident. The neighbor whose axe head flew off the handle. The driver who looked down for just one second.
The Hebrew is doing something specific. Miklat shares a root with klitah, meaning absorption. It’s the word Israel still uses to describe how it takes in immigrants. An ulpan klitah is an absorption center. A city of refuge isn’t a jail cell or a technicality that lets someone off the hook. It’s a place built to take a person in, fully, the way a body absorbs what it’s given.
But the text refuses to keep this simple. The one who fled must remain there, not for a fixed sentence, but until the death of the sitting High Priest, a mortality with no connection to what he did. Step outside the walls before that day, and the victim’s own kinsman, the go’el ha-dam, may kill him without guilt. There is no release date. No parole board, no moment when remorse itself triggers freedom. The clock belongs to no one in the story. Not the guilty. Not the grieving. Not even the community that built the walls.
I think about this law when I’m sitting with people who never swung an axe. The hardest conversations I have as a chaplain are with those left behind after someone they loved has taken their own life. The question always comes, in some form. Why couldn’t I have stopped them? What could I have done differently? The law in Masei is written for the hand that acted. But the ache it names reaches beyond the letter of the text. It reaches the parent who didn’t call back, the spouse who went to sleep instead of staying up, the friend who sensed something was wrong and said nothing. No court can rule on that kind of guilt, because there was no crime. It is its own kind of b’shogeg, harm without intent, and it deserves its own klitah, its own absorption. There is only the unbearable arithmetic of what might have been different, run again and again, with no verdict ever arriving.
We want closure on a schedule, closure being a word that means to shut something. We want five stages of grief with a finish line, a program that promises healing by a set week, and a story the culture is ready to call resolved. Masei suggests some ruptures don’t run on anyone’s calendar. What I have seen console the otherwise inconsolable is not an answer, because there isn’t one. It is something closer to what the city of refuge offered before anyone had ruled on guilt or innocence, before any judgment was handed down. A sacred space of empathy and love. Built to absorb a person exactly as they are, guilt and all, for exactly as long as it takes. No release date there either.
So the harder question isn’t who needs a city of refuge right now. It’s whether we can build one, not to explain away the guilt, but to hold it and stay standing at the gate for as long as someone needs us there.
Matot – What holds you to another person once you want something they don’t?
That question sits beneath Matot, and the text hides it in a structural trick. The parasha opens with the laws of vows: ish ki yidor neder l’Adonai… lo yachel devaro — if a man vows a vow, he shall not profane his word; he must do all that comes from his mouth. Yachel means to profane, to hollow out, to treat as common what should have been set apart. A vow is not a private transaction between a person and God. It’s a wall built around your speech so others can trust it.
Two chapters later, Reuben and Gad ask to settle outside the land, and Moses doesn’t hear a request — he hears betrayal. “Shall your brothers go to war while you sit here?” he demands, then goes further: you are a brood of sinful men, rising up to add to God’s anger against Israel, like the spies before them. This is not negotiation. It’s a rupture.
What follows repairs it, and the Torah deliberately writes the repair in vow-language. “We will build sheepfolds for our flocks,” the tribes answer, “but we ourselves will go armed before our brothers until we have brought them to their place.” Break that vow, Moses warns, and you will have sinned against the Lord. The same charge the parasha opened with for a neder left unkept.
I don’t think that’s an accident. Wanting something different from your community isn’t, by itself, a betrayal. But the only way to want it and still belong is a vow neither side can walk back from, one earned through confrontation, not by going around it.
In my pastoral work, I’ve sat in the room right after that rupture — before either person knows whether the relationship survives the difference or ends. What decides it isn’t who apologizes first. It’s whether the vow still holds when neither feels like keeping it. It is the opposite of yachel, a vow kept whole.
Where in your life is a vow like that being asked to hold right now?
Shabbat Shalom
We welcome Shabbat and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
It is a time of sacred celebration and rededication to the ideals upon wbich this nation was founded. Let us thank God for our blessings and continue the work on behalf of us all. I share Ray Charles’ version of America the Beautiful
Shabbat Shalom
עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן
Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.
May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.
Parashat Pinchas: Who Told You That Was God?
The most dangerous sentence in religious life is not “God is dead.” It is “God told me to.”
Grant everything. God rewarded Pinchas. The plague stopped. The covenant was real. Let’s sit with that fully, without deflecting into questions of fallacy or anthropomorphism.
Then what?
Parashat Pinchas forces us to ask the question we would rather avoid: how do we distinguish between someone who genuinely heard a divine command and someone who dressed their own violent, irrational certainty in holy language?
Pinchas did not announce a prophecy. He did not consult Moses. He did not wait for the cloud to move. He felt something burning within him, seized a spear, and acted. The text calls it kana’ut, zealotry. And zealotry, by definition, does not pause to ask whether the voice it hears is God’s or its own.
This is not a theoretical problem. Yigal Amir was certain that God wanted Yitzhak Rabin dead and pulled the trigger on Israel’s Prime Minister. The settlers who burn Palestinian villages invoke divine command. The men who flew planes into buildings on September 11th believed, with everything in them, that they were doing God’s bidding. Every act of religious extremism in our lifetime has been committed by someone who felt what Pinchas felt: a burning, urgent, absolute conviction that the holy cause could not wait for process, permission, or the slower work of community discernment.
Pinchas heard God. We have stipulated that. But that settled question raises an unsettled one: what did the rest of us receive when God rewarded him? A record of a single grace, given to a single person in an unrepeatable moment? Or a template, permission for anyone who burns with enough certainty to act without constraint?
The tradition answers this with unusual clarity: it is not a template. The rabbis ruled explicitly that kana’ut cannot be taught, authorized, or legislated. What Pinchas did cannot be commanded because the moment you command it, you hand a weapon to anyone who has ever mistaken their own rage for the voice of God.
But this only sharpens the question. If we cannot rule it out, cannot authorize it, cannot teach it, then how does anyone know, in the burning moment, whether what they feel is revelation or self-deception?
Two traditions offer guardrails. The American tradition answers with the rule of law: no private conviction, however burning, overrides the collective agreement. The Jewish tradition answers with machloket l’shem shamayim, an argument for the sake of heaven. Hillel and Shammai disagreed about nearly everything, passionately, for decades. What made their argument holy was not that one of them was right. It was that neither of them picked up a spear. The argument itself was the faithfulness.
Korach, by contrast, was certain. He even had a point: all Israel is holy; why does Moses alone lead? But his argument was for himself, not for heaven. Certainty in service of the self, dressed in the language of principle, is exactly what kana’ut looks like from the inside. The difference between Hillel and Shammai and Korach is not the passion. It is whether you can stay in the room when you don’t prevail.
Both guardrails say the same thing in different languages: subordinate private certainty to collective process. Neither is sufficient on its own, and neither holds forever.
The law is corrupted. The argument for heaven devolves into paralysis. The judges weep at the entrance to the tent as the plague spreads. This is precisely the condition that makes Pinchas feel righteous, as he confronts a genuine emergency and a genuinely failed institution.
What does the tradition say, then? Not: pick up the spear. But also not: keep weeping. Stay in the argument, even when the argument is failing. Bear witness. Refuse both the violence and the paralysis. What we surrender is the clean story, the one where we acted, the plague stopped, and we knew we were right. What we keep is harder: the argument, the relationship, the refusal to let our certainty become someone else’s catastrophe.
Right now, both are under assault. The rule of law is openly contested by people certain their cause overrides it. The capacity for machloket l’shem shamayim, good-faith disagreement within a shared relationship, is nearly impossible to sustain in a world that rewards the spear and punishes the pause.
That means Pinchas is not an ancient problem we have learned to contain. He stands at the center of this moment, spear in hand, absolutely certain.
The question is not whether we recognize him. It is whether we recognize him in ourselves.
“The most dangerous sentence in religious life is not ‘God is dead.’ It is ‘God told me to.’”
Shabbat Shalom -We Rise Up
This Shabbat we read Parsha Balak an inspiration that what is destined for good cannot be turned to destruction. Andra Day shares Rise Up as we welcome Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom
עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן
Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.
May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.
Chukat-Balak: We rarely know what someone was holding for us until it’s gone.
We rarely know what someone was holding for us until it’s gone.
That is not a metaphor. The Talmud teaches (Ta’anit 9a) that a well of living water, Be’er Miriam (Miriam’s Well), traveled with Israel through the wilderness because Miriam could find water. Not through magic, but through a capacity she possessed, an instinct for locating what sustains life even in the harshest terrain.
And then she died. And no one else knew where to look.
What follows is painful to read. The people howl at Moses. God tells him to speak to the rock. Instead, Moses, exhausted and grieving, strikes it. Twice. Water pours out. And Moses is told he will never enter the Promised Land. Not because he struck a rock, but because he couldn’t demonstrate what Miriam had demonstrated for decades: that the desert holds life within it, waiting to be invited out.
The question I keep returning to is not why Moses failed. It’s why no one had learned what Miriam knew. Who had been watching? Whose hands had been placed alongside hers?
Later in the passage, when the Israelites follow the foreign god Baal Peor, whose very name means “to lay bare, to be exposed,” I wonder whether this is what happens to a people who have lost their inner compass. Not weakness. Exposure. The kind of vulnerability that comes from having nothing to hold on to.
This Shabbat, I want to hold three questions with you. Who have we been teaching? What are we actually passing on, not the titles but the capacities? And can we trust, even in the middle of the wilderness, that what comes next can be good?
I hope to see you.
עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן
We continue to pray for peace in the Middle East, a region that has endured war for too long; and we pray for the safety of our troops. May they stay safe and return home soon.
What’s Going on?
As we welcome Shabbat and read Parsha Korach, Marvin Gaye’s What’s going on is an unorthodox way to sing it in. “Korach used the language of justice to serve his own ambition. This Shabbat, Marvin Gaye asks us to look honestly at our own motives — and our world’s.”
Shabbat Shalom
עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵיm תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן
Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.
May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.
Juneteenth: The Proclamation Is Not the Liberation
Freedom cannot be bestowed.
That is what Juneteenth teaches, if we read it honestly. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers rode into Galveston, Texas, and told enslaved people they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier. The news had been deliberately withheld.
People who were legally free had been kept in chains.
I sit with that as a Jew. Not because our stories are the same. They are not, and I want to be clear about that. The deliberate withholding of freedom from people already legally free, followed by a century of Jim Crow, redlining, and state-sanctioned terror, is a specific history that is not ours to claim. But we know something about living in a country that promises equality and delivers something else. Jewish Americans were excluded from universities, neighborhoods, and professions long after the law said otherwise. We built our freedom here. We fought for it, organized for it, generation after generation. Not the same distance. But enough of the same road to understand what it means when a proclamation is not liberation.
Freedom declared is not freedom achieved.
That distance has a name in Hebrew. The true condition of liberty, not the absence of chains but belonging, nesting, and being at home, is called dror. It appears in Leviticus 25:10 as the heart of the Jubilee: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” u’k’ratem dror ba’aretz l’khol yoshveha. The phrase is engraved on the Liberty Bell here in Philadelphia.
Dror shares its root with the swift, darting bird that cannot be caged. In Psalm 84, the dror finds her nest. Freedom is not merely an unlocked door. It is the ability to build a home.
You cannot nest in a relationship built on hierarchy.
The Black-Jewish coalition built some of the most significant civil rights work this country has ever seen. And it is fracturing. I cannot name all the reasons from where I stand, but I can name some of them honestly. The tensions over Israel and Gaza have pulled progressive coalitions apart in ways that have left Jewish Americans isolated in spaces they once helped build. There have been moments in the racial justice movement when antisemitism surfaced and was not adequately confronted. And Jewish organizations have sometimes retreated into self-protection at precisely the moments when showing up for Black Americans would have cost something. All of this has accumulated. The distance between us is not an accident.
I have been part of that accumulation. Not out of malice, but out of a posture I want to name and examine: tzedakah without brit. Tzedakah is not charity. It is justice, a moral and ethical obligation owed to every human being by virtue of their dignity. Yet even justice, at its most rigorous, assumes someone who owes and someone who is owed. Brit, covenant, is different. In brit, there is no creditor and no debtor. There are only partners, each bound to the other by what they have promised, each carrying something the other cannot generate alone. The Jewish community has often brought tzedakah to the Black community when what the relationship required was brit. I have shown up as a donor when I needed to show up as someone who needed this too. The hand extended downward, however sincerely, is not the same as hands clasped across.
During last year’s Super Bowl, an ad ran that I have not been able to stop thinking about. A Jewish boy, clearly frightened, walked down a school hallway. He found an epithet written on a Post-it note inside his locker. His Black friend appeared beside him and (paraphrasing) said: “Don’t worry about this. I have your back.”
What moves me about that image is not who is scared and who is confident. It is that they are there together. The Black friend did not calculate whether the Jewish boy had earned his solidarity. The Jewish boy did not weigh whether he deserved it. One person was vulnerable. The other showed up. That is not tzedakah. That is brit.
And it runs in both directions. Fannie Lou Hamer, testifying before the 1964 Democratic credentials committee with the FBI listening and her life on the line, taught a room full of Jewish liberals what courage is, something they could not have learned on their own. The civil rights movement and the fight against antisemitism are not parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. They are the same road. Both communities have been told by the powerful that their humanity is conditional. Both communities carry traditions of survival, resistance, and a stubborn insistence on dignity. When Black and Jewish Americans stand together, it is not because one is helping the other. It is because the work of building a just world belongs to both, and neither can finish it alone.
The Jubilee was not tzedakah. It was brit. The landowner returned what the system had accumulated on his behalf. The landless person was not a charity case. He was a covenant partner whose rights had been deferred. That is what made the Jubilee holy: not that someone gave, but that the relationship was restored.
Restoration, not generosity. Two covenant partners, each asking the other: what do you need that only I can provide?
That question requires something specific. It requires the willingness to be seen as the one who needs, not only as the one who provides. It requires showing up without the guarantee of reciprocity, because the covenant is the point, not the return. It requires trusting that the other person’s struggle is not separate from yours.
Juneteenth poses a specific question to the Jewish community. Not what we are permitted to do. Not what would make us feel righteous. What does this day demand of us toward our Black neighbors in this city, right now?
Two people walking the same hallway, watching each other’s backs. That is what covenant looks like. I don’t think Juneteenth asks us to admire that image. It demands that we become it.
Korach’s Question Is Still Ours-Who gave you the right?
“Rav lachem — you have gone too far. The entire congregation is holy, every one of them, and God is in their midst. So why do you raise yourselves above God’s assembly?” (Num. 16:3). It sounds almost democratic. Everyone is holy, and power should be distributed. Who appointed you?
The word Korach uses for “raise yourselves” is hitnassu, from the root nasa, meaning “to lift” or “to carry.” This is no accident. Throughout the Book of Numbers, nasa is precisely what leaders are called to do for others. The census begins seu et rosh, “lift the heads” of the Israelites (Num. 1:2). In the Torah’s own grammar, leadership is the elevation of people. Korach takes that same word and turns it reflexive: you have been lifting yourselves. What began as a vocation becomes, in his telling, a vanity.
He has a point. Jacob Milgrom, in his landmark JPS Torah Commentary on Numbers (1990), notes that Korach’s protest reflects a genuine theological tension: the democratization of holiness at Sinai (“a kingdom of priests,” Ex. 19:6) sits uneasily alongside the hierarchical priestly structure that follows. Rashi, commenting on the opening verse, is more direct: his eyes misled him (Rashi on Num. 16:7). Korach understands the letter of the law. His error is not theological ignorance. It is envy dressed as principle. He deploys a genuine grievance to serve personal ambition, thereby corroding the very community whose holiness he claims to champion.
This is where Korach becomes unsettlingly contemporary.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) documented the collapse of social capital, the networks of trust, reciprocity, and civic engagement that hold communities together. Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build (2020) identified the specific pathology: our institutions have stopped forming people and have become platforms for individual performance. Leaders no longer serve the institution; they use it. The congregation becomes an audience. The office becomes a stage.
Korach doesn’t want to serve the assembly. He wants the assembly to confirm him.
A moment in the story is often overlooked. When Moses summons Datan and Aviram to speak, they refuse to come: lo na’aleh, “we will not come up” (Num. 16:12). The very men accusing Moses of inappropriate elevation refuse to engage. Their grievance has become more important to them than the community they claim to represent. This is how populism curdles: the aggrieved insist on the legitimacy of their anger while refusing the relational work that legitimate challenge requires.
What does legitimate challenge look like? Moses, for all his flaws, shows us something: he falls on his face (Num. 16:4). Not in capitulation, but in recognition of the stakes. He doesn’t reach for power. He keeps asking whether there is another way.
The erosion of trust in our moment is not simply the result of bad actors. It is the result of a culture that has learned to reward Korach’s move: mobilize grievance, claim to speak for everyone, and leverage that claim for personal advancement. It feels like democratic accountability, but it functions like its opposite.
The text poses a genuine question to us. Holding leaders accountable is an obligation. But how do we do it without Korach’s self-serving use of righteous language? How do we distinguish the prophet from the demagogue when both speak the language of liberation?
The Torah does not resolve this. It leaves us with it, deliberately.
Discernment is itself a form of holiness. And it has to be cultivated. It doesn’t arrive by earthquake or fire.
It comes, as it usually does, in relationship.
Key Citations
Rashi on Numbers 16:1 (s.v. va-yikach Korach).
Milgrom, Jacob. Numbers: The JPS Torah Commentary. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Levin, Yuval. A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus. New York: Basic Books, 2020.