What Are We Willing to Believe?-Parashat Shelach

The ten spies weren’t lying. That’s what makes Parashat Shelach so difficult to sit with.

They went. They looked. They came back and reported exactly what they saw: a land flowing with milk and honey, yes, and also giants and fortified cities. And as we so often feel, they add: we felt like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so were we in theirs. Numbers 13:33.

This is not dishonesty. It is about perception.

It is also a deeply human thing. The spies were not weak people. They were the chosen leaders of their tribes, sent precisely because they were capable. And yet standing before the walls of Canaan, something in them collapsed inward. The text doesn’t tell us why. It doesn’t need to. We know why. We have felt it ourselves. Fear has a way of shrinking our self-image before we have had a chance to act. We look at what is in front of us and conclude, before taking the first step, that we are not enough. The journey’s end is determined. Before they ever walk into Canaan.

The word for spies in the Torah is meraglim, from the root regel, foot. They were sent to walk the land. To touch it. To feel its soil. But what the ten spies brought back wasn’t the earth. It was their terror, projected onto the landscape. They looked at the land through the lens of their own smallness and concluded that the smallness was the land’s fault.

This is not a report on Canaan. It is a teaching about how fear shapes what we are capable of seeing.

Caleb and Joshua walked the same hills and tasted the same grapes. They came back with a different report, not because they were braver or stronger, or had seen something the others had not. They came back differently because they remembered differently. They carried with them the sea splitting, the manna falling, the cloud by day and the fire by night. They understood that they had not arrived at this border by their own strength alone. That memory, of miracle, of deliverance, of promise fulfilled along the way, gave them a self-image the ten could not sustain. They looked at what stood before them and saw not the size of the obstacle but the fullness of what they were capable of becoming.

Fear doesn’t lie to us about what’s in front of us. It lies to us about what we’re capable of.

B’nai Yisrael. In their fear, they condemned themselves to forty more years of wandering. Not as divine punishment but as the consequence of having decided before the battle was joined that they had already lost. You cannot enter a land you have already surrendered in your imagination.

We have all stood at the edge of a promise, one made to us, or one we made. And the voice insisting the battle is already lost before it has begun is most often our own.

We each carry more proof of what we have survived than fear would have us remember.

The giants are real. That was never the question.

The question is whether you are willing to believe in yourself enough to walk through your fear anyway.

Shabbat Shalom

Behaatlotecha-when you lift up

The iconic Joni Mitchell from 2022 shares her iconic song Both Sides Now.

A different version, but poignant.  A message tied to the parsha as we enter Shabbat.

a prayer for peace

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.

Shabbat Shalom

 

The Blueprint for Sustaining the Light-Parshat Behaalotecha

Why do we keep looking back at a past that wasn’t even that good?

That’s the question hiding inside Parshat Behaalotecha. The Israelites have everything: the Mishkan, the cloud, the fire, the infrastructure of a people on the move toward something sacred. And within chapters, they’re weeping for Egypt’s cucumbers.

It would be easy to judge them. It is harder to recognize ourselves.

Here is what the Torah is actually diagnosing: nostalgia is a lie we tell ourselves about the past. The fish they’re mourning were eaten in slavery. The melons, the leeks, all of it was part of a life in which they were not free. Memory has a way of editing out the cost of what we’ve left behind, leaving only the flavor of what felt familiar.

But there’s something even sharper underneath the complaint. The manna was miraculous, and it had become ordinary. Not bad. Just expected. This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation: what we once received as a gift quietly becomes baseline, and then disappointment begins right at the level of yesterday’s abundance. Having more doesn’t produce gratitude. It resets the threshold for what counts as “enough.”

The parsha opens with the image of the menorah: b’haalotecha et ha-nerot, when you lift up the lights. The kohen returned every single morning to tend the lamps, trimming wicks, clearing ash, and replenishing oil. Sacred light didn’t sustain itself. It required showing up, again and again, for the unglamorous work of maintenance.

That’s the image the Torah gives us for the spiritual life. Not the dramatic moment of ignition. The daily return.

The question Behaalotecha poses is not: Why am I struggling? It is: What am I actually hungry for, and have I confused familiarity with nourishment?

What flame in your life is asking you to come back to it?

 

 

 

You Knew What You Were Getting Into with Mamdani

Years ago, a friend came to me frustrated that his child’s Quaker school wasn’t fully observing Jewish holidays. He wanted to vent — and then wanted to know what we could do about it.

My answer was simple: you knew what you were getting into. The Quaker school system serves many communities, cultures, and traditions. Its mission isn’t to support any one of them; it’s to instill the values it considers foundational. That’s not a failure. That’s what you signed up for.

We are having a Quaker School moment with New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

A portion of the Jewish community is outraged that Mamdani has declined to participate in the Israel Day Parade. But Mamdani was never unclear about where he stood. He is a self-described democratic socialist, and his views on Israel were not hidden — they were part of his appeal. To have seen him marching as a parade marshal would have looked exactly like what it would have been: a cheap attempt to curry favor.

This is who New Yorkers elected.

Elections have consequences. Whether or not I agree with Mamdani, the ballot box was where I could register my view. That moment has passed. Expressing outrage now is a day late and a dollar short. New York got what it voted for.

If the outcome feels wrong, the answer isn’t to spit into the wind. It’s to find better candidates — people who reflect the critical values at stake. The machinery of Democratic politics in New York needs a serious post-mortem: how did this happen, what forces converged, and what will it take to do things differently next time?

Don’t complain that the person elected isn’t delivering what you wanted when what he’s delivering is exactly what he promised.

Shabbat Shalom

Bridge over Troubled Water is a to prepare for Shabbat Naso.

Naso gives us the Priestly Blessing — the oldest words in continuous Jewish use. Simon & Garfunkel found the same melody three thousand years later.

Our prayer for peace

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.

What Jealousy Knows That Love Forgets- Parsha Naso

I have sat with people whose trust has shattered — in marriages, friendships, and communities — and almost always, the breaking came not from a single dramatic act but from a slow accumulation of doubt. A question that shouldn’t have needed asking. A silence that lasted too long.

Parashat Naso knows this gap intimately. It moves through every layer of broken trust, from the outside in: communal rupture, a marriage poisoned not by confirmed betrayal but by suspicion, and finally the Nazir — the one who has seen enough human brokenness to withdraw from relationships altogether.

Each rupture runs deeper than the last. Yet the Torah’s response to each one is the same: none of these restorations happen in private. You cannot repair what was broken between two people with only those two. We need a container larger than the injury — something that can hold what we cannot carry alone.

But the parsha demands something even harder. The Sotah drinks the water without knowing what will happen. That act, entering genuine uncertainty, is itself an act of trust. The Torah teaches something almost paradoxical: you cannot wait until you trust again before taking the risk of trusting.

And where does that courage come from? The parsha answers with Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Blessing. The blessing is not something we generate ourselves — it comes from outside us, bestowed by the kohanim and ultimately from God. I am placing my name upon you. I am lifting my face toward you. Shalom is not merely peace, but wholeness, the integrity of parts restored to each other. It is given to us precisely so that what comes next becomes possible.

Because the parsha keeps going. The heads of the tribes each bring their offerings — twelve princes, twelve consecutive days, the same gift each time, each one named and fully witnessed. No shortcuts. Consistent presence, showing up the same way again and again, until the wholeness you are building becomes real enough to hold.

The blessing does not replace the work. It makes the work bearable. Work that each of us is called to do.

Freedom’s just another word…

This week we celebrate Shavuot, the moment at Sinai when God gave us the Torah, z’man matan Torah. “We left Egypt to be free. So why did we go straight to a mountain and accept a set of obligations?”

What did we say yes to? And why does it feel like freedom?

These are the questions our tradition asks us to ask ourselves.

“The only free person is one who engages in Torah,” says Pirkei Avot (6:2). And the proof? The tablets: “charut al haluchot” — engraved upon the tablets.

“The rabbis do something audacious here. They look at the word charut, meaning ‘engraved,’ and say: ‘Don’t read charut. Read cherut. Freedom.’ The words for ‘engraved’ and ‘freedom’ are nearly identical in Hebrew, differing by a single letter. That’s not an accident — that’s an argument. The rabbis are saying: the engraving is the freedom. The law is the liberation.”

“Most of us were raised with the opposite assumption. We think of freedom as the absence of constraint — freedom from something. But the rabbis point elsewhere. They point toward freedom for something.”

The Israelites didn’t wander out of Egypt into a void. They walked from one kind of constriction into something that gave them shape. The Hebrew for Egypt, Mitzrayim, comes from metzar, meaning a narrow place. This new place is not a cage. It is a form. The way a riverbank doesn’t imprison the water, it gives it somewhere to go.

Receiving the Torah wasn’t the end of freedom. It was the answer to freedom’s hardest question: now that you’re out — what are you for?

 

 

Shabbat Shalom

BaMidbar, or the Wilderness, is where Torah is given.  We were unmoored until our encounter with the Divine. The questions Bob Dylan asks in Blowin’ in the Wind are the questions we all must ask as we traverse the wilderness.

We pray for peace.

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.

Shabbat Shalom