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.

Dont Give up

Based on this week’s Parsha, Shelach Lecha, I am sharing Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” to welcome Shabbat. Believe!

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.

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.

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?

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

“Emor gives us the Jewish calendar — the architecture of sacred time. This Shabbat, as spring deepens, George Harrison reminds us that the light always returns.”

Here Comes the Sun; Lev. 23 — the moadim, appointed times. Each season carries its own sacred light. Emor is the calendar of holiness.

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.

Shabbat Shalom

“This week’s parsha contains the Torah’s most radical demand — not sacrifice, not ritual, but love. Rabbi Creditor put it to music and the world has been singing it ever since.” Love your neighbor as yourself, Lev. 19:18 — v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha. The centerpiece of the Holiness Code is not ritual but relationship.

Listen to this beautiful music shared by Chazan Daniel Mutlu and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue.

Shabbat Shalom

What Does It Mean to Celebrate?

Reflections on Yom Ha’atzmaut in a Fractured Time

Yom Ha’atzmaut is here.

And I am not sure what to do with it this year.

I suspect I am not alone.

Some of us will celebrate with a brightness that feels slightly forced. Others will scroll past the blue-and-white posts on our feeds, unable to summon joy. Some will feel that celebrating at all is a kind of moral surrender — a looking away from things that cannot be ignored.

If any of this describes you, I want to be clear: your discomfort is not disloyalty. It shows how seriously you take what Israel was meant to be.

And if you find yourself in a different place from other Jews you love, people struggling just as honestly from the other direction, that too is part of this moment. There may not be a single right way to stand before this day, but there is a Jewish way to wrestle with it.

The Text We Keep Forgetting

I want to go back to May 14, 1948.

Not to the military maps or the political negotiations. To the document. To the words the founders actually chose when they had the chance to speak.

“The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” — and commits to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

The founders did not reach for military might. Not for ethnic supremacy. Not even for simple survival. In their most solemn moment, they reached for the prophets. They staked this new state’s legitimacy on a moral vision — ancient, demanding, and unmistakably Jewish.

That is what Yom Ha’atzmaut is actually celebrating.

Not merely a military victory. Not a geopolitical fact. The moment a people declared they would return to their land and do so justly.

The Tradition They Invoked

They knew exactly which prophets they were citing.

Isaiah, who thundered that sacrifice without justice is an abomination. Amos, who declared that God despises our festivals when the poor are crushed at the gates. Micah, who distilled the entire Torah into three obligations: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly.

These were not gentle voices. They were Israel’s most demanding lovers, celebrating the covenant and indicting its betrayal in the same breath, sometimes even in the same verse. They never abandoned Israel when it failed. They held it, fiercely, to its highest self.

That is the tradition Yom Ha’atzmaut places us in.

Not cheerleading. Not abandonment. Something harder and more honorable than either: prophetic loyalty.

The prophets never argued that Israel’s struggles forfeited its right to exist. Nor did they suggest that Israel’s existence placed it beyond accountability. They said something more demanding than either: precisely because this people is called to something higher, the gap between that calling and the present reality must be named, mourned, and closed.

The Gap We Cannot Pretend Away

The Declaration is not a historical artifact. It is a living covenant — and covenants make demands.

So let me name what the Declaration’s own language requires us to ask.

There are wars that were both existential and necessary. Wars whose courage deserves to be honored without hesitation or qualification. And there are military and political choices whose necessity is genuinely disputed — whose costs have fallen heavily on people who did not choose them.

There is an occupation now entering its sixth decade. The Declaration promised equality and justice. For millions of people who have known nothing else, the daily reality of life without sovereignty or legal recourse is a standing question addressed directly to the founders’ vision.

There is violence carried out by those who claim the land in the name of Jewish values — desecrating both the land and those values in the same act.

And there is a sustained assault on judicial independence — the very institution standing between the state’s founding promises and their erosion. When accountability is dismantled, the gap between aspiration and reality stops being painful and becomes permanent.

I am not making a partisan argument. I am holding the present up to the Declaration’s own words.

To name these things is not to delegitimize Israel. It is to hold Israel to its own founding covenant.

That is, in fact, the most Jewish act we can take.

What the Rabbis Already Knew

Jewish tradition has already given us a framework for exactly this kind of complexity.

On the last days of Passover, we recite only half Hallel — the psalms of praise — rather than the full Hallel.

The reason is arresting.

When the angels wanted to sing as the Egyptians drowned in the sea, God stopped them. “My creatures are drowning, and you want to sing songs?” According to tradition, full joy is morally unavailable when others are suffering, even when that suffering follows from our own necessary deliverance.

Yom Ha’atzmaut does not call for half Hallel. The miracle of Jewish sovereignty — a people returning from the literal ashes of history to reestablish a state in their ancestral homeland — is real, extraordinary, and worthy of full-throated celebration.

But perhaps not a Hallel entirely untroubled, either.

Not because the miracle is diminished. Because the vision the founders declared is not yet fully realized, and people are suffering in the shadow of that gap.

This is not despair. This is Jewish moral honesty.

The refusal to let celebration become anesthesia.

The Most Counter-Intuitive Thing I Want to Say

To celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut is not to endorse the present.

It is to hold the present accountable to the founding promise.

When we gather, sing, and mark this day, we are not saying: everything is fine. We are saying: this vision is worth everything, but it is not yet complete. We are not done, and we refuse to walk away.

To stop celebrating is to abandon the field, to concede that the gap between aspiration and reality is simply how things are.

To celebrate without reckoning is to betray the vision and to turn a covenant into a tribal rally.

The prophetic answer, the Jewish answer, is to do both, fully, in the same breath.

Sing because the miracle is real.

Grieve because the distance from the vision is real.

Reject the false choice between love and conscience, because genuine love has never required us to close our eyes.

The prophets did not love Israel less for naming its failures. They loved it more, precisely because they refused to let it become less than it was called to be.

An Invitation

This Yom Ha’atzmaut, let your celebration be the most serious thing you do.

Sing — because seventy-seven years ago, a people who had just walked through fire stood up and declared they would live, build, and do so with justice. That deserves every note.

Grieve — because the distance between that declaration and today’s reality is not minor, and pretending otherwise dishonors the founders and those living in the shadow of that gap.

And then sit with this question, not as rhetoric but as a real question I am asking you directly:

What does my love for this state truly require of me?

Not what it permits. Not what it excuses.

What does it require?

That question — taken seriously and wrestled with honestly — may be the most Zionist act of all.

חַג עַצמָאוּת שָּמֵאח

A meaningful and searching Independence Day.

From Grief to Geulah-Holding mourning and miracle in the same breath

No other nation on earth asks its people to do what Israel asks each spring: to sit in the ashes of devastating loss on one day, and dance in the streets the next. Yom Hazikaron — Israel’s Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror — flows directly, by design, into Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day. The transition is not an accident of the calendar. It is a theological statement.

In Israel, when the siren sounds, an entire country stops — on highways, in markets, mid-sentence. Over 24,000 soldiers and thousands of civilians are remembered not as statistics but as names and faces, beloved. Then, within hours, fireworks rise over the same sky. The whiplash is intentional. Joy built on forgotten grief is shallow. And grief without the horizon of hope becomes a tomb.

During my year as a rabbinical student in Jerusalem, I had the privilege of standing on Har Herzl, Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery, for the ceremony that bridges these two days. There, among the graves of soldiers and statesmen, surrounded by thousands of Israelis, young and old, grief transformed in real time. The final notes of the memorial prayers gave way to the lighting of the torches, and the air itself seemed to shift. It was not that the sadness lifted; rather, hope rose to stand alongside it. I experienced more than a transition. This is a theology. In that moment, the narrative of the Jewish state and the narrative of my own Jewish heart were woven together into a whole cloth; each thread distinct yet inseparable from the other.

That sequence — lived in the body, not merely studied in a book — is the pedagogy. You cannot fully understand Yom Ha’atzmaut without first standing in the silence of Yom Hazikaron. The independence feels different when you know what it cost.

We are not asked to choose between memory and celebration. We are asked to hold both and to let the weight of one lend depth to the other.

As American Jews, we stand at a particular intersection in these days. We did not lose children in those wars. We were not present for 1948’s desperate birth, 1967’s breathtaking turn, or October 7th’s shattering grief. And yet, we are not strangers. Israel is not a foreign country to the Jewish soul. It is the address of our deepest longings, the landscape of our prayers, and at the core of our peoplehood.

These two days invite us into belonging, not as spectators but as members of an ancient family. To observe Yom Hazikaron is to say: their loss is part of our story. To celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut is to say: their miracle is part of our story, too. The spiritual architecture of this sequence teaches us that meaning is forged at the intersection of sorrow and hope. This is the Jewish way. This has always been the Jewish way.

May we honor those who fell, celebrate what they made possible, and carry both truths — as one people, from wherever in the world we stand.