Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Am Yisrael

  • Re’eh  ·  O Say, Can You See?

    My father kept one of those hokey maxims framed on his office wall: “When you are up to your a** in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.” I used to smile at it and move on. Lately, I can’t. This week, Moses stands before the people and does something that should stop us cold. He says, Re’eh, See. And then he sets before them a blessing and a curse.

    See. As if seeing were the easy part.

    The parasha opens with the Hebrew imperative re’eh: look, perceive, take it in with your own eyes. Not sh’ma, hear, the verb that opens the great declaration of faith. Moses is not asking the people to accept a teaching on someone else’s authority. He is asking them to see for themselves, to recognize blessing and curse when the two stand right in front of them. Arguably, that is the hardest thing he asks of us in the whole Torah.

    Because in the moment, we almost never can. Blessing and curse do not come labeled. They arrive tangled together, wearing each other’s faces. The job that looked like a curse turns out to be the doorway. The relationship that felt like blessing slowly hollows us out. We are down in the swamp, swinging at alligators, and the reason we came has vanished from view. Moses says, “See,” and honestly: from here? I can barely make out my own hand.

    I have to be honest about what the text does, because it does not obviously agree with me. Moses plants the blessing and curse on two mountains, blessing upon Gerizim, curse upon Ebal (Deut. 11:29). When the ceremony plays out, the labels are fixed in advance. The Levites call each curse and the people answer amen (Deut. 27). Nobody is squinting across the valley, agonizing over which mountain is which.

    So let me name my own leap rather than smuggle it in. I want to ask what this ceremony means for those of us who never get the labels in advance. Here is what I notice: Moses does not send one lonely seeker up the mountain. He gathers the whole people into the valley and assigns half to each height, and the words travel back and forth across the divide, out loud. The seeing is not solitary. It happens in the space between us.

    Which lands me in a contradiction I would rather hold than hide. The command is re’eh, see for yourself, take no one’s word for it. And the surprise is that I cannot. I am too deep in my own swamp to trust my own eyes about it. The only way I reach the view “from thirty thousand feet” is to turn to you, on the other mountain, and let you tell me what I cannot see: that thing you call a blessing, look again. That thing that feels like a curse, stay with it. The verb is see. The practice turns out to be sh’ma, to heed another voice. I can only see through you.

    Which brings me back to the title. O say, can you see? The anthem asks it at dawn, straining to see whether something precious survived a night of thunder and rockets and glare. That is the honest condition. We are all peering through the smoke of our own night, unsure by ourselves whether what we love is still standing. The miracle was never in the thunder and the lightning. It is in people sheltering one another from the storm, calling across to each other at first light so no one has to read the sky alone.

    I still cannot always tell the blessing from the curse in the moment I am living it. I have stopped expecting to. But I have learned who to ask.

    So, since you can see a valley of mine that I cannot: who is standing on your far mountain, and what have you not yet asked them to help you see?

  • Eikev- Gratitude-Shabbat Shalom

    This Shabbat Parshat Eikev gives us many things to contemplate.  Foremost is gratitude.  v’achalta v’savata u’veirachta: you shall eat and be satisfied and bless. The obligation to feel gratitude in moments of abundance.“Eikev warns us: don’t forget God when things are good. George Harrison wrote this song after a long dark winter. Gratitude is hardest — and most necessary — when the sun finally returns.”

    Shabbat Shalom

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    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

    Va’etchanan gives us the Shema — the prayer we say morning and night, the prayer on our lips at life’s last moment. Simon & Garfunkel understood what it means to be a bridge for someone who needs one.

    We continue to pray for peace for all.

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    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.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULIjKYa4lyI

  • What story do we tell ourselves? Parsha V’etchanan

    What story do we tell ourselves? Our memory of events often differs from what actually happened. The deviation from the facts is not due to faulty memory; instead, it reveals a story that better meets deeper personal needs as we try to find meaning in the experience. This tendency to reshape narratives is a profoundly human trait, one that is powerfully explored in the Parsha V’Etchanan through Moses.

    In the second Parsha of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls the Exodus and God’s giving of the Torah. The word V’Etchanan means “I pleaded.” Moses recounts his encounter with God, beseeching God to allow him to enter the Promised Land. Moses’s plea, filled with a heartbreaking sense of injustice, is denied. He explains his fate to the people with an accusatory tone: “The Lord was angry with me on your account and would not listen to me.”

    Taken at face value, Moses appears to be shifting the blame for his own mistake—striking the rock at Meribah—away from himself and onto the Children of Israel. He isn’t just holding them responsible for the act itself but also for his suffering caused by his unfair punishment for that act. After 40 years of leading often ungrateful and rebellious people, Moses was exhausted, broke down, and acted in a way that was uncharacteristic for him, but he is held fully accountable. Moses isn’t merely recounting a story but revealing a fundamental aspect of human nature: blaming others for our own actions.

    We often face these situations. How do we respond when confronted with insult or injustice? Too often, we avoid taking responsibility for our actions and instead blame others. We react with harshness or indifference, rationalizing rather than owning up to the situation. The “whataboutism” mentality justifies bad behavior by claiming that if someone wrongs me, I am justified in doing something wrong too. However, our tradition teaches us that ultimate responsibility lies with the individual. The lesson is not that others’ actions can justify our own, but that we are accountable for our behavior, regardless of the circumstances. We cannot point fingers at others to absolve ourselves.

    This theme of personal accountability is closely connected to Moses’s chilling prophecy. He warns the people that after they have lived in the land for some time, they will inevitably “deal corruptly” and turn away from God. This human weakness and tendency toward complacency lead to a future of exile. However, Moses offers a remedy for this bleak future: a return to the fundamental principles of their faith, sharing both the “Ten Commandments” and the Shema and V’ahavta.

    Our tradition teaches that living by our values is non-negotiable. What we know as Derekh Eretz—the ethical “rules of the road”—must always be followed. We are only given dispensation when we are prevented from fulfilling our obligations. The strength and enduring nature of Judaism require that we respect others and live in a way that benefits both ourselves and our community.

    We stand against all hatred—not just antisemitism. We support the laws of the land and everyone’s rights to those protections. We believe in feeding the hungry, no matter who they are, housing the homeless, and upholding the dignity of work and the ability to support one’s family. Judaism teaches us to do these things because we understand what it means to be a stranger and to honor every person, since we are all created in God’s image.

    A society is judged by how it cares for its most vulnerable. This is a core principle of Judaism. Especially during difficult times like these, we are called to reaffirm and champion our values. They are more than just guidelines; they ground us, giving us clarity, meaning, and purpose.

  • Shabbat Shalom -Dvarim, Joni Mitchell and Both Sides Now

    As we welcome the Shabbat of Parsha Devarim, Moses recalls the long journey and we look back with Joni Mitchell.

    Shabbat Shalom

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    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

    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

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.