Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: America

  • 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

    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.’”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We Remember Them

  • The Empty Chair at the Chessboard: Why the Influence Narrative Fails

     

    The persistent claim that American foreign policy is being dictated by Israeli pressure regarding the Iranian regime is as common as it is misguided. However, my frustration with this narrative isn’t rooted in a defense of the special relationship of the United States and Israel. Rather, it stems from a refusal to acknowledge a much more uncomfortable truth: the current chaos in the Middle East is not the result of a Jewish conspiracy, but a symptom of Donald Trump’s reckless, superficial, and dangerously transactional leadership.

    To suggest that an ally can force the United States into a conflict against its own will is a profound admission of American weakness. It paints a picture of a superpower without a rudder. If the administration is being led into a fight, it isn’t because of the strength of the lobby in Washington; it is because of a vacuum of leadership in the Oval Office.

    There are legitimate reasons to debate the extent of U.S. involvement in this region. Many of us remain deeply ambivalent—caught between a sincere desire for peace and a cold-eyed recognition of the threat the Iranian regime poses to Western stability. How imminent that threat is remains a valid question for debate. Israel, facing an existential threat on its doorstep, has its own compelling reasons to seek regime change—a position Benjamin Netanyahu has held for three decades. He is a leader seizing a strategic opportunity for his nation’s survival.

    While the United States and Israel may share the broad goal of a neutralized Iran, their specific national interests are not identical. A strong American president would recognize these overlapping interests while maintaining a firm grip on the U.S. strategic compass. Instead, we see a Commander-in-Chief who has consistently approached a high-stakes geopolitical chess match with the mindset of a checkers player.

    The tragedy here isn’t that we’re being bullied into a fight we didn’t choose. The real tragedy is that we have a leader who is fundamentally unqualified to operate in a world where the U.S. has historically been the stabilizing superpower. By acting on impulse and self-interest instead of broad strategy, the administration has created havoc that our allies must endure and our enemies can exploit.

    If we believe another country can truly force the United States to do its bidding, it confirms our worst fears: that the most powerful man in the world is also the most impulsive and easily swayed. We deserve more than a presidency that acts as a series of erratic transactions. We deserve leadership that understands the weight of its authority and the complexities of the world it aims to lead.

    NB. I do not normally write about politics, however, given the current conspiracy claims regarding Israel and the war, I thought this was necessary. ~ Rabbi David Levin

     

  • Thoughts on our current War-A War of Choice vs. a War of Necessity

    The distinction between a war of choice and a war of necessity can be ambiguous. Most individuals fall into one of three categories: support, opposition, or uncertainty.

    I find myself in the third category. War is a profoundly destructive force that aims to annihilate and devastate. Beyond the immediate destruction, the future remains shrouded in uncertainty. Which threats are imminent? The question defies a straightforward answer.

    The First World War was a precursor to the Second World War, which in turn led to the reconstruction of Europe and the onset of the Cold War.

    Explanations justifying the actions of the United States and Israel in the present context are imperative. Congress should have been adequately informed in advance and must exercise its constitutional authority to authorize war. The support of allies is crucial, though not indispensable. However, without their consultation, the partnership’s strength is significantly diminished.

    Once the initial damage is done, it is time to transition to the next phase. If a complete repair is not undertaken, we risk fomenting another round of dissatisfaction and hatred, perpetuating the cycle indefinitely.

    I earnestly desire peace, not merely the cessation of war but the capacity to coexist harmoniously despite our differences, marked by empathy, respect, and mutual understanding. Then, might the path forward be hopeful.

     

  • Shabbat Shalom

    I find myself drawn to the folk music and protest songs of an earlier tumultuous time in this nation’s history and some of the current balladeers singing about the need for justice in a time of injustice.

    As Black History month draws to a close, and the work of civil rights seems more urgent than ever, I wanted to welcome Shabbat with Teach Your Children, the classic from Crosby Stills and Nash.

    Wishing everyone Shabbat Shalom

  • Shabbat Shalom my brother

    The Hollies recorded this classic in 1969.  The words still resonate for me and this Shabbat I hope we are a little bit close to realizing the message.

    Shabbat Shalom