Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: culture

  • Shabbat Shalom

    We are to tell our story as an act of gratitude.  “Ki Tavo commands us to bring our first fruits and tell our story — not as boasting but as gratitude. Andra Day rises because the story she carries demands it.” 

    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.

  • The Night They Rewrote the President’s House

    In the middle of the night this past July, National Park Service crews removed the panels at the President’s House on Independence Mall and replaced them with a different version of the story. No announcement. No public unveiling. That was probably the point.

    In the musical Gigi, there is a song called “I Remember It Well.” Two former lovers recall the same night, and their memories don’t agree on a single detail. Neither is lying. They illustrate what history frequently does too: the story we tell ourselves is often incomplete and rarely matches what actually happened.

    We like our history tidy and uncomplicated, an unblemished hero, and an easily understood meaning. History, like most human stories, is not a record of what happened. It is processed and filtered, then handed back by the storyteller/redactor as meaning.

    In 2010, a new exhibit titled “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” opened at the President’s House. It told two stories at once: the birth of the presidency and the story of the nine people Washington enslaved in that same house while he governed. He led a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, yet he owned slaves. This fuller, more honest story is both complex and ironic.

    In March 2025, a presidential executive order directed the National Park Service to remove exhibit content that portrayed our founding in a negative light. Last January, the Park Service removed the panels at the President’s House. Philadelphia sued to have the original panels restored and lost. This is a fight over the manner we understand history, including whether we can hold two truths about the same man at the same time.

    George Washington was a brilliant general and a remarkable first president. He nobly and voluntarily walked away from power when he could have kept it. He was also a slaveholder who relied on enslaved labor to run his household while building a nation on the language of liberty. All of this is true. Nothing cancels the other. A history that tells only the first part isn’t protecting Washington for us; it’s attempting to protect us from him and from what his contradiction asks us to see in ourselves.

    I don’t think the answer is to tear him down or to build him up. Our responsibility is harder than either: to let him stand as he was, admirable and implicated at once, and to ask what that implies for us.

    Washington is not a special case. Shlomo Carlebach rewired how a generation of Jews sang and prayed, and he used his standing to harm women who trusted him. Richard Wagner composed music that can move people to tears and also wrote antisemitic tracts that the Nazis later claimed as their own. Genius and leadership often come with their shadow.

    Do we dismiss a person’s achievements because of their faults? Or do we hold the gift and the fault together, refusing to let either erase the other? That is the real work before us, at the President’s House and whenever someone or something we admire also carries the inexcusable.

    The comfortable version of history asks little of us. We may learn some new facts, but otherwise it essentially confirms what we already believe and sends us home unchanged. The complicated version asks us to sit with imperfect people, including our ancestors and even ourselves, who were capable of both nobility and cruelty in the same lifetime.

    Some see this as a weakness in the story; I believe it is the story itself.

    What would it mean to let the fault sit right beside the gift, in Washington, in Carlebach, in anyone on whom we’ve built an inheritance, not as a footnote but as part of the story? What would it mean to do the same with our own history, our own families, or our own choices? We don’t get to answer that question once and be done. We have to keep answering it, generation after generation, argument after argument.

    That is where learning from history truly lives, not in the tidy version but in the argument we’re still willing to have.

     

  • You’ve Made It- a message of Ki Tavo

    You’ve made it.

    I remember standing in a robe I’d never worn before, waiting for my name to be called at ordination and receive my Smichah. Five years of arduous struggle with text and new learning, self-doubt and yearning, brought me to a door with a new life just on the other side of the threshold.

    Ki Tavo opens on the same threshold: the name means “when you come” or “when you enter.” After forty years of a life lived one day’s manna at a time, B’nei Israel is told what happens on the other side of the wandering. Stand half the tribes on Gerizim, half on Ebal, and hear the blessings and curses called out across the valley. Near the parsha’s close, Moses says something startling: “Until this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear.” (Deut. 29:3)

    Rashi, citing the Talmud, calls the sojourn a forty-year apprenticeship: a student doesn’t fully grasp a teacher’s wisdom while still living within it. Freedom and despair held the whole trek, neither ever defeating the other. The same generation that walked out of Egypt upright, unowned for the first time in memory, kept begging to go back, the terror of the open desert outweighing whatever freedom was supposed to feel like. Both built the organs Moses says only now work.

    I am sure you also remember the Wizard of Oz: the Wizard sends Scarecrow off with a diploma and Tin Man off with a heart-shaped watch. I used to read this as a secret they always had. They didn’t. Scarecrow learned to solve real problems along their journey, badly at first, better as the miles went on. Tin Man ached for Dorothy until the ache became, undeniably, a heart. The diploma and the watch mark the end of the apprenticeship. Moses closes one too, forty years later, on the plains of Moab.

    I have a deeper appreciation now of what I didn’t know in that robe. The Smichah didn’t hand me anything. It marked the point where five years of study and work had built enough of a rabbi to be trusted with the door. The building continued, with no ceremony, the following Monday.

    Which may be why Ki Tavo doesn’t let the forging stop at the border. It follows its own graduation line with a list: honest weights, field corners left for the hungry, a tithe handed over before you’ve decided you can afford it. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the forty years continued in miniature: a heart needs exercise to stay strong, and it gets that on ordinary days, not mountaintops.

    Ki Tavo’s list is not merely a set of ledger entries, God tallying rewards for the obedient and punishment for the defiant. I buried that pediatric theology long ago, when a good man’s chart recorded things his heart hadn’t earned. Good people lose everything; careless people prosper for decades, and no verse explains it away. What I trust is quieter: what we do in the small, unwatched hours still matters, and it adds up.

    The freedom didn’t turn into relief once they crossed, and the despair didn’t lift either. That may be why the mountains remain two, standing across from each other, neither ever collapsing into the other, both still true today. I know people who believe in a zero-sum game think a finite pile means grabbing first, before the next person can, treating others as threats rather than neighbors. I know others, driving across town with food for someone they’ve never met, paying a cost that isn’t theirs because someone had to. Gerizim hasn’t canceled Ebal. They’re both still standing, and so are we, somewhere between them.

    I have a heart to know now, more than I did years earlier, that it was built the way B’nei Israel was: not handed over but earned over years, with no one else watching. Ki Tavo isn’t really asking whether we possess it. It’s asking what we do with it on the Tuesdays after the ceremony ends, when no one is watching, and every day thereafter.

    Which mountain are you standing on today?

     

  • The Kippah on My Head Is Not a Target on My Back

    Should I take off my kippah?

    I first asked myself that question years ago, before a trip to Hungary. Viktor Orbán was reaching for power by invoking an old script, the anti-Semitic tropes his country knows too well, and I did not want to become a small, portable target for whatever that script might awaken in a stranger. I was not traveling alone. My wife would be beside me, and the fear was not only for me. If my kippah made me a target, it made her one too.

    I brought the question to my friend and teacher, Rabbi Brad, a man with a cooler, wiser head than mine. He didn’t answer it. He asked me to ask a different question. For many people I would meet, he said, I might be the first Jew they had ever stood beside in the flesh. Perhaps, he suggested, the kippah wasn’t a liability to manage. Perhaps I was being handed an assignment, an unlikely diplomat to a community that might be more curious than cruel.

    I took his advice, and it opened doors I could not have imagined from the outside. Jews who had spent decades in hiding found me because I was visibly, unmistakably one of them, and that visibility told them it was safe to speak. I heard survival stories that had never been spoken aloud before that day. None of it would have reached me if I had made myself smaller, safer, and harder to see.

    This is not just a piece of personal history. It’s an argument for a claim I still believe: the kippah was never a challenge thrown at the world. It was a door held open.

    I did not expect to be asking the same question again, this time about New York City, in 2026. Yet here I am.

    Here are the people I encounter on an ordinary day here. The cab driver who gets me to the airport. The man behind the bodega counter who knows my order before I say it. The woman at the pushcart serving food from a country I couldn’t find on a map, standing beside another cart from a country nowhere near it. The subway platform at rush hour, where I can stand for four stops and watch a whole world get on and off around me, no two people from the same place, all of them going somewhere.

    New York was never the melting pot we were taught to sing about, where everyone’s edges dissolved into sameness. It is a stew, every ingredient still itself, still recognizable, simmering together anyway. It is a city built, whatever its failures, on the idea that a person gets to wear who they are without flinching, on that platform, behind that counter, and everywhere between.

    I won’t pretend the danger people are naming is imaginary. There is an angry rabble here too, and a hateful mob, and, worse, the lone wolf who needs no crowd at all to do harm. And I won’t pretend that taking off the kippah wouldn’t make me a slightly harder target to find. It would. Hiding works, a little, the way hiding always works. But safety was never the only question worth asking, and it cannot be the only one we let ourselves ask. Playing it smart is real; each of us has to make our own honest reckoning about when a threat is truly a threat, and I won’t tell another Jew what their reckoning should be.

    However, a life organized entirely around that reckoning isn’t a life. It’s a retreat dressed up as caution. We need a north star that isn’t fear. Something better. Something that still believes the man at the bodega counter, the driver, the woman at the pushcart, might be capable of curiosity instead of contempt—because most days, they are.

    I learned this from my rabbi and friend, standing at a doorway to Hungary, years before I understood what he had truly given me: the kippah on my head was never a target on my back. It was always, and continues to be, an invitation. I won’t let anyone—not history, not a headline, not a lone wolf’s shadow—convince me to fold it up and put it away.

  • What Happens to the Stragglers? Parsha Ki Tetzei

    Why does a portion overflowing with civil law stop, in the middle of everything else, to tell you how to build your roof?

    When you build a new house, Torah says, put a ma’akeh, a guardrail, on the roof, so no one falls. It sits in Ki Teitzei almost an afterthought among dozens of other laws: return the lost ox, pay the worker before sundown, leave the gleanings for the poor. But ma’akeh is the right word for the whole portion. Every law here is a guardrail, a protection for those who could fall or be pushed.

    We build guardrails because we don’t fully trust each other, and a society honest about that protects people exactly where power tends to slip: the wife accused without evidence, the son a father wants to disown, the worker whose wages could vanish if no one were watching. Ki Teitzei is guardrail after guardrail, each one placed where someone could fall.

    Madison wrote the same instinct into the Constitution: if men were angels, no government would be necessary, and since they are not, government must be given enough power to govern and then be obliged to control itself. Checks and balances in our government are guardrails by another name, built because we know what power does when no one is watching or nothing is stopping it.

    What they were built to keep out has a name: Amalek. Torah tells us exactly what he did. He attacked from the rear, cutting down the stragglers, the elderly, and the exhausted, too weak to keep pace after Egypt. The Hebrew for it is zanav, to tail. And Torah adds one line about why: he did not fear God. Fearing God, in this text, means knowing something stands above you, that your own strength is never the final word. Amalek feared nothing greater than himself, and a man who fears nothing greater than himself decides soon enough that the weak exist for his convenience.

    Hubert Humphrey put it plainly, dedicating a federal building: the moral test of government is how it treats those at the dawn of life, the children; those at the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped. Society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. Those are exactly Amalek’s targets.

    I recognize that fault line right now, and it does not belong to another country. Those same guardrails, due process, the courts, a Congress willing to check power rather than defer to it, get treated as obstacles rather than as boundaries. Immigration raids treat frightened, exhausted people the way Amalek treated the stragglers, as targets of opportunity rather than as human beings owed protection. Settlers in the West Bank, claiming to act in the name of my own tradition, terrorize Palestinian families with brutality that has everything to do with Amalek’s logic and nothing to do with Torah. When the government looks away from these or blesses them outright, I no longer consider them legitimate by the standards of our tradition.

    Ki Teitzei commands us to erase Amalek’s memory precisely because that instinct never fully leaves: the appetite for treating a guardrail as an inconvenience rather than a covenant. What do we do when the stragglers being picked off are visible right now, on the news, at the border, in cities, villages, and olive groves? It is one of Moshe’s final charges to his people before he dies: make sure we are never mistaken for Amalek, or for the government, or for the neighbor who lets him operate unchecked.

    I have no program to offer, no plan for how a rabbi in Philadelphia moves the world’s cruelty. But I know what my tradition asks of me before I know what to do about it: let the stragglers, wherever they are this week, be people I am responsible for, not a category I have learned to tolerate.

    What would it cost you to do the same?

  • Shabbat Shalom : Justice – Shoftim,

    “The most urgent imperative in Devarim: justice, justice — pursue it. Dylan has been asking the same question his entire life. So has Torah.

    This Shabbat, both voices together, with the artistry of Peter, Paul and Mary.

    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.

  • Shabbat Shalom

    Re’eh-See.  This Shabbat we read the parsha asking us to see what’s going on, to choose the blessing instead of the curse.

    Playing for Change shares this cover of Marvin Gaye’s classic, What’s Going On.

    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

  • 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.

  • 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.