What’s Going on?

As we welcome Shabbat and read Parsha Korach, Marvin Gaye’s What’s going on is an unorthodox way to sing it in. “Korach used the language of justice to serve his own ambition. This Shabbat, Marvin Gaye asks us to look honestly at our own motives — and our world’s.”

Shabbat Shalom

עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵיm 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.

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.

Shabbat Shalom

Behaatlotecha-when you lift up

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

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

a prayer for peace

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

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.

May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.

Shabbat Shalom

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.

What Jealousy Knows That Love Forgets- Parsha Naso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Humanity in the Wilderness-Bamidbar

We are living in a wilderness. The landmarks we relied on — shared institutions, common ground, the assumption that the person across from us inhabits the same basic reality — have grown unfamiliar. We are between what was and whatever comes next. Disoriented. And tempted, as people always are in disorienting times, to cluster into tribes, to find safety in the familiar, and to stop seeing the people just outside our camp.

Into that disorientation, the Torah this week offers a name for where we are. Bamidbar — In the Wilderness. And the first thing it does, before laws, before strategy, before the long march begins, is this: God tells Moses to count the people.

Not manu otam — number them. S’u et rosh — lift the head. Every person, by name, by clan, by family. Not a tally. A seeing.

This is the question Bamidbar puts to us: What does it mean to count someone?

We know one answer. We live with it every day. We count people to manage them — to allocate resources, to measure outcomes, to track attendance. In that kind of counting, what matters is the number, not the person behind it. The individual disappears into the aggregate. A congregation becomes “membership numbers.” A person in grief becomes a “case.”

The Torah offers a different answer.

In the wilderness, where the Israelites have no city, no home, no fixed identity beyond the memory of slavery, God insists on counting each one by name. Before anything else can happen — before the camp is organized, before the march continues — every person has to be seen as a person.

The word midbar shares a root with davar — word, speech, the act of speaking. The wilderness is the place of speech. Not the speech of a crowded life, where we talk past each other in corridors and Shabbat kiddushes. The speech of the stripped-down encounter — where there is nothing left but the person in front of you and what is actually true. That is where the Torah is given. Not in a palace. In the midbar, where the distractions fall away, and the question becomes unavoidable: who is here, and do I actually see them?

The Levites are counted separately in this parsha. Every other tribe is counted for military service — men twenty years and older, those who can bear arms. The Levites are not. They are assigned to the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, the portable dwelling of the divine in the midst of the people. Their job is not to fight. Their job is to tend the place of meeting — to keep open the space where a genuine encounter is possible. The entire camp is arranged around that center. The whole organization of the Israelite community in the wilderness is structured around proximity to the place of real meeting.

This is not incidental to Judaism. It is the architecture of it.

Bamidbar does not let us retreat into our tribes. Before the march begins, before positions are taken, God says, “Lift the head.” Not of your group. Of every person. The census is not an invitation to count the people who look like you.

Here is the call: Find one person this week you have been counting but not truly seeing. Not a category. Not a face you pass in a corridor. A person, by name, by what they are actually carrying right now. Ask a real question and stay for the answer.

That is what it means to be in the wilderness together. That is this week’s work.

Shabbat Shalom

As we enter Shabbat, this week’s Torah portion reminds us that we are in it together.

Praying for peace and wholeness, 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.