Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Parashah

  • Both Boys Lived- A message from Rosh HaShanah

    Both Boys Lived

    Nobody is sacrificed on either morning. We move past that faster than it deserves.

    The knife stops. The well appears. Both boys grow up and become something. Ishmael is promised twelve princes and a great nation. When he dies, the Torah uses the identical phrase it gave Abraham eight verses earlier, vayigva vayamot vayei’asef el amav, meaning he breathed his last, died, and was gathered to his people. Isaac carries the covenant. Neither is destroyed by what was done to him, and neither ever says a word against the man who did it.

    Begin with what they were called, because neither boy was given a name of his own. Yishmael, “God will hear,” is assigned because the Lord has heard your affliction. It is the record of his mother’s rescue, fastened to him before he was born. Yitzchak, “he will laugh,” comes from a father laughing face down on the ground and a mother laughing behind the tent flap. One name commemorates a woman being heard. The other commemorates two people who did not believe. Neither name is about the boy carrying it.

    A mother saves them both.

    Hagar lifts her voice in the desert, and God hears the boy. Then comes a verse we don’t read on Rosh Hashanah. Vayehi Elohim et hana’ar vayigdal. God was with the lad, and he grew. He lived in the wilderness and became an archer, and his mother took him a wife from Egypt. She arranged her son’s marriage herself, in exile, with nothing. Isaac’s father sends a servant and ten camels to do it for him.

    Sarah is harder. She acts on her child’s behalf so he will live, and she puts another woman’s child in the desert. She sees her son, but she sees him so narrowly that she cannot see anyone else’s. And still, the one fact the Torah gives us about Isaac’s inner life is that he was comforted after his mother. Not after his father. Vayinachem, from the root that also means to change your mind, because comfort in Hebrew is a turning, and Isaac has a great deal to turn from.

    So, what happens to the children we do not see? Are they sacrificed? The Torah’s answer is no, but it is not a comforting no. The trauma somehow endures despite the achievements.

    They live. That much the text will say. They grow, they marry, they raise twelve princes, they inherit the covenant, they are gathered to their people full of days. Somebody looks at them. The looking gets done. Someone who is not you does it. Whether that is the same thing as being fine, the Torah leaves it for later, and it does answer it.

    What gets sacrificed is the relationship.

    Count the words. After the mountain, Abraham and Isaac never speak again in the Torah. Between Abraham and Ishmael, there is not a single recorded word in either direction. Here is a man who fathers two nations yet has no conversation with either of his sons. That is the cost of the Akedah, and it is not paid by a boy.

    You can see this happen now in families where everybody is still alive and nothing has visibly gone wrong. The child is thriving. There is work, a partner, and children of their own. The parent can narrate all of it accurately and has learned every detail from somebody else.

    Abraham dies at a hundred and seventy-five, and Isaac and Ishmael bury him together at Machpelah. The verse does not say they mourned him. It says they buried him. Then the Torah moves on, listing Ishmael’s sons, and Isaac returns to the well.

    The boys were never the sacrifice. Ask who was. Then ask whether somebody is out there right now, growing up without you.

    May the Days of Awe bring you meaning; may the year ahead be good.

    L’ShanahTova U’metukah.

  • Shabbat Shalom – Parsha Nitzavim-Vayelech

    As we approach this Shabbat in Elul, we are reminded of everyone’s importance; we all stand in covenant, responsible.  So Choose life. Debbi Friedman’s beautiful music, shared by Cantor Rollin Simmons, brings this core message of our tradition to life.  
    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. 

     

  • Parshat Nitzavim-Vayelech — How Do You Say Goodbye

    How do you say goodbye when you already know how the story ends?

    Moses has one day remaining. Since Nitzavim-Vayelech falls on the last Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, the text positions him exactly there: a hundred and twenty years old, told he will not enter, and watching the people whom he had carried through the desert stand at the edge of a land which he will only be able to see from a mountain. We have all seen something similar when someone we loved was coming to the end; there is a sudden flash of clarity just at that moment, the fog lifting briefly so that the person we knew can make one more visit. They don’t usually make speeches; instead they concentrate on what is truly important to them: they enquire about the grandchild, resolve what remains unresolved, say the name that needed to be said, and then the opportunity closes once again. Even though Moses remains as clear-sighted as ever, he too has this same kind of opportunity, and he makes use of it in the same way.

    After finishing the Torah, Moses gives it to the Levites; then he calls Joshua before the entire nation and gives him two words in place of a eulogy: chazak v’ematz, be strong and resolute. Furthermore, in the phrase which names the parashah, vayelech Moshe, instead of the people coming to him he goes out to them. The rabbis interpret this verb literally and state that Moses spent his final day walking from tent to tent so that nobody would have to go to him to say goodbye.

    This is not a farewell speech; it’s a man refusing to allow his goodbyes to become just another item that people have to collect.

    Earlier in the parshah, Moses had already told them what he wanted them to retain after his death. He did not want them to have a system of judges or a war strategy for Canaan; instead, he told them that it is already in their mouths and in their hearts, something they do not need to obtain from heaven or fetch across the sea. Last week’s portion explained why that closeness took so long, 40 years: the people were shaped into a state of readiness through hunger and their experiences wandering in the Midbar, rather than being ready from the start. At this point, the distance is finally short enough. Moses is not leaving them a locked box; he is telling them that the key is close by.

    He also instructs them to choose life so that both they and their children may live; that seems confident. But what comes next is not. God clearly tells Moses that the people will break their faith, follow other gods, and suffer as a result, and orders Moses to compose a song to serve as a witness on the day this occurs. It is strange to leave a nation behind, not with a promise that they will remain faithful but with a poem already ready for the time when they do not.

    I do not believe that Moses is contradicting himself; in my view he is achieving something more difficult than simply showing confidence. Earlier there is a promise that when they are scattered and eventually come back, God will gather them once again, even from the most distant places. Moses is not making provision only for success; he is preparing for both failure and a return, since after forty years’ experience he has realized that a people worthy of being led are never found solely in the good times or only in the bad. Leadership must have a plan for both situations, and so he leaves them one.

    I think about my own version of that afternoon more than I say aloud. What did I actually teach the people who came through my door? What survives me that isn’t a title or a building? Moses left no army or institution bearing his name. Simply a scroll. A name spoken twice to steady a nervous successor. A day spent walking tent to tent instead of waiting to be visited.

    What is written on your scroll? And who is going to need you to go to them before the day is up?

    Shabbat Shalom.

  • 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.

  • 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?

     

  • Shabbat Shalom

    As we welcome Shabbat and read from Ki Tetzei, the musical connector is Lecha Dodi.  Based on a verse from Isaiah, we are told “Dont be ashamed” despite the trials of the week, welcome the comfort of Shabbat.

    David Sasso brings Lecha Dodi to us with Bluegrass.  Using this genre is a metaphor about reaching out to others and creating relationships wherever they may be.

    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 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.

  • Why does justice have to be chased? Parshat Shoftim

    Tzedek tzedek tirdof, says Moses in this week’s Parshah, Shoftim. Justice, justice shall you pursue. Not achieve. Not establish. Pursue, tirdof, the same root you’d use for chasing something running from you.

    I keep circling the doubling. Rashi reads it as ends and means: one can’t justify the other. True, but not enough. Justice never holds still long enough to be caught in one hand: the justice of the letter and the justice of the spirit, what the law permits and what it should permit. Say it once, and you’ve named half of it. Say it twice, and you’ve admitted the whole thing is bigger than any single verdict.

    Moses gets specific: appoint judges and officers, gather two witnesses, investigate meticulously, take no bribe, “for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous.” Then, almost without transition, a line that should unsettle us: in every generation someone will interpret this law for you, and you are not to deviate, right or left.

    Read plainly, that’s a demand for total deference. The Talmud makes it stranger, not simpler. Rosh Hashanah 25b insists this applies “even if the judge before you is Yiftach,” a flawed, minor judge from the book of Judges, “in his generation as though he were Samuel in his generation,” the greatest judge Israel ever had. The law itself hasn’t changed. But the period and society in which it is interpreted have.

    That should unsettle us more than it comforts us. A judge can be wrong, or bought, or certain he holds all of justice in his hand when he’s holding half of it. But a judge can also be persuaded, and this is less a flaw than the whole point.

    We call ourselves a nation of laws, one that holds together only if it applies to everyone alike. We build precedent so no single ruling carries that weight alone. But precedent moves too: we watched the Supreme Court overturn nearly fifty years of it, reversing Roe v. Wade. Whatever you believe about the merits, Shoftim already taught the deeper lesson: no court of last resort is anything but some version of Yiftach. We can appeal upward, term after term, but the appeal ends somewhere, and we are bound to comply, whether we agree or not. A shared law is only shared if it binds the people who lose the argument too.

    I remember waiting for test results, my wife beside me, the room dark and lonely, my imagination filling in what the doctor hadn’t said yet. The doctor could have been wrong about the diagnosis, about the treatment. What I noticed was how little the verdict had to do with the anguish. It was the not-knowing whether whoever held my chart was seeing me or processing me. Lo takir panim, the Torah tells judges: do not recognize faces. It’s a warning against favoritism, and equally a demand to see the face in front of you clearly enough to recognize the humanity looking back. You cannot do that with a law no one is left to interpret in the present moment.

    We are handing more of our judgment to systems that can never be Yiftach in any generation: built once, unable to say, “the letter of the rule does not serve the person in front of me.” Risk-assessment algorithms in sentencing. Automated denials in insurance and benefits. A frozen rule can’t be bribed, nor does it tire at the end of a long docket. But Torah already knew that a system incapable of being persuaded isn’t the same thing as a just one. Tzedek tzedek tirdof describes a pursuit, and a pursuit requires someone alive enough to be moved.

    When was the last time I let a rule be argued with? When was the last time I trusted a person in front of me more than the process built to replace them? Tirdof doesn’t promise you’ll catch it. It only takes stopping off the table.

    Shabbat Shalom.

  • 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