Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Relationships

  • 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.

  • Parshat Eikev — “My Power and the Might of My Hand”

    Every success we’ve ever had, we tell ourselves we earned outright. Ourselves alone. Our sweat, our sleepless nights, our nerve. It is almost never true, and Parshat Eikev names the lie for what it is.

    “Beware,” Moses warns, “lest you eat and are satisfied, and build good houses and dwell in them, and your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies — and your heart grows haughty, and you forget the Lord your God… and you say in your heart, kochi v’otzem yadi asah li et ha’chayil ha’zeh — my own power and the strength of my own hand have made me this wealth.” (Deut. 8:12–14, 17)

    I have sat at enough hospital bedsides to know how quickly that sentence collapses. I was with someone who had amassed substantial wealth by building a successful business, a “self-made” man. Now, breath labored, strength gone, in a bed he could no longer leave, his truth lay before him; the wealth was real. So was the hard work. But beneath it all was a foundation he never laid himself — the health, the years, the people who taught him his trade, those who lovingly supported him, and the improbable fact of even being alive to do any of it.

    That’s the forgetting Moses worries about. Not the wealth itself; the Torah has no quarrel with houses, flocks, and gold. The danger is amnesia. A heart so full it forgets what filled it.

    Even the parsha’s name makes the point. Eikev is usually translated as “because,” but its plain meaning is “heel.” The part of the body we don’t look at, the part that drags behind, trampled by everything else on its way to something more important. Rashi reads it as a warning about the commandments we treat as too small to matter. I also hear something else: the heel is what follows in the wake of a life, the consequence that trails behind and eventually catches up.

    Shel Silverstein tells this story more plainly in The Giving Tree. A boy loves a tree, and for a lifetime she gives him everything: apples to sell, branches for a house, her trunk for a boat. Every time he needs something, she says quietly, “Take it; it will make me happy.” He never once says thank you. He only says I need until there is nothing left of her but a stump. Only then, an old man with nowhere else to go, does he sit on what remains and find it, at last, enough. The boy learned to be satisfied with almost nothing, but only after he had already taken almost everything.

    Except that the warning in Eikev is supposed to land before that, before the wealth, before the haughty heart, while the tree is still standing and nothing has yet been taken. It didn’t fully take, anyway. Centuries later, Hosea accuses Israel of forgetting the God who fed them in the wilderness, nearly making Deuteronomy’s own warning come true. The timing was right. The lesson didn’t stick, regardless.

    Here is what I can’t resolve, and I don’t think I’m supposed to: the same God who watches all this forgetting happen anyway is the God who fed them manna for forty years, who let them go hungry on purpose “to make you know that man does not live on bread alone,” and fed them regardless of whether the lesson landed. The love doesn’t wait for us to get it right. It carries us toward the promised land even as we’re still telling ourselves we’re carrying ourselves.

    So here’s the question Eikev leaves me with, unfinished: not whether I’m grateful in the abstract (I usually am, in the way that costs nothing), but whether my life is built to show it while there’s still a tree standing. Whether the small commandments I keep, the heel-commandments, easy to trample, say out loud what my heart already knows. What would it look like to learn this lesson now, on time, grateful while the tree is still giving, not only afterward, thankful for what’s already gone?

     

    Rabbi David Levin is president of the Board of Rabbis and founder of Jewish Relationships Initiative and EthicalLegacy.com

  • 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.

  • Masei – What do we owe the person who broke something they never meant to break?

    Masei spends its final chapters on legal architecture, tribal borders, and inheritance rules. But it also includes the law of the arei miklat, the cities of refuge, built for the person who kills b’shogeg by accident. The neighbor whose axe head flew off the handle. The driver who looked down for just one second.

    The Hebrew is doing something specific. Miklat shares a root with klitah, meaning absorption. It’s the word Israel still uses to describe how it takes in immigrants. An ulpan klitah is an absorption center. A city of refuge isn’t a jail cell or a technicality that lets someone off the hook. It’s a place built to take a person in, fully, the way a body absorbs what it’s given.

    But the text refuses to keep this simple. The one who fled must remain there, not for a fixed sentence, but until the death of the sitting High Priest, a mortality with no connection to what he did. Step outside the walls before that day, and the victim’s own kinsman, the go’el ha-dam, may kill him without guilt. There is no release date. No parole board, no moment when remorse itself triggers freedom. The clock belongs to no one in the story. Not the guilty. Not the grieving. Not even the community that built the walls.

    I think about this law when I’m sitting with people who never swung an axe. The hardest conversations I have as a chaplain are with those left behind after someone they loved has taken their own life. The question always comes, in some form. Why couldn’t I have stopped them? What could I have done differently? The law in Masei is written for the hand that acted. But the ache it names reaches beyond the letter of the text. It reaches the parent who didn’t call back, the spouse who went to sleep instead of staying up, the friend who sensed something was wrong and said nothing. No court can rule on that kind of guilt, because there was no crime. It is its own kind of b’shogeg, harm without intent, and it deserves its own klitah, its own absorption. There is only the unbearable arithmetic of what might have been different, run again and again, with no verdict ever arriving.

    We want closure on a schedule, closure being a word that means to shut something. We want five stages of grief with a finish line, a program that promises healing by a set week, and a story the culture is ready to call resolved. Masei suggests some ruptures don’t run on anyone’s calendar. What I have seen console the otherwise inconsolable is not an answer, because there isn’t one. It is something closer to what the city of refuge offered before anyone had ruled on guilt or innocence, before any judgment was handed down. A sacred space of empathy and love. Built to absorb a person exactly as they are, guilt and all, for exactly as long as it takes. No release date there either.

    So the harder question isn’t who needs a city of refuge right now. It’s whether we can build one, not to explain away the guilt, but to hold it and stay standing at the gate for as long as someone needs us there.

  • 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.