Category: religion

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.

Korach’s Question Is Still Ours-Who gave you the right?

“Rav lachem — you have gone too far. The entire congregation is holy, every one of them, and God is in their midst. So why do you raise yourselves above God’s assembly?” (Num. 16:3). It sounds almost democratic. Everyone is holy, and power should be distributed. Who appointed you?

The word Korach uses for “raise yourselves” is hitnassu, from the root nasa, meaning “to lift” or “to carry.” This is no accident. Throughout the Book of Numbers, nasa is precisely what leaders are called to do for others. The census begins seu et rosh, “lift the heads” of the Israelites (Num. 1:2). In the Torah’s own grammar, leadership is the elevation of people. Korach takes that same word and turns it reflexive: you have been lifting yourselves. What began as a vocation becomes, in his telling, a vanity.

He has a point. Jacob Milgrom, in his landmark JPS Torah Commentary on Numbers (1990), notes that Korach’s protest reflects a genuine theological tension: the democratization of holiness at Sinai (“a kingdom of priests,” Ex. 19:6) sits uneasily alongside the hierarchical priestly structure that follows. Rashi, commenting on the opening verse, is more direct: his eyes misled him (Rashi on Num. 16:7). Korach understands the letter of the law. His error is not theological ignorance. It is envy dressed as principle. He deploys a genuine grievance to serve personal ambition, thereby corroding the very community whose holiness he claims to champion.

This is where Korach becomes unsettlingly contemporary.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) documented the collapse of social capital, the networks of trust, reciprocity, and civic engagement that hold communities together. Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build (2020) identified the specific pathology: our institutions have stopped forming people and have become platforms for individual performance. Leaders no longer serve the institution; they use it. The congregation becomes an audience. The office becomes a stage.

Korach doesn’t want to serve the assembly. He wants the assembly to confirm him.

A moment in the story is often overlooked. When Moses summons Datan and Aviram to speak, they refuse to come: lo na’aleh, “we will not come up” (Num. 16:12). The very men accusing Moses of inappropriate elevation refuse to engage. Their grievance has become more important to them than the community they claim to represent. This is how populism curdles: the aggrieved insist on the legitimacy of their anger while refusing the relational work that legitimate challenge requires.

What does legitimate challenge look like? Moses, for all his flaws, shows us something: he falls on his face (Num. 16:4). Not in capitulation, but in recognition of the stakes. He doesn’t reach for power. He keeps asking whether there is another way.

The erosion of trust in our moment is not simply the result of bad actors. It is the result of a culture that has learned to reward Korach’s move: mobilize grievance, claim to speak for everyone, and leverage that claim for personal advancement. It feels like democratic accountability, but it functions like its opposite.

The text poses a genuine question to us. Holding leaders accountable is an obligation. But how do we do it without Korach’s self-serving use of righteous language? How do we distinguish the prophet from the demagogue when both speak the language of liberation?

The Torah does not resolve this. It leaves us with it, deliberately.

Discernment is itself a form of holiness. And it has to be cultivated. It doesn’t arrive by earthquake or fire.

It comes, as it usually does, in relationship.

 

Key Citations

Rashi on Numbers 16:1 (s.v. va-yikach Korach).

Milgrom, Jacob. Numbers: The JPS Torah Commentary. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Levin, Yuval. A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

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

 

The Blueprint for Sustaining the Light-Parshat Behaalotecha

Why do we keep looking back at a past that wasn’t even that good?

That’s the question hiding inside Parshat Behaalotecha. The Israelites have everything: the Mishkan, the cloud, the fire, the infrastructure of a people on the move toward something sacred. And within chapters, they’re weeping for Egypt’s cucumbers.

It would be easy to judge them. It is harder to recognize ourselves.

Here is what the Torah is actually diagnosing: nostalgia is a lie we tell ourselves about the past. The fish they’re mourning were eaten in slavery. The melons, the leeks, all of it was part of a life in which they were not free. Memory has a way of editing out the cost of what we’ve left behind, leaving only the flavor of what felt familiar.

But there’s something even sharper underneath the complaint. The manna was miraculous, and it had become ordinary. Not bad. Just expected. This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation: what we once received as a gift quietly becomes baseline, and then disappointment begins right at the level of yesterday’s abundance. Having more doesn’t produce gratitude. It resets the threshold for what counts as “enough.”

The parsha opens with the image of the menorah: b’haalotecha et ha-nerot, when you lift up the lights. The kohen returned every single morning to tend the lamps, trimming wicks, clearing ash, and replenishing oil. Sacred light didn’t sustain itself. It required showing up, again and again, for the unglamorous work of maintenance.

That’s the image the Torah gives us for the spiritual life. Not the dramatic moment of ignition. The daily return.

The question Behaalotecha poses is not: Why am I struggling? It is: What am I actually hungry for, and have I confused familiarity with nourishment?

What flame in your life is asking you to come back to it?

 

 

 

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.

Commanded to Let Go: What Shemitah Teaches About Sinai, Suffering and Starting Over

BEHAR – BECHUKOTAI  •  5786

Parashat Behar opens with a striking geographical framing: “Vayedaber Adonai el Moshe b’Har Sinai” — God spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai. The Midrash famously asks why specify Sinai here? Because Shemitah — the sabbatical year — is Sinai’s teaching made tangible. Revelation wasn’t a one-time delivery of words. It was a rhythm embedded into the land itself.

Every seven years, the fields lie fallow. Debts are released. Slaves go free. What has accumulated — wealth, obligation, bondage — is released back toward equality. Then, after seven cycles of seven, comes Yovel: the Jubilee. Land returns. The slate is wiped clean. Not as punishment, but as design. Not as weakness, but as wisdom.

This is not agricultural policy. It is a theology of impermanence.

Some of us know this not as theory but as lived reality. A robbery, a fire, a hurricane, a financial collapse that arrived without fault. An impossible debt that grew heavier no matter how faithfully it was carried. For those who have used bankruptcy not to escape responsibility but to find the only available path forward — Torah sees you. Shemitah exists precisely because the Midrash understood that sometimes circumstances overwhelm even the most honorable person and that a society without a release valve ultimately crushes both the debtor and the community.

Bechukotai asks: what happens when we refuse? The curses are not divine wrath — they are a portrait of a world that never lets go. A land driven to exhaustion. A community that abandons its most vulnerable rather than absorbing their loss together. This is what we build when we mistake accumulation for security and holding on for strength.

Obedience, then, isn’t submission to arbitrary decree. It is the discipline of release, trusting that we and others can survive the pause and that starting again is not shameful.

We must look around to see who in our community is carrying an unbearable weight right now. The Torah didn’t leave the reset to individual conscience; it built it into communal law because community is precisely where it must happen. This Shabbat, consider what it means to be someone else’s Shemitah. Be the one who says: your debt to me is released. Begin again. We will begin again together.

 

 

Shabbat Shalom

“Emor gives us the Jewish calendar — the architecture of sacred time. This Shabbat, as spring deepens, George Harrison reminds us that the light always returns.”

Here Comes the Sun; Lev. 23 — the moadim, appointed times. Each season carries its own sacred light. Emor is the calendar of holiness.

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. 

Shabbat Shalom

“This week’s parsha contains the Torah’s most radical demand — not sacrifice, not ritual, but love. Rabbi Creditor put it to music and the world has been singing it ever since.”  Love your neighbor as yourself, Lev. 19:18 — v’ahavta l’reiacha kamocha. The centerpiece of the Holiness Code is not ritual but relationship.

Listen to this beautiful music shared by Chazan Daniel Mutlu​ and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl​ of Central Synagogue​.

Shabbat Shalom