Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: religion

  • 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

  • From Grief to Geulah-Holding mourning and miracle in the same breath

    No other nation on earth asks its people to do what Israel asks each spring: to sit in the ashes of devastating loss on one day, and dance in the streets the next. Yom Hazikaron — Israel’s Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror — flows directly, by design, into Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day. The transition is not an accident of the calendar. It is a theological statement.

    In Israel, when the siren sounds, an entire country stops — on highways, in markets, mid-sentence. Over 24,000 soldiers and thousands of civilians are remembered not as statistics but as names and faces, beloved. Then, within hours, fireworks rise over the same sky. The whiplash is intentional. Joy built on forgotten grief is shallow. And grief without the horizon of hope becomes a tomb.

    During my year as a rabbinical student in Jerusalem, I had the privilege of standing on Har Herzl, Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery, for the ceremony that bridges these two days. There, among the graves of soldiers and statesmen, surrounded by thousands of Israelis, young and old, grief transformed in real time. The final notes of the memorial prayers gave way to the lighting of the torches, and the air itself seemed to shift. It was not that the sadness lifted; rather, hope rose to stand alongside it. I experienced more than a transition. This is a theology. In that moment, the narrative of the Jewish state and the narrative of my own Jewish heart were woven together into a whole cloth; each thread distinct yet inseparable from the other.

    That sequence — lived in the body, not merely studied in a book — is the pedagogy. You cannot fully understand Yom Ha’atzmaut without first standing in the silence of Yom Hazikaron. The independence feels different when you know what it cost.

    We are not asked to choose between memory and celebration. We are asked to hold both and to let the weight of one lend depth to the other.

    As American Jews, we stand at a particular intersection in these days. We did not lose children in those wars. We were not present for 1948’s desperate birth, 1967’s breathtaking turn, or October 7th’s shattering grief. And yet, we are not strangers. Israel is not a foreign country to the Jewish soul. It is the address of our deepest longings, the landscape of our prayers, and at the core of our peoplehood.

    These two days invite us into belonging, not as spectators but as members of an ancient family. To observe Yom Hazikaron is to say: their loss is part of our story. To celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut is to say: their miracle is part of our story, too. The spiritual architecture of this sequence teaches us that meaning is forged at the intersection of sorrow and hope. This is the Jewish way. This has always been the Jewish way.

    May we honor those who fell, celebrate what they made possible, and carry both truths — as one people, from wherever in the world we stand.

     

  • Shabbat Shalom

    A beloved poet sharing his musical gift.  This Shabbat I share Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ Where do the Children Play.

    Wishing a peaceful Shabbat for all.

    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

  • What Does It Mean to Truly Heal? Parshat Tazria-Metzora

    What Does It Mean to Truly Heal?

    Think of the last time you heard your name mentioned in a conversation that stopped the moment you walked in. That sudden silence — the awkward smiles, the quick subject change — carries a weight that is hard to name but impossible to forget. Most of us have been on both sides of that moment. We know how it feels to be the one walking in. If we are honest, we can recall times when we were the ones who went quiet.

    Parshat Tazria-Metzora confronts us with one of the Torah’s most unsettling teachings: our words leave a mark on the world — and on ourselves. The rabbis understood tzara’at not as a mere physical affliction, often mistranslated as leprosy, but as an outward sign of an inward fracture, the consequence of lashon hara, speech that wounds. The Chofetz Chaim, R. Yisrael Meir Kagan, whose life’s work on the ethics of speech grew from this very parsha, took this so seriously that he would lose sleep over a careless word he himself had spoken. Not someone else’s words — his own. That level of accountability feels almost foreign to us today, in a world where harmful speech is effortless and its consequences are rarely felt by the speaker.

    Most of us can recall a comment we made that traveled further than we intended — a remark at the dinner table, a message in a group chat, or a confidence shared just once that somehow became common knowledge. We told ourselves it was nothing. The Torah tells us otherwise.

    But this parsha does not leave us in guilt. It offers us a path forward. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that the metzora’s —the afflicted person ’s—journey was the Torah’s model of restorative justice—not punishment, but the purposeful work of healing and return. The community does not forget those who have been excluded. It waits for them, and welcomes them back.

    That same path is open to us. This week, consider one conversation you might repair, one word you might withhold, and one silence you might choose when careless speech would have come easily.

    “Mavet v’chayyim b’yad halashon”

    “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” — Proverbs 18:21

    The Torah is not asking us to be perfect. It is asking us to be honest — and then, one word at a time, to begin again.