Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Repentance

  • Parshat Ha’azinu-Just a Thing Before I Go

    Moses knows this is his last day, and he does not ask for one hour alone.

    Ha’azinu opens with him addressing not his family, not his closest disciples, but the heavens and the earth themselves: “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; and let the earth hear the words of my mouth” (Deuteronomy 32:1). The parsha takes its name from that first word, ha’azinu, “give ear.” After forty years leading a people out of slavery and through the wilderness, and on the day he will die without ever entering the land he spent his life walking toward, Moses does not turn inward. He turns outward and asks the whole of creation to listen.

    That question continues to dog me.  What is left to do, on your very last day, except finish the work?

    There is no time for anything else. No mountain to climb for a private reckoning, no quiet reflection meant only for himself. Moses uses what remains of his life exactly as he used all of it, in service to the people he is about to leave behind. The tradition knew this. Rabbi Eliezer taught, “Repent one day before your death” (Pirkei Avot 2:15). His students asked the obvious question: who knows the day of their death? He answered that this was exactly the point. Since we don’t know, we should live each day as though it might be that one (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 153a). Moses is living this teaching on the one day he knows for certain is his last.

    Most of us don’t have that certainty. I do not know whether this is merciful or cruel, but it is human life.

    I often use a passage when I officiate a funeral. Death will come, and we cannot enter into judgment with it. Our question, why, will go unanswered. We rob death of its ultimate victory by living our lives so that when death comes, it takes us from a world where one corner is a little better because we were there. These thoughts do not give us an answer, but they refuse to let the unanswered why be the last word. And for the bereaved, they offer comfort for a loved one who is now but a precious memory.

    That, I think, is what Moses is doing on this last day. He has his own unanswered why. After everything, he will not cross into the land, and Ha’azinu does not resolve that grievance for him. He is resigned to his fate and doesn’t spend his final hours arguing the verdict. He spends them making sure the corner of the world he’s standing in, the people in front of him, are a little better for having had him.

    Rosh Hashanah asks us to imagine our names being written, and Yom Kippur asks us to imagine them sealed, v’chotveinu b’sefer hachayim, inscribing us in the book of life. We ask for more time in the very season that reminds us we won’t have unlimited time. We know we’re mortal. We ask anyway. I don’t think that’s a contradiction so much as an act of honesty. Wanting more life and knowing its limits turn out to be the same posture, not two different ones.

    Could I live even one day, let alone a whole year, with Moses’ clarity? Probably not, but I would like to try.

    The hope of these Ten Days isn’t that we become Moses. On his last day, we’re handed a smaller, answerable question in place of the one none of us can answer. Not why. Just this: whose corner of the world got a little better because we were standing in it this year. Who we sheltered. Who we listened for. Who heard us say, this year, give ear.

    G’mar chatima tova. May we be sealed for a good year, and may we spend it the way Moses spent his last one.

     

    I acknowledge AI (Claude, Gemini, and Grammarly), in developing this essay.

  • L’Shana Tova & Shabbat Shalom

    Rosh HaShanah and Shabbat join tonight.  Achot Ketanah, Little Sister, is a piyut that welcomes Rosh HaShanah.

    The piyyut is traditionally sung at Maariv on Erev Rosh Hashanah, and is only heightened when it falls on Friday night, as it does this year. It addresses the people as a sister whose year of suffering is ending, pleading, “may the year and its curses end” — a song poem building toward hope rather than announcing it. It is the theology of both holidays in one text: Shabbat’s rest meeting the New Year’s reckoning.

    Shabbat Shalom L’Shanah Tova uMetukah.

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Altar of Accountability: Ancient Ritual as Modern Ethics

    The Book of Leviticus, Parshat Vayikrah, is often seen as an outdated and mysterious guide for animal sacrifice. However, beneath the “flesh and fire” lies a sophisticated psychological framework for accountability. Vayikrah teaches us that for a community to survive its members’ shortcomings or failures, it requires a social reset built on four distinct pillars.

    1. Radical Ownership- Semikhah

    Accountability starts with Semikhah—the person physically places their hands on the animal’s head [1]. The Ramban, Nachmanides, explains that this act makes the individual recognize the sacrifice as a substitute for themselves; it establishes a visceral link between the person and the cost of their mistake [2]. In modern leadership, this shifts from the passive and all-too-common phrase of “Mistakes were made” to taking personal accountability: “I am responsible.” You can’t pass the blame for an error; you must accept it and embrace the consequence, along with the need to fix it.

    II. The Taxonomy of Error- Chatat vs. Asham

    Vayikrah distinguishes between the Chatat, the offering for unintentional errors [3], and the Asham offered for breaches of trust or trespass [4]. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch notes that while a Chatat is a “missing of the mark,” an Asham implies a desolation of the conscience [5]. This framework teaches that accountability isn’t just for malice or punishment; even unintentional negligence requires a public “clean-up.” It highlights that the impact of our actions matters just as much as our intent.

    III. Radical Transparency –Vidui

    A sacrifice is invalid without Vidui, or verbal confession. Maimonides, the Rambam, states that no sacrifice achieves atonement unless the offender “makes a verbal confession” [6]. Accountability involves acknowledging the harm for which we are responsible. By speaking the mistake aloud, the offender brings the error out of secrecy and into the open, allowing the community to process the breach.

    IV. Restorative Justice -The “Fifth”

    Regarding robbery, the Torah mandates that the offender cannot seek Divine forgiveness until they settle the human debt: “He shall restore it in full, and shall add the fifth part more thereto” [7]. Rashi emphasizes that restitution must come before the sacrifice [8]. This is the gold standard of restorative justice. True accountability is “Principal Plus 20%,” recognizing that the victim lost not just property but also time and trust.

    Conclusion

    Vayikrah teaches us that forgiveness is an earned state, not an entitlement. The sacrificial system ensured that the victim was compensated, the mistake was acknowledged, and the offender faced a tangible consequence. By following these steps—Ownership, Categorization, Verbalization, and Restitution—we transform ancient rituals into a timeless blueprint for integrity that remains relevant today.

    Citations

    1. Vayikrah 1:4. 2. Ramban on Vayikrah 1:9. 3. Vayikrah 4:2. 4. Vayikrah 5:15. 5. Hirsch on Vayikrah 4:2. 6. Rambam, Hilchot Teshuvah 1:1. 7. Vayikrah 5:24. 8. Rashi on Vayikrah 5:23.

     

  • The Palace of Redactions: A Modern Megillah

    On Purim, we wear masks to hide our faces. But the Megillah is a story about taking masks off. It is about a world—much like our own in 2026—where wealth and status are the ultimate masks. Behind the silk curtains of Shushan and behind the redacted lines of the Epstein files, the same crime is hidden: the belief that some people are “taken” (lekach) for the pleasure of those who are untouchable. Today, we aren’t just celebrating a victory; we are demanding a revelation.

    The Megillah is a crime report of systemic objectification. The “law of the women” (Esther 2:12, Sefaria) turned state-sponsored trafficking into a standardized procedure. This mirrors our modern “Dat” (decree): the Non-Prosecution Agreements and Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) that transformed silence into a contractual obligation. When abuse is cloaked in the law, it becomes invisible.

    Neither Ahasuerus nor Epstein acted alone. Ahasuerus relied on seven advisors—the enablers who legalized cruelty to protect the throne and the men in power. Today, we see this in the strategic redactions that shield the powerful while the victims’ trauma remains exposed.

    A just society cannot be built on the minimum files the system is willing to release. Our call to action is to mirror Esther’s courage. She moved from being a nameless body to an active agent of justice who acted lo chadat—not according to the “rules” of the elite.

    We must demand accountability from the enablers, not just from the predator. Mordecai’s challenge echoes today: “And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis.” (Esther 4:14, Sefaria)

    We are called to be the generation that finally tears down the palace walls and unmasks the truth.

    May we be blessed with the eyes of Esther, to see through the redactions and masks of our own time. May we be granted the voice of Vashti, to say NO to the commodification of our bodies and our dignity. And may we be filled with the resolve of Mordecai, to understand that our positions of safety are not for our comfort but for the protection of those still trapped behind palace walls.

    May the light of truth scatter the darkness of the inner court, and may we see a day when justice is a shared inheritance for all.

     

  • Shabbat Shalom

    I find myself drawn to the folk music and protest songs of an earlier tumultuous time in this nation’s history and some of the current balladeers singing about the need for justice in a time of injustice.

    As Black History month draws to a close, and the work of civil rights seems more urgent than ever, I wanted to welcome Shabbat with Teach Your Children, the classic from Crosby Stills and Nash.

    Wishing everyone Shabbat Shalom

  • The Dead Child- a prayer from the ashes of October 7

    As we remember the horror of October 7 and the aftermath, the words of Menachem Rosensaft bring us a somber resonance. Let this day of remembrance stir us to mercy for the child, not because we doubt our cause, but because we cherish our conscience.

    “the dead child

    in gaza city

    khan younis

    rafah

    is cried over

    with the same tears

    by the same God

    the same Allah

    the same Adonai

    as the dead child

    in kfar aza

    nahal oz

    be’eri

    …

    and it is

    for the not yet dead child

    palestinian child

    israeli child

    muslim child

    jewish child

    that the killing must end

    the war must end

    the terror must end

    the hatred must end”

    —Menachem Rosensaft, from Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025)

     

     

  • Psalm 27 is added to our prayers during Elul and through the chagim.

    We prepare ourselves for this special time with the prayer that we might dwell in the house of the Divine.  May your experience this season be meaningful, filled with reflection, repentance, and renewal.

    Thanks to Chava Mirel for this beautiful rendition of Psalm 27:4.

    Shabbat Shalom

    #BringThemHomeNow