Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Tikkun Olam

  • 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. 

     

  • Rashi and Discernment

    I have a wonderful dog. His name is Rashi (if you know, you know), and he holds his post on the sofa in my study, keeping watch over the road and the property below. He announces the mail carrier. He announces every delivery truck, the refuse trucks, every dog on the sidewalk, and every neighbor who dares to walk past on our sidewalk or the one across the street. Heaven help the car that turns into our driveway without a written invitation he has personally endorsed, which is to say almost never. It would be admirable, this loyalty, if it did not arrive with a force capable of waking the dead. I sit at my desk, holding a fragile thought together, when Rashi decides the moment has come to alert the household to a squirrel. I have started to suspect he is in league with my cardiologist, testing whether my heart can survive the shock. So far, so good.

    This morning I looked at Rashi, whom I am fairly convinced understands English when it suits him, and asked whether he might practice a little discernment. It is not, in this house, an unreasonable request. My wife and I have spent years studying Mussar, and discernment is a word Rashi has heard often enough to have an opinion on.

    He did not have opinions. He barked at a falling leaf.

    Here is what I did not say to him, because a dog cannot be expected to absorb a full teaching between barks. Discernment is not a demand for silence. It does not ask Rashi, or any of us, to stop noticing the world. The instinct that makes him bark at the mail carrier is the same instinct that makes him a genuinely good dog: alert, loyal, unwilling to let anything on this property pass unremarked. Mussar has a name for the discipline I was actually asking of him. Zehirut, watchfulness, is the first rung Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto builds in Mesillat Yesharim, and its claim is modest. Before you act, look. Examine your ways, whether they are good or not, rather than moving through the day on reflex. The word shares a root with azhara, meaning warning, which tells you something about its purpose. Watchfulness does not exist to shut the alarm off. It exists to ask, in the half-second before the alarm sounds, whether this is actually the moment for it.

    That half-second is the whole of it. Discernment lives in the gap between the thing arriving and the response leaving your mouth. It asks you to be present enough in that gap to notice what you are about to do, what it will cost the person standing in front of you, and what it will cost you, too, if you are willing to admit it. There is an old line, usually credited to the Stoic Zeno of Citium and just as often misattributed to Epictetus, about why we have two ears and one mouth: so that we might listen twice as much as we speak. I have always found it easier to quote than to practice. It does not tell you to say nothing. It tells you where the ratio ought to sit.

    If you imagine Rashi without the bark at all, you have not pictured a wiser dog; you have pictured a stuffed one, and I would miss the real animal, alarms and all. What I actually want from him, and from myself, is smaller than silence. It is the pause. The moment when you are self-aware enough to feel the bark forming and to ask whether this squirrel, this comment, or this reply typed in anger needs to leave you right now. Some of them do. Most of them, in my experience, do not.

    We are in Elul, walking toward the Yamim Noraim, and the season brings a familiar instruction: look back at where you fell short. I want to offer a different use for looking back. Not an accounting of what you got wrong so much as a record of what you learned and where you might pause next time, so that the person you are becoming in 5787 carries slightly better judgment than the one writing this sentence. That is the real work of Teshuvah. Not punishing the self you were, but training the self you are still becoming.

    I have not figured out how to ask this of myself in all the moments it actually matters, at my desk, mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-life. I suspect I am not alone in that. Rashi, for what it is worth, slept through the entire writing of this essay. No comment on the squirrels.

    Wishing you all a year sweetened by a few more pauses than the one behind us.

    L’Shanah Tovah u’Metukah

  • This Is Not a Security Problem

    (This Essay was published in the Jewish Exponent on July 27, 2026 and reprinted here)

    Each time I enter the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, I stop at the security checkpoint. The guards may recognize me from previous visits, but I still empty my pockets and remove my belt. Beyond the checkpoint, I put myself back together. Inside this special space, I am safe. Located on Independence Mall, across Market Street from the Liberty Bell, the museum acknowledges the Jewish community’s extraordinary place in the United States. But that specialness also makes it a target. Just two weekends ago, someone defaced the sculpture outside the Weitzman, and someone else violated the sanctity of New York’s Central Synagogue.

    I won’t tell you how to feel about it. Anger, fear and grief are valid responses to these and many other assaults. We are deeply saddened that our country harbors hatred that betrays the great promise we believe in. Yet anger, fear and grief can be paralyzing. Paralysis becomes silence, and silence is the goal of those responsible for these heinous, cowardly acts. I will not give them what they want.

    There is a phrase in the Talmud that I keep returning to, Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh: all of Israel is responsible for one another. Arevim shares its root with eiruv, the boundary that turns separate private courtyards into a shared domain on Shabbat, so that carrying between them becomes simply what neighbors do. Arevim is about creating community. It is about refusing to treat your neighbor’s doorway as the limit of your concern.

    Here is what I think a lot of us get wrong about that phrase. We hear “all of Israel” and assume it’s drawing a line: our people, not others. I don’t think that’s what it’s teaching; instead, it’s teaching that responsibility has to start somewhere concrete before it can go anywhere. For us, it starts here with us. It was never supposed to end there.

    This is not a security problem. It is a relationship problem disguised as a security problem.

    Let me be plain. I am not minimizing guards, locks, magnetometers, or cameras. =The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia has invested real money through its community security initiative to harden facilities and keep a bad Saturday morning from becoming a funeral. I’ve sat in briefings and learned what a trained guard and a hardened building can prevent. If you give to Federation, some of what you gave helped build that. You should know it, and you should give more this year because the need did not go down this month. It went up.

    But there is more for each of us to do than write a check. It’s an extension of believing we are part of a larger society, invested in each other’s safety, not just our own. We tend to treat interfaith friendship as something for calmer times: a shared meal, a joint text study, or a panel discussion with refreshments afterward. I want to suggest we have that backward. The friendships built during calm times are the real infrastructure that concrete barriers can’t replace. The guard who might recognize me at the Weitzman is not Jewish. Neither is my friend who will stand beside me and publicly declare that we support each other. Those relationships did not happen because of a program. They happened because we showed up enough times to become people to each other, not categories. Some weeks, that feels like a small thing next to everything else rabbis are supposed to do. This week, it doesn’t feel small at all.

    I also want to be honest about something closer to home. The Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia, which I have the honor of leading, brings Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal and Conservative rabbis into the same room, even though we disagree about enormous things. Areivut does not ask us to resolve those disagreements before we act together. It asks us to act together anyway, because responsibility supersedes disagreement. If that’s true inside our own house, it has to be true at its borders, too.

    So here is what I am asking of Philadelphia Jewish Exponent readers, who are already inside the tent, already connected enough to a Jewish institution to hold this publication in your hands. Call your legislators. Not an email, but an actual voice on the phone, so a staffer has to hear it and take a name. Ask what they are doing to fund security at houses of worship, ours and our Muslim neighbors’ alike, because we are both targets of the same hatred. Increase what you give to Federation’s security fund and say why.

    Then do the harder thing. Think of one person outside this community, a neighbor, colleague, or parent from your kid’s soccer sideline, and call them. Share what happened at the Weitzman. Tell them what it would mean if they showed up outside your synagogue some Saturday morning, not to do anything, just to be there. They will not know you want this until you ask.

    Finally, show up yourself. This Shabbat, go to shul and be counted. It costs only getting dressed and going, and it matters more than every paragraph I’ve written here. An empty sanctuary tells whoever did this that their plan worked. A full sanctuary, with a few unfamiliar faces near the door because you asked them to come, tells them something else entirely.

    My email tagline says, “God’s miracle is not in the thunder and lightning. It’s in people sheltering each other from the storm.” I believe this more than ever, not because it is easier to believe now, but because I watched what happens when a community decides to test whether it is true. Areivut is not a slogan on a wall. It is your presence. It is a phone call you have not yet made.

    Who is it to?

    Rabbi David Levin is president of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia and founder of the Jewish Relationships Initiative.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Kippah on My Head Is Not a Target on My Back

    Should I take off my kippah?

    I first asked myself that question years ago, before a trip to Hungary. Viktor Orbán was reaching for power by invoking an old script, the anti-Semitic tropes his country knows too well, and I did not want to become a small, portable target for whatever that script might awaken in a stranger. I was not traveling alone. My wife would be beside me, and the fear was not only for me. If my kippah made me a target, it made her one too.

    I brought the question to my friend and teacher, Rabbi Brad, a man with a cooler, wiser head than mine. He didn’t answer it. He asked me to ask a different question. For many people I would meet, he said, I might be the first Jew they had ever stood beside in the flesh. Perhaps, he suggested, the kippah wasn’t a liability to manage. Perhaps I was being handed an assignment, an unlikely diplomat to a community that might be more curious than cruel.

    I took his advice, and it opened doors I could not have imagined from the outside. Jews who had spent decades in hiding found me because I was visibly, unmistakably one of them, and that visibility told them it was safe to speak. I heard survival stories that had never been spoken aloud before that day. None of it would have reached me if I had made myself smaller, safer, and harder to see.

    This is not just a piece of personal history. It’s an argument for a claim I still believe: the kippah was never a challenge thrown at the world. It was a door held open.

    I did not expect to be asking the same question again, this time about New York City, in 2026. Yet here I am.

    Here are the people I encounter on an ordinary day here. The cab driver who gets me to the airport. The man behind the bodega counter who knows my order before I say it. The woman at the pushcart serving food from a country I couldn’t find on a map, standing beside another cart from a country nowhere near it. The subway platform at rush hour, where I can stand for four stops and watch a whole world get on and off around me, no two people from the same place, all of them going somewhere.

    New York was never the melting pot we were taught to sing about, where everyone’s edges dissolved into sameness. It is a stew, every ingredient still itself, still recognizable, simmering together anyway. It is a city built, whatever its failures, on the idea that a person gets to wear who they are without flinching, on that platform, behind that counter, and everywhere between.

    I won’t pretend the danger people are naming is imaginary. There is an angry rabble here too, and a hateful mob, and, worse, the lone wolf who needs no crowd at all to do harm. And I won’t pretend that taking off the kippah wouldn’t make me a slightly harder target to find. It would. Hiding works, a little, the way hiding always works. But safety was never the only question worth asking, and it cannot be the only one we let ourselves ask. Playing it smart is real; each of us has to make our own honest reckoning about when a threat is truly a threat, and I won’t tell another Jew what their reckoning should be.

    However, a life organized entirely around that reckoning isn’t a life. It’s a retreat dressed up as caution. We need a north star that isn’t fear. Something better. Something that still believes the man at the bodega counter, the driver, the woman at the pushcart, might be capable of curiosity instead of contempt—because most days, they are.

    I learned this from my rabbi and friend, standing at a doorway to Hungary, years before I understood what he had truly given me: the kippah on my head was never a target on my back. It was always, and continues to be, an invitation. I won’t let anyone—not history, not a headline, not a lone wolf’s shadow—convince me to fold it up and put it away.

  • 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

    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

  • 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.

  • Shabbat Shalom

    We welcome Shabbat and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

    It is a time of sacred celebration and rededication to the ideals upon wbich this nation was founded.  Let us thank God for our blessings and continue the work on behalf of us all. I share Ray Charles’ version of America the Beautiful

    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.