Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Torah

  • Parshat Nitzavim-Vayelech — How Do You Say Goodbye

    How do you say goodbye when you already know how the story ends?

    Moses has one day remaining. Since Nitzavim-Vayelech falls on the last Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, the text positions him exactly there: a hundred and twenty years old, told he will not enter, and watching the people whom he had carried through the desert stand at the edge of a land which he will only be able to see from a mountain. We have all seen something similar when someone we loved was coming to the end; there is a sudden flash of clarity just at that moment, the fog lifting briefly so that the person we knew can make one more visit. They don’t usually make speeches; instead they concentrate on what is truly important to them: they enquire about the grandchild, resolve what remains unresolved, say the name that needed to be said, and then the opportunity closes once again. Even though Moses remains as clear-sighted as ever, he too has this same kind of opportunity, and he makes use of it in the same way.

    After finishing the Torah, Moses gives it to the Levites; then he calls Joshua before the entire nation and gives him two words in place of a eulogy: chazak v’ematz, be strong and resolute. Furthermore, in the phrase which names the parashah, vayelech Moshe, instead of the people coming to him he goes out to them. The rabbis interpret this verb literally and state that Moses spent his final day walking from tent to tent so that nobody would have to go to him to say goodbye.

    This is not a farewell speech; it’s a man refusing to allow his goodbyes to become just another item that people have to collect.

    Earlier in the parshah, Moses had already told them what he wanted them to retain after his death. He did not want them to have a system of judges or a war strategy for Canaan; instead, he told them that it is already in their mouths and in their hearts, something they do not need to obtain from heaven or fetch across the sea. Last week’s portion explained why that closeness took so long, 40 years: the people were shaped into a state of readiness through hunger and their experiences wandering in the Midbar, rather than being ready from the start. At this point, the distance is finally short enough. Moses is not leaving them a locked box; he is telling them that the key is close by.

    He also instructs them to choose life so that both they and their children may live; that seems confident. But what comes next is not. God clearly tells Moses that the people will break their faith, follow other gods, and suffer as a result, and orders Moses to compose a song to serve as a witness on the day this occurs. It is strange to leave a nation behind, not with a promise that they will remain faithful but with a poem already ready for the time when they do not.

    I do not believe that Moses is contradicting himself; in my view he is achieving something more difficult than simply showing confidence. Earlier there is a promise that when they are scattered and eventually come back, God will gather them once again, even from the most distant places. Moses is not making provision only for success; he is preparing for both failure and a return, since after forty years’ experience he has realized that a people worthy of being led are never found solely in the good times or only in the bad. Leadership must have a plan for both situations, and so he leaves them one.

    I think about my own version of that afternoon more than I say aloud. What did I actually teach the people who came through my door? What survives me that isn’t a title or a building? Moses left no army or institution bearing his name. Simply a scroll. A name spoken twice to steady a nervous successor. A day spent walking tent to tent instead of waiting to be visited.

    What is written on your scroll? And who is going to need you to go to them before the day is up?

    Shabbat Shalom.

  • The Night They Rewrote the President’s House

    In the middle of the night this past July, National Park Service crews removed the panels at the President’s House on Independence Mall and replaced them with a different version of the story. No announcement. No public unveiling. That was probably the point.

    In the musical Gigi, there is a song called “I Remember It Well.” Two former lovers recall the same night, and their memories don’t agree on a single detail. Neither is lying. They illustrate what history frequently does too: the story we tell ourselves is often incomplete and rarely matches what actually happened.

    We like our history tidy and uncomplicated, an unblemished hero, and an easily understood meaning. History, like most human stories, is not a record of what happened. It is processed and filtered, then handed back by the storyteller/redactor as meaning.

    In 2010, a new exhibit titled “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” opened at the President’s House. It told two stories at once: the birth of the presidency and the story of the nine people Washington enslaved in that same house while he governed. He led a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, yet he owned slaves. This fuller, more honest story is both complex and ironic.

    In March 2025, a presidential executive order directed the National Park Service to remove exhibit content that portrayed our founding in a negative light. Last January, the Park Service removed the panels at the President’s House. Philadelphia sued to have the original panels restored and lost. This is a fight over the manner we understand history, including whether we can hold two truths about the same man at the same time.

    George Washington was a brilliant general and a remarkable first president. He nobly and voluntarily walked away from power when he could have kept it. He was also a slaveholder who relied on enslaved labor to run his household while building a nation on the language of liberty. All of this is true. Nothing cancels the other. A history that tells only the first part isn’t protecting Washington for us; it’s attempting to protect us from him and from what his contradiction asks us to see in ourselves.

    I don’t think the answer is to tear him down or to build him up. Our responsibility is harder than either: to let him stand as he was, admirable and implicated at once, and to ask what that implies for us.

    Washington is not a special case. Shlomo Carlebach rewired how a generation of Jews sang and prayed, and he used his standing to harm women who trusted him. Richard Wagner composed music that can move people to tears and also wrote antisemitic tracts that the Nazis later claimed as their own. Genius and leadership often come with their shadow.

    Do we dismiss a person’s achievements because of their faults? Or do we hold the gift and the fault together, refusing to let either erase the other? That is the real work before us, at the President’s House and whenever someone or something we admire also carries the inexcusable.

    The comfortable version of history asks little of us. We may learn some new facts, but otherwise it essentially confirms what we already believe and sends us home unchanged. The complicated version asks us to sit with imperfect people, including our ancestors and even ourselves, who were capable of both nobility and cruelty in the same lifetime.

    Some see this as a weakness in the story; I believe it is the story itself.

    What would it mean to let the fault sit right beside the gift, in Washington, in Carlebach, in anyone on whom we’ve built an inheritance, not as a footnote but as part of the story? What would it mean to do the same with our own history, our own families, or our own choices? We don’t get to answer that question once and be done. We have to keep answering it, generation after generation, argument after argument.

    That is where learning from history truly lives, not in the tidy version but in the argument we’re still willing to have.

     

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.’”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?