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  • Come Back As Yourself

    “I could have been a contender.”

    These are the words of Terry Malloy, the boxer turned longshoreman in On the Waterfront, and they mean more once you know how he gets there. He had real promise, before he let his brother talk him into throwing a fight so the men running his union could collect on a bet. Years later, in the back of a cab, that same brother is sent to keep him in line, and the whole debt comes due at once: “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” It isn’t about boxing. It’s a man naming, out loud, the exact moment his life turned away from what it might have been.

    That’s why it lands. It names the gap between who we thought we’d become and who we actually are, the gap that middle age stops letting you pretend is theoretical. The road not taken closes. Not with drama. Just with time.

    Usually we do one of two things in response: mourn it, or pretend it isn’t there. I want to try something different.

    My family had a textile business, two generations deep—the unglamorous kind that a life gets built around, until cheaper labor and faster shipping made forty-five years of our name stop mattering. Dad tried to reinvent himself: retail, then real estate. I pushed him to keep trying because that’s what a son does: You believe your father’s capacity is inexhaustible because you need it to be. Then his illness took hold, and I understood, later than I should have, that the well he was reaching into had gone dry. I reinvented myself too, into finance and real estate, the sensible things, unfulfilling not because I did them badly but because they weren’t mine. So I did something my mother could not have imagined and would not have chosen: I left it all behind to become a rabbi. (My mom always hoped I’d become a doctor and go to Harvard.) But I’d be lying if I said the question closed. It just changed shape as I got older.

    A lot of us have a romantic notion, seductive because it flatters us, that somewhere inside us was a fuller, truer version of our life—and that everything we did diminished it. That notion requires imagining a version of yourself untouched by a father’s illness, unaffected by untaken or unsuccessful risks, and unshaped by every constraint of the life you actually had.

    That person never existed. No road not taken, just a fiction. Mourning a fiction is a strange way to spend the only life you get.

    Mine is not a story about a promise unkept. It is a story about what grows in the actual soil I was given, the only soil there ever was.

    There is a Hasidic story about Reb Zusya of Hanipol, who came to his students one morning, trembling after dreaming of his own death and the judgment awaiting him. They expected him to say he feared being asked why he hadn’t been more like Moses, why he hadn’t parted a sea. That wasn’t what frightened him. The question was: Why weren’t you Zusya? Not why didn’t you become the figure some other soul was built to become. Why didn’t you become, completely, the one thing only you could ever have been?

    I did not expect to find the same teaching from the American businessman Mark Cuban, but when he was once asked about reincarnation, he said that if he came back, he’d like to come back as himself. Not younger, not richer, not luckier. Himself. A life that had been entirely his, imperfections included, was the thing worth having again.

    But I don’t want to let myself off the hook that easily. There’s a second question beneath the first, and it might be the harder one.

    Anyone who has raised children knows something philosophy took centuries to catch up to: Personality doesn’t start as a blank canvas. It shows up. Before language and before nurture has time to work, a child is already themselves. Torah knew this before we had a word for temperament. Rebecca feels her twins struggling inside her, vayitrotzetzu habanim b’kirbah, and is told, before either has drawn breath, that she carries two already divided nations. Jacob and Esau don’t become different men through different parenting. They arrive different.

    If that’s true, the question isn’t only whether I became what I could have been. It’s whether I did right by the person already there, in the people I was given to raise, teach, and sit with. Did I recognize what was already present, or spend those years trying to instill in them the shape I’d privately hoped for for myself?

    I pushed my father to become something his illness had already made impossible, because I loved him and couldn’t accept the alternative. I have had to unlearn that same instinct with the people I love now, when I keep choosing to will potential into being rather than stewarding it toward where it already wants to grow.

    So I leave the question where I found it. Not whether I could have been a contender. Not even Zusya’s question, exactly, because that one was his to ask. Mine is smaller: What did I do with what was mine: the business that collapsed, the father whose strength ran out, and the people I was given to raise, teach, and sit with, already formed and asking only to be seen? Am I what I should be for them?

  • What is your one thing? V’zot Habracha

    That question sat with me long before I could explain why, until it found its place: Kraków, at the edge of a war. I went in the war’s first weeks, when Poland’s eastern border was still processing the deluge of Ukrainian women and children who had grabbed what would fit in one bag and fled their homes. Thirty rabbis brought two tons of supplies and a stack of money to do our small part in this humanitarian crisis. We headquartered at the JCC. We walked into Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, now the city’s hip center, with klezmer spilling out of restaurant doors and mezuzah-shaped keychains in gift shop windows. Jewish culture was on display, preserved as kitsch.

    The Rema Synagogue stands across the square, and behind it lies a cemetery the Nazis tried to destroy. Most of the gravestones had been broken or removed and repurposed as paving stones. The ones that remained were put together to form a wall, creating a mosaic of broken names. However, one grave was untouched: that of Moses Isserles, the Rema, whose notes on the Shulchan Aruch continue to shape how many Jews pray, eat, and live. His gravestone is inscribed in Hebrew with the words: “From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.”

    The line was never intended for him; it had been cut centuries earlier on the tomb of Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), who is perhaps revered as second only to Moses Rabbenu. Kraków took the epitaph and added to it, so three men with the same name now share the same sentence: Moses, who brought the Torah down from the mountain; Maimonides, who systematized it; and Isserles, who made it applicable to Ashkenazi Jews. They were all true giants and are so highly regarded that people still visit their graves.

    This week we study V’zot Habracha, the Torah’s final parsha. Moses makes his final preparations; he goes up the mountain, bestows his final blessings, explains how festivals such as Sukkot are to be celebrated, and then dies. The Torah does not allow him to enter the land he traveled toward for forty years; instead, he sees it and leaves a blessing behind. That is all.

    In our tradition, we look up to those who achieved greatness: a lawgiver, a philosopher, or a legal scholar who still guides a Jewish family in Philadelphia to keep milk and meat separate. When we visit the graves of these later Moses figures, we might wonder whether we could ever do what they did. But that is not the right question, and it might even lead us astray.

    In City Slickers, the old trail boss, Curly, played by Jack Palance, raises a crooked finger and tells Mitch, played by Billy Crystal, that the secret of life consists of a single thing. Mitch waits anxiously to find out what it is, but Curly does not say. Instead, he tells him, “That’s what you have to find out,” before riding off.

    Most of us will not write a Shulchan Aruch or lead people out of slavery. That is not what we are meant to do, and our tradition does not expect it. Instead, it asks for something smaller, and even harder: to find your one thing. This could be the care you bring to your daily work, or the care you show as an adult child, parent, spouse, or friend during a tough time. It might also be something quieter, like serving on a board without recognition, or spending time with someone who is dying and simply wants company.

    We have just completed the Yamim Noraim and closed the Torah scroll at its final word, only to open it again at the beginning. This cycle is the lesson: we never truly arrive; we keep returning, year after year, to the same question. What is your one thing? Not so that your name will be carved in stone, but so that when people say, ‘may their memory be a blessing,’ it will truly be so.

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

     

  • Shabbat Shalom

    We welcome Shabbat and Sukkot this evening.  May the shelter of peace extend to all. Craig Taubman blends his music with Mattisyahu to help us set the mood.

    Shabbat Shalom. Chag Sukkot Sameach.

    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.

  • A Roof You Can See Through- A Reflection on Sukkot

    On Leviticus 22:26–23:44 and the architecture of Sukkot

    I have never been sure what to do with a roof I can see through.

    That is what the sukkah asks of you, and the text is specific. Leviticus 23:42 says teishvu, you shall sit in booths seven days, and the roof covering has to come from what grew and was cut down, branches and leaves, laid loosely enough that starlight and rain get in. The root of the sukkah is skhakh, to cover or weave together, and the covering, unlike a thatched roof, was never meant to seal you off from the sky. It was meant to let you feel the sky while still being inside.

    The reason for this is in the next verse: So that your descendants will know I had the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of Egypt. The sukkah is not a shelter you build because you need one. We build it from memory, with our own hands, concretizing the story for our children.

    The timing of this is important. Four days earlier, on Yom Kippur, we stood fully exposed and vulnerable, asking to be seen and forgiven. The Torah’s answer to that kind of exposure is not to hand you back your walls and their security; it shouldn’t be back to business as usual; it marks a change and a fresh start. We build a weaker version of our home on purpose, and then we are commanded, more explicitly than anywhere else in the text, to be joyful inside it. U’smachta lifnei Hashem Elokecha shivat yamim (Lev 23:40), you shall rejoice before your God seven days. Not despite the thin roof. Inside it.

    This understanding challenges a common assumption: joy comes only after you are safe. The Torah seems to argue something very different. The joy the Torah commands does not come after vulnerability is resolved. It comes while vulnerability remains, literally overhead, with stars and the moon peeking through.

    Sukkot is also called Chag Ha’Asif, the festival of the ingathering, the harvest at its fullest. The same seven days celebrate the year’s greatest abundance and the temporary dwelling you build to remind you how little you actually control. The text wants to hold these in tension. You can have enough, even abundance, and still go outside and sleep under branches, because fullness was never what made you truly secure to begin with.

    Secure space is different from sacred space. The text doesn’t offer a simple answer to that question here. The sukkah doesn’t keep out the weather. It keeps you sitting with people who chose to sit with you, under a flimsy roof that offers no protection. The shelter isn’t in the structure; it is in the people who showed up to dwell in the sukkah with you. Quoting my own tagline: “God’s miracle isn’t in the thunder and lightning but in people sheltering others from the storm.”

    Most of what we build in our lives, including our institutions, our homes, even our religious practice, is built for permanence. We reinforce it and want it to hold. And once a year, our tradition asks us to build the opposite on purpose, something that cannot hold, and to call that the dwelling place of joy.

    So, my conclusion isn’t a conclusion at all.  Instead, I am left with a couple of questions: Where in your life this year is the sturdiest structure, and where is the one with the roof you can see through, the one that only stands because people chose to sit inside it with you?  And which one, if you are honest, has actually made you feel safe?

    Wishing you a sweet good 5787!

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

     

     

  • Shabbat Shalom and G’mar Tov

    “Moses doesn’t end with a speech. He ends with a song. The Torah — the whole thing — ends in music. This Shabbat, so do we.”

    For Shabbat Ha’azinu, I share People Get Ready performed by The Impressions.It is a beautiful invitation for all to join together and a lovely way to share the Shabbat before Yom Kippur.

    Wishing all a Gmar Chatima Tova and 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.

  • Selfless love on Yom Kippur

    In the Jewish tradition, a form of kindness is regarded as the most genuine, defined by its selflessness and the fact that it will not be repaid.

    Jacob is dying and asks Joseph for one request—not a blessing, not forgiveness—but a favor. He asks that Joseph take his body out of Egypt and bury him alongside his fathers. “V’asita imadi chesed v’emet,” he says, “treat me in chesed and emet” (Genesis 47:29). Rashi’s commentary eventually developed into a distinct category within Jewish law and language: chesed shel emet, meaning kindness done to a person who is dead, since the dead cannot thank you, cannot return the favor, nor can they even know that it has been done. With all other kinds of kindness, there is always the possibility of quid pro quo or at least a hint of reciprocity, such as the quiet satisfaction of having done something that was noticed. This kindness, however, has no such element; it is precisely this lack that gives it the quality of being emet, true.

    At a graveside, I reflect on this. The ritual that makes the point is that we bury the person ourselves; mourners and friends fill in the hole by hand with a shovel, and the shovel is never passed directly from one person to another. After you have finished your portion, you put it back into the ground. The next person then picks up the shovel where it lies. In some communities, they go a step further by turning the shovel upside down before using it, making this common tool as intentionally awkward and difficult to use as possible. The mitzvah must be difficult. This is no accident; it is the whole point. It has to be made hard enough so that it can’t be mistaken for something done for the person carrying out the action’s own benefit. There is no one to thank you for it, merely the dirt and a shovel which someone has left standing there for you to pick up.

    I don’t think our tradition was meant to stop there, though. It speaks to presence in general, the importance of staying with someone even when it gives you nothing in return.

    I am reminded of the musicians on the Titanic and of Janusz Korczak, who refused opportunities to save himself and instead stayed with the children of his orphanage as they were taken onto the trains to Treblinka, remaining with them, as far as can be told, until the end. None of them received thanks from the people they cared for. Those people could not offer future loyalty, could not become worthwhile allies, and likely failed to remember to thank them, as most would be dead within an hour. Wallace Hartley’s band continued to play on a ship that was already lost. Korczak went toward a place with only one exit. Their act of kindness was not forced; it was a choice made by people who had an exit and chose not to take it, to help people who would never be able to open a door for them in return. In neither story is there any repayment of kindness.

    This is especially important during these Yamim Noraim, or the Ten Days. During that time, we ask to be entered into a book, remembered, inscribed, and forgiven—despite the many failures and efforts that fell short this past year. There is nothing wrong with wanting your efforts to count for something. But Jacob’s request to Joseph goes in the opposite direction. He is not the one performing chesed shel emet; rather, he is stating in advance what kind of kindness his son will show him when Jacob is no longer in a position to give anything back. In the story of the dying man, it is not the dying man who is generous. It is the living one who is.

    Most of us will not be Korczak. We won’t be asked to choose the train. But we will be asked to sit with someone who can’t thank us. A parent who no longer knows our name. A friend past the point of conversation. Someone on the street in need of food. The Torah portion Ha’azinu asks the living to give ear. Chesed shel emet asks something quieter: to keep giving ear to someone who, by the time we arrive, may no longer be able to hear us.

    In the coming year, may we be the kind of kindness that was never waiting to be repaid.

    G’mar chatima tova.

     

    *I acknowledge AI’s assistance in writing this essay.

  • 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.

  • L’Shana Tova u’Metukah

  • Both Boys Lived- A message from Rosh HaShanah

    Both Boys Lived

    Nobody is sacrificed on either morning. We move past that faster than it deserves.

    The knife stops. The well appears. Both boys grow up and become something. Ishmael is promised twelve princes and a great nation. When he dies, the Torah uses the identical phrase it gave Abraham eight verses earlier, vayigva vayamot vayei’asef el amav, meaning he breathed his last, died, and was gathered to his people. Isaac carries the covenant. Neither is destroyed by what was done to him, and neither ever says a word against the man who did it.

    Begin with what they were called, because neither boy was given a name of his own. Yishmael, “God will hear,” is assigned because the Lord has heard your affliction. It is the record of his mother’s rescue, fastened to him before he was born. Yitzchak, “he will laugh,” comes from a father laughing face down on the ground and a mother laughing behind the tent flap. One name commemorates a woman being heard. The other commemorates two people who did not believe. Neither name is about the boy carrying it.

    A mother saves them both.

    Hagar lifts her voice in the desert, and God hears the boy. Then comes a verse we don’t read on Rosh Hashanah. Vayehi Elohim et hana’ar vayigdal. God was with the lad, and he grew. He lived in the wilderness and became an archer, and his mother took him a wife from Egypt. She arranged her son’s marriage herself, in exile, with nothing. Isaac’s father sends a servant and ten camels to do it for him.

    Sarah is harder. She acts on her child’s behalf so he will live, and she puts another woman’s child in the desert. She sees her son, but she sees him so narrowly that she cannot see anyone else’s. And still, the one fact the Torah gives us about Isaac’s inner life is that he was comforted after his mother. Not after his father. Vayinachem, from the root that also means to change your mind, because comfort in Hebrew is a turning, and Isaac has a great deal to turn from.

    So, what happens to the children we do not see? Are they sacrificed? The Torah’s answer is no, but it is not a comforting no. The trauma somehow endures despite the achievements.

    They live. That much the text will say. They grow, they marry, they raise twelve princes, they inherit the covenant, they are gathered to their people full of days. Somebody looks at them. The looking gets done. Someone who is not you does it. Whether that is the same thing as being fine, the Torah leaves it for later, and it does answer it.

    What gets sacrificed is the relationship.

    Count the words. After the mountain, Abraham and Isaac never speak again in the Torah. Between Abraham and Ishmael, there is not a single recorded word in either direction. Here is a man who fathers two nations yet has no conversation with either of his sons. That is the cost of the Akedah, and it is not paid by a boy.

    You can see this happen now in families where everybody is still alive and nothing has visibly gone wrong. The child is thriving. There is work, a partner, and children of their own. The parent can narrate all of it accurately and has learned every detail from somebody else.

    Abraham dies at a hundred and seventy-five, and Isaac and Ishmael bury him together at Machpelah. The verse does not say they mourned him. It says they buried him. Then the Torah moves on, listing Ishmael’s sons, and Isaac returns to the well.

    The boys were never the sacrifice. Ask who was. Then ask whether somebody is out there right now, growing up without you.

    May the Days of Awe bring you meaning; may the year ahead be good.

    L’ShanahTova U’metukah.