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  • 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.

  • 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. 

     

  • 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.

  • 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