It’s Elul, the month that leads us up to the Days of Awe. The busiest time of the year for pulpit clergy. Also the most spiritually intense time of year, when we’re supposed to be engaging in an accounting of our souls and making teshuvah. We are eating, sleeping, and breathing high holiday prep. Those of us with "halftime" pulpit positions are working fulltime-plus. (These things are true every year.)

All of us have just had the hardest Jewish year we can remember. Usually when we reach Simchat Torah, we get an emotional and spiritual break. In 5784, we went into crisis mode before the holidays ended. The calamities haven't stopped, so we never downshifted out of crisis mode. Even those of us with extensive pastoral care experience may have never provided it at these levels for this long.

I can't begin to describe the depth of grief and trauma across our communities this year. Some of us are ministering to Jews who are strongly Zionist-identified, to progressive Jews who are struggling with what's unfolding, and to non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews in deep solidarity with Palestinians. Many of us are trying to hold together communities, families, and friendships that are fracturing. 

Please be kind to your clergy. Many of us are worn thin, feeling (in Tolkien's words) "like butter scraped over too much bread." We have spent this year trying to bring presence while mourning, ourselves. Preparing for the High Holidays is an awesome responsibility, and we’re grateful to be able to do it! And this year, we may be running on empty before the marathon of the holidays even begins.

It is always humbling to read my words translated into another language -- especially into this language that I so deeply love. And I'm moved to know that this particular poem, a cry from my heart, reached one of my Israeli friends and colleagues deeply too. Thank you for this translation, R. Simcha Daniel Burstyn.

(You can read my poem in English plaintext here in an earlier blog post. And/or, the Hebrew and English are both posted as comments on this Facebook post where I also shared this translation.)

I want to look at three verses from tonight’s Torah portion. One of them is big and systemic, while the other two are more intimate and personal. Each one suggests a spiritual practice to me – something we can actively make a practice of doing as we approach Rosh Hashanah.

צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף לְמַ֤עַן תִּֽחְיֶה֙ וְיָרַשְׁתָּ֣ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְהֹוָ֥''ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לָֽךְ׃    

Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and inherit the land that your God יהו;;ה is giving you. (Deut. 16:20)

This verse is one of Torah’s profoundest messages. The repetition of the word tzedek, justice, might come to teach us to chase after justice both internally and externally, inside and out. Or maybe it means that we need to seek justice for others, and also for ourselves.

Ibn Ezra says the repetition means that we must pursue justice whether we ourselves win or lose. We must pursue justice because justice is what’s right – even if it doesnt benefit us personally. Justice matters, justice is precious and holy, even when we don’t ourselves win.

The American justice system is not perfect. There are wrongful convictions (which is why The Innocence Project exists). But I believe that justice, as an ideal, is one of the ways we live up to what’s best in us. And my time serving on a jury left me feeling humbled and moved. 

“Jury service,” I wrote then, “asks us to do our best to root out any preconceptions or prejudice, and to approach everything we hear with an open mind. That's a pretty good spiritual practice for anytime, honestly. So is holding deep empathy while also upholding accountability.”

I invite us to try to live in the world, between now and the holidays, as though we were serving on a jury and someone’s future is at stake. Notice our biases, and work to mitigate them. Approach everything with an open mind. Seek accountability from a place of deep empathy. 

שֹׁפְטִ֣ים וְשֹֽׁטְרִ֗ים תִּֽתֶּן־לְךָ֙ בְּכל־שְׁעָרֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֨ר יְהֹוָ֧''ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ לִשְׁבָטֶ֑יךָ וְשָׁפְט֥וּ אֶת־הָעָ֖ם מִשְׁפַּט־צֶֽדֶק׃

You shall appoint magistrates and officials in your gates, in all the settlements that your God יהו’’ה is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. (Deut. 16:18)

Appoint judges for your sh’arekha – your gates. For our mystics, this means not only the literal gates of our towns, but the “gates” into us. Our eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth are seven gates that we need to guard in order to ensure the justice that this week’s parsha tells us to pursue.

What do we let in through these gates: what words do we read, what media do we consume? Whose stories do we seek out, and whose stories do we ignore? Where are we getting our news? Whose voices do we center? Whose voices do we ignore, or just… not want to hear? 

And what do we let out through these gates? Are we careful with the words we speak? Do we repeat hearsay or gossip, or speak about others outside of their presence? Have our words caused harm this year? (The answer is yes, whether or not we can call instances to mind.)

I invite us to guard our gates as a spiritual practice this month. “The mind is like tofu: it takes on the flavor of whatever we soak it in,” said Reb Zalman z”l: whatever we let in these gates becomes our marinade. And whatever we let out of these gates shapes our impact on the world.  

תָּמִ֣ים תִּֽהְיֶ֔ה עִ֖ם יְהֹוָ֥''ה אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃

You must be wholehearted with your God יהו’’ה. (Deut. 18:13)

During Elul, our mystics teach, “the King is in the Field.” Though sometimes tradition imagines God as a King, transcendent, unapproachable, this month we imagine God “descending” into creation and walking with us in the fields, a friend Who wants to hear what’s on our hearts.

This verse invites us to bring our whole hearts to God. Here’s my invitation: suspend whatever disbelief might be getting in the way. Take some quiet time this month – whether we’re out for a walk, or driving alone in the car – and speak aloud to God, as to a friend, what’s on our heart. 

What are we worried about? What do we regret? What do we hope for? We might be surprised by what we hear ourselves say, or how it feels to hear ourselves say it. If we make a practice of this, between now and Rosh Hashanah, how might that deepen the holidays for us this year?

Three invitations: 

Pursue justice by approaching the world with the integrity of a juror. 

Guard our gates, mindful of what we’re taking in and what we’re putting into the world.

And pour out our hearts – not to the vast indifferent universe, but to an imagined beloved Friend. 

Shabbat shalom.

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

From Texts to the Holy, Ben Yehuda Press. 

Here's the poem in plaintext for those who need it that way.

Pray

Sometimes I manage
formal conversation,
a love letter evening
and morning and afternoon

but most of the time
I rely on the chat window
open between us all day.
I want to tell you everything.

This month you are near.
Walk with me in the fields.
I want to take your hand
and not let go.

 Rachel Barenblat

How can we approach a new year
when time stopped on Shemini Atzeret

-- "the pause of the 8th day," when
God beseeches, "linger with Me

a little longer," and we relish
the sukkah's peaceful fragility

for just one more day before
jubilant circle dances with Torah

in our arms like a toddler --
last year we woke on that awful day

to the news of Hamas attacks
and now it's Elul again, when

"The King is in the Field," but
this year God walks with us

in endless mourning, paying
shiva call after shiva call, and

there are still hostages, though
six fewer living ones than last week

not to mention whole neighborhoods
razed to rubble, resurgence of polio,

forty thousand Palestinian souls
dead, an endless abyss of grief?

I can't write an Elul poem this year
when my heart stopped beating properly

on Shemini Atzeret and may never
feel entirely unbroken again.

The pause of the 8th day. See Silence after the chant, 2014.

The King is in the Field. See Walking in the fields, 2017.

Previous years' Elul poems.

In last week’s parsha we found the verses we now recite as the Sh’ma and V’ahavta. In this week’s parsha, Ekev, we read the verses that make up the next paragraph of the Sh’ma, the one that begins v’haya im shamoa, “If you listen, really listen–”  (Deut. 11:13-21) Torah says: if we really listen and do these mitzvot, God will grant us rain in its season, and good harvests.

And if we don’t, then God will close up the heavens to us and the earth will not yield what we need to survive. The rabbis of the early Reform and Reconstructionist movements removed this paragraph from the prayerbook because it felt either too supernatural or too transactional. We all know that sometimes bad things happen to good people. A life of mitzvot is no guarantee. 

Today many of us have returned this paragraph to our prayers. This evening we encountered one creative translation, from R. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z”l. There are others, like my poem “Listen Up, Y’all.” For me, the message of this passage is deeply apt in this era of climate crisis. It may evoke different things for us at different times; that’s part of what Torah and prayer do.

Much of Torah’s richness lies in her capacity to speak to us in ways beyond the literal. Torah often functions like poetry: it has things to teach us on levels that have nothing to do with argument. Of course, as a poet, I would say that! But our whole interpretive tradition is based on the understanding that Torah speaks on multiple levels. We take Torah seriously, not literally. 

Torah calls us to teach the mitzvot to our children, inscribe them in our mezuzot, and live by them so that our generations will “endure in the land that God swore to our ancestors to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.” (Deut. 11:21) A few verses later Torah says our inheritance will stretch from the Euphrates to the sea – a truly enormous piece of land. 

Some Jews do take passages like this as evidence for who should hold the keys to which real estate. West Bank settlers, and the government officials who support them, may read Torah as an eternal land grant. But that’s not how I read it, any more than I read the verses about scarcity and harvest as a literal prediction of what happens if we do or don’t observe mitzvot. 

Deuteronomy is the newest part of Torah, written down around 700 BCE. We’ve had a spiritual connection with that beloved land for a really long time, and that moves me deeply. But that doesn’t mean we’re the only people who do! Clearly the Palestinian people do too. And whatever the future of that land looks like, it has to include both of the peoples who call it home. 

I pray for a ceasefire in Gaza. I pray for the hostages to be returned safely, speedily and soon. I pray for an end to this terrible, tragic chapter that has shattered all of our hearts. I pray for Israelis and Palestinians both to receive the gifts that Torah this week promises: good rains in their season; new grain and wine and oil; everything human beings need in order to thrive.

Torah tells us this week to “walk in God’s ways.” (Deut. 11:22) Rashi says this means: God acts with loving-kindness, and so should we. Torah also tells us to “cut away the covering over our hearts.” (Deut. 10:16) Torah urges us to remove our protective calluses, a scant six weeks before the new year – all the better to do the work of teshuvah to which this season calls us. 

I mentioned earlier that in the 20th century this second paragraph of the Sh’ma was cut from our liturgy in two branches of Judaism because it seemed to offer an if/then promise that wasn’t borne out by the world as we know it. This isn’t the first time “The Rabbis” have made this kind of call. In Jewish tradition we don’t pray for rain during Israel’s dry season. 

At Pesach we stop asking for rain and start asking for dew. On the fall festival of Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah we begin asking for rain… and that’s a festival and a transition that is going to be tough this year, because last fall that was Oct. 7. I suspect we will be calling forth rain with our tears this year, and probably for many years to come.

Why don’t we pray for rain during Israel’s summer? Because our tradition teaches us not to pray for the impossible. Our sages long ago posited that to pray for an impossibility, like rain in the dry season of a desert climate, would shatter our faith. If we ask for something impossible, and it doesn’t come (because it’s impossible), we might conclude that prayer is worthless. 

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.” Prayer isn’t a vending machine, where we put in a dollar and God gives us a treat. Prayer works on / in us.

And you know what we do pray for every day, in the rainy and the dry season alike? Peace. Our sages ensconced that prayer in our daily liturgy all year long, which means it must be possible. Maybe God can’t make rain out of dry skies, but with God’s help we can always seek peace. May our prayers together tonight balm our broken places and strengthen us in seeking peace. 

This is the d'varling that I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

In this week’s Torah portion, Va’ethanan, Moses continues his long swansong, his final speech to the children of Israel at the edge of the Jordan river. In just a few weeks’ time (sooner than we think!) our reading of Torah will end with his death there. Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures) continues with the book of Joshua and stories of conquest and Israelite kingdom, but we don’t read that week by week every year. After Simchat Torah we’ll begin Torah over again. 

In the frame of Torah, Moshe is speaking to the children of Israel, now mostly the descendants of those whom he originally led out of Egypt. After the incident with the scouts, when ten of the twelve returned to say, “the inhabitants of the Land look like giants, we felt like grasshoppers, we can’t do this,” God decided that the generation that had known slavery would not enter the Land of Promise. Their spirits were so accustomed to constriction they weren’t capable of hope.

There’s a midrash that says that every year on the ninth day of the month of Av, the anniversary of the scouts bringing their negative report, the children of Israel would dig their own graves in the wilderness and climb into them. And the next morning some of them would be dead, and they’d be buried, and the rest of the people would climb out and go on living… until one year no one from that early generation was left to die. Everyone who had known slavery was gone.

Anyway, those who remain: that’s who Moses is speaking to. He tells them the stories of everything that happened on their parents’ wilderness journey, including the revelation of the Ten Commandments (Deut. 5:6-19) – or maybe the whole Torah, or maybe all Jewish wisdom that ever was or will be – at Sinai. And then he says: okay, this is the instruction, the thing you’re supposed to really follow and obey: and he offers the Sh’ma and V’ahavta. (Deut. 6:4-9)

In the frame of Torah, he’s talking to the children and maybe grandchildren of those who knew slavery. In our own frame, these verses are speaking directly to us. Here we are, “encamped” along a boundary between what was and what will be. Between the old year that is soon to end, and the new year we haven’t yet begun. Tisha b’Av began our seven-week journey toward Rosh Hashanah. Whether we feel ready for this or not, we’re on the runway to the Days of Awe.

In a sense, Moses – or Torah – or God – is speaking these words directly to us. Listen, O Israel. That’s us: we are the children of Israel, the people Israel, that name we inherit from our ancestor Jacob who wrestled with an angel and earned the new name One-Who-Wrestles-With-God. Torah says, I’m talking to YOU. And the instruction? To love God* with all our hearts, all our souls, all our might. To teach this to our generations. To bind it to our hands and hearts.

I said God* with an asterisk after it. By now this refrain is probably familiar to many of you: if the G-word doesn’t work for you, find one that does. We are commanded to love Justice. To love Mercy. To love Truth and Meaning and Hope. Torah says: find something that matters to you and cleave to it. And let your attachment to God* or Justice or Mercy or Truth guide your actions: what you do, what you build, what you work toward, how you are in the world.

This mitzvah is self-sustaining: it says, “teach me to your generations.” It says, “write this on the doorposts of your house.” Imagine a world where every doorframe was adorned with big banners that read, “Do the right thing.” Or “Remember what really matters.” Or “Feed the hungry, care for the vulnerable, be ethical in every way.” Would we really remember, if those words were everywhere? Or would we learn to look past them and not really see? 

I think it’s probably human nature to look past our reminders. How often do we stop at a door where there’s a mezuzah and touch it and kiss our fingers, reaffirming our commitment to the ethical covenant of mitzvot that is our inheritance? I’ll admit: I forget most of the time. And I forget mitzvot. And I forget the work of teshuvah. Which is why when we hit Tisha b’Av and start this seven-week runway to the high holidays, I start to feel a deep sense of urgency.

Uh boy: there’s a lot of inner work we maybe didn’t do this year. There are places where we missed the mark and ignored it, or let ourselves believe that a half-hearted something was good enough, or let ourselves off the hook. We did not always act like a community guided by mitzvot. And the time for heshbon ha-nefesh, “an accounting of the soul,” is coming due. Torah this week comes to tell us: return to basic principles. Return to Sh’ma and V’ahavta. Start there.

What do we need to hear, this year, as we reach this point in our journey?

To what do we need to attune, both individually and communally as the people Israel?

Whose are the voices we’ve been ignoring, and what would it take for us to open to them now?

And what do we need to love, this year, as we reach this point in our journey?

What face of God or Justice or Mercy do we need to love and uplift with all our hearts? 

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

Walls burned or broken
Peacemakers kidnapped and slaughtered
Children terrorized

Buildings bombed to rubble
Hospitals destroyed
Cisterns emptied

Everywhere pictures of the hostages
Everywhere reminders of the martyrs
Everywhere parents burying children

Our grief and fury could wash away creation.
Will anyone survive, clinging to this battered ark?
Is there an olive tree left anywhere?

R. Rachel Barenblat

I wrote this as part of the Liturgical Arts Working Group at Bayit, and recently shared it there as part of our Tisha b'Av collection this year. Our offering of contemporary kinnot / laments for Tisha b'Av is available both as a downloadable PDF and as google slides suitable for screenshare, and it's called How?! I hope something in the collection speaks to you.

Last night as I was driving my teenager to a rehearsal, we listened to some of an audiobook of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, his summer reading assignment. The writing is stunning. Every time I heard the narrator offer a "Heil Hitler!" -- entirely reasonable for a book set in Germany during the Third Reich -- I had to make a conscious effort not to shudder. I bit back several comments that wanted to spill out. I don't want to transmit to him my anxiety about Hitlerian echoes in our present day. 

This morning I am in a meeting about coming together to mourn and remember October 7. I have thoughts about the ritual components of such a gathering, but first we have to talk about safety. The national threat landscape. Risk assessment. Would we be safe holding a commemoration outdoors? (Would we be safe holding a commemoration in a synagogue?) Early October is one of the most beautiful times of year here, but we all know we can't protect against a gunman if we're outdoors.

And if we were outdoors, would protestors disrupt our mourning with signs and accusations of genocide as we sing El Maleh for the dead and pray for the return of the remaining hostages? (People shouted Heil Hitler at an Israel-Paraguay soccer match at the Olympics.) Today, on day 300 of the hostages' captivity, Hamas has broken off negotiations with Israel again. Also today: is the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania too pro-Israel to be a VP pick? Trump insulting Jews again is now old news.

This week I keep writing and re-writing a line in what might become my Rosh Hashanah sermon, about how "braced-against" is not a healthy spiritual posture. (It's really not.) Do I have a stomachache from drinking too much coffee, or from the way my insides are tied in knots about the experience of being a Jew in the world today? I know many of you are in this emotional-spiritual place, too. I still wear a kippah in public, but now I wonder who is silently blaming me for Gaza when they see me in it. 

And here's the poem in plaintext for those who prefer it that way:

Chord

Grief hums constantly
like cicadas.
It's silt clogging
the storm drains.
It's a bad penny
landing same side up.

Grief says
the poem ends here.

And still
there are cornflowers
amidst the froth
of Queen Anne's Lace,
the moon peeking
through cotton candy clouds,
your voice in my ear.

Give the penny away.
Dredge the streambed clear.
Take up your instrument
and turn the doleful hum
into a chord.

This week’s Torah portion, Hukat, begins with the parah adumah. The Israelites are instructed to bring a red heifer who has never borne a yoke. The priest takes it outside the camp and offers it, burning it along with hyssop, cedar wood, and something crimson. Its ashes are kept for making mei niddah hatat, “waters of lustration,” used to “purify” someone after contact with death. (More on that in a moment.) 

This is weird, and not just to us. Rashi observed that the nations of the world would taunt us about the oddity of this law, which is why it’s called a hok. Hukim are the category of mitzvot that may not make logical sense, like kashrut. We observe them as a spiritual discipline, part of accepting “the yoke of heaven,” tradition’s way of saying there’s something in the universe more mysterious than we can grasp.

I see hukim the way I see poetry that’s allusive and evocative. If I approach this like a poem or a piece of visual art, I notice how this parsha is shot through with the recurring theme of death. Immediately after the parah adumah, we read that someone who touches a dead body becomes tamei for seven days. Tum’ah is Torah’s term for the spiritual condition of having coming into contact with life or death. 

In Torah's understanding we become tamei upon encountering a dead body, menstrual blood or semen, certain forms of illness. I follow R. Rachel Adler in understanding tum’ah as a kind of spiritual-electrical charge. Someone who’s tamei is temporarily vibrating at a different frequency than everyone else. This is the spiritual state that the waters of lustration were used, in Torah times, to wash away. 

The first time I served on our hevra kadisha I understood this in a new way. It’s not that touching the bodies of our dead is somehow “unclean.” It’s more like: once I had helped to wash and dress and bless the body that had once held the soul of a human being, I felt changed. The world outside the funeral home felt weird. I felt spiritually out of phase, not quite in normal time, for a little while. 

I remember feeling that way after late-night shifts when I was a student chaplain at Albany Medical Center, too. After holding the hand of someone who was dying, or praying with someone headed into emergency surgery, nothing felt the same. As I learned much later, it's also how I felt after giving birth: I felt fragile, precarious, both heightened and dissociated, temporary and eternal all at once.

Today the parah adumah ritual is impossible. There is no high priest to make a sacrifice in the appointed place in the appropriate ways. Rambam even suggested that only one more parah adumah will ever be born, to be brought by the messiah. There are no waters of lustration anymore. Especially now that the ritual literally can’t be performed, we grow and learn through studying it rather than actually doing it. 

In place of the waters of lustration, we’ve evolved other rituals to close shiva. For instance, walking around the block and going back in through a different door: embodying both our readiness to re-enter the world, and also how mourning has made us different than whoever we were before. But the central idea that death impacts us and we need a transition to return to normalcy still rings true. 

Reading about death and tum’ah this year I can’t help thinking about Israel and Palestine. I think about the violent deaths of Israelis at the Nova music festival and the kibbutzim that were attacked on October 7. I think about the violent deaths of Palestinians in Gaza over the last 281 days. Everyone there has touched death, and no one has had the luxury of time to mourn, nor closure for their grief.

I yearn for waters of lustration that could wash away their vast grief (and ours) and soften the hearts of those who have power to create change. I wish we had a way to balm every wounded soul and body in Israel and Palestine. Healing feels impossible – as impossible as a ritual that demands a place and a role that haven’t existed in 2000 years and a sacrificial modality of prayer we no longer use.

In times like these I’m grateful that our tradition is built on hope that no matter how broken our world has been, and this year we’re all aware that it is plenty broken, a better future is possible. Even if I don’t know how we’re going to get there. The truth is, it’s not my job to know how the world is going to get there. It’s my job to care for y’all. And it's aleinu, on all of us, to do what we can to build better. 

One of my most profound memories of hospital chaplaincy is the night a kid was hit by a train. I wasn’t yet a parent, and I remember saying to my chaplaincy supervisor that I don’t know how I could have borne the parents' grief if I were. He told me that no matter what, faced with this kind of grief, all we can really give is our heart, our presence, our care. It’s the holiest gift human beings have to give.

I can’t make sense out of the magnitude of loss in Gaza and Israel. Any single person’s grief can be infinite. The grief of whole peoples…? There are no words. And that brings me back to the idea of a hok, a mitzvah we can’t explain. Accepting the “yoke of heaven” means accepting that we can't always make sense of the world. In the face of this much grief, we may not be able to make anything “okay.” 

But we can feel-with one another, and we can insist on empathy for every Israeli and every Palestinian. I know that some people think my empathy is misplaced, or that it benefits the wrong people. For me, empathy is a core spiritual discipline, and part of that discipline is extending it to everyone. Faced with inconceivable loss, our hearts and our care are all we have; they are the holiest gift we have to give.

May this Shabbat Parah bring peace to all who mourn, and comfort to all who are bereaved. 

This is the d'var Torah that I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

How to describe the particular joy of convening with fellow-builders and friends? The annual Bayit board retreat is a time for brainstorming, visioning, looking back and looking forward, adjusting course. Conversations weave and flow. We riff off of each other, ideas sparking. We go from tachlis / practical questions to deep spiritual work. It's like making jazz, and it reminds me why I love what I do.

We oscillate between board meetings (some of us joining remotely via Zoom), meetings of various working groups, and downtime. We talk about organizational structure and what will best serve us going forward. We re-examine Bayit's mission and vision. We revise our website so it better reflects us. We look at the organic evolution of our organization and our build projects and what might come next.

In quiet moments on the living room couches or on the mirpesset or up on the roof we work together on the manuscript for Judith Schmidt's Blessing from Broken. We read particularly great lines out loud to each other, marveling at how good this work is and how lucky we feel to be midwifing it into the world. We talk about how and why our organizational values support collaborative co-creation.

We daven every morning, and sometimes afternoon and evening. What a profound gift that is for me. Often we pray on the roof deck of our rented house under the tent of the big open sky. It's different every time, an impromptu interweaving of melodies and nusach: sometimes a cappella, sometimes with a nylon-stringed guitar or two, a quick familiar glide through liturgy or a slow luxurious stroll.

One morning we pray-test a new-old melody for Modah Ani, singing the first line to the tune of the Mingulay Boat Song. Another morning we pray Psalm 136 to the tune of the Banana Boat Song. On the 4th of July we interweave the Declaration of Independence into morning prayers, and sing Mi Chamocha to the Star-Spangled Banner -- and reflect on our aspirations for this place where we live.

We talk about congregational service, tools for supporting shul boards, games that could lift up spiritual meanings of Purim. Together we think through how to structure the Visual Mahzor we're publishing, and we work on a curriculum we'll be releasing soon, for a high holiday prep course on teshuvah. We make many pots of coffee. We walk to the ocean and marvel at its perpetual motion and beauty.

We hone in on why we do what we do. There are great conversations about the spiritual importance of uplifting others' voices, about games and card decks and publications, bench marks and evaluation, how we know when something "works," new ways of engaging with familiar texts, organizational structures and modalities, Agile coaching and design thought, working groups and leadership ladders.

And then we set aside our work and spend a precious Shabbat together. As always, it's both beautiful and bittersweet because it means the week will end! We dine and bless and sing and pray (and read and nap and play board games -- summer Shabbats are luxuriously long.) Now it's time to return home... and to keep creating, testing, refining, and sharing tools for a Jewish future always under construction.

The High Holidays aka Days of Awe aka Yamim Nora'im are meant to be a pinnacle of the Jewish spiritual year. But what if the words in the mahzor (high holiday prayerbook) don't move you? Or what if you're not a synagogue-goer? Or what if you're a visual thinker, or looking for inspiration in a different way? Images speak their own language that can reach the heart in ways that text may not.

Enter Bayit's Visual Mahzor project, a volume of art inspired by the texts of the Yamim Noraim / Days of Awe. Curator Justin Sakofs solicited art that arises out of the Torah and Haftarah readings for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  We recently launched a Kickstarter to help bring the book to fruition, and as of this writing we're 65% funded. You can become a backer of the project (and learn more) here. 

This is the kind of work I love midwifing into the world. It's a project I never would've thought of, but as soon as Justin brought it to the table I understood how it could reach people who might not connect with the traditional texts, or who might be looking for a new way in. And it allows us to lift up the work of 30 extraordinary artists who engage in a kind of creativity I admire so much. 

The video on Kickstarter features glimpses of just a few of the works of art in the collection (more can be seen in the thumbnail images above). The book will be 8" square, easily tucked into a tallit bag to bring to shul. Gaze at the art while listening to Torah and haftarah readings, or during services more generally, and see what arises. Each piece of art can enrich our relationship with these texts.

The Visual Mahzor could also be stashed in your backpack for an autumnal hike, displayed as a coffee table book to show Jewish pride, used as a conversation-starter in living rooms or coffee shops, given to someone who invites you to a break-the-fast or high holiday meal, or delved-into as a meditative focus during the high holiday season and beyond. Click through to learn how to support this project.

We've reached light's peak
but that doesn't mean
everything is downhill.

The riverbed to loss
is well-carved.
Keep your cup brimming.

Even if you can't name
the tree of white blooms
it flowers anyway.

Volunteer wildflowers
take defiant root.
Learn from them

and from this profusion
of petunias,
silent orchestra

of purple trumpets
in riotous array
singing color and light.

Reading B’ha’alotkha this year, what jumps out at me is Pesah Sheni. God spoke to Moses saying, the children of Israel should make the Passover offering at the appropriate time. Except there were some people who couldn’t make the offering because they had come into contact with death. So they came to Moses and said, what about us? 

Moses asked God, and the answer he received was: anyone who couldn’t observe Passover at the right time, because of an encounter with death or because they were on a long journey, can make the offering at the next full moon. (Num. 9:10-12) In other words: if we miss the appropriate time and place for Pesah, we get a second chance.

We've all regretted something we didn’t manage to do. Maybe it’s something personal: I wish I’d done more to encourage people to vote. Maybe it’s something communal: the conversations we began after last month’s initial Israel/Palestine film screening were amazing, I wish we’d started listening and learning together years ago.

Here come these verses about Pesah Sheni to remind me it’s not too late. If there’s something that will bring us closer to God (remember, that’s what a korban / an offering was, from the root that means to draw near; and if the G-word doesn’t work for you, think Justice, or Compassion, or Truth) we get another opportunity.

Granted, Torah goes on to say that if we could’ve made the Pesah offering at the right time, and for some reason we just didn’t, “our soul will be cut off from our people.” (Num. 9:13) For me that’s a descriptive statement, not a prescriptive one. If we don’t engage in mitzvot or connect with community, we’re going to wind up feeling disconnected. 

So much in modern life can make us feel disconnected. I don't think I need to list those things; I imagine each of us could make our own list. And this year, on top of that, painful divisions in Jewish community around Israel and Gaza have made many of us feel alienated and disconnected in spaces where we most yearn to feel otherwise. 

But Jewish life is predicated on the premise that community matters. And I increasingly believe that figuring out how to be in community even when our views on Palestine and Israel differ is some of the most important work we can do right now – as Jews, as Americans, as human beings. 

Recently I read an interview that Roxane Gay did with the author Lamya H, included at the end of the e-book of Lamya’s memoir Hijab Butch Blues. Lamya says:

“I was lucky enough to be part of a very intentional queer Muslim community…. Not everyone was someone I would be close friends with. But because we were building this thing that was deeply intentional, everyone showed up for everyone else. It’s where I learned a lot of organizing skills, in terms of navigating conflict and being around people whose politics are different from yours, who live in the world in ways that don’t match yours – but who you deeply, deeply connect with, and who become chosen family. Navigating all of those things taught me so much about the value of kindness.”

Roxane Gay responds, “When you engage in community with kindness, it makes it possible to navigate all kinds of terrain, both good and challenging.” I read that and I thought: this speaks to me as a member of a broad Jewish community that’s struggling with the challenge of deeply-held views on Israel and Palestine, all rooted in Jewish values, that don’t align.

This year some of us are grieving what our Israeli cousins are going through, and some of us are grieving what our Palestinian cousins are going through. We may feel that difference keenly. But I believe our hearts are big enough to hold it, alongside the common ground that we all want a better future for our beloveds in that beloved land. 

We all want a better future in this beloved land, too. When I read about the plan for a "post-Constitutional" Federal government or those who want this to be a “Christian nation” – when I think about other rights that we could lose – the stakes feel impossibly high. We need each other in Jewish community now more than ever. 

Which brings me back to this week’s parsha. The Hebrew word mitzvah / commandment is a close cognate to the Aramaic word tzavta / connection. A mitzvah is something that connects us: to God (whatever we understand that to mean), to tradition, to community, to each other, to ourselves. 

Torah’s talking about someone who missed Pesah because they were in contact with death or on a long journey. But Rashi expands that. He says, it doesn’t need to be a long journey that keeps us away from mitzvot and community. Even if we were just right outside the door, we can still seek a do-over. 

Framed in modern terms, we could say: no one’s going to police what’s kept us from the mitzvot, from community, from building a more just world. We might feel like our failure to do these things before disqualifies us from doing them now, but Torah says otherwise. Torah says, re-orient, re-align, and try again. That's the work of teshuvah, which is the work of Jewish life.

In an ideal world, Pesah happens at the full moon of Nisan and sets us on a path toward covenant. “We were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and God brought us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm: out of servitude and into holy service, partnering with God in building a more just world.” That’s our core story.

In an ideal world, we’re already on that journey. And if we’re not, it’s not too late to start. It's not too late to welcome the refugee and protect the vulnerable and tend to the climate crisis and uplift human dignity. Like the saying goes about planting a tree: the best time to do it would’ve been then. The next best time is now. 

This is the d'varling I offered at Kabbalat Shabbat services at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)