This post is about grief and death and loss and children in Israel and Palestine. If these aren't subjects you can face right now, you might want to scroll on by and skip this one. Take care of yourself.

My heart keeps breaking for Kfir and Ariel, two Jewish children taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 at ages 9 months and 4 years. Their bodies were returned a few days ago, and forensics confirms that they died by their captors' hands. Everything in me rebels against the mental image of that horror.

I've spoken to so many Jews who feel alone in this. It's unfashionable to care about Jewish deaths, about Israeli deaths. Our hearts get stuck in our throats like a bone of grief every time we see a baby with ginger hair, and it feels like the rest of the world doesn't understand or notice or care.

That is an old groove, carved on our collective hearts by centuries of persecution and Jew-hatred, and it is easy to reinforce that groove now. I am trying to smooth away that groove because I don't want to live in it, but right now I feel like my skin is being sandpapered away, leaving my heart exposed.

There is no good way to make this transition, so I'll just say it bluntly: every Palestinian child killed during this war was someone's family, too. They shouldn't have gone through this either. The death of every child, the death of any child, is an entire world destroyed. Nothing about this is ok.

I know that someone will yell at me for mentioning the suffering of the wrong side. (No matter which side they think that is.) Someone will say, "It's not the same; how dare you mention their losses and ours in the same breath?" I am a mother with a tender heart. I feel all of it. I can't not grieve.

Ariel and Kfir should not have died. Ayman and Rimas, Palestinian children killed in the West Bank this week, should not have died. Children should be able to grow up into the whole of who they will become. Nobody's children should be at risk. This is not the way the world should be, for anyone. 

I don't think any of us should be yelling at each other about what or how we grieve. I wish we could give each other more grace. Living in grief has an impact on both body and soul, and we have all been living in grief for a long time now. Anyone who cares about anyone "over there" is living in grief.

I've been trying to write this post for days. Words usually come easily. Not now. I want a better world, a world of peace and safety for everyone: every Israeli and every Palestinian. I know that we are very, very far from the world as it should be. I can't find the right words. Only the cry of my heart.

המקום ינחם אתכם בתוך שאר אבלי ציון וירושלים

 إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُون

Worth reading:

• On hostages and broken hearts, R. Danya Ruttenberg, Life Is A Sacred Text
• Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas Deserved A Better World, Lior Zaltzman, Kveller
• Navigating through grief and hope for Gaza, Salena Tramel, New Lines magazine, written during the first brief ceasefire

Grief is sticky. It glues things together, so one source of sadness links up with another. Sometimes it plays possum in my heart and I think it's gone. But it's not gone. It always seems to visit again.

I remember my mother teaching me the phrase "play possum" after we found a mama possum and her babies in one of the trash cans behind my childhood home. They're not dead, they're pretending.

One day recently my beloved ex, who is spending a few days in Texas near where I grew up, sent me a photograph of a mostly-dry lakebed in a place where my family and I spent a lot of my childhood.

In the grand scheme of climate grief, the loss of a small Texas lake doesn't even register. More than half of the worlds' large lakes are drying up. This isn't like that. But it still makes my heart seize.

My parents used to tell stories about dancing to a jukebox beside that lake, drinking longnecks under the big starry Texas sky. They started going there as young marrieds in the 1950s. How can it be gone? 

It turns out that the lake isn't actually gone forever. The dams feeding that system of lakes were failing -- but now they're being repaired, and water will fill the lakes and river again by late 2025. 

Suddenly I remember my dad reminiscing about a watch he lost in that lake decades ago. I'll bet while the lake is dry and they're repairing the dams, someone's finding all kinds of treasure down there. 

If this were a poem, or a dream in need of interpretation, the dry lakebed could represent feeling drained, empty of resources or resilience, after pandemic and insurrection and so much more.

Does our feeling tapped-out change if we remind ourselves that the spiritual well from which we each draw is not, in fact, empty? That life-giving waters will rush back in, that we will be buoyed again?

If you're feeling empty, you're not alone. So much is broken; so much is breaking. We're struggling to figure out how we can best help each other, how to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe.

When life's cup feels empty, it can be difficult to believe that it will be filled again. For me, some of the work lies in remembering that what feels empty now may not be that way forever. 

Reading the news
is like
waking into
still having
dead parents.

Microplastics
and wars
persist.
Permafrost melts.
Hillsides burn.

Soon, in charge
of health:
a guy
who doesn't trust
vaccines.

No limbic system
was made
for this.
I am
a cracked jar.

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָ''ה֙ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃

יהו’’ה said to Abram, “Lekh-lekha / Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (Gen. 12:1)

Torah uses many different names for God. This is considered the most holy of God’s names, the one that seems to enfold all possible permutations of Was / Is / Will Be. This is God-Who-Is-Becoming, God Whom we mirror in our human capacity for growth and change. That’s the voice that says here to Abram, lekh-lekha: there’s a journey ahead of you.

This is not the journey any of us hoped to be on right now. I’ve spoken this week with so many of us who feel shellshocked and reeling. Me, too. We’re mourning the loss of a future where immigrants are welcomed, where no kid goes hungry at lunchtime, where climate science and vaccines are honored and understood, where trans and queer people can live without fear. 

And so much more. Our world changed this week in ways I know I can’t yet wholly imagine. One of the most useful things I’ve read in the past few days was an article in Scientific American called Election Grief is Real: Here’s How to Cope. It’s an interview with therapist Pauline Boss, who originated the concept of ambiguous grief in the late 1970s. Pauline says:

We should normalize the anger and the sadness. I think we jump too quickly to pathologize emotions that are scary. I think you need to be patient with yourself if you’re feeling angry, sad, grieving right now. I think that’s a normal reaction to a surprising outcome and an outcome that, in our view, is going backward and not forward.

So accept your feelings. Know there’s no closure to grief. Know you had a loss.

We need to take our time in feeling this – even though frankly it feels terrible and none of us want to dwell on it. But a seismic national shift of this magnitude is going to have enormous impacts, on us and on the world, and if we pretend that away we won’t be in a position to navigate those impacts wisely or well. So the first thing I can offer is: let ourselves feel.

And then here’s a subtle inner shift, when we are up to it. We don’t want to dwell on these feelings, but we can dwell in them – and God* dwells in them with us. (Whatever that word means to each of us right now: source of meaning or justice or hope.) Another of our tradition’s names for God is Shekhinah, meaning God Who Dwells In this broken world… and in us. 

When I say that God dwells in us, I mean possibility lives in us. Hope lives in us. Kindness lives in us. Truth and justice live in us. No amount of cruelty or coercion, bullying or gaslighting, can take these away. They are our birthright, and they are eternal. This is one of Judaism’s core tools for navigating difficult times: knowing that we are part of something that endures.

Pauline Boss goes on to say, one risk of grief is that it can immobilize us. We need to help each other forestall that possibility. She says, “You need to do something active in order to deal with a situation you can’t control… It will help to be active, not just to sit back and grumble and not just to lash out either. Action is psychologically what helps when you’re feeling helpless.” 

This is true from the micro scale to the macro one. One night this week my teen and I baked cookies for one of the kids in his Shakespeare play. It was tangible and grounding: breathing in the scent of chocolate, feeling dough under our hands. And it brought unexpected joy to another kid’s afternoon. Little things like this matter a lot right now. Making and giving are acts of agency.

And on the macro scale: there will be forms of community care and community organizing that we can do in months and years to come, and they will be more necessary than ever before. And that brings me to the other most useful thing I’ve read this week, 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won, an essay by teacher, activist, and author Daniel Hunter.

He begins by pointing out that after pandemic and insurrection, amidst climate crisis (I would add: after a year of horrors in Israel and Gaza, which have had a deep impact on many of us) we are already exhausted and destabilized. “Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other and exhaustion at the utter chaos. We’re already feeling it.” 

His first suggestion? Pay attention to our inner state. Trust our own emotional reality, trust what we know and feel and experience, because authoritarianism thrives by sowing and strengthening mistrust. Before we can begin to face trying to do good in this painful new world, we need to tend to our spiritual lives. We are running on empty. We need to care for our souls.

Some part of me frets, reading this: but there’s so much that’s already broken! And it’s going to get so much worse! Yes, there is, and it is. And that’s exactly why each of us must do everything we can to be steady inside, and to trust our own moral and spiritual compass. Judaism has tools for this. (Shabbat and regular gratitude practices are my first two go-tos on this front.)

Judaism has a lot of tools for this, actually. We are not the first generation of Jews to live through massive upheaval. Or to navigate increasing Christian nationalism. Or to figure out how to maintain our ethic of caring for the vulnerable in a time of rising fascism and authoritarianism. Much of human history has looked like this. Much of the world looks like this now.

And some of Judaism’s tools for this moment are a lot like what Daniel Hunter articulates in his essay. We need to let ourselves grieve, even sit shiva for what could’ve been – because if we don’t, some essential part of us may be frozen in the shock of this week, and that’s not good for us or for the world. We need humility, to recognize the vastness of the things we can’t change.

And then we need to find something we can change, and focus there. As I said to my teenager the morning after the election, we will figure out how we can help people who have it worse than we do. “Yeah, Mom. We’re white, we’re middle-class, we’re cisgender – we’re going to be fine. But other people won’t be.” Our job is always to help people who are more vulnerable than we.

So how are we going to help? Daniel Hunter suggests a quadrant of four possibilities: protecting vulnerable people, civil disobedience of unethical policies, defending our existing civic institutions, and building alternatives to what we know now. Sit with those, and see where your heart pulls you. And know that as you sit with this, you are not alone. We are in this together.

“Go forth,” YHVH says to Abram. Go out into the world and make a difference. Or maybe “Go into yourself,” because that’s another way to translate lekh-lekha – go deep, engage in soul-searching, plumb the depths of who you can be. The beauty of Torah, of course, is that the one phrase can be both at once, and both are instructions we need to take to heart this week.

We don’t know exactly what the future will hold. I don’t expect it to be easy. And yet there will also be joy and celebration and care for one another – because no one can take those away. In Brecht’s words, “even in the dark times there will be singing.” He wrote that in 1939, the year my mother and her parents fled the Nazis for what was then the safe haven of America.

No matter what the coming years hold, we know what our tradition teaches: it’s our job to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Source of All. (Micah 6:8) It’s our job to care for those who are vulnerable. To help people who have it worse than we do. To stand up for what’s right. That is always Judaism’s call: in the best of times, and in the worst of times. 

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.)

The news out of the Middle East is not good. (Understatement.) It looks like the wider regional war -- the one everyone's been saying all year that we need Israel and Iran to avoid -- is beginning. Which might mean that, as horrendous as the last 360 days have been, we may be headed for worse.

It's a good thing I spent part of this year learning how to recognize and work with trauma reactions, including my own. The panicked feeling in my stomach, the shortness of breath, the tears banging at the back of my eyelids, the paralysis and fear -- hello, trauma. I don't want to welcome you back in.

But I've learned that trying to pretend trauma away doesn't work. And neither does squeezing my eyes shut and begging God to make the world different. The only path forward is to soften, thank the trauma for trying to take care of me, and use my meditation tools to help the grief and fear drain.

You know what I can't fix? The Middle East. Anything happening in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, or anywhere else. (While we're at it: I can't fix American xenophobia, one political party's plans to deport tens of thousands, or the likelihood of post-election violence, either.)

I can't fix climate crisis denialism, or the impacts of Hurricane Helene, or rising antisemitism and Islamophobia and transphobia, or any of the things that are ratcheting up anxiety until I feel -- so many of us feel! -- like an over-tightened guitar string that's about to break. I cannot fix any of it.

So I make challah dough, listening to psalms, softly singing the Thirteen Attributes. "Adonai, adonai, el-rahum v'hanun -- Yud heh vav heh, compassion and tenderness..." I run the dishwasher and put away clean warm plates. I set the table for the new year 5785, literally and metaphorically.

I think of everyone whose holiday table will be incomplete. I think of everyone who won't have a table or a place to celebrate at all. I think of scenes of devastation, from the Middle East to Appalachia, and I pray for safety and tranquility and kindness. I pray for all of us to be able to take care of each other.

Most of us don't have the power to fix the big things that are broken. It's simply not in our hands. But we can fix what we can reach. We can find the next good thing to do. "We must love one another or die," Auden wrote. It's and, really. The second part of that line is inevitable. The first part is up to us. 

Dear Mom --

Today is my shul's annual cemetery service. As always, I will think of you and of your grave two thousand miles away. I will remember your mother who used to talk about how in Prague they visited  relatives in the cemetery on Sundays. She thought Americans don't do that enough. I think of you often at this time of year as the trees put on their fall colors. You loved this season when you were lucky enough to be in a place that has it. The leaves changing, the light changing. Autumn in south Texas doesn't look anything like this. More than thirty years after moving north I still marvel at it too.

I thought of you the other night when I took my son to the symphony. The local symphony plays in an imposing building with huge columns. During the first pandemic year, when my son was ten and we were sheltering-in-place, we took lots of walks on the college campus, and he built a replica of that building in Minecraft! But he'd never been inside. He was appropriately wowed. But mostly he was wowed by the experience of seeing a symphony orchestra up close and personal. It's entirely unlike the experience of watching one on YouTube, or even on the big screens on the lawn at Tanglewood.

The first thing on the program was Beethoven's 7th, which might be my favorite of his symphonies. As we listened, I found myself remembering shiva for you. Your longtime friend, who had been my rabbi when I was a teen, spoke about your love of European culture. How you always took your children to the symphony and to the opera. You wanted us to appreciate the beauty of great art in that grand old tradition. In retrospect I wonder whether you got that from your mother, who grew up cosmopolitan in urban Prague. What must it have been like for her to move to the rural American south after that?

It's strange for me to realize that my son wasn't yet playing the double bass when you died. He got the opportunity to try playing the bass in his fourth grade year, which in the spring became the first Covid year. But your headstone's unveiling happened right before Covid, which means you died a year before the pandemic, long before he took up this instrument. The double bass has pride of place in our living room, next to the hand-me-down upright piano that once was yours. He'll be playing part of the Max Bruch Kol Nidre at services soon: another piece of music that I remember you used to love...

Anyway, my teen was set alight by watching the orchestra from just a few rows away, and seeing three of his music mentors performing live. His favorite was the Stravinski: such bombast! On our way out I told him that I remembered going with you to see (what was then called) the San Antonio Symphony. He knows you were deeply musical, and he thinks that's why you loved the symphony so much. He may be right. Dad enjoyed it too, but I think Dad was there because you wanted to be. You wanted us to appreciate this kind of music. I wanted you to know that your youngest grandson does, too.

Happy new year, Mom, wherever you are.

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.

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.)

"When Adar enters, joy increases." -- Ta'anit 29a

When Adar enters, my parents wave
from beyond the veil.
They followed each other
out the door and into
the early spring earth.
My mother blazed the trail
like a 1950s movie star
perched on a pretty little horse,
riding into the sunset.
Dad was lost
the minute she left
but he found his way. The last thing
he murmured was, "looking good" --
to my brother? to himself
in the mirror behind closed eyes?
Or maybe to mom, waiting patiently
just outside our field of vision
for him to realize
the water was fine,
he could just
jump in.

Do you celebrate
your yahrzeits
like birthdays?

Are you closer to us
at this season
as when planets
as align?

Are you always here
or only when we remember?

When you watch
a funeral
from there
what do you feel?

Did you organize
a welcome party
for the new arrival --
chains of illness
thrown off
like light bedsheets
in the morning
-- and is she already
making art
with steady hands?

Making art. See The Art of Adapting (2018, 9 minutes) and its sequel Tina Epstein - Parkinsons (2023, 38 minutes). Seriously, watch these short films by Christian Ayala; they are well worth it.

Both of my parents died during the lunar month of Adar, three years apart. Yesterday my cousin Tina z"l joined them in whatever comes next. May her family be comforted along with all who mourn.

Rain taps on the roof like quiet hands.
So much softer than clods thudding
on a plain pine box.

Once everyone is gone
they take away the green tent
open on all sides, the worst chuppah.

The words wash away, but
I'll never forget
who rolled up his sleeves to finish shoveling.

In Jewish tradition, everyone present at an interment shovels some earth onto the casket. It is considered one of the last acts of lovingkindness we can do for the person who has died. 

I do remember, very clearly, who picked the shovel back up and helped us truly finish burying my parents after everyone else had taken a ceremonial turn. I wonder whether every funeral I conduct from now on will always bring those memories to mind.

This week’s parsha, Shlach, holds the story of the scouts. God tells Moses to send scouts to explore the land of promise, one from each tribe. Twelve are chosen. When they reach the land, they find grapes so big that they require two men and a carrying-frame. Upon returning, ten of the scouts say: there are giants there. We felt like grasshoppers. We can’t do this.. 

Joshua and Caleb argue otherwise. They plead, “don’t be afraid!” (Num. 14:9) But the ten who’ve lost faith carry the day. And their loss of faith is contagious. “If only we had died in Egypt!” the people shout. “Or if only we might die in this wilderness!” The children of Israel don’t have hope that anything will ever become better than they’ve known it to be so far. 

And God says, “fine, you know what: if you don’t trust in Me even after everything you’ve just seen, the Exodus, the signs and wonders, you can stay here in the desert for forty more years. When this generation is gone, then I’ll lead the children of Israel into the land of promise. But you are clearly too scarred by the traumas you’ve endured. You don’t get to make it there.”

This year I’m feeling empathy for the minyan of ten who didn’t think they could do it, the ones who said, “I don’t have it in me, and I can’t believe that I ever will. This is too big. I’ve spent my whole life slaving to meet Pharaoh’s demands, or to try to feed my family in traumatic circumstances. All I can see ahead is more grind, and I’ve lost heart for the struggle.”

I suspect we’ve all felt that way. I don’t have it in me, and I can’t believe that I ever will. All I can see ahead is more grind, and I’ve lost heart. Loss can put us in that place. Or depression. Or grief, or overwhelm, or illness, or disappointment – you don’t need me to count the ways. The scouts get a bad rap for losing faith, but I suspect we can all relate to them.

There’s nothing wrong with fear or doubt. “Spirituality” that pretends we never have those feelings is at best incomplete. I don’t think any life is entirely devoid of those – not if we’re paying attention and being real. The place where the scouts got themselves into trouble, I think, was giving in to despair. As Reb Nachman of Breslov teaches, “it is forbidden to despair.” 

It’s forbidden because despair means giving up on God’s capacity to lift us out of life’s narrow places. If the “G-word” doesn’t work for you, try: despair is giving up on the possibility of change, the possibility of hope, the possibility of anything ever being better than this. It’s noteworthy that Reb Nachman was depressive. Was he giving the advice he himself most needed to hear? 

Enter Caleb and Joshua: the scouts who say, “wait, we can do this.” Sometimes we need to hear that the future can be more than whatever limitations are currently constraining our hearts. When we’re in the narrow place of not being able to see a way out, we need someone to remind us that change is possible and that the future can be sweeter than we can currently see.

These roles – the person who despairs; the person who offers hope for better – aren’t innate. We take turns. Sometimes I'm the one with the reminder that life can be better than we fear, and sometimes I’m the one who needs to be reminded. All of us are the weary souls too demoralized to imagine better, and all of us are the dreamers who can see a better world.

When we despair we need someone to walk with us, to feel with us, and to remind us that when we feel most stuck, change can be waiting in the wings – even (or especially) if we can’t see it. I think about how Isaac might have felt during the akedah: bound, immobile, his father’s knife raised over him – not yet knowing there was a ram waiting just outside the frame.

To be clear: the loved one who is ill may not be cured. The grief that comes with loss can’t be short-circuited. Sometimes what’s broken can’t be repaired. But change is always possible, even if that change is “only” internal. Honestly, internal change can be… everything. Maybe not what is, but how we feel about what is. How we experience what is, and how we respond.

The scouts represent the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Our mystics associate the tribes with different qualities, weaknesses, and strengths. The cleric, the judge, the scholar, the sufferer: each tribe is linked with a different archetype or journey. In today’s world, I don’t think these energies define us. I suspect we each resonate with different core qualities at different times. 

The tribe of Judah, Caleb’s ancestor, is associated with leadership and with gratitude (hoda’ah). And Joshua descends from Ephraim, who is associated with transformation and with thriving even in tight places. These same qualities can fuel us when we accompany each other into tough times, and when we hold on to hope for those who can’t feel it right now themselves. 

I’ve come to see God’s threat of a lifetime in the wilderness not as prescriptive but as descriptive. It’s not that our lack of faith is punished by a lifetime of suffering. Rather: when we’re mired in despair, that’s what our lived experience becomes. Our work is to transform the prospect of a lifetime of wilderness wandering into a sacred journey of becoming. 

And we can’t do that alone. We all have moments of feeling like grasshoppers faced with giants; we need each other. When we’re in this together the fact of the wilderness is the same, but the internal dynamics and lived experience can be different. And when we hold hope for each other, we keep open the door to possibility, and the promise of blessing, and change. 

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

"What did we even do for Purim last year?" I wonder aloud to a friend. It's disconcerting. Purim happens every year. Surely last year I must have celebrated it in some way! But I can't remember a thing. It's as though Purim has been wiped off of my mental map. What could we have done?

"Weren't you in shiva?" he asks, and the memory stops me in my tracks. Of course. That's why I can't remember last Purim: I didn't have one. On Purim I was in the midst of the week of shiva. I was new to being wholly parentless. Talk about topsy-turvy: my world was completely upside-down. 

Dad died on the 6th of Adar II (the second Adar that happens in a leap year), right before Purim. As it happens, Mom also died during a Jewish leap year, on the 21st of Adar I. This year's a "normal" one, not a leap year, which makes their yahrzeits feel... not normal, because they've switched places.

On the Gregorian calendar, Mom died in February and Dad died in March. Jewishly, their yahrzeits now orbit around each other. Hers comes first during leap years, which fits the way we experienced it. His will come first during non-leap years. Like this one we're in now. No wonder I feel scrambled.

Dear Dad: what a year it's been. A few days ago I visited your kever. I pressed my palm to the earth and cried. Look how tall your grandson's gotten, I said, as though you can see him more clearly when we're there. I do feel a certain closeness to you and Mom when I'm there, walking where you walked.

One of the things I brought home with me after you died was a silver gragger, engraved from Mom to you and dated January 1, 2000. I wish I could ask y'all about it now. Why a gragger? Why New Year's Day? What was the story? I dreamed of you the other night, but my questions have no answers.

Every night
I tuck my teen in bed

and close his door, humming
the lullaby you used to sing.

Most kids of his generation
don't know "A Bushel

and a Peck." 1950:
you were glamorous,

flirting with the bugler
you would later marry.

I don't think he remembers
"put another nickel in,

in the nickelodeon,"
though you sang it

when he was swaddled
in velcro-edged blankets.

Another top hit
from when you were fourteen,

the age he's
barreling toward

now.

Songs that didn't make it into this draft of this poem include "Sisters, Sisters" (White Christmas, 1954 -- the year my parents married), "Annie Mae, Where Are You Going," (origins unknown, though I suspect it's a camp song from the late 40s or early 50s), and "The Billboard Song" which exists in many folk versions, though of course I'm attached to the one Mom used to sing. Sometimes I wonder which songs from my son's childhood -- or, perhaps, from mine -- will delight and comfort him in the (hopefully distant) future when I'm gone.

In the photograph attached to the email that I just got, they're both in the living room. Sitting comfortably, talking with family. It's an action shot, not a candid, which makes it seem all the more real. I can hear their voices. They could be right there! I know they're not. But I wish they were.

One of the things I never anticipated about mourning my parents is the role distance would play. I've lived two thousand miles away from them since I was seventeen. (I'm going on forty-eight.) Most of the time, in my adult life, their presence was at a distance. And that was fine. It was normal.

It was comforting, knowing they were there. I knew that when I got off the plane, one of them would be in the cellphone parking lot awaiting my call. I knew that their living room would still be just as it had been, and so would the pad of paper in the kitchen awaiting grocery lists...

It was comforting, knowing that some things never change. Except of course they do.

Someone else inhabits that house now. Treasures become trash: the clothes we didn't take went to Goodwill, the books sold to a used books store by the pound. I've had moments of wondering: what is it all for? With or without illness, life ends, and what's left can feel so small.

That's a whole mood, as the kids say. It's become a familiar one, these last few years. It's also grief talking. I don't feel it as often as I did a year ago, but it's not gone. Letting myself feel grief, while still holding on to my certainty that love and care matter even if we're temporary -- that's the work.

On the Jewish calendar it's not yet Adar (aka parental yahrzeit season). But on the secular calendar we're approaching February vacation week. In 2019, we spent that week saying goodbye to Mom. In 2022, we spent it saying goodbye to Dad. Each time, they died a few days after we visited.

We're returning to Texas for a few days in February. It will be my first time back that's not for a funeral. From here it's easy to slip into feeling like they could still be alive, just far away. But that fiction won't hold when I arrive in a Texas where they will no longer be there to greet me. 

Let me take you back to a few short weeks ago, when I was sick with Covid. I was idly poking around Twitter. I was feeling lousy, couldn’t really focus on books or even TV. And then someone I don’t know well posted that she was in shock. 

A friend of hers, who’d had Covid a few months prior, had kept a lingering cough from the virus… and had just died of a pulmonary embolism. Out of the blue. She seemed fine, aside from the cough, for which doctors kept giving her cough syrup and sending her home. But we know that Covid is often associated with surprise blood clots. Boom: pulmonary embolism, and gone.

I responded with Jewish tradition’s usual words of comfort, on autopilot. What I couldn’t help thinking was: wow, Yom Kippur came early this year! I meant, the reminder to take stock of my life and confront mortality.

Yom Kippur is sometimes called a day of rehearsal for our death. We wear white, like our burial shrouds. Many fast from food and drink, like the dead who need nothing. We recite the vidui confessional prayer, as tradition teaches us to do on our deathbeds. And we do big cheshbon ha-nefesh work — taking an accounting of our souls. Who have I been? Where did I fall short? If I’m lucky enough to keep living, what do I need to change? If I died tomorrow, what words would I want to have said – what amends would I want to have made – in order to leave this life with a clean slate?

I don’t expect to die of a surprise pulmonary embolism. But none of us knows how much time we have, Covid or not.

Pirkei Avot (2:15) teaches us to “Make teshuvah the day before your death.” But who among us knows when the day of our death will be? Therefore Judaism calls us to make teshuvah everyday. To do the inner work of self-reflection, and the outer work of changing and making amends, all the time.

The cards we gave you on Rosh Hashanah read, “The world was made for me,” and “I am dust and ashes.” Holding both of those truths at once is the quality we call Tiferet, our holy “and” of heart-centered balance. (And the theme of this year's Days of Awe.)

These awesome days themselves recapitulate and balance those truths

“The world was made for me” – that’s Rosh Hashanah. Hayom harat olam, “Today is the birthday of the world!” On Rosh Hashanah we celebrate the renewal of all creation.

“I am dust and ashes” – that’s today. I am dust and ashes means we are mortal. So what do we want to do with what Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life”?

At the end of February, my son and I flew to Texas to say goodbye to my dad. He was eighty-seven and already pretty frail, and Covid hit him hard. By the time we flew down, we knew the end was near.

I remember at first being shocked at how much he’d changed. He floated around in time. Words weren’t always available, or they came out scrambled. He was often confused. He opened his mouth to be fed, like a baby bird.

And then I started to notice where my dad’s soul was shining through the fog. He couldn’t always come up with words, but he would look at my son and smile with a glint in his eye, and then tilt his head to the right until my son did the same, and then tilt his head the other way until my son mirrored him, and repeat until they were both laughing. It was like the physical comedy in old silent films. In those moments he couldn’t talk, but he could still tell his grandson a joke.

He had a favorite caregiver, a Black woman named Eddie. Sometimes he was lucid enough to tell me that she had reared ten children and had been through a lot. Other times he said she was his best friend and he’d known her for years. (He hadn’t.)

“This here’s my daughter,” he rasped to her one day, gesturing at me. “You know what she does?”

Eddie smiled at him fondly. “No, what?” she asked.

There was a momentary pause as he reached for words. Finally he blustered, “Well, ask her!”

He couldn’t remember what I do for a living. The word “rabbi” was missing from his brain. But he remembered that I do something that matters, something worth kvelling about.

“If I weren’t in jail, none of you would be here,” he said to me one morning. I asked him if he felt like he was in jail, and he shrugged.

At first I thought he meant the assisted living facility, but then I realized: he could have meant his failing body. His body that was giving out on him in so many ways had become his soul’s prison, and he was getting ready to go free.

As they were dying, each of my parents showed something about who they most fundamentally were, deep down, when everything else is stripped away.

With Mom, it was her joie de vivre and her motto, “make hay while the sun shines.” With Dad, it was a deep care and sweetness, coupled with that confident glint in his eye. What do we hope will persist in us to the end? What qualities do we hope will shine through?

In the book of Exodus, Moshe asks Pharaoh to let his people go, and Pharaoh repeatedly hardens his heart and says no. At a certain point, the text shifts, and says that God hardens his heart. Which at first blush might seem sort of unfair: why would God do that? Our sages teach: when Pharaoh hardened his heart, over and over, he created that pathway in himself. He carved it deep with his own actions. All God had to do was let Pharaoh be who he already had chosen to be.

With every action, with every choice, we’re making internal pathways. And those paths inform who we are and how we are. If I walk an inner path of trying to cultivate balance, that path becomes well-worn and clear and easier to follow. If I walk an inner path of resentment, that too becomes self-perpetuating after a while.

It’s the spiritual equivalent of the old saying, “If you keep making that face, you’re going to get stuck that way.” If we keep making that face, we’re going to get stuck that way. So what face do we want to make in 5783? Okay, I’ve pushed the metaphor too far. But the truth within it stands: who we say we are is irrelevant. What matters is who our actions show us to be.

Dying tends to distill us to our essence, and we don’t get to choose what that essence is – except we actually do. We don’t get to pick something that looks nice, like choosing a sweater out of a catalogue – “You know, I’d like my inner essence this year to be pink and happy in the spring, and amber-colored and contemplative in the fall.” But we do get to make choices, and our regular daily choices will inform who we are and how we respond when push comes to shove.

None of us can control when we die, but we do have some control over who we are in this life. The idea of teshuvah – that we can repent, can make amends, can do the work of change – means that who we’ve been doesn’t have to be who we’ll become. Balancing who we’ve been and who we’re becoming – there’s Tiferet again.

And, there’s no magic short cut. No game hack that gets us a high score we didn’t earn. Anyone can make teshuvah – and anyone who wants to make teshuvah has to do the work. And there’s no time like the present. Indeed, some say there’s no time other than the present. Now is all we have.

What changes would we need to make in order to be remembered the way we want to be remembered?

I’m not talking about the kind of new year’s resolutions some of us make on January first – “I want to be bikini-ready by summertime!” I’m talking about how we treat each other. What character qualities we bring to the fore. How we treat “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger” – the people most at-risk and vulnerable. (Maybe today it’s the trans kid, the disabled person, and the refugee.) Whether or not we’re doing something to make the world a better place. How we treat the barista or the Stop and Shop employee – or that person we don’t like who really gets on our nerves.

Because those are the face we show to the world. No matter what our self-image might be, everyone else experiences us through our actions and choices. And those actions and choices are how we’ll be remembered, when we’re gone.

Earlier this summer a congregant came into my office, and we chatted about one thing and another. And just as she was about to leave, she held up one of the little Life Lights pamphlets from the rack in the back of the room, and she asked me, “Does Judaism believe in a soul?”

The one-word answer is yes. Yes, Judaism teaches that we have souls, and that while our bodies are temporary, our souls endure.

“No one ever told me that when I was growing up,” she said. “Honestly it would’ve sounded goyische.” As though Christians had a monopoly on spiritual discourse. Y’know what, they’re so focused on “saving our souls,” we’ll downplay souls altogether. And in some ways the early Reform movement did that, stripping out a lot of the mystical and supernatural language because it felt outdated, “Old Country,” not rational and modern – and yeah, maybe too evocative of our proselytizing neighbors.

But Jewish liturgy is full of references to the soul. The choir this morning sang a beautiful setting of אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַֽתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא. – “My God, the soul that You have placed within me is pure!” Usually the soul is described as something that God gives to us, or guards for us overnight while we are sleeping and returns to us when we wake. Notably, our liturgy insists that our souls are fundamentally pure: no matter how we’ve screwed up, the light of the soul never dims. It just gets a little schmutzed-up by our mistakes, and teshuvah is how we clarify the soul so its light can shine.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every Jew necessarily believes in an eternal soul or any kind of afterlife to which that soul might journey. “Two Jews, three opinions,” as the saying goes. If you’ve never heard this before, or if you don’t believe any of this, that’s okay, you still belong here. Even if you don’t believe in God, you still belong here! (Though remind me to send you R. Brent Spodek’s beautiful I (don’t) believe in God.)

As far as what happens to that soul once the body dies…? I can tell you that I have a book called Jewish Views of the Afterlife, and it’s several inches thick. Over the last 3000 years Judaism has offered many different visions of what might come after this life, ranging from blissful Torah study in the Garden of Eden, to reincarnation when a soul still has work to do or things to learn.

I find all of this endlessly fascinating. And in some ways it’s all beside the point. The question beneath her question was something like: is my beloved still here? I believe the answer is yes.

Many Jews believe that our dead remain accessible to us. Some say we can speak to them as we speak to God. Some say we can ask them for help, or to intercede with heaven on our behalf. Some say we may receive their answers in dreams, or in the world around us. Some say we may feel their presence in the wildlife that graces our path. (Rabbi Pam Wax has an extraordinary poem about that in her book Walking the Labyrinth.) And, of course, the silent Yizkor prayers we’ll say in a moment are a time when many of us go beneath our tallitot and connect with those who are gone.

“I am dust and ashes” doesn’t mean we’re trash. It means our time is fleeting. So what will we do with it? What do we hope will shine through us to the end? If we knew we were going to die tomorrow, what amends would we rush to make, and what words would we need to say… and how about doing those things today, every day, so we’re always ready to return to the Source from whence we came?

This is the sermon that I offered on Yom Kippur morning at Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires (cross-posted to the From the Rabbi blog.)

כִּֽי־אָבִ֣י וְאִמִּ֣י עֲזָב֑וּנִי וַֽיהֹוָ֣''ה יַאַסְפֵֽנִי׃

"Though my father and mother abandon me, God will take me in.” (Psalm 27:10)

It’s the start of Elul 
and these words
stick in my throat.

They’d grown so tired.
I told them it was okay,
they could go. But right now

it isn’t okay. They won’t
ever sit at my table again.
Their voices are silent.

All the high holidays
I haven’t lived yet
stretch ahead of me

without parents,
just still photos
behind the lit candle.

It’s a scant six months
since we buried him
on his side of the bed. 

Having no parents
is so much more (or less)
than having only one.

Your number is still in my favorites.
(So is Mom's.) This morning
I touched the screen by accident
and for an instant I dialed you.

I hung up quick as I could, before
the recorded voice could tell me
this number is no longer in service.
(As though I could forget.)

Opened my email instead, and
there in my inbox: a photo of you
and me, and my son (maybe five?)
at the zoo. To see you again

happy with your grandson...!
Maybe the tap of my iphone screen
came from the other side. It's been
three months, you're learning how

to place a call from there.
Good morning, Dad. I'm doing okay.
So good to hear your voice.
I had a heart attack just like you.

(I've been saying I wanted to be
more like you were in later life.
This wasn't what I had in mind.)
But I'm going to be fine. Last time

you were here we talked about
someday expanding my tiny mirpesset:
I did that this year. I like to think
you sit with me out there sometimes,

when you're not playing backgammon
with Phillip again, or taking Mom
to parties overflowing with champagne
where the band never stops.

If this speaks to you, you might also find resonance in Crossing the Sea, the book of poems that arose out of my first year of mourning my mom.

Forgetting where the car is parked
means something important left undone.

The structure deflated like punched dough
means vulnerability and self-blame.

The taxi that makes stop after stop for hours
is the same as the airport with no signs:

what made you think you had any control
over where you're going or when you arrive?

The suitcase that won't hold everything
means the same as the one left behind.

The empty hot tub at the top of the house
is ambiguous, but skylights mean hope.

None of these statements accord with any school of dream (or poem) interpretation I know. I'm also not sure how I feel about placing any single interpretation on a dream or poem. But both are worth holding up to the kaleidoscope, turning them to see what we learn from how the shapes (re)align.

The Italian place I remember
had dark walls, and candles
in cut-glass red votive bowls.
I thought the owner was Polish.

He and my dad were buddies,
talked business, smoked cigars.
I wore black-patent Mary Janes,
drank Shirley Temples, feasted

on baskets of crusty bolillos:
French bread reimagined
into perfect torpedoes
by Mexican hands.

That's where Dad taught me
how to relish soft-shell crab,
and the names of big wine bottles
like Jeroboam and Methuselah.

All I knew about Methuselah
was that he lived a long time,
maybe forever. I thought
Dad would too.

The restaurant that inspired this poem was the original Paesano's. Here's a reflection on the place written at its 50th anniversary, and here's an oral history from Joe Cosniak. I went to junior high and high school with the daughter of co-owner and chef Nick Pacelli, of blessed memory. 

The photograph above came from Vintage San Antonio - A Photo History (FB). Meanwhile, bolillos are a Mexican roll which some trace to the period of French colonization in Mexico. I baked some today. Mine aren't as beautiful as the ones from Paesano's, but they're still pretty good.

Obviously my household of origin didn't keep kosher. I don't eat soft-shell crab anymore, but I remember loving them when I was a kid. Shrimp Paesano, too. Maybe it's just as well: let them be a memory, along with Dad's cigar smoke and the way he laughed with his friends.