An image from The Blues Brothers. 

Two news stories are sitting in my consciousness side by side. One is Columbia University losing federal funding and the related plan to deport a Palestinian grad student activist who had a green card. As a Jew, I am deeply troubled by the chilling effects of removing funding from universities that allow certain kinds of protests. I'm even more appalled by the threat of deportation for one's political views. And doing that in our name, as though it made Jews safer? News flash: it does not.

The other story is about the rabbi who was disinvited from speaking at an anti-Nazi rally. (See also Cincinnati rabbi disinvited from rally against neo-Nazis over his support for Israel.) Rabbi Ari Jun believes "that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in some portion of their ancestral homeland." He also believes that Palestinians have that same right to self-determination; opposes settlements, the war in Gaza, and Netanyahu; and dreams of a two-state solution. 

As Rabbi Jun notes, his views are pretty mainstream in liberal Jewish communities, but the organizers of this rally decided he's not welcome. Here's a(nother) progressive organization deciding that a Jew who supports both Israelis and Palestinians is beyond the pale. This kind of thinking is all too common (see Adriana Leigh's I Will Not Hide My Judaism in Progressive Spaces). It makes me sad, it drives a wedge between allies, and it feels deeply counter to what I think the world most needs.

Here's the real kicker, in Rabbi Jun's words:

The topic on which I planned to speak was the importance of building broad, intersectional efforts to fight against the threats of Nazism and white supremacy, despite the differences that might otherwise exist in the groups invited to such coalitions.

The kind of coalitions I am speaking of aren't always comfortable for everyone around the table, but they work. You can’t fight back against existential threats by limiting the number of people who join you. You fight back, successfully, by living within the discomfort of finding allies for specific purposes, even if you know you do not agree with them on all things.

This feels so important to me in this moment of what the Guardian calls the crisis of Trump’s assault on the rule of law. This is an unprecedented time. Things are bad, and I fear they will get worse, for so many communities: for Jews, for Palestinians, for queer people, for people of color, for immigrants and refugees. We need coalition-building. We need to be able to stand together and support each other, even when we don't agree on everything, even when standing together is uncomfortable.

We need to be able to stand together against Nazis. I don't particularly want to stand with those who think either Israelis or Palestinians should be exiled from the land -- I think that's unrealistic, it's "unserious thinking," and it's the opposite of helpful. But in order to push back against Nazis I would gladly link arms with people who hold views I find disagreeable, because the threat of Nazism is too great. I'm disheartened that the organizers of this rally don't seem to share that principle. 

And we need to support the constitutional right to peacefully assemble and protest, even if those protests make us uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable with "From the river to the sea" and "we don't want no two states." But if someone can be deported for political views, then we're back to McCarthyism. There's a reason the ACLU stood up for the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie. No matter how objectionable some views might be, Jews should stand for the right to express them.

Neither of these is the way to combat actual antisemitism or support Jews in flourishing. 

*

Here's the good news I can offer today. On Sunday, a dozen people sat around a table at my synagogue and participated in an autobiographical comics workshop called Drawing Through Conflict, co-led by local Jewish comics artist Anna Moriarty Lev and art therapist Kaye Shaddock. It was part of an ongoing series of opportunities and events organized by a small group of congregants who believe in the importance of learning together about the Middle East even when we might deeply disagree. 

Around that table we did not all share the same views about, or experiences of, Israel and Palestine. Over the course of two hours, as drawing prompts took us deeper, we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable with each other. We wrote and drew and laughed and cried and trusted each other with our stories. Does this "solve" anything in the Middle East? Of course not. But does it have the capacity to impact our hearts, our connections, and our local community? Absolutely. And I believe that matters. 

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

When my angled knife cuts through
the air smells sharp and clean.
Shreds of cabbage pile up.
Fennel, apple, scallion, celery.
Lemons, olive oil, kosher salt.

I learned this as "Shabbat salad."
Searching for its origins, I find
salatet malfouf, which is Lebanese,
and another variation (same name)
on a Palestinian cooking blog.

File this alongside salat katzutz
(or salata falahiyeh, same thing,
the chopped one with the cucumbers) --
one of those foods everyone wants
to claim as ours. Someone

I don't know yelled at me
recently on Facebook that there's
"no standing together with evil,"
which is what he said "all of them"
are. I hear this from both sides.

I wish I could set a banquet with
no chairs empty. This is medicine:
like the first shoots of spring
that I believe with a perfect faith
(though it tarry) will someday come.

I learned this as Shabbat salad. See Shabbat Salad at Sivan's Kitchen (video and recipe).

Salatet malfouf, which is Lebanese. See salatet malfouf. See also A Jew Cooks Palestinian: Cabbage Salad Edition.

Salat katzutz / salata falahiyeh. See Salata Falahiyeh (Palestinian or Farmers Salad). In the Jewish Diaspora it's often called Israeli salad; in Israel it's usually either called סָלָט קָצוּץ / salat katzutz (chopped salad) or סָלָט עֲרָבִי / salat aravi (Arab salad.) Its Arabic name is سلطة فلاحية  salata falahiyeh.

With no chairs empty. See The Empty Shabbat Table.

I believe with a perfect faith. "In the coming of the Messiah. Though he tarry, nevertheless do I believe that he will come." From the prayer Ani Ma'amin, adapted in turn from Rambam (d. 1204), arising out of his commentary on mishnah (c. 200 CE.)

For more background: 

• Anthony Bourdain Explains the Israel-Palestine Conflict Through Food, The Washington Post, 2013. Watch the episode of Parts Unknown here on YouTube, or read the transcript - though watching is more powerful. The second half of the episode in particular lands differently now than it did 12 years ago. 
• Here's why Palestinians object to the term 'Israeli food', Reem Kassis in The Washington Post, 2020. All About Israeli Food (a response to the previous piece), Ilana K. Levinsky in The Times of Israel, 2022.
• In a new war over eating Middle Eastern food, eating hummus and shawarma has become a political act, Andrew Silverstein in The Forward.  2023.

May all be fed, may all be nourished, may all be loved. 

There is a mental image I'm carrying with me. A mother, a bit younger than me, sitting on a folding chair in front of a cement wall. She is holding a toddler who clings to her like a life raft. Her eyes are closed and exhaustion is written in every line of her face. Another night of the alarms going off, the family racing to the bomb shelter, the frightened child trying to sleep in their mother's arms.

Another mental image: a desperate father holding a malnourished child, pleading on Bluesky for the aid that would enable him to maybe get a loaf of bread. There are so many people like this that they run together in my mind. I'm not proud of that. I want to be able to say that I take every person's suffering seriously. I know that every human being is a spark of God, made in the divine image.

The mother holding her child is Israeli. The father holding his child is Palestinian. I know one of them personally, and read her Facebook updates often. The other is a stranger to me. I ache for both of them. Their situations are not the same, but both are suffering. Their fates are bound up together. As a recent Forward article notes, neither of these peoples is leaving that beloved land. 

I know that Israelis are lucky to have bomb shelters. (I wish Gazans had them too.) I also know that doesn't erase the trauma from the barrage of rockets, coming now from the Houthis. At least I think that's who's bombing now. It's hard to keep track. And it's easy to feel like everyone hates Jews anyway, so does it matter who's trying to kill us this time? Isn't someone always trying to kill us? 

Some people hate Israel because they hate Jews, and they would prefer that we not exist at all. (Sometimes that takes the form of actively trying to wipe us out, which is an old story but apparently one that is evergreen.) Some people abhor the actions of Israel's government, or the actions of several consecutive Israeli governments. (Some of the most ardent among that group are Israeli Jews.) 

Some say: but the occupation, and the brutality of the war on Gaza, mean that Israelis deserve to be bombed. And some say: but October 7, and the first and second intifadas, mean that Palestinians deserve to be bombed. And some say: empathy for "those people" just normalizes evil. My heart rebels against all of those views. No one deserves this. This is not the way the world should be. 

My heart breaks for everyone living under fire. My heart breaks for every Palestinian parent trying to keep their child warm and safe and comforted during a famine, in winter, in war -- and for every Israeli parent trying to keep their child warm and safe and comforted in a bomb shelter.  Anguish on behalf of suffering parents and children is not partisan. This suffering doesn't nullify that suffering.

I keep thinking about every parent who is terrified for a child, or trying to comfort a child, or God forbid grieving the loss of a child. I think about the Prayer of the Mothers and Women Wage Peace. I think about the Prayer of Mothers for Life and Peace by Sheikha Iktisam Mahameed and Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum. I know I can only imagine, from a distance, what parents in that place endure.

The thought I keep coming back to is: no one should live like this. Surely every Israeli and every Palestinian has PTSD -- not just from the last 456 days but also from the years that preceded them. No one should live (or die) like this. And yet countless thousands are living and dying like this. I put my hopes in the coexistence activists of Standing Together, though their dream feels distant.

I didn't want to begin a new year without acknowledging that the suffering in the Middle East is a constant background hum. In the words of Yehuda HaLevi (d. 1141), my heart is in the east. Of course, 1000 years ago he was yearning for a Jewish return to Zion; it's different now. But the constantly of the yearning remains. How I yearn for all of the peoples of that land to live in safety and peace. 

I went outside to bentsch lulav -- to take up the Four Species of date palm, willow, myrtle, and etrog, bring them together, make a blessing, and shake them in all six directions. I waited until the temperature rose to 40F (4.4 C) and the white rime of frost had melted. Even so, a plastic flowerpot that had filled with rain had frozen over. I could see my breath. I came back inside pretty quick.

Sometimes I'm mildly envious of people who live in Mediterranean climes at this time of year. I see photos of sukkot in California: open, airy spaces decked with tapestries and pillows because rain is unlikely. It was like that in Texas where I grew up, too. Here in New England, especially when the holidays are late on the secular calendar, Sukkot is cold. We wrap up in lots of blankets. 

Torah doesn't explain the taking up of the Four Species. Maybe in antiquity they just made sense. A lot of people see them as fertility ritual (the etrog could be analogous to the womb; bringing it together with the phallic lulav carries some pretty clear symbolism.) We know that lulav and etrog were taken up and waved in the Temple daily at Sukkot during the centuries when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. 

Midrash teaches (Lev. Rabbah) that of the four species, one tastes good (dates / palm), one smells sweet (myrtle), one is neither sweet-scented nor sweet-tasting (willow), and one is both tasty and delicious (etrog). These in turn represent people who study Torah but don't do good works, people who do good works but don't study Torah, people who do neither, and people who do both. (Be an etrog.)

Sometimes they're understood to represent four parts of the body with which we might serve the One (eyes, lips, spine, and heart), or the four letters in the Holy Name. And they can also evoke four ecosystems in the land of Israel. The lulav / palm hints at the lowlands; the aravot / willows suggest the rivers; hadassim / myrtle, the mountains; and the etrog, the irrigated areas where people farm.

I wonder how many people just stopped reading because I mentioned the land of Israel. I just wrote several impassioned paragraphs about that, and then deleted them. I shouldn't need to present my progressive bona fides in order to meditate aloud on these sweet ancient earth-based rituals of sukkah, lulav, and etrog, and why they connect my spirit with the place where this tradition began. 

All over the world, Jews don't pray for rain during the Land's dry season. (Ending in a few days.) Our daily prayers remind us when the Land relies on dew, and when the rains might come. Local climate notwithstanding, my lulav hyperlinks me with there. "[A]s wines on far continents prickle / to bubbles when their native vines bloom," as Marge Piercy wrote in her poem about Tu BiShvat. 

I love this 2000-year-old connection with the earth and weather, the plants and seasons, in the place where Judaism began. The older I get, the more meaning I find in remembering that the place where Judaism began shaped it, and therefore shaped the spiritual practices we've been carrying with us for centuries. Sitting in my sukkah I'm part of a chain of tradition bridging both time and space.

This doesn't obviate the fact that Palestinians are spiritually and physically rooted in that place too. (And now I've ticked off a whole different group of readers!) I reject the right-wing fantasy of "Greater Israel." I don't know how the two peoples will ultimately coexist, but along with every Israeli I know, I believe that they must. I yearn for dignity, self-determination, safety, and peace for all.

How will they get there? I have no idea. I suspect the folks at Standing Together have plenty of thoughts. The realm of what I can impact feels very small. At least in my own spaces, like this one, I can push back against those who would use this practice to deny another people self-determination, and against those who would deny the geographic roots of this practice and my religious tradition. 

Engaging in imaginary arguments with people to my right and with people to my left does no one any good. I scratch the etrog lightly with my thumbnail and breathe deep, grounding myself in spiritual practice and in things I can touch and sense. The clack of palm fronds. The spice of myrtle leaves. The knowledge that all over the world we are taking up our lulavim and praying for better days.

Sukkot is approaching, the festival where we build little "booths" and dwell in them for a week, representing the harvest houses of our ancestors or the tents of our ancestral wilderness journey. According to the path we call halakha (with which different Jews have a wide variety of different relationships; that's a conversation for another day) a sukkah must be impermanent. A perennial gazebo won't cut it. It has to be something we build and then take down. "Impermanence embodied," Buddhist-inflected Jews like me say. A reminder that there is profound beauty in what doesn't last.

The roof must be made of something that grew in the ground: palm fronds, bamboo, cornstalks, fir branches, whatever grows and can be sustainably harvested wherever we are. This is one of Sukkot's connections to earth-based practice; in our ancestral story we come from earth and to earth we return. There has to be enough roof there that it registers as a roof, but not so much that it blocks our capacity to see the full moon (Sukkot begins at full moon) and the stars. A leafy roof. "A leaky roof," R. Arthur Waskow once wrote -- a typo that can teach us a deeper truth about bittersweet openness.

Here in Massachusetts autumn has arrived. Yom Kippur was unseasonably beautiful, dappled with golden light through autumn trees. Now we've got cold rains. It will be a chilly week for eating and praying outdoors. I predict that at least once we'll wind up citing the teaching that when the sukkah is unpleasantly cold and wet, it's ok to forego the mitzvah and return inside. This morning I went to the hardware store and bought a 50-lb bag of play sand to place atop one of the bottom struts of my sukkah kit, because last night the winds that accompanied the rain blew it halfway across my deck.

Sukkot lands differently this year than ever before. Last Sukkot feels like a time of innocence. Before the Hamas attacks. Before the ensuing war. You don't need me to tell you; you know what the last year has been. Some of our feelings of permanence were shattered on Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah last year. Granted, Oct. 7 didn't come out of nowhere. The horrors of that day are rooted in the complex welter of choices made by people in power across the Arab world and Israel over the last 75 years. Before Oct. 7, I was able to set that aside, living as if it mostly didn't impact me. But it does.

Before Oct. 7, I never imagined that in my own era I would see the world seemingly rejoice at the slaughter of Jews, though probably I should have. I never imagined that the ensuing war in Gaza would result in the loss of so many lives, though probably I should have. I never imagined any of how this last year would feel, for me or for those whom I serve. The activated trauma. The horrors of war seen from afar. The more intimate wounds of friendships and relationships coming apart at the seams. The hardening of positions. The blame. The feelings of unsafety. The grief -- God, so much grief. 

Who am I to teach about impermanence -- the disability wisdom I gave over on Yom Kippur morning; how a sukkah is like a sand mandala is like parenting; the beauty of living and loving in our fragile bodies and homes and lives -- when there's a literal war going on? When many people I know and love, and countless people I will never know, are displaced or homeless or sheltering from rocket fire or unable to shelter from rocket fire? When Jews and Israelis are under siege, when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, with hostages are still in captivity, as this awful war expands?

And that's not even getting into the climate crisis and the two hurricanes that struck Florida in rapid succession. Those who live in places that flooded, who are without power, who have lost something or anything or everything -- y'all don't need me to tell you what you're going through. And those who don't live in those places have all seen the footage, and I suspect that none of us feel as safe as we did before. Honestly, who am I to teach about impermanence in a time like this? The world is teaching us plenty. And amidst this, we're supposed to resist hiding under our blankets, and instead build sukkot?!

Yes. Amidst this, we build sukkot. We hammer together our metal kits with mallets, or we pound nails into wood. We make walls out of tarps or tapestries or, in my case, the kind of material that waterproof camping tents are made of. We make roofs out of something organic, branches or bamboo mats or armfuls of cornstalks. Maybe we adorn them with fairy lights and pumpkins, or with the Seven Species that grow in the Land of Promise, or with handmade decorations and garlands. And in them starting Wednesday we will bless wine and bread, we will eat and drink, we will be thankful.

I know I can't imagine what it's like to be in flood-stricken Appalachia or Florida or in the wartorn Mideast. And I know I can't regain the innocence of last Sukkot, before I was constantly and consciously aware of so many excruciating things. All I can do is bring all of this awareness with me into the sukkah, and trust that its flimsy, barely-there walls will be strong enough to hold this vast tangle of emotions. (They always are.) So I build. Because building is fundamentally our job as Jews. We build on ancient foundations; we build toward a world of justice; we build and resist despair.

We build because being part of a thousands-of-years-old tradition is itself a form of resilience. We build because we are links in a chain of tradition. A sukkah is like a human life: here and then gone. But its brevity doesn't make it less meaningful; on the contrary! And Jewish tradition and practice don't die when we do, because we teach them to our generations, as our forebears taught them to us. We are impermanent, but the tradition outlives us, and this is precisely how. We build and we beautify. And then we sit in our sukkahs, and even in this broken world we uplift sparks of joy.

Inspired, in part, by this post from Sarah Tuttle-Singer.

I want to start the new year by naming the elephant in the room.

This year some of us have been deeply worried about Israel and Israelis. We can’t stop thinking about October 7 and Israeli hostages in Gaza. Maybe we’ve lived in Israel. Maybe we have family or friends in Israel and they know someone who was killed or taken prisoner. Compounding all of that, maybe we feel like the world has turned on Israel, maybe on all Jews. We’re worried about Jews worldwide at increased risk. Every anti-Zionist slogan, or boycott of a Jewish or Israeli business, or campus protest, leaves us feeling like the world doesn’t want us to bring our whole Jewish self to the table. 

And some of us have been a wreck because of Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon. Maybe we have a familial connection there, or maybe our families are Arab or Muslim. We yearn for a ceasefire; maybe we’ve been standing out for one in the Williamstown roundabout every Friday. Compounding all of that, we feel alienated from the sector of the Jewish community that seems not to feel what we feel. Maybe we aren’t comfortable with Zionism, or maybe with any kind of nationalism, and we wonder how to find home in a Jewish community that doesn’t see this the way we do.

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. 

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.)

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.

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. 

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.)

"A Drop in the Ocean" by David Parker.

I talk to friends in Israel. They tell me everyone knows someone who is connected with the hostages. About the protests outside the Prime Minister's house. How the hostages are on posters everywhere, in public art pieces everywhere, how theirs have become household names even for those who didn't know them. How every baby they see reminds them of Kfir Bibas, kidnapped at 9 months, now 17 months. Some of them tell me how it feels to send a son or daughter or sibling or grandchild off to fight Hamas, knowing that some will not come home again. After eight months, no one is the same.

I read the words of friends with loved ones in Gaza. They tell me about the destruction. Buildings collapsing, tens of thousands dead, two hospitals now the sites of mass graves. The rubble, the hunger, the fear. How even the places where people had run to seek refuge don't seem to be safe anymore. When the IDF bombs a school, many don't believe the goal was taking out some number of Hamas fighters embedded within. Why would they believe the IDF or the Israeli government? They trust neither. They believe the goal is to wipe them all out, or to cause as much damage as possible.

I wake to the news that four Israeli hostages are home, rescued by the IDF. Three of them are in their twenties, kidnapped from the Nova music festival. I'm old enough that they look like kids to me. The image of Noa Argamani reuniting with her father overwhelms me with emotion. I imagine what's going through his heart and mind, seeing his daughter alive after 245 days of fearful wondering. I imagine what's going through hers. One Israeli special forces police officer died from wounds sustained in the rescue. I imagine that person's family and their grief. Does this feel "worth it," to them?

Meanwhile, at least 125 were killed in the strike on Nuseirat that enabled the rescue. Or maybe 210 dead and 400 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Or the "Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry," in the words of Ha'aretz. (Some don't believe the IDF; others don't believe the Gaza Health Ministry.) No one seems to dispute the fact that most of those killed and injured are women and children. I read descriptions of hospital hallways teeming with the wounded. I imagine what's going through the hearts and minds of those families, and the families of the dead. Who do they blame for their grief?

Sometimes it is impossibly surreal that here and there are happening at the same time. Sometimes it's hard to see the beauty of here because we're so caught up in feeling-with them there. (Which "them," which "there"? Fill in the blank for yourself.) I don't think I know anyone who cares about Israelis or Palestinians who is okay this year, much less anyone who aspires to care about both. How to rejoice for the four who've been brought home, when hundreds of other lives ended in the process and peace seems nowhere in sight? How to taste a single drop of joy intermixed with this vast salt sea of sorrow?

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit…you shall eat your fill of bread and dwell securely in your land. (Lev. 26:3-5)

In the past I’ve read these opening verses in part as an environmental teaching. If we live in a way that’s aligned with the mitzvot, we’ll be laying the groundwork for a healthy planet. Last week’s parsha Behar (often read as a double portion with this week’s Behukotai) talks about the mitzvah of shmitah, letting the earth rest in every seventh year. In an era of climate crisis, we know that treating the earth in a transactional way that privileges profit over sustainability will lead to woe – like the curses listed later in this parsha.

All of that still resonates. But this year I got caught on the phrase “you shall… dwell securely in your land.” And all I can think is: halevai – would that it were so! 

The idea of dwelling securely feels almost laughable. The horrors of October 7th shattered a sense of safety and security for many of our Israeli friends and family. Violence across the West Bank and the war in Gaza have shattered any sense of safety or security for Palestinians. Torah’s promise is so far from the reality we see in the news and on social media that it draws me up short. 

There’s no practical comparison between our life here and the lives of Israelis or Palestinians – we’re not living under rocket fire or aerial bombardment. Still, I know that many of us don’t feel wholly safe and secure in this land either. The fact that our synagogue has been locked ever since the hostage crisis at CBI Colleyville is testament to that. 

Some immediately blamed prominent Jews for the results in this week’s jury trial of the former president, and the resurgence of that antisemitic conspiracy theory makes many of us anxious. Meanwhile I know that many of us are experiencing vitriol aimed at Zionists or Israelis as a blow to our own hearts and our sense of belonging. 

There’s a difference between feeling unsafe and being unsafe, but both take a toll.

I will grant peace in the land, and you shall lie down untroubled…no sword shall cross your land. [Your army] shall give chase to your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. Five of you shall give chase to 100, and 100 of you shall give chase to 10,000… (Lev. 26:6-8)

I have mixed feelings about Torah’s promise of routing enemies. I understand why superior power is the dream of every oppressed people! And yet I wish Torah could have promised, “You and those whom you understand as enemies will become able to see a better path forward.” But I don’t think that perspective was viable in antiquity. 

Honestly, it doesn’t always feel viable now. Even though I share our prophets’ yearnings for the day when swords will be beaten into plowshares… and poet Yehuda Amichai’s yearning to go even further:

Don’t stop after beating the swords
into plowshares, don’t stop! Go on beating
and make musical instruments out of them.
Whoever wants to make war again
will have to turn them into plowshares first.

(Someone’s actually doing that, by the way – a group called Armory of Harmony.)

This print features that Amichai poem in Hebrew, and is available from the artist here. 

These verses remind me of the second paragraph of the Sh’ma, the one that says that if we follow the mitzvot we’ll get the rains in their seasons and will receive all that we need. (The one that our siddur leaves out, because its editors found its promise too transactional.) 

I agree that a purely transactional reading fails us. If our reason for doing mitzvot is that we’ll get rewarded, that’s liable to fall apart the first time we realize that the wicked often prosper, and that terrible things can happen to good people who live an upright and mitzvah-filled life. 

But I find meaning in that part of the Sh’ma when I interpret it in a less literal way, as we did this morning. I think we can do the same here. 

The word hok, a type of mitzvah, is related to the root meaning to engrave. Hukkim are the mitzvot that are carved on us, or the ones we carve on our own hearts through repetition and through allowing ourselves to be changed. Think of how water wears away stone to form channels through which it can flow. 

The verbs telkhu and tishm’ru, “walk” and “keep,” remind us that the mitzvot are our path. As the Ahad Ha-Am said of Shabbat, “More than the Jewish people have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” It’s true of all of the mitzvot: we keep them, and they keep us.That’s how we acquire betah, faith or trust. 

JPS renders betah as “dwell securely,” but this isn’t the kind of security that might come with an alarm system. It’s inner security, it’s faith. If we walk a path of keeping mitzvot and letting them keep us, that’s how we can live in trust, or have trust live in us. This may be a tall order in these days of rising antisemitism and continuing anxiety and fear for all of our beloveds in the Middle East. But I think it’s the invitation that Torah offers us. 

Still, what can we do to reinterpret the verse about our enemies falling before us by the sword? In the daily amidah, there’s a line of prayer that asks God for a time when our enemies will have no hope. It’s become common practice in liberal Jewish circles to replace “enemies” with “enmity.” May enmity itself wither and disappear from the earth. 

The commentator known as the Sforno understands the verse about giving chase to our enemies as: “without even needing to fight them.” In other words: maybe someday when humanity is wholly aligned with a path of right actions and justice, warfare will just… become obsolete.  Enmity itself will disappear. 

Most of our commentators don’t make that kind of interpretive move. Then again, most of our sages lived in eras when Jews faced persecution: R. Yochanan ben Zakkai during the first Roman-Jewish war, Rashi during the Crusades, Rambam who fled from Iberia with his family, the Hasidic masters during the era of pogroms and the Holocaust. It’s a sobering reminder that even those of us living in American comfort, far from today’s sites of bloodshed, carry ancestral memory of centuries of persecution and hatred.

But we also still carry Torah’s promise. It’s up to our generation and the generations to come to build toward a world in which enmity will fall by the wayside. A world in which all can live with betah, complete trust and safety. Because here’s another thing I noticed this year: Torah promises that we will live securely in our land, and in the next verse, that God will grant shalom to the land. I like to understand that to mean: we’ll live with faith and trust and safety wherever we are, and wholeness and peace will come to everyone. 

Here’s what I hear Torah saying to us this year:

If you walk in the paths of the mitzvot, and
let them be carved on your heart and mind, and
allow yourself to be shaped and changed by them...
Then you’ll become aware of the rains in their season –
sustenance and hope flowing to you from beyond you.
And there will be times in your life when you can’t feel that flow,
just like there are seasons in Jerusalem when the rain doesn’t fall.
But you’ll find that whatever you have, is enough to get you through.
Then you will be filled with fundamental faith and trust wherever you are.
And there will be wholeness and peace everywhere.
And you will be able to lie down and truly rest
and enmity itself will disappear.
And I will be ever-present in your midst:
God, Who brought you out of the narrow place
so that you can live in a way that is upright,
ethical and unbowed.

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

A colleague mentioned that they are taking time away because of the particular exhaustion and grief of trying to serve a divided community after October 7. I wonder how many of us can relate to that.

There's the pain of October 7: still reverberating in almost everyone I know, whether we're there or here, no matter what our politics. I don't even want to write about the nightmare of that day.

There's the pain of the war that has followed. I know that it's laughable to speak about that from the comfortable vantage of here. But watching what's unfolding in Israel and Gaza hurts the soul.

I don't want to write about that either. Surely none of us need more words about the horrors of what we're seeing. Even from this distance, the images lodge in our souls like emotional shrapnel.

There's the pain of how people here respond to how other people here respond to events there. There's the pain of communities here torn apart by disagreements about what's happening and why.

Generations and friends, not speaking to each other: furious, betrayed. One says: but why don't they care about Israeli hostages? One says: but why don't they care about Palestinians enduring famine?

It's like they don't even care about [Israeli] [Palestinian] suffering at all. And that becomes its own source of moral injury: how am I supposed to be in community, Rabbi, with someone who...  

I want to say: we are all grieving. Maybe that simple, terrible truth can be our common ground when nothing else feels steady. For all of us, hasn't 5784 been a year of constant, unrelenting grief? 

Amidst all of this, on Facebook a poet friend posts a graphic saying "The aim was always ethnic cleansing." I know who's being accused, and I know that by and large, the poetry community agrees.

I don't say: Whose aim? Are you talking about Bibi and Ben-Gvir, or all Israelis, or all Jews? I don't say anything. I'm not sure I have the resilience to take the emotional hit from the argument.

I do search the phrase, "the aim was always ethnic cleansing." The first hit is BreakThrough News, which has disturbing origins. I wonder whether those who share the meme would care.

There's so much cognitive dissonance. And then there's the constant question: is this metaphorical heartache / metaphysical heartache, or do I need to tuck a nitroglycerin under my tongue?

The Presence
has no address,
goes with us
everywhere:
in wholeness
and in exile.

This place
is still
a focusing lens
for our prayers,
though not
only ours.

Stories
land differently
when I can see
the topography
of spring and desert,
valley and hill.

To describe this
place of promise,
I would need
God's voice:
all possible meanings
at once.

Lately I've been trying to spend less time refreshing the news and more time working on my next poetry manuscript.  The news is grim and there's so little I can do. Despair is corrosive to the spirit. Better to work on making something -- even if that something is just words.

Of course, poetry isn't wholly a distraction from the sorrows of the world. Especially given that this week I've been working on revising a series of poems that originated last year in a trip to Israel / Palestine. (Some of these lines first found form in the blog post Fifty truths, posted last June.) 

A poem is not like an essay or an argument -- at least most of mine aren't. My poems often originate in yetzirah, the sphere of the yearning heart, rather than in briyah, the world of clarity and intellect. For me a poem is more like a painting or a collage, hopefully functioning on an associative level. 

A friend remarked recently that she's never before experienced a situation where so many people are not only utterly divided on an issue, but not even agreeing on basic facts about it. That's another thing that can feel corrosive to the spirit. Another reason that lately I turn to poetry. 

I think of poetry the way I think of midrash: no single poem is "the right answer," but the totality of poetry taken together can offer a glimmer of ultimate reality. That's maybe especially true when it comes to poems about this contested, complicated, beloved place. 

Bearing hatred is exhausting. So is the constant vigilance of wondering who's going to attack next, and from which side. Of course, I have the luxury of meaning that metaphorically. 

In some spaces Jews like me feel unwelcome because we insist on empathy for Palestinians. Self-hating Jew. Why don’t you care about your own people? What about October 7?

(Do you somehow imagine we haven’t been gutted with grief for the inhabitants of Kibbutz Nir Oz, Kibbutz Beeri, the massacred, the slaughtered, the raped, the kidnapped, the hostages?)

In some spaces Jews like me feel unwelcome because we insist on empathy for Israelis. I was with you until you mentioned the hostages. “We don’t want no two states, we remember ‘48!”

(Do you somehow imagine we haven’t been gutted with grief for the inhabitants of Gaza, their homes turned to rubble, entire families wiped out, hospitals in ruins, starving in plain sight?)

The grief is a tsunami and it doesn’t stop. Neither does the anticipation that every time we articulate care about anyone, someone is going to slam us for caring about the wrong side.

It is unpopular to insist on empathy. Because I won't stand for dehumanizing either Israelis or Palestinians, people tell me I am naïve, ignorant of power dynamics, complicit in atrocities. 

Yesterday Micah Sifry wrote about asking pro-Palestinian activists what they mean by liberation. “[The] end of Zionism in our region… completely, from the river to the sea,” one said. 

I have said for years that opposing Israel isn’t necessarily antisemitic. I meant opposing the actions of its government. Opposing the Occupation. Opposing policies or choices or injustices.

Opposing the existence of the state altogether is something different. But saying Israel shouldn’t exist at all suddenly seems almost normative in progressive spaces and literary spaces. 

And other spaces, too. But those are the ones that hurt, because I used to feel at home in them. Now it feels like there’s a purity test, and anyone who professes empathy for Israelis fails it.

This year’s PEN literary awards were canceled because half of the nominees withdrew themselves from consideration, accusing the organization of "false equivalences, equivocation and normalizing."

Years ago I was put on a Self Hating Israel Terrorists list (lovely acronym, no?) because I oppose the Occupation. It's not news that some on the right will slam any Jew who cares about Palestinians.

But being slammed by others on the left for caring about Israelis is new for me, and it's painful in unexpected ways. It's why Guernica withdrawing Joanna Chen's essay was such a gut-punch. 

This morning I read Yardenne Greenspan’s searing essay We Are No Longer Welcome. Much of what she writes resonates with me. Many Jews have lost a sense of safety, a sense of home.

Meanwhile 1.9 million Palestinians and 135,000 Israelis are displaced from their homes. In the face of actual homelessness, these feelings are irrelevant, of course. But I still feel them.  

Rabbi Aaron Brusso wrote about the fifth child – the one who tries to hold complexity. “She wants to love her neighbor and the stranger but neither are interested in loving her.” 

I am, in fact, the fifth of five children in my family of origin. But I feel like that fifth child spiritually, too. For those who won't curtail empathy, right now it's hard to know where to find home.

Symbols, This Year

The shankbone is for houses across Israel and Gaza
where the Angel of Death has not passed over.

Maror for the hot tearful bitter sharp pain
of hostages held underground and children imprisoned.

Haroset, for mortar: Gaza bombed to rubble. 
The egg is roasted like charred kibbutz walls. 

Everything is dipped in tears like the sea that closed 
when God rebuked, "My children die, and you sing praises?"

Matzah: cracker of liberation and affliction. (Gazans
approaching starvation know only one of these.)

There’s no place on the seder plate for ambivalence, 
survivors’ guilt, history’s persecutions telescoping into now.

In every generation trauma traps us in Mitzrayim.
Will this be the year we begin to walk free?

R. Rachel Barenblat

This prayer-poem for Pesach is part of the new collection of poetry, liturgy, and art for Pesach 2024 released earlier this week by Bayit. Click through for This Broken Matzah, available as a downloadable chapbook / PDF of liturgical poetry and art, or as google slides suitable for screenshare. 

Featuring work created in collaboration by the Liturgical Arts Working Group at Bayit, this collection includes work by Trisha Arlin, Joanne Fink, R. Dara Lithwick, R. David Evan Markus, R. Sonja Keren Pilz, Steve Silbert, and R. David Zaslow, and me. 

Most of Megillat Esther reads like a soap opera, full of banquets and beauty pageants and assassination plots and nemeses. There’s a theme of topsy-turviness. Haman is hung on the very gallows he had built for Mordechai, and instead of being slaughtered the Jews of Persia prosper, and we all live happily ever after. But there’s one part of the turn-about that we don’t typically act out in our Purim play. In chapter 9, the Jews slaughter 75,000 Persians.

The context is this: although Haman himself has been defeated, the King had issued a decree saying that on the 13th of Adar Persians were welcome to kill Jews at will. And he had no way to undo that decree, because in this story the king is comically powerless. Mordechai suggests, “Why don’t you issue a new decree giving us the right to defend ourselves?” The king does that, and the Jews do… that. Every year, I wish that this part of the story weren’t there.

I’m not alone in that. Some communities that hold full readings of the megillah race through those verses as fast as they can. Or they sing them in Eikha trope, the melancholy musical mode used at Tisha b’Av when we mourn the fallen Temples and the brokenness of creation. The folks at The Shalom Center recently released what they’re callling The Chapter Nine Project, featuring a variety of alternative revisionings of that part of the story. 

Megillat Esther was written during the 4th century BCE. It’s generally understood to be a work of fiction, though King Achashverosh may have been a fictionalized version of Xerxes I. The megillah is unusually full of loan-words from Akkadian and Assyrian. Even the character names might be borrowed: Mordechai and Esther could be variations on Mespotamian and Babylonian deities Marduk and Ishtar, and Haman might be a derivative of local Elamite deity Humman.

I don’t have any problem with seeing Megillat Esther as a work of fiction. A text doesn’t need to be historically verifiable in order to be sacred or meaningful. I’d venture that most of us don’t think the universe was literally created in six days, but Torah’s poetic teaching that Shabbat rest is the culmination of creation is deep spiritual wisdom. Esther contains deep spiritual wisdom too – about resilience, about leaps of faith, about what’s hidden and what’s revealed.

In a month we’ll immerse in the story of the Exodus, in which God brings us forth from the Narrow Place with a mighty hand and outstretched arm. In this scroll, in contrast, God’s name literally does not appear. Here God is nistar, hidden. (And yes, that word shares a root with the name Esther.) It’s part of what makes this story feel so modern: there’s no Voice of God here. We can only glimpse God through the miracle of ethical choices and right actions.

So what do we glimpse in unethical choices? Jewish tradition writ large supports the right to self-defense, so I can understand the part of the story where we go after those armed against us. And Haman getting hung on his own gallows feels like a kind of literary justice. But the murder of his ten sons feels excessive, and it’s highlighted by scribal calligraphy – meant to evoke “joy over the fact that they were destroyed.” (Maharal, Or Hadash 9:10) Whoa.

Purim is a festival of joy, but this doesn’t feel joyful. (I’m also not convinced that his sons were our enemies. Neither is the Israeli comedy troupe HaYehudim Ba’im, who in one of their sketches portrayed a soldier returning from the war of defeating Haman and the Persians, and saying, “yeah, that Haman was a real piece of —--, but I want you to ask yourselves: what are his children guilty of?”) (Find that here – no English translation though.)

Our tradition also teaches discomfort at the death of an enemy. There’s a midrash that appears in many Passover haggadot describing how, when the Egyptians drowned in our pursuit, God rebuked the angels, “My children are dying and you sing praises?!” (Talmud, Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b.) For this reason we spill drops from our second cup of wine. I’m more comfortable with that than I am with this part of the megillah, but both are part of our tradition. 

Today is a special Shabbat, one of the Shabbats with its own name: Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of Remembrance. Shabbat Zachor falls on the Shabbat before Purim, and on it, we read a special extra bit of Torah, Deut. 25:17-19, describing how Amalek attacked us on our way out of Egypt. Amalek attacked the back of the caravan, wiping out those who were elderly or sick or weak. Torah commands us to blot out the name of Amalek, and to never forget.

Haman, meanwhile, is understood as a distant descendent of the tribe of Amalek. We’ll “blot out” his name with our graggers tomorrow night. This year I’m struck by the juxtaposition of blotting out the name of our adversary – and the entirely missing Name of that One we call God in the scroll we read at this season. Could there be a spiritual connection between the presence of the massacre in chapter 9 of Esther, and the absence of God’s name in this book? 

It’s as though when we give in to violent fantasies of revenge, we render holiness invisible. Maybe God’s names, which are a stand-in for God’s presence, literally can’t coexist with this degree of gratuitous violence. “Gratuitous” being the key word here, because we know there’s plenty of violence and conquest in other parts of Tanakh. But the massacre of 75,000 Persians feels excessive, even vindictive, in a way that’s hard to bear. Maybe it’s hard for God, too.

This year that part of the story also lands differently because of the ongoing horrors of the Israel-Hamas war. Many of us are still enmeshed in grief for those who were slaughtered or kidnapped by Hamas at the very start of 5784. Hamas’ hatred of us makes Haman feel too real. And many of us are enmeshed in grief for tens of thousands of Palestinians killed or displaced or starving since then, which makes the violence at the megillah’s end also feel too real.

Maybe the vengeance chronicled in this story landed differently during 2000 years of exile than it does now. For centuries we lived precariously, couldn’t become citizens of most nations, weren’t allowed to hold certain professions. And whenever something went wrong, like the Black Death, we were blamed and massacred. Revenge fantasies turn out to be common where there is PTSD and complex grief. They can offer a sense of control when life feels shattered. 

But that control is illusory. And marinating in revenge fantasies can be spiritually unhealthy. According to psychologist Judith Herman (author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence), traumatized people who engage in acts of revenge don’t thereby get rid of their PTSD. Instead they seem to suffer more. According to Dr. Michelle Maidenberg, the only real answer is working through the anxiety and grief caused by the trauma in the first place.

The threat of communal annihilation is traumatic. And Jews have collectively known that threat intimately and often, from the Crusades to the Inquisition to pogroms to the Holocaust. We joke about “they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat,” but it’s actually pretty dark. As one passage in the traditional Passover haggadah teaches, “in every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” That’s a grim worldview. It’s not the way I want to see the world around us.

But maybe the subtext of the Megillah – the fact that God’s very name is missing – can teach us that a violent counter-response to trauma isn’t the right path. I don’t know how the whole Jewish people could go about the psychological and spiritual work of healing the trauma of being hated, of being attacked, of facing annihilation over and over. But I think that if we can do that work, it will bring us closer to making the divine presence manifest in the sacred text of all creation.

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