Jazz Shabbat 2024

Our Jazz Shabbat at The National Jazz Museum in Harlem on January 19.

Nothing on My Tongue

Dear friends, 

Imagine the world going silent.  

Perhaps the last time such a moment took place was 3,334 years ago (according to Rabbinic calculations.) That was when our people stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, as described in this week’s parashah, and expounded upon ever since. 

“When the Holy Blessed One gave the Torah no songbird chirped, no winged creature took flight, no cow mood, no angel flew, no seraph said “holy!” The sea did not move, the people did not speak, but the world is quietly keeping silent – and the voice came out: “I am YHVH your God.” 

Without keeping silent, we learn, revelation would not have come. Keeping silent is an old virtue that could use some reviving. So much of our anguish and anger these days come from people's inability to measure their words. 

“Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel said: All my days I grew up among the sages, and I did not find anything as good for the body as silence: and anyone who speaks too much brings about sin.” 

The silence that took over the world before the utterance of the first of the Ten Commandments (or in Hebrew the Ten Dibrot, or spoken pronouncements), allowed for the word of God to be heard in all of its precision and power. It imbued the words that came out with a transcendence of time and space. 

The rabbis succumb to their poetic instincts: 

“Every single word that came out of the mouth of the Holy Blessed One filled the entire world with the smell of sweet spices.” 

“Every single word that came out of the mouth of the Holy Blessed One split into seventy languages.” 

“When the Holy Blessed One gave the Torah to Israel His voice went from one end of the world to the other, and the kings of all the nations were taken over by trembling, and they began to sing.” 

And yet, precise words that come after true silence can be dangerously strong. 

“Every single word that came out of the mouth of the Holy Blessed One made the souls of Israel depart.” 

In other words, when the Hebrews heard God’s voice, they all died! Then how did we receive this story, you might ask. 

“The word came back in front of the Holy Blessed One and said: Master of the world, you’re alive and your Torah is alive – but you sent me to dead people?! - They’re all dead! 

The angels began to hug and kiss them. “Don’t worry, you are children of YHVH!” And the Holy Blessed One sweetened the word in His mouth and said to them: are you not my children? I love you! And continued to touch them until their souls returned.” 

That word travelled all the way to the end of the world and right up to its source. 

This is the power of a word preceded by silence. Not only can it kill, but it can also give life, as the Book of Proverbs put it:

 מוות וחיים ביד הלשון
“Death and life are in the hand of the tongue.” 

At our Kabbalat Shabbat next Friday we will be transported by the Qanun of our musical guest, John Murchison to that prayerful realm of “nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah,” as Leonard Cohen described it. Until then, let us all practice staying silent, and maybe allowing the few precise words that follow to emerge.  

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A Happy Story

Tu Bishvat Seder this week in our Windsor Terrace branch of the School for Creative Judaism 

Dear friends, 

A happy story is set to reach its climax tonight in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. You’re all invited, and it’s worth accepting and taking the Q train out to Cortelyou Road to witness it tonight at 9pm.

It started, like many stories begin these days, with anger and accusations of hate, followed by cancellations. But then, right as everyone was taking sides and feeling hurt and commenting and grieving how rotten the world has become, there was an unexpected twist in the plot. It was so radical that it disarmed all the nay sayers and confused all the yay sayers and reshuffled the deck to shake it out of the political, and into that distant realm we used to occasionally inhabit called “human.”

The story began when a Palestinian restaurant opened a couple months ago. The owner, Abdul Elenani, an Egyptian married to a Palestinian woman, named the restaurant after his beloved, Ayat. There were several bold decisions made by the owners. When you walk in the first thing you see is a large mural of Al Aqsa. Around it are images of beauty, and oppression. When you open the menu the first thing you see is a full page in Arabic, Hebrew and English that reads: “End the Occupation.” All of that did not cause a stir. What did was the seafood section. It reads: “From the River to the Sea: Shrimp Kebab, Salmon Kebab, Whole Red Snapper, Whole Branzino.”

Within a few weeks from opening, Abdul had received dozens of hate mail, death threats and suggestions for what should happen to the dead and living of the Gaza strip. Soon after, newspapers began reporting about it. Some Jews in this incredibly diverse neighborhood swore it off, while others started organizing a boycott.

And then Abdul miraculously transformed the direction of the story. There were also Jews who came to the restaurant to show solidarity in the face of the boycott. In conversations with them he managed to come up with a plan: he invited them, and the entire Jewish community of the neighborhood to a Shabbat dinner. Word started trickling out. I caught word of it on the Whatsapp group of Israeli peace activists in New York, after one of the members received a warm invitation from Abdul, telling him to bring all his Israeli friends. “Everyone is welcome.” Under current circumstances Palestinians inviting Israelis, no matter how left wing they are, is almost unheard of. Abdul made it clear that the dinner will be free. He hired musicians to make the event festive. And Kosher caterers to allow for all Jewish diets to attend.

When we started realizing how big this event is becoming, some of the Israelis organized a second dinner, for the activists, who wanted to pay for their dinner. Abdul tried to convince us not to pay, but eventually agreed for people to pay whatever they felt comfortable paying. This past Monday 50 Israelis gathered at Ayat for dinner. It was a rare moment for a community of dispersed and argumentative peace activists - as marginalized as anyone these days - to come together and share a happy moment. Many of us will be there tonight again.

The title of the seafood section remains the same. But the understanding of the phrase, when sitting in the restaurant (which has a few other branches around the city) is different. This was the brilliance of Abdul. He told the NY Post: “You can’t come to me and translate my verse. You should ask me and I will give you my translation. I’m not going to change it because you want to change the meaning to feed your story.”

What does it mean to him? “This mantra stands for Palestinians to have equal rights and freedoms in their own country. In no way does this advocate any kind of violence.”

Personally, I’ve heard this mantra many times in my life. I don’t like it when Palestinians use it, or when Jews use it. But there was one time when for a moment it sounded just right, when my friend, activist and writer Udi Aloni roared it at a protest: “From the river to the sea ALL the people will be free!”

I am of course aware of the problematic nature of this phrase, and of the erasure it implies in the minds of many people who employ it. But the simplicity, even the innocence that it can hold when spoken by some, helps me in those cases to remove the armor, the tinted glasses, and whatever is on my ears skewing the sound bites, and see a human being. This is what can save us. This is redemption.

If one man can take a cancellation circus and transform it into a celebration of humanity, maybe a lot more of the horrors we are witnessing are also opportunities for transformation.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Wonder, Mindlessness and A Love Supreme

John Coltrane - A Love Supreme, Part IV - Psalm (Live In Seattle, 1965)

Dear friends, 

Creation is the move from chaos to order that is often obscured by darkness. Like most things in this universe, we can’t see it happening. It’s like the communication between trees, the realization reached by the person next to us on the subway, or the perfect, disjointed unison of a Jazz quartet.

“I never have to tell them anything,” said John Coltrane of his three collaborators, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones shortly after they completed one of the greatest Jazz albums in history, A Love Supreme. “They always know what they’re supposed to do and are constantly inspired. I know that I can always count on them. And that gives me confidence. There is a perfect musical communion between us that doesn’t take human values into account.”

So goes creation. No human values. A logic far deeper is at play when, for example a seed sprouts in the earth.

“Even in the case of A Love Supreme," continued Coltrane, "without discussion, I don’t go any further than to set the layout of the work.“

Not to compare a professed servant of God to God, but it seems that Coltrane followed in the image of the divine, as described in Genesis:

“And the earth was formless and empty
and darkness was over the surface of the deep,
and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said ‘Let there be light,’
and there was light.”

The holy phrase תהו ובהו, translated above as “formless and empty” is worth pausing over in this musical context. While the phrase is not exactly logical, more linguistic or poetic, possibly even onomatopoeiac, תהו comes from תהה meaning to wonder, and בהו from בהה meaning to mindlessly stare, or zone out. The chaotic raw materials of creation are mindfulness and mindlessness.  These are often the two elements that lead to something new. The wondering, a type of thinking that implies curiosity and inquiry is the active element. And the blank staring is a type of passive emptiness without which, in my own experience new ideas don’t come. We need both the search and the rest, the waking and the sleep for newness to appear.

Consider this statement from Coltrane: “For me, when I go from a calm moment to extreme tension, it’s only the emotional factors that drive me, to the exclusion of all musical considerations.”

What rises in him while he’s blowing his horn is divorced from the musical structure of the piece.  The moment of creation, as we might call it, when a musician is truly connected, and allows their instrument to be a vessel of the soul, is a moment of chaos and freedom, which can only come about within the structure held by the other members of the ensemble. While he’s in תהו, wonder, the rest of the quartet is in בהו, mindlessness. When they hold the wonder - he can inhabit the emptiness.

With the frame of melody, chord progression and improvisation, Jazz combines structure and freedom, intention and emptiness, prayer and meditation. This is especially true of the Spiritual Jazz out of which was born A Love Supreme, a blast of inspiration shot into the world in 1964, from a musician who called music his “way of giving Thanks to God.”

Tonight we will be gathering at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem to experience the overlap between music and faith that drove Coltrane, through the Jewish Jazz of our musical guru Frank London, and his ensemble. I hope to see you there.

We see the chaos in the world. We tremble at its empty formlessness. What we cannot yet see is the new light being created out of it. Perhaps we will catch a glimpse of it this evening.

There is a structure to the universe. Some have heard it called a love supreme.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Hope resides in the Spirit - reflections on a David Shulman lecture

By Julia Stone

“What time is it right now in Israel?” David asks. He’s sitting next to Rabbi Misha in the front of the room- father and son- clad in earthy winter flannels and sweaters. It’s a Monday night and the two men are staring out at a crowd of about 70 Jewish New Yorkers, anxious in our folding chairs, all of us looking for some kind of lifeline. When David starts to speak, he’s so gentle it’s like he’s having 70 private conversations at once. He is effortlessly intimate.

“It’s the middle of the night in Israel”, someone answers. You can see David’s chest cave in slightly. “The nights are the worst”, he whispers like a confession, “the nights are filled with terror.”

David lives in Jerusalem, but he’s one of a group of devoted Israeli activists who have been traveling to the occupied West Bank for some 20-odd years to protect Palestinians from increasingly violent Israeli settlers. The activists wake up before dawn, travel through checkpoints, and decamp for the night in Palestinian homes – their physical bodies serving as the last line of defense.

I googled David before I arrived at the talk, and it’s difficult not to be immediately impressed by him. Or should I say enamored. He’s a multi-lingual, multi-award-winning scholar and Indologist, and he’s also a poet- although I’m not sure which language he writes in. Somehow, in the early 2000’s, he found time to join the nascent grassroots volunteer organization - Ta’ayush - that’s long since been at work to “break down the walls of racism and segregation by constructing a true Arab-Jewish partnership.” It strikes me that David is many things inside of one human vessel.

***

Reporting about the October 7 Hamas attack and what’s happening in Gaza has dominated the Western media in the past two months, but the West Bank is also under attack. Right now, amidst the devastation and chaos of war, a segment of Israeli settlers has seized the moment to further its goal of eliminating Palestinians from the southernmost part of the West Bank- and they’re doing so with the tacit approval- and sometimes even direct support- of the Israeli Defense Forces.

The settlers launch their intrusions into the Palestinian homes at all hours, but they particularly favor the middle of the night. They know to strike in the darkness- when the cameras of the Israeli activists struggle to capture what’s happening in the shadows. When the Palestinian children are asleep. Aren’t we all the most vulnerable while dreaming?

But David lets us watch the sunrise with him as he begins his talk. He paints the sky over the Palestinian homes- golden, warm, the glow transforming throughout the day like onions turning to caramel. He describes a village of shepherds. These aren’t political extremists- these aren’t individuals affiliated with the various Palestinian terrorist groups that dominate the news headlines. These are people who plow the land. Their livelihoods depend on the fruits of the soil.

Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas: A, B, and C – noncontiguous sections of land where an estimated 3 million Palestinians currently reside. David’s group of activists primarily focuses on advocating for Palestinians in Area C. “Let’s imagine a village”, he begins, “in the South Hebron Hills- the southernmost part of the occupied West Bank.”

The land here is inhabited by shepherds and small-scale farmers, or a combination of the two. David tells us that they are not nomadic people, but are firmly rooted and many of them have worked this very land “since time immemorial.” They are ordinary, peaceful human beings with an “almost-blank” security record. They live a “biblical lifestyle” in small hamlets, where their homes consist of 4-7 canvas tents, maybe a few metal shacks. As David speaks, it is increasingly clear that these people are a threat to no one.

It is ravishingly beautiful there, he tells us. There are sheep and goats and the hills are rocky and elevated and speckled with green, thorny shrubs against the backdrop of beige. In the spring there are wildflowers. There’s a vista and you can gaze out for miles as the land and the sky change color in tandem throughout the day-- wrapping-up in a blanket of deep purple blue. David tells us that the sight of the shepherds never ceases to move him.

***

About half a million Israelis currently live in the West Bank, which under international law is completely illegal. Under Israeli law, however, the older settlements are still regarded as legal. But the same can’t be said for the new outposts.

There are three primary types of Israeli settlements, and David outlines important distinctions among them. First, you have the “quality of life” settlements, built close to the 1967 border Green Line. The Israelis who live here don’t usually have a particular ideological attachment to the land, but instead typically settled there because it was cheap. Israelis could build a big villa there with the help of government subsidies, and most of them commute to the larger Israeli cities for work.

The residents of these settlements don’t tend to be violent, although some, like the settlers in Halamish in the hills north of Ramallah, have from the start having been “making life hell” for the Palestinian villagers of Nabi Saleh. These settlers constantly harass, attack, and steal land from the villagers, and they even took over the beautiful well that was a central site and vital component of life in Nabi Saleh. Three Israelis were also killed Halamish in a stabbing attack in 2017, which only increased the tensions.

The second type of settlements are the “veteran” settlements placed in the heart of the West Bank; these residents are ideologically committed. These are the Jews who believe they have a religious commandment to settle the land, and most of these settlements were established in the 1980’s and 90’s. The settlers who live there are virulent and impassioned, with the settlers of Itamar southeast of Nablus representing some of the most violent among them.  

The third type of settlements – and easily the most terrifying- are the “outposts.” David tells us that outposts are a relatively new tactic of the most radical settlers- and they’ve only been established over the past five or six years. But he estimates that there are already about 100 outposts.

The outposts are where the most aggressive settlers- often teenage boys- come to claim their turf. They bring with them sheep and goats and M16s. David describes these boys as frequently “deeply troubled, brainwashed teens” who have found a type of asylum within the settler movement. They embody a certain form of religiosity that isn’t unlike other religious extremist groups. And they are a perversion of every Jewish value that I hold dear.

Most importantly, perhaps, these outpost settlers are completely safe from any consequences of their actions. They think they’re going to bring the Messiah by clearing the land of any non-Jews, or more secular Jews like me, and they’re in favor of an apocalyptic war. To them, the Palestinian farmers and shepherds are the ones defiling the land.

***

And here’s where David begins to tell us about how, exactly, these settlers go about ridding the land of the Palestinians. It’s important to note several things about David- highlighted both by his son Misha and his daughter-in-law Erika who had gone with him on some of his protective missions into the West Bank.

David isn’t a person who complains much. He was born in the United States but he chose to move to Israel in 1967 after a self-proclaimed love affair with the Hebrew language-- but his life work has involved the study of Indian languages and cultures. He served in the IDF and raised his three sons in Israel, where they also served. David doesn’t consider himself to be on the far-left. He thinks that any moderate person would feel the way about the settlers that he does - if only they could see them in action, face-to-face.

David has regularly made the uncomfortable and dangerous journey to the southern edge of the West Bank for over 20 years. He’s no stranger to the area, and he has no reason to exaggerate or lie about anything that he’s about to tell us. Listening to him, you quickly understand that he sees this particular slice of land, with these particular inhabitants and intruders, with a sense of indisputable moral clarity.

It’s also clear that David understands the full gravity of his descriptions and language. He tells us about how his beloved grandmother, who lived in the Western Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv was subject to a devastating Cossack pogrom. He describes how his grandmother’s brother nearly escaped the violent onslaught by taking refuge in a pool of water nearby, but instead he drowned to death while hiding. David doesn’t take the word “pogrom” lightly.

And yet, that’s the word he uses to describe what some of the settlers are doing to the Palestinian villagers. David explains that he’s only going to share details from events that he’s seen with his own eyes. There’s too much disinformation and misinformation to believe almost anything else at this point. Bearing in-person witness to the violence is crucial.

The outpost settlers like to attack between midnight and 3am. They arrive in groups ranging from 3 to about 50, but typically there are around 20 of them. Every single one of them is armed. David mentions here that the Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been instrumental in ensuring that these settlers get plenty of M16s.

The settlers also carry pistols and butcher knives. Butcher knives. The attackers are sometimes young- about 16 or 17 years-old, but there are also older men in their twenties or thirties. They are rage-filled and destructive. David tells us that the settlers wear Israeli army uniforms- but they are not soldiers. They are pretend soldiers.

These teens are not trained to use weapons, but that doesn’t seem to faze Ben-Gvir. They go house to house and start shooting- sometimes into the air, but often aiming at sheep and goats- killing anything in their way. David tells us that he personally knows of about 10 people who have been murdered by settlers on these rampages over the last few weeks, but nothing ever happens to the killers. Israeli law has no purchase here.

And often the IDF soldiers actively support the settlers as they launch their midnight pogroms. The attackers “break anything that is break-able- doors, windows, cooking vessels…they might set fire to the house.” They are screaming curses and threats- “a mantra of threats.” They tell the Palestinian families that they “have 24 hours to leave” or else they will all be killed. Women, children, whoever.

If there’s any food in the homes, the settlers will throw it all out, maybe piss on it. Over the years, David’s group and other activists have helped the Palestinians secure water tanks on their property- essential infrastructure in such arid land. And the activists have worked to secure wind turbines and solar panels so that the Palestinians have electricity. But the settlers use these goods for target practice.

As they’re ransacking the locals, the outpost settlers shoot the turbines and solar panels and water tanks. They could be there from anywhere between half an hour to 3 hours, wreaking havoc upon the inhabitants. Sometimes these attacks will be coordinated with the IDF and other times the soldiers will just stand-by passively and watch it.

The Palestinians under attack are a far cry from the militant gunmen who invaded southern Israel. These Palestinians are not affiliated with terrorist groups. They have no weapons to defend themselves. They still use plows pulled by donkeys. If they can’t take care of the land, next year’s crop will be ruined. They won’t be able to survive.

David reminds us here that the entirety of the West Bank belongs to Palestinians- noting only one exception of the Etzion bloc- a bit of land purchased by Jews pre-1948. “Everything else is theirs”, he says. The settlements are built mainly upon so-called “state lands” meant to be kept in reserve for the Palestinian population; instead, they have been appropriated, through a legal ruse that the Israeli courts have accepted, for settling Jews on them, in clear contravention of international law.

Listening to him, you can tell that David is personally attached to many individuals that he’s come to know through his years in the West Bank. He doesn’t talk about Gaza- it’s too big, a live-wire, complicated by a different imbalance of power and grievances. Instead, he describes how some Israelis are at war in what are clearly the wrong places, adopting what are clearly immoral methods.

In the Southern Hebron Hills where he and the activists go to sleep, David uses his body as a shield. The Hebrew word “Magan” can mean a shield, a protector, or a source of peace in times of great trial.

David tells us about how the settlers and IDF soldiers take the plows that belong to the shepherds. Sometimes the soldiers even take the tractors. They confiscate the goods- knowing that they are essential to the Palestinians’ survival- and hold them in an army outpost somewhere. If the Palestinians or activists manage to track down the equipment, they are often charged 4-10 thousand shekels for their retrieval- an insurmountable amount for the shepherds and farmers.

These Palestinians are “living in terror”. They have zero rights and no recourse. They are frequently prohibited from accessing the land they own for their livestock to graze, and David tells us that with “lands in dispute” the Palestinians are at the mercy of a ruthless, bureaucratic machine.

***

Someone in the audience asks, “When the settlers launch their attacks and encounter you and your fellow activists, what do you do then?”

David answers that he speaks directly to the settlers who are attacking. He tells them that “what they are doing is illegal”- that the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Israelis cannot prevent Palestinians from accessing their own grazing lands. He feels it’s his job to inform them of their transgression- and if they don’t absorb the meaning of it in the moment, that maybe at some time later what he says might resonate.

The activists have also learned to stream the violence on Facebook Live, so the video can be shared even if their recording devices get destroyed.

But the activists are committed to non-violence, so their only weapons are the unenforced Israeli law, live videos, and the presence of their bodies. David concedes that all of the activists have been brutally attacked over the years. And the risk to their own lives only seems to be increasing.

The settlers see the war in Gaza as their moment of opportunity. David tells us that the Palestinians are being constantly harassed, and over the past six months Palestinians have been expelled from over 16 villages – highlighting how many Palestinians were forced out of Ein Samia village earlier this spring. With all eyes on Gaza, who will stop these violent marauders who violate the most fundamental principles of decency and humanity?

It is clearly not right that activists like David need to take their own lives in their hands to protect people who should never be under attack in the first place. There are enough actual enemies in this neighborhood to fight. As David finishes up his talk, one of the audience members asks him what we can do- how do we help? David admits that in the crush of war, there’s not much anyone can do- that he’s only doing the most micro thing and even that he says is not enough.

But in a world of big ideas and grand deception, the micro actions take on even greater meaning. The personal interactions between his group and the Palestinians they attempt to protect. The talk delivered to 70 strangers who are suddenly closer because of the shared experience of listening.

Someone asks David if he is an optimist. He replies that he’s not really an optimist- an optimist would have to look at what’s happening and rationally say that it’s going to get better. He thinks it might get better, but he doesn’t know for sure. Instead, he says that he still has hope. “Hope resides in the spirit” he tells us.

***

I hesitate to write about Israel as an American Jew, and especially as there’s a war going on that I’m not fighting. I don’t agree with the policies of the Israeli government, or many governments for that matter. I despise extremism in any form- be it the zeal of violent Jewish religious settlers or the leadership of Hamas.

But if David is brave enough to put his life on the line to protect his neighbors, the least I can do is to share his teachings. If I cannot prevent injustice, at least I can help keep injustice visible.

Listening to David speak, I’m reminded of the shaken feeling I had when learning about the Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who died at the hands of Hamas. Was she naïve to believe that the people she wanted to coexist with would also accept living side-by-side with her? Was her effort to befriend and support Palestinians all in vain?

And then I watched a clip of one of Vivian’s Palestinian friends, weeping on live TV. The news anchor was also weeping. What made Vivian a righteous woman has everything to do with her life and nothing to do with her death. Vivian might not have chosen how to be killed but she fully decided how to live.

Rabbi Misha wrote that his father, David, is perhaps most at peace right now while sleeping in the homes of Palestinians in the West Bank. Doing something, doing nothing. Existing there, side by side. His body, both a weapon of protest and a shield of justice. His spirit above them, preparing for a new dawn.

***

Out of the Depths

Gaza, as seen from Kfar Aza. Photo by Itamar Dotan Katz

Dear friends, 

Dear friends,

To mark 100 days of the hostages in captivity, and 100 days of death and destruction, as a means of praying for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the displacement, destruction and killing of innocents, and a safe return of the hostages, I turn to the ancient words of the poet:

מִמַּעֲמַקִּים קְרָאתִיךָ יהוה

Out of the depths I call to You

Two great minds help me make meaning of these words and those that follow in Psalm 130. 19th century German rabbi, Samson Rafael Hirsch, and contemporary (Jewish) Zen priest and translator of the Psalms, Norman Fischer. This psalm, writes Rabbi Hirsch “sings of the ways in which the Jewish spirit can rise up even from the depth of that deepest misery of all, misfortune coupled with the burden of guilt.”

This is our situation, after being brutally attacked, and having responded with an operation that took the lives of at least 23,357 people.

The poet continues:

אֲדֹנָי שִׁמְעָה בְקוֹלִי תִּהְיֶינָה אָזְנֶיךָ קַשֻּׁבוֹת לְקוֹל תַּחֲנוּנָי:

Listen to my voice

Be attentive to my supplicating voice

קוֹל תַּחֲנוּנָי, “My supplicating voice,” is not only about begging according to Hirsch. Coming from the Hebrew word חן, grace, it is the expression of a broken person’s commitment to improve: “I endeavor to make myself worthy of Your grace once more,” he translates. God hears our prayers when they are not complaints. The cries of help heard by divine ears are those in which despite our misery and despair we leave an opening to the possibility of human agency and goodness.

אִם עֲוֺנוֹת תִּשְׁמָר יָהּ אֲדֹנָי מִי יַעֲמֹד: כִּי עִמְּךָ הַסְּלִיחָה לְמַעַן תִּוָּרֵא

If you tallied errors

Who would survive the count?

But you forgive, you forbear everything

And this is the wonder and the dread

The dread is related to what Hirsch calls “the iron law of cause and effect.” We know what killing thousands children will do as well as Hamas knew what killing, kidnapping and raping brings. It should fill us with dread to the brim. But the wonder is there too in the form of the unknown, of the possibility of transformation, of the very real existence of changing one’s ways. In Hirsch’s words: “You have provided man, Your creature who is capable of sin, with the ability to rise up again at any time, and assured him of Your help and forgiveness in his striving for redemption from the bondage of sin.” There is both wonder and dread in the idea of forgiveness, in which in Hirsch’s understanding the past is wiped out, and instead we might experience “a new future, untouched by all the consequences of previous error.”

קִוִּיתִי יהוה קִוְּתָה נַפְשִׁי וְלִדְבָרוֹ הוֹחָלְתִּי: נַפְשִׁי לַאדֹנָי מִשֹּׁמְרִים לַבֹּקֶר שֹׁמְרִים לַבֹּקֶר

You are my heart’s hope, my daily hope

And my ears long to hear your words

My heart waits quiet in hope for you

More than they who watch for sunrise

Hope for a new morning

“Together with the awareness of my guilt,” Hirsch explains, “there is also the hope and trust in forgiveness.” It is hard to see forgiveness now, but we know it exists, and can appear unexpectedly as it has done countless times in each of our lives. “Even in the low state to which I have descended through my own fault, within the inalienable core of my soul there lies the force that will draw me up... a force which, in the midst of the night of my own life and from the darkness of the nights of time, will help me find the light that heralds its approaching nearness. And my own trust in the morning to be brought to pass by the coming of forgiveness is greater and surer still than that of the eye which looks eastward at night to watch for the morning.”

יַחֵל יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶל יהוה כִּי עִם יהוה הַחֶסֶד וְהַרְבֵּה עִמּוֹ פְדוּת: וְהוּא יִפְדֶּה אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל מִכֹּל עֲוֺנֹתָיו

Let those who question and struggle

Wait quiet like this for you

For with you there is durable kindess

And wholeness in abundance

And you will loose all our bindings

Surely

The word "Yisrael" means those who question and struggle. What allows us strugglers to find peace even in our darkest, most guilt-ridden hours is the knowledge that love is ever-available. Or in Hirsch’s words: “Loving-kindness is ready at all times to redeem.”

Here's Fischer's full translation:

Out of the depths I call to You

Listen to my voice

Be attentive to my supplicating voice

If you tallied errors

Who would survive the count?

But you forgive, you forbear everything

And this is the wonder and the dread

You are my heart’s hope, my daily hope

And my ears long to hear your words

My heart waits quiet in hope for you

More than they who watch for sunrise

Hope for a new morning

Let those who question and struggle

Wait quiet like this for you

For with you there is durable kindess

And wholeness in abundance

And you will loose all our bindings

Surely

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Dying With A Kiss

Dear friends, 

Moses died differently. So did Miriam and Aaron, as well as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These six all died, according to the Talmud, with a kiss from the shechinah, the gentle presence of God. Some of us are lucky enough to receive a soft departure, and some less. Dying, I learned this week can, under some circumstances, be a beautiful part of life.

Last Shabbat’s Parashah was Vayechi, “And he lived,” which describes Jacob’s death. The patriarch gathers his children. He blesses his grandchildren. He leaves instructions for his burial. He speaks to each of his sons. Then he lays down and “is gathered to his people.”

This special way of describing death implies a type of reunion with previous generations, possibly with loved ones who have passed. It suggests that dying is an experience that is decidedly not solitary. The word the Torah uses for “people” is actually plural, עמיו, “peoples,” as if to say “when you die you will not be alone.”

The Jewish prayers often associated with death imply a presence that accompanies the dead.

Psalm 121, part of the canon of Psalms in funerals and burials, puts it this way:

יְהוָ֥ה שֹׁמְרֶ֑ךָ יְהוָ֥ה צִ֝לְּךָ֗ עַל־יַ֥ד יְמִינֶֽךָ׃

YHVH is your shomer, your guardian companion, the shadow by your side.

After Jacob breathes his last, we immediately hear about a kiss:

וַיִּפֹּ֥ל יוֹסֵ֖ף עַל־פְּנֵ֣י אָבִ֑יו וַיֵּ֥בְךְּ עָלָ֖יו וַיִּשַּׁק־לֽוֹ׃

“Joseph flung himself upon his father’s face and wept over him and kissed him.”

In our tradition, that kiss is expressed in a variety of physical and spiritual ways. People sit with the body from death until burial, often reciting Psalms. The body is washed and purified, while the washers recite love poetry from the Song of Songs. Some bodies get cleansed in the Mikvah. All of this comes out of a loving concern for the soul, which is imagined to still be present in the vicinity of the body until burial.

Finally, after family and friends express their love and appreciation, the body, now dressed in soft cloth, is laid to rest, and then lovingly covered with the earth from whence it came.

The tradition is signaling to us the importance of a death of beauty. Death is not separate from life, but an integral part of it, and for some it can be a truly wonderful part, if we treat it with the right attention and care.

As I spent the last week with a dear grandparent preparing to pass, I marveled at the sweetness of a blessed departure. Family gathered around her in her final days. She blessed them all and thanked them, and they her. Once she passed, her body received the full treatment that Jews offer their dead. It was as beautiful a death as one could hope for.

This week brought into sharp relief the the brutal deaths of so many Palestinians and Israelis over the last months, many of whom did not even receive proper burial, never mind the unspeakable moment of death itself. This never-ending war in Gaza has robbed so many people of their lives. And it has robbed almost all of those who lost their lives from a loving, dignified death as well.

Let this at least remind us of the glory of a dignified passing, and help us seek the sweetness and blessings in times of transition and loss.Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Small Moral Acts

For those of you who missed it, David Shulman's talk about the situation in the West Bank during the war.

Dear friends, 

“Never underestimate the power of one small moral act.” This was one of the lines that stuck with me from my father’s talk about the West Bank on Monday. When contemplating this week’s parashah the following morning, I realized that this is a defining characteristic of Jewishness, or at least of the biblical character after whom Jews are named, Yehudah, or Judah.

The parashah begins with the greatest Hail Mary in the Bible. Joseph and his brothers have been estranged for decades, since they sold him into slavery. Now the brothers come in front of Joseph a second time to beg for food. Joseph responds by angrily imprisoning Benjamin and telling the rest of them to go back to Canaan. The relationship is on the verge of becoming irreparable. If they leave, Jacob will die of sorrow, and the brothers will forever live in animosity. It is at this moment that Judah steps into action. There is no reason for him to think that what he is about to do will help. Joseph has planted stolen goods on them and used it as proof to imprison Benjamin. He sits on his throne surrounded by advisors and guards. He has not shown openness to anything other than deciding things on his own.

However, Judah’s desperation seems to move him toward a simple, crazy act:
ויגש אליו יהודה
"And Judah approached him."

The early translators of Torah into Aramaic translate this: “And Judah came close to him.”

This act, which shouldn’t have helped, only endangering the brothers further, radically changes everything. After decades of separation, anger and guilt, this step toward him brings tears to Jospeh’s eyes, and completely shifts the relationship toward forgiveness and love.

On Tuesday evening I was invited to speak at a protest of Israelis for Peace in Columbus Circle calling for immediately returning the hostages, a bilateral ceasefire and the Netanyahu government to resign. There I described this moment in the Parashah as exactly like the political moment in Israel/Palestine. There are two options on the table: solidifying our mutual relationship of hatred, anger and guilt for another few generations, maybe for good, or attempting a small, Judean act of approach.

The Netanyahu government will not make such an approach. “Never, ever,” as my father put it on Monday. “He will fight it tooth and nail,” he said. Netanyahu’s entire political life has been designed to prevent a Palestinian state. The ethos of separation, expressed in the Joseph story by living for decades with no knowledge of each other’s lives, and on the ground with walls and fences, has failed. Crazy as it might sound to Israelis who are licking their wounds and whose distrust of Palestinians is higher than ever; and crazy as it might sound to Palestinians who are still dying every day, this, now is literally the pivotal moment.

After Judah’s approach, and his soft speaking in Joseph’s ear, Joseph sends out of the room everyone other than the brothers, and weeps loudly. He tells his brothers who he is, and they are so shocked that they move away from him. It’s then that Joseph makes a gesture like his older brother did.

גשו נא אלי

“Come close to me,” he says,  and the Torah continues, “And they came close.”

“Don’t be angry at yourselves,” he tells them, and one can hear him speaking to himself too: don’t be angry, Joseph.

It is then that Joseph suggests an end to the physical separation as well:

“Come down to me from Canaan, do not stay standing where you are. Instead, sit in the Land of Goshen and be close to me.”

This is the first of nine mentions of The Land of Goshen in the Parashah. Goshen is a kind of suburb of Cairo. It’s strange to have that many mentions of it in such a short segment. It’s as if I’d tell you to come live in Hoboken, and just keep saying Hoboken over and over and over until you start thinking I’m trying to communicate something else. Goshen comes from the same root of the word Vayigash. It can be understood less as an actual place, and more of a state of mind: It is the place of coming close, the town of pivots, the city of approaches against all odds; the land of small moral acts.

May we inhabit this land this Shabbat. May we fill the world with our small acts. May the Jews act like Judah did in front of Joseph. May the Land of Israel; of battling with humans and gods, become a land of Goshen, where massive acts of cruelty are replaced with small acts of kindness.

Happy Christmas to all of you who celebrate the birth of this true pacifist. And happy Solstice: the darkest days are behind us.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

The Pain of Inflicting Pain

Grayson expressing darkness through movement at our Windsor Terrace branch.

Dear friends, 

At our Shabbat/Hanukkah concert last week I described how my father has been making us all nervous by insisting on spending some nights in Palestinian villages in the West Bank that are threatened by extremist Jewish settlers. He has been working with Ta’ayush: Jewish Arab Partnership for Peace for decades to work against the settlers’ attempt to ethnically cleanse certain parts of Area C, which makes up much of the Palestinian Authority. Usually this involves simply being there, since a Jewish presence tends to restrain the settlers. As soon as the war began, the settlers upped their antics and as a result several of those villages were abandoned. The activists sprang into action and have been taking shifts sleeping in some of the villages to help them withstand settler violence. Spending time there is not without risk. And yet, during this war, the only times in which my father has been at peace were those nights spent taking a shift in one of the villages. 

He doesn’t explain exactly why this sense of peace manifests there, but I suspect that it has to do with what might be called “doing the right thing.” It is a way for the activists to get beyond all of the complicated questions of justice, self-defense, nationality, and touch upon a simpler driving ethic: people should be allowed to live peacefully.  

This war has created an internal rift in every Israeli, and in most Jews around the world as well. We want to live by this simpler ethic, and yet virtually all Jewish Israelis and most Jews world-wide support the war to uproot Hamas, which has thus far claimed the lives of 18,787 Gazans, most of whom were not Hamas fighters. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes for good. Millions are traumatized, trying to survive moving from place to place, living in tents that can’t stop the rain, with little to no food or clean water. No matter our reasoning, no matter whose fault we think this is, no matter our position on the war, we are living with the knowledge that we are inflicting tremendous pain on the people of Gaza. We are living the agony of that deep dissonance between who we want to be and what we are doing. This has been the story of the State of Israel from day one. 

Receiving pain is worse. But inflicting pain is also incredibly painful.  

Israeli media is incredibly sparse on news about Gazans. One of the reasons for this is that it is too painful to them to take that information in. They’re still processing the trauma of October 7th, and everyone has friends or family in the army, and they keep having to run to the bomb shelter, so taking in the details of a massive civilian catastrophe is beyond their capacities. 

When I was at synagogue in Jerusalem two weeks ago, the rabbi spoke about Jacob’s great fear before returning to the land of Israel to meet his brother Esau, whom he had wronged two decades earlier. The Torah tells us twice that Jacob was afraid: one, says Rashi, denotes his fear of being killed. The other his fear of killing. He’s equally terrified of receiving and of inflicting harm, perhaps because he knows that when you inflict harm you have two options: acknowledge what you’ve done and suffer through a painful Teshuvah, or, more likely, deny it and live a compromised, angrier life. 

This anger, fueled by the denial of harm you caused is one of the final things Jacob speaks to before he dies. On his deathbed he addresses each of his children. When he comes to Shimon and Levi, we learn that of his entire life, the one thing Jacob is most ashamed of is his sons’ “honor killing” of the sons of Shechem, when the two brothers brutally murdered an entire village in response to their sister’s rape. When explaining Jacob’s words at his deathbed, Rashi ties that vengeful act with the terrible deed of selling their brother Joseph into slavery. 

“Shimon and Levi are brothers,” says Jacob, and Rashi explains: “brothers in the plot against Shechem and against Joseph.” 

Rashi’s suggestion is that Shimon and Levi’s role in getting rid of Joseph led them, through denial and escaping accountability to an anger that drove them to commit murder. 

אָר֤וּר אַפָּם֙ כִּ֣י עָ֔ז וְעֶבְרָתָ֖ם כִּ֣י קָשָׁ֑תָה

"Cursed be their anger so fierce, 
And their wrath so relentless,"
Says their dying father. 

On Monday evening my father will be giving a talk in New York about the situation in the West Bank, and the work of Israeli-Palestinian activist groups like Ta’ayush there. You’re all invited, sign up HERE. His work there is the work of seeing with your own eyes the suffering inflicted by Jews, and acting to prevent and repair it. It is the work of beginning to address the harm that Israel is causing to Palestinians, and to our aching Jewish hearts. If we stand a chance at making it all work over there, it might begin on Monday evening. 

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

A lion Has Roared

The interview I conducted last year with Norman Lear and his daughter Maggie in honor of his reception of the Kumah; Rise Up Award for a life in the intersection of faith, art and politics.

Dear friends, 

Norman Lear passed away this week after 101 years of working to bring light and love to this world. I had the good fortune to know Norman and have occasional conversations with him, often expanding on the first thing he ever told me: “We have to take religion back in this country.” The last time we spoke he was trying to remember an old Yiddish lullaby he used to hear as a child. It felt as though he was stretching back in time to a point in his life when religion represented goodness and love, before it was taken away from him, from us, before it soured.  

His death reminded me of the greater context in which this war is taking place. It is part and parcel of the battle over the soul of Jewishness, the spirit of faith, the underlying demands, purpose and meaning of this word human beings use sometimes, God. 

On the first night of Hanukkah yesterday there were two events that portray opposing attitudes toward this question. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Maccabees March was an ultra-nationalist display of religious superiority and hate. Religious Jews likened themselves to the freedom fighters of old as they took over the Muslim quarter in that delightful way of theirs.  

When evening landed on New York a different type of Jewish gathering took place in Columbus Circle, where a few Jewish organizations partnered with Arab and Muslim friends to light candles for a ceasefire. They stressed solidarity and friendship that extends beyond the tribes. They asked people to display “ceasefire now” signs on their windows in the way that a Hannukkah Menorah is displayed on the window. In doing that, they likened themselves not to the Maccabees, but to the rabbis who molded Hanukkah into what it is today. Those rabbis, who lived a generation or two after the Maccabees made a conscious choice to change the focus of the holiday from military victory to light and miracles.  

One of the reasons the rabbis chose to do that was because the Maccabees really were not all that different from the religious fundamentalists in our world today. The Book of Maccabees describes them at war with the moderate Jews, and with any expression of solidarity with the people of the world at large, even before the cruel Greek ruler, Antiochus came into the picture.  

One fun activity is to take the Hanukkah story and suggest who in that story is the equivalent in today’s conflict. We could say that Netanyahu is Antiochus, the evil ruler who won’t allow the locals self-expression. That would put Hamas as the Maccabees, which despite the similarities doesn’t land right. We could say that Sinwar is Antiochus, refusing the Jews their right to exist as free people and the IDF are the Maccabees. But the power dynamic there seems way off.  

Instead, I’d offer the following: The Jews in the story are those who are not free. Taken hostage by the forces of division and extremism, the moderate majority are being forced to act in ways that are antithetical to who they are. Hamas and the Israeli extreme right have swept over the land with their ideology of separation, which has led us to this point. The entire world seems teetering on the verge of being engulfed in this self-centered world view.  

I believe the miracle will come. I believe the forces of dark division will be uprooted, or weakened enough that we will be able to rededicate our broken temple, to again live authentically within our vision of a shared humanity. But we will have to speak our vision loud and clear in order to succeed. 

The prophet Amos, whose poetry we find in this week’s Haftarah, was one of the greatest voices of a religion of care and human decency above all else. He ends his song with these words: 

אַרְיֵ֥ה שָׁאָ֖ג מִ֣י לֹ֣א יִירָ֑א אֲדֹנָ֤י יֱהֹוִה֙ דִּבֶּ֔ר מִ֖י לֹ֥א יִנָּבֵֽא׃ 

A lion has roared, 
Who can but fear? 
Adonai My GOD has spoken, 
Who can but speak out? 

We have heard the roar of the lion. We are feeling the tremors. We see clearly how much we despise living in a world of division. This Hanukkah let us reach back to the most basic meaning of the Hebrew word Hanukkah: dedication. Let us dedicate ourselves to the fight for our freedom from religious zealotry in all its forms. And let us answer the divine command: to speak into existence a world of friendship. May we live to see the dedication of the temple of our shared humanity in the holy city of Jerusalem. 

I hope you can join us for Andalusian Lights, our Arab-Jewish concert for Hanukkah this evening. And I hope you can take a few minutes to listen to Norman Lear in the interview above share stories of fighting antisemitism in WWII, and laying out a vision of a faith world we can all get behind and uphold.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Transforming War into Bread

Yaakov Godo, (standing to the left) whose son Tom was murdered on 10/7 in The Families' Tent. Bereaved family members have vowed to remain in the tent in front of the Knesset until the Netanyahu government falls.

Dear friends, 

The Hebrew word for word for war, Milchamah, comes from Lechem, bread. A war might front as military engagement, but it manifests in food, education, housing, social services and family. Despite the ceasefire, I arrived on Monday to a country at war. Even though the devastation here is minor next to that in Gaza, being here has reminded me of the upside down day to day reality and psyche of being at war. Before we disembarked, the pilot added a prayer for the release of the hostages. Then we walked by the signs pointing to the airport bomb shelter, and then the pictures of dozens of hostages, some of whom were freed this week, thank God.

Yesterday my brothers and I joined twenty other volunteers in sorting cabbages and working in the broccoli fields of Nir Mosheh, one of the villages just around Gaza. Most of the agriculture of the country comes from this area, but because of the war they now have almost no workers. Some were murdered on 10/7, others kidnapped. The Palestinian workers who used to come in from Gaza to work the fields will probably never come back. The Thai government flew back all of its citizens that had come to Israel to work the fields. So in order to save the crops, hundreds of Israelis are volunteering daily as they look at the houses where Hamas terrorists roamed and murdered, and at the Gaza strip beyond the hills to the east, where thousands have already been killed.

"Were they here," I asked the Yemenite farmer who gave us our assignments. "They killed my brother." "And your parents, are they okay?" "My parents are finished," by which he meant alive.

When we arrived back at my brother's place in the Jerusalem Hills a sign is plastered on the wall with the various places you can hide in the house and nearby in case of a siren. Every evening the family gathers to light a candle for the hostages, and everyone on the land who needs light. Sitting around that evening waiting for news about the hostages released that day, my sister in law fretted over the daily lives of the Palestinians she works with but hasn't seen since the war began. "The electrician, the contractor, the carpenter, all of their work is here. They must have no money at all now," she fretted.

My friends from high school are in some alternate reality. One, whose wife is French, took the four kids and flew back to France five weeks ago. He hasn't seen them yet. Another is in the Reserves and his wife is taking care of the children so she can only work limited hours at her job running a bank. Another friend of mine's mother and sister who live up by the Lebanese border were evacuated and told they shouldn't expect to return home before March at the earliest. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fill the hotels all over the country.

Kids here are experiencing serious disruptions, fears and difficult information to process. My seven year old nephew needs his mother more these days, with the knowledge of the kidnappings that can't be escaped since their faces are posted on walls everywhere you go. My friend's teenage daughter kept running to the safe room whenever she heard a loud noise. Like everyone else here, she knows about the widespread rape and other sex crimes that occurred all over on that terrible day. The kids all describe the frightening booms of the bombs falling in Gaza, which they can hear all the way to the Jerusalem Hills. And this, of course is nothing next to the reports of trauma among kids in Gaza sleeping in tents, not knowing what's left of their homes, and sometimes of their families. There are many new orphans on this land.

One of the scariest things for me on this trip was the amount of civilians with rifles I see on the streets, and the fact that most of them walk around with the magazine inserted. When I was a soldier in Southern Lebanon I was strictly forbidden to walk around with the magazine inserted into my rifle. Now that Israel's criminal racist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir has handed out thousands of (American) rifles to Jews, and the level of fear has sky-rocketed, those precautions have been abandoned. They will be hard to roll back. The extreme right has been well armed. My 18 year old nephew put it this way: "We have two options: ongoing war with the Palestinians, or civil war." If the country tries to reach a peace agreement, the Israeli right will explode against the center, and the Palestinian right will explode against theirs.

Believe it or not, despite all of this several people have told me that the war has been "a special time." They describe care and kinship they haven't felt in years. A deep shared sadness, and a a renewed belief in the people of this country. During the ceasefire, (which I pray and hope will resume within a day or two), every evening the entire country would await anxiously for images of the returned hostages. Every person here at around 9 or 10pm sheds tears watching the reunions. I've never experienced such an anguished shared joy on a daily basis.

When I got off of the plane my father took me straight to the Knesset to what's called The Families' Tent. Started by Ya'akov Godo, whose son, Tom was murdered on the Seventh, several bereaved parents, children and grandchildren have vowed to stay in the tent in front of the Knesset until this government falls. One of the people who started the initiative with Godo is David Agmon, a former IDF general who then went on to become Netanyahu's chief of staff in the Nineties. "After three months I told him you don't need a chief of staff, you need to replace yourself, and walked away." On the Seventh, and the following week, Agmon, who's 76 was down south battling Hamas terrorists out of Israeli towns. When the government wouldn't let him help the army any longer (because of his loud anti-Netanyahu position) he joined with Godo to start the Families Tent. So far these two old men have been sleeping in that tent for almost four weeks.

The incredible thing about the brave women and men living in this tent is their forward looking attitude. These are some of the most hopeful people you can meet anywhere, broken though they are by the deaths of their family members. Several of them spoke at today's Kabbalat Shabbat. They described the deaths of their sons, daughters and grandparents. They cried in front of us. They described the police tearing down their signs about the murder of their loved ones, which made government officials uncomfortable. They listed their indictments of the government that failed so completely and has yet to take even the faintest shred of responsibility. And they talked about the future that the country will build once Netanyahu and his despicable government is removed.

This future is inextricably linked with a word that has become something of a joke here: Shalom. The singer Achinoam Nini said at Kabbalat Shabbat that this crisis is so deep that it can put us back onto the road toward "her favorite word: Shalom." She dedicated her song to peace activist Vivian Silver. Another teenager who spoke promised to continue the work toward peace that her murdered grandmother began. One of the signs there read: "There is no such thing as a military victory."

The victory will come when the Milchamah, that massive disruption to food, housing and everything in life that is regular and good, becomes Lechem, bread that people share. No more war. No more extremism. No more senseless violence. No more hatred. Just peace. Let us pray that Achinoam Nini is right. And let us work to make the miracle of the transformation of war into bread come true.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

As I Write

Dear friends, 

As I write, for the seventh Friday in a row, families of hostages and their many supporters are gathered in front of the Tel Aviv Museum for Kabbalat Shabbat. This is the first week in which there are smiles on some of their faces.

One verse in this week’s parashah jumps out of the pages of Genesis: ושבתי בשלום אל בית אבי, “I shall return safely to my father’s home.” For the past 72 hours I can’t stop hearing the voice of an Israeli father of two young children who were kidnapped. He was asked what he is looking forward to. “Smelling them,” he answered, “holding them and smelling the scent of their hair.”

As I wrote those last words an update popped up on my screen: “The hostages are in the hands of the Red Cross.” Twelve Thai hostages have already been released. Thirty-nine young Palestinians have been transferred to the place from which they will be released back to their families. Many children are about to come home.

This year’s holiday offered a tremendous, heavy gratitude. Thank God the fighting has paused. Thank God the kids and their mothers are coming home. But the return of hostages is not likely to produce scenes of jubilation. That same father continued to speak aloud his fears of finding a dead look in his children’s eyes. There will be a lot of work for the released hostages and their families, and for us all. Most of the hostages will remain in what’s left of Gaza. And we will remain with the unbelievable destruction that we all caused. A staggering 17,000 people lost their lives in this war so far. What do we do with our heavy gratitude?

The most expounded upon word in the parashah is a small one: אם, “if.”

“If God remains with me," Jacob says, "if God protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father’s house—YHVH shall be my God.”

Jacob has just woken up from an incredible dream. God appeared to him standing over a ladder to the heavens and spoke words of a solemn promise to protect him wherever he goes, and to bring him back safely to his homeland. When he awakes, Jacob realizes the incredible thing that just happened to him. "This place is frightening: It's where God resides, and where we can enter heaven.”

The place of possibility, Jacob tells us, is a terrifying place.

It is here, in this gateway to the heavens, in which I believe we are currently standing, that he utters his conditional oath, beginning with that little word אם, “if.”

How could Jacob use that word when God just promised him that He will be with him, ask the rabbis? If...THEN YHVH will be my God?! How could he have such little faith at such a moment of confirmation? Answer the rabbis: “lest the sin cause the abrogation of the promises.” It was not God who Jacob had little faith in, says Nachmanides, but himself. The obstacles ahead of him seem too great. Keeping up hope and faith and positivity in a world that sends the opposite signs is too hard. Time changes the way we ourselves see things. So how could I commit today to working toward peace in ten years? How could I commit myself to the justice, mercy and love that our God embodies, when I don’t know what will happen to me? God may be with me as God promises, but will I have the strength to be with God?

God’s promise to us is to always be with us. One of the best moments of my week was when I sang words from Isaiah with the students and parents of our Hebrew school. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore.” I described to them the geopolitical situation Isaiah lived in, with ongoing wars between Judea and Israel, between Assyria and every other nation, between the two great superpowers, Egypt and Assyria. One student raised his hand and said: “It’s the same as this war. I attack you and you attack me back and I attack you back and you attack me back.” Another said: “It’s like our whole world, with wars in Ukraine and Russia, and the Middle East and other places.” This understanding that kids have, and that Isaiah had, about the futility of war and the obvious possibility of putting down arms is always with us. This is the divine promise.

Jacob concludes his vow like this:

וְהָאֶ֣בֶן הַזֹּ֗את אֲשֶׁר־שַׂ֙מְתִּי֙ מַצֵּבָ֔ה יִהְיֶ֖ה בֵּ֣ית אֱלֹהִ֑ים וְכֹל֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תִּתֶּן־לִ֔י עַשֵּׂ֖ר אֲעַשְּׂרֶ֥נּוּ לָֽךְ

"And this stone, which I have set up as an altar, shall be God’s abode; and of all that You give me, I will give you ten times over.”

Jacob promises to translate his gratitude into giving. Normally translated as “I will give you 10%” or “I will give you a tithe,” the Hebrew can easily be understood as giving "ten times over." Today, as I write and receive updates about people coming to safety, I invite you to commit yourself to Jacob’s promise: To do our best to remember the presence of God as expressed in our children’s innate understanding of the stupidity of war and the simplicity of peace, even as reality challenges our attempts to do so. And to begin the process of giving ten times over what we have received now. If we start now, we may yet fulfill our promise, and live to see God fulfill Hers.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Continuing Her Way

Dear friends, 

Late one night, Rabbi Israel Salanter walked past the rickety shack of an old shoemaker. The rabbi noticed that, despite the late hour, the man was still working by the light of a dying candle. 

“Why are you still working?” asked the rabbi. “It is very late and soon that candle will go out.” 

The shoemaker replied: “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to make repairs.” 

The rabbi went out into the street and yelled out over and over: “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to make repairs!” 

This is one of the many stories shared at the funeral of Canadian Israeli peacemaker and activist, Vivian Silver, who was murdered on October 7th in her home in Kibbutz Be’eri.  
Vivian’s funeral itself, which you can watch HERE was such a candle. It was filled with a profound sentiment of continuing her work, and spreading her ideas far and wide, even as we mourn the death of the Tzadeket, or righteous woman that she was.  

Her son, Yonatan said in recent interviews that “I now have her optimism. It feels like a relay race; she passed something onto me.” 

Like any funeral, this one reminds us of the tremendous devastation of the loss of a life. Her children spoke. Her brother. Her friends. That simplicity echoed the clarity of her words from 2018 : “Enough! We cannot continue without a diplomatic horizon. We cannot accept as routine operations and wars that bring only killing, destruction and pain.” 

It was especially moving to hear Vivian’s Palestinian friends and partners commit themselves to continue her path with even greater urgency. Some were from the organization she co-founded, Women Wage Peace. Others were friends from neighboring Palestinian villages that Vivian worked to support. One of the women, Radir Hani said through her tears: “Vivian, I want you to know that Hamas did not murder your vision. It is impossible to kill compassion, humanness, solidarity, the striving toward a safe life.”  

And it was incredible to hear this extraordinary woman’s life story, coming from Winnipeg to New York to Kibbutz Gezer to Kibbutz Be’eri, tirelessly working to promote women’s equality, human equality and friendship.  

Often our instinct is to shy away from difficulty, from hard conversations, from unpopular positions. If we are to take up the mantle of a person like Vivian we would do the opposite. This is a woman who lived in the most dangerous part of one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The safe room in her house was well used. She spoke of the need for peace out of a place of danger and intimacy with the problems the lack of peace deepened and produced.  

Vivian came to Israel out of a deep belief in Zionism, which like many Israeli humanists was seriously challenged over the decades of occupation and political inaction. The full-throated Zionism that led her to make Aliyah in the Seventies was replaced with what she called Conditional Zionism. “I believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state, as long as we give the same right to the Palestinian people,” she said. If Zionism necessitates subjugation, oppression and any form of inequality, Vivian tells us, she - who devoted her life to it - was not interested in it. I wonder whether she believed that out of a moral standpoint or a practical one. Did she say that because her Jewish and humanist values demanded that, or simply because she saw clearly that a Zionism that prevents Palestinian freedom and dignity does not allow Jews to live there safely? Probably both. 

This terrible tragedy, which goes along with so many other tragic deaths and kidnappings of peace activists on both sides of the fence separating Gaza and Israel, calls on us to dive into the fray. I thought of Vivian during my trip to DC this week to march among hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom didn’t seem to share my views. I took courage from her as I held up my double sided sign: "End the cycle of violence" on one side, "The occupation is killing us all" on the other. I thought of her when I heard a report from a friend from the ceasefire march in Brooklyn last week, who said she felt comfortable speaking Hebrew in the presence of the mostly Arab marchers. Despite fearing she would be in a crowd of people who see her as the enemy, she went to stand for what she believed in. If we want to find peace between Jews of different opinions, between Jews and non-Jews here in the US, which we know has to do with what happens in Israel/Palestine, and even more so if we want to move toward peace in the Holy Land, we have to engage. We have to suffer discomfort. We have to imagine peace and enact it in our circles. 

“This could be such a haven to both of our people here,” Vivian said recently, “I know what life could be like if we put down our arms.” Revenge, in the case of Vivian Silver looks like giving our all for the sake of peace. Let’s keep that candle burning.

Please join us for a virtual Shabbat gathering this evening at 6:30pm with meditation led by Michael Posnick and music by Ellen Gould.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Eyes on the East

"With love as deep as the colors of Jerusalem" 
A Mizrach by Eileen Shulman

Dear friends, 

A Mizrach is traditional Jewish art piece that is placed on the eastern wall of the house. It includes the Hebrew word, Mizrach, meaning east, meaning the Land of Israel, meaning the site of holiness, meaning the place of truth, meaning the way forward. Staring at the one my mother painted in her home in Jerusalem and now lives on my wall, I found some focus this week.

The Shloshim has passed, the thirty-day mark since the horrors began. We’ve been in a cloud of emotions and confusion that has rocked our understanding and shifted our perspectives. And then, on Wednesday evening, as I listened to Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green of Standing Together speak in the Upper West Side, the haze seemed to scatter. “Stand up,” I heard them echo Lekha Dodi, “step out of the chaos.”

Many of us have been caught in confusion and pain that has left us frozen. We were so shaken that we questioned basic values that guide us. Unsure what to call for, we succumbed to the fury around us. I found myself envious of those who could clearly take a stand, no matter on which side, simply because they could put their emotions into action. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t find a single protest I felt comfortable going to. Free Palestine meant more than those words. Stand with Israel meant more than just that. Cease Fire came with “Genocide,” often with “River to the Sea,” sometimes with “By Any Means.” Release the Hostages came with a sea of flags, whose representatives had just spoken about devastating Gaza for generations, and then cut off basic supplies and destroyed tens of thousands of innocent lives. My entire adult life I have been fighting to end the occupation so that Jews can continue to live in the Land of Israel, and Palestinians can be free. Suddenly I couldn’t comfortably stand with either side. Justice, no matter whose, felt off the mark of truth.

The trickiest thing about being far away is that you can lose sight of the reality on the ground over there. You can stop looking for a solution and focus instead on some perfect notion of justice. Whether or not people have a right to act in one way or another is irrelevant to whether that same act is constructive or not. That should be our measure.

On Wednesday night a Palestinian woman and an Israeli man took the stage to state a simple truth: neither of them is ever leaving. No one is going anywhere. It is from that truth that I begin to find clarity, and from there that I stand up to act. (please watch the recording of that extraordinary event HERE. It gets going at minute 22.)

I do not act out of an expectation that it will “work.” I do not act out of an expectation that I will see peace tomorrow, or this year, or this decade, or even in my lifetime. Jews have been taught not to expect peace since the day we came into being. Instead, we do it Lishmah, for its own sake. When Sally and Alon-Lee speak about their work of “choosing a shared future,” they know the tremendous odds against them. They pay real prices for it, especially during these times. Palestinian Israelis, including very prominent ones are currently in Israeli jails simply for joining a demonstration against a war in which their family members are being killed in great numbers. Jewish Israelis are also in jail for expressions of solidarity and concern that this operation will come back to haunt them. But the activists of Standing Together and Spirit of the Galilee and Combatants for Peace and The Bereaved Parents Circle and Ta’ayush and other joint Jewish-Arab movements are steadied by the simple fact that no one is going anywhere, and this leaves everyone there with a simple choice between never-ending war, or building a shared future.

Sally and Alon Lee were asked what we in the US can do to help. Alon gave a four-point answer:

Support the movement financially.

Realize our influence in this moment. Blinken sits in on meetings with Israel’s war cabinet. He responds to our calls. Write to your reps, not with general heartbreak or concern but with clear demands. Alon didn’t outline these, and each of us can come up with our own, but a few obvious ones are: Release the hostages. Humanitarian pause. Humanitarian corridor. Basic supplies to Gazans. Stop handing out rifles to extremist settlers. Protect Palestinians in the West Bank from settler attacks. Freedom of dissent in Israel. A far more effective strategy to protect civilian lives in Gaza.

Realize our influence toward a solution to the conflict. Is there anyone who still thinks the status quo can hold? The occupation needs to end. The Hamas-Bibi era has to pass. You think it’s hopeless? Do it anyways. Understand the physical danger that hopelessness brings and step out of it. Hopelessness is what both Netanyahu and Hamas have sold these last several decades. Reject it. It was Carter who forced a right-wing Israeli leader to make peace with his sworn enemy. It can happen again.

Create a less toxic conversation here. The high fumes that we have witnessed in this country burn a palpable effect on the state of affairs in Israel/Palestine. Work peace into your conversations and expressions here. Check the way you speak, and get less offended and enraged, especially when you’re in conversation with Palestinians and Israelis. When, for example, a Palestinian says From the River to the Sea, remember that the very same language exists in certain Israeli circles (such as the founding charter of the country’s governing party.) When an Israeli says “I don’t care about Palestinian deaths,” imagine how you would feel if you lived there, where everyone in the country knows people who were murdered or kidnapped or both. Remember the videos these are seeing, and the ones these are seeing.

There is no doubt that we have our own problems over here in America, many of which have been brought to light by this war. But if we are going to be helpful to Israelis, and that has been one of the hardest elements of the experience for many of us, we have to keep our eyes on the Mizrach. There is a goal that we are striving for, which necessarily involves a shared future for Palestinians and Israelis. Let us begin working toward that now. Let us avoid language that erases one side. Let us resist division here so they can unite there. Let us amplify the voices of unity and help them build a future out of broken buildings and hollow hearts. To borrow a phrase from Netanyahu: this will be long and difficult.

My father has been miserable these days because since October 7th around twenty of the Palestinian villages in the West Bank that he’s been working to protect from extremist settlers have succumbed to their threats and been abandoned. The only times he is not entirely miserable about it is when he is in a Palestinian village under threat supporting them. Acting Lishmah, for its own sake has no rewards other than that fleeting feeling that you are doing the right thing. Does anything matter more?

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Humility of the Heart

Dear friends, 

One of the infuriating aspects of this war has been the decline of humility. So many people keep telling so many others their unshakeable opinions, often with a moral judgement of anyone who doesn’t hold their opinion. Even people essentially on the same side of the argument are expressing themselves toward one another in confrontational ways, which reveal a self-assuredness that leans dangerously close to arrogance. When Hamas officials were asked why they attacked in the first place, one of the first words they used was arrogance. Whether we believe them or not, humiliation and arrogance are two of the instigators and driving forces of this war. They create conflict, tension and weak thinking, and part of our work should be to tame those feelings, and instead work toward one of the great values of all religions, humility.

In the 13th century in Egypt lived the only rabbi I know of who earned himself the nickname “The Sufi.” Clearly, Rabbi Avraham Ben HaRambam had strong relationships with the Muslim thinkers around him. Being Maimonides’ son, he had tremendous knowledge of Judaism as well. In his masterpiece Hamaspik Le’ovdey Hashem, The Guide to Serving God, Rabbi Avraham devotes a long chapter to the Hebrew word Anavah, humility. Alongside countless examples of the humility of the ancestors and the prophets in the form of verses from scripture, we find one verse that is quoted seven times in the chapter, and which Rabbi Avraham uses to illustrate the single greatest expression of humility in scripture.

Attributed to King David, a man whose life was jam-packed with enemies, betrayals, fearful flight and humiliating defeats, alongside moments of great triumph, the verse comes from one of David’s highest expressions of being hated, Psalm 109. This bitter poem, in which he indulges in imagining all the horrible things people are saying about him, portrays David in a position that feels familiar nowadays. Despite his never-ending attempts to stand for love, not hate, for goodness in the face of evil, for peace and camaraderie in a time of division, he feels perceived as exactly the opposite:

I pour out love

But they see destruction

They’ve turned me into the devil

Treat me like a demon,

Repay good with evil

My kindness with hate

In these moments, David teaches, we have a choice between despair and hope.

What’s left to do, he asks. Comes the answer:

I am a prayer.

How can we retain that prayerful position? How might we maintain the goodness we feel is driving us, and not add more violence into the world?

Rabbi Avraham talks of two types of humility. External humility is easier. You could even fake it, or train yourself simply to think before you act by pausing, imagining the recipient of your communication, or remaining silent (often the best cure). But the real prize is the far more difficult and remote Anavah Pnimit, internal humility. This is the perfect honesty of a person who knows their faults, gets complexity, and does not demand that reality conform to their wishes, but bows down in the face of a painful impossibility.

לבי חלל בקרבי, says the poet, my heart is hollow within me.

This is the verse that I’ve been walking around with this past week as I watch the scenes of destruction and death from Gaza, the images of beautiful young men who have fallen in battle, pictures of people taking cover during a funeral as the entire world fills with sharp, nasty noise.

The second word in the phrase, חלל, can be understood in a variety of ways. In certain contexts it means a soldier killed in battle, in others a desecration or an injury, and often it means an emptying out, or simply a vast open space.

This verse fragment is, to Rabbi Avraham, the greatest example of internal humility. When my heart is a dead soldier I slow down. I may not even speak. I can't see myself as greater, stronger or smarter than others. When my heart is an empty space within me, it is connected to the vastness of space beyond, where opinions become mute. Our hearts, David tells us, are specific to us. They speak to us out of the integrity in our core. When they carry that non-judgmental space of loss, and the connection to the never-ending, they keep us from lashing out violently against other hearts, but instead, perhaps, they might bring one heart closer to another.

Let us be humble this week, and hope that our humility shields us from participating in the spiraling hatred.

For Adonai stands with him who has been drained of hope,

Protecting him

From the self-appointed

Judges of the earth.

Here is the full Psalm in a translation I made back in the (good old?) twenty-teens:

Psalm 109 / What’s Left to Do?

(For the Conductor

A song by David)

God of my psalm,

It’s time for you to speak up.

Stop answering my songs with whispers

No one hears.

Their mouths have opened over me.

Their wicked thoughts

Their deceitful words

Their tongues twisting lies toward me

Hatred surrounds me

A war that need not be.

I pour out love

But they see destruction

They’ve turned me into the devil

Treat me like a demon,

Repay good with evil

My kindness with hate

What’s left to do?

I am a prayer.

“Place some villain over him

Let Satan stand to his right.

Judge him to be wicked

See his prayer as sin.

Shorten his days

Make his business fail.

Orphan his children

Widow his wife.

May his sons and daughters be forever in motion,

Begging for food, searching for meaning among the ruins of their lives.

He always loved the curse, so give him what he likes.

Now let him wear his curse like a well-tailored suit

Let it constantly hold his waist tight like a belt

Let him be Infested with it

Let it sink into his belly with the water he drinks

Let it settle into his bones with the oil he consumes.”

That is what those who call me their adversary ask of God

Them, who advocate against my very soul.

What’s left to do?

I am a prayer.

And you, Adonai, my Master

Use me as your agent

Let me do your work here

in this little corner

Where goodness and kindness

Shade over me,

All comes from you.

I am poor

I am alone

My heart is hollow within me.

I walk around like a lengthening shadow

Thrown by the winds like a locust

My knees fail

I have no appetite

I am skin and bones,

A disgrace

People see me and shake their heads in woe.

What’s left to do?

I am a prayer.

Help me, Adonai

Love me.

Be kind, my God.

That will bring me back.

Their little curses are nothing

Your blessing is everything

Show them your hand

So that they understand.

Then they will stand corrected,

Acknowledge their wrongs,

Wipe their lips dry with shame,

Cover their faces in embarrassment,

Hide behind a coat of regret.

And your servant will be at peace.

Speak thanks, my mouth,

Speak thanks again

In private and among multitudes sing praise.

For Adonai stands with she who has been drained of hope,

Protecting her

From the self-appointed

Judges of the earth.

What’s left to do?

I am a prayer.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Fear and Self-Righteousness

Dear friends, 

My favorite moment at our Shabbat two weeks ago, which fell on World Jihad Day, was when I asked whether people were scared to come, and Ricky, a community elder, with no hesitation yelled out “No!” About half of the crowd had their hands raised, admitting they came despite their fears. Fear showed itself to be a prominent feature of this war from the very beginning. While Arab Americans who have spoken their opinions in public have lost their jobs, Jewish students in Cooper Union were closed into the library with a mob of anti-Zionists banging on the windows. And of course, six-year-old Wadia Al Fayoum z”l who was murdered in Illinois (police is saying that it appears as though the murder of Samantha Wohl in Detroit last week “had nothing to do with anti-Semitism"). Whether you’re Jewish or Arab in America you are probably experiencing at least a minimal level of fear.

What does that do to us?

Not only does it make us fidgety, nervous and reactive, it also makes us speak and behave in ways that we normally wouldn’t. The national traumas have risen to the front level of our hearts. These fears often translate into justification of actions we would normally consider wrong.

What I’m hearing around me is primarily talk of right and wrong. Words like justice and injustice fill the stratosphere. “kidnapping children is a justified means of resistance.” “Killing 750 people in one night is justified in order to protect our people against further attacks.” These are very common attitudes among people who normally abhor hurting innocents.

A lot of the people I speak with in Israel and Palestine are not talking about justice. They don’t claim to be morally right, nor do they categorically call the everyone on the other side wrong. Most of my Israeli friends even admit that if they were Palestinian they would likely resist in some way. And many of the Palestinian voices I hear understand the Israeli need for self-defense. Even if they both reject the methods the other side is currently using, they understand this not as a battle between right and wrong, but simply a battle for survival. The terms right and wrong are relevant to the war of opinions, when Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for their physical lives, and my guess is that their leaders would behave in similar ways whether they thought they were in the right or not.

One thing I learned growing up in Israel is that there is a huge difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. Righteousness is an attitude that we hold easily when we don’t feel like we’re under attack. Self-righteousness is what happens to us when we act against the righteousness in our core, because we feel we have no choice. In an anguished act, we attempt to explain ourselves to ourselves. When our inner core, who knows full well that there is no just way to kill a child rejects our excuses we spiral off loudly into the world. It’s an expression of deep failure, of a terrible disappointment with the world, with God, with ourselves.

This has been the story of this conflict from the very beginning. Two nations, both of whom are filled to the brim with life-loving righteous people, are pushed to acts of destruction, inhumanity and violation of their core instincts for the sake of their physical survival. Biden spoke of Golda Meir’s idea of the Israeli secret weapon: “We have no place else to go.” That’s true for Israelis, and true in a much more concrete way for Gazans.

We can of course argue over the limits of right and wrong, and about how helpful or destructive these self-righteous acts of hideousness are. But I’d like to suggest what to me is a more constructive approach for those of us here in the diaspora.

Traditionally, diaspora communities play the role of cheerleaders for their home nations. As a gross generalization, Jews have gone to pro-Israel rallies and Arabs to pro-Palestine rallies. This is directly connected to the fear for our people over there. But we have a responsibility to remember that whatever fear we may be experiencing – real though it may be – is nothing in comparison to that of escaping bombing, shooting, kidnapping and murder over there.

Diaspora communities in times of war could be playing a different role. We could be using our insider perspective not to yell and scream but to educate those around us who don’t understand what antisemitism is, what the occupation is, what the State of Israel has meant to Jewish people, and what the Palestinian experience has been in the last century. And we could be using our outsider perspective to restrain our own communities back home, who are acting out of fear for their lives. Since co-existence between Jews and Arabs is easier far away from Israel/Palestine, we could be offering examples of how to do that. We could be reminding everyone back home of the righteousness in their core. We could be talking about what comes after this war, which might yet make some of the blood and tears come to something positive.

I’m not saying this is easy. It’s not. But as we ask ourselves: what is our task? Let us not forget the core tenets of our faith, the humanity that bursts forth out of the commandment “Do not murder.” I think that even those of us who stand in complete support of Israel could be doing it out of an attempt to preserve not only the physical survival of our people, but its ethical core. And those of us who are in complete opposition to Israel’s actions could be doing it with compassion for those soldiers risking their lives for their community’s survival.

This all takes a tremendous degree of humility and expansiveness, but if we can’t hold multiple perspectives we are failing our tradition and failing ourselves. If 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz can shake the hand of her Hamas captor as he sends her back home, we here can certainly work toward a less inflammatory conversation in the US.

In this week’s Haftarah we again hear words of consolation and encouragement from the prophet Isaiah:

הַחֲרִ֤ישׁוּ אֵלַי֙ אִיִּ֔ים וּלְאֻמִּ֖ים יַחֲלִ֣יפוּ כֹ֑חַ יִגְּשׁוּ֙ אָ֣ז יְדַבֵּ֔רוּ יַחְדָּ֖ו לַמִּשְׁפָּ֥ט נִקְרָֽבָה׃

Stand silent before Me, you islands

So nations can renew their strength.

First, approach. Then, speak.

Then we might come close to one another,

And move together toward a conversation.

Isaiah offers us a beautiful challenge: Let us not be islands yelling out our self-righteous noise, but humble, forward-looking communal messengers of hope.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

MUSIC: About Two Months

“In the fall of 2022, I began recording daily piano improvisations in an attempt to differentiate the moods of the passing days. 

This routine helped me let go of preciousness, leading to some quiet observations. 

Certain pieces emerged in a more structured form and found their way into this album - About Two Months. “

Yonatan Gutfeld, Music Director.

Flattening Gaza

Dear friends, 

In December 1941 a gutsy American daughter of a German rabbi showed up in Times Square to protest against the US joining World War II. Her name was Judith Malina, and about sixty years later I found myself with her protesting against the War in Iraq. Despite my decade making theater with Judith and the Living Theatre I could never bring myself to Judith’s committed Pacifism. This week I find myself asking whether she was wrong to protest in 41’. In these miserable wars between nation states the only position worth attaching yourself to completely is Judith’s. So no, she wasn’t wrong. I also ask myself whether she was right to protest as she did in 41’. Again, I come up with that same answer, no she wasn’t right. We’d probably all be dead had the US not joined the war.

Clarity, it strikes me this week, is an unbelievable blend of truth and falsehood. It’s what politicians rely on, reducing reality into actionable items. Thank God I’m not one of them. I find myself simultaneously suspicious and admiring of those able to take a clear stand in this moment. The people I surround myself with are ones who tend to be attuned to the complex truths around them, who see depth and richness in the multiplicity of subjective truths out there and inside them. To “flatten Gaza,” as the Israeli leadership has vowed to do, is not just physical. It’s happening in the realm of ideas. Anyone, for example who simply says “they had it coming,” about either side is ignoring the fact that we are talking about real people, who are all complex, scarred and beautiful.

To me, this week, with all of its destruction has made any clear position of pro or against seem both admirable and flat. And yet one must take a stand.

How do we do that?

A few years ago, my father was debating whether he could accept Israel’s highest honor, the Israel Prize. He abhors the cruelty of the state and spends much of his time working to defend Palestinians from the man who was going to hand him the prize in a glitzy event, PM Netanyahu. He consulted his sons. I answered him with a question: what does your god tell you to do?

This is the question I ask myself these days, and a question you might ask yourself too. There is something unique about each one of us, and a voice there at our core speaking clearly. It may send you out into the streets with an Israeli flag and it may send you to congress with a call to "stop the genocide," as has become one of the slogans some are using in this war. It’s the voice Judith Malina heard, which for her was absolutely true. This is a voice that contains all the truths buzzing around inside of you, and then tells you where you stand.

One thing I’ve managed to hear from this voice this week is that there is no justification for killing civilians. Another is not about Gaza. Since last Saturday over 60 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, many of them murdered in cold blood by extremist Jewish settlers. There are some videos of these killings online that look a lot like the Hamas ones from last Saturday. The settlers are really running wild. Several Palestinian villages have been abandoned this week due to settler violence. Perhaps if we spread the word about this unchecked violence we can play a part in stopping it.

Sometimes we can hear this voice in the words of our prophets. This week’s Haftarah gives us Isaiah’s words to the Jews who had just suffered the disaster of being beaten in war and exiled. In this moment of terror and loss, when the natural instinct is to close ranks and look inward, he offers the opposite advice:

הַרְחִ֣יבִי׀ מְק֣וֹם אָהֳלֵ֗ךְ וִירִיע֧וֹת מִשְׁכְּנוֹתַ֛יִךְ יַטּ֖וּ אַל־תַּחְשֹׂ֑כִי הַאֲרִ֙יכִי֙ מֵֽיתָרַ֔יִךְ וִיתֵדֹתַ֖יִךְ חַזֵּֽקִי׃

“Widen the space of your tent,

stretch your tent curtains wide,

do not hold back;

lengthen your cords,

strengthen your stakes.”

Specifically in times of grief and conflict we are invited to widen our tent, to think broader, to include and invite others, and to remember there is a future to be built.

רַחֲקִ֤י מֵעֹ֙שֶׁק֙ כִּי־לֹ֣א תִירָ֔אִי וּמִ֨מְּחִתָּ֔ה כִּ֥י לֹֽא־תִקְרַ֖ב אֵלָֽיִךְ׃

“Distance yourself from oppression,” the prophet continues, “then you won’t be afraid; brokenness and terror will not come near you."

As nonsensical as it sounds, the building of the future starts now, and begins with hearing that still, thin sound of our inner truth.

בִּצְדָקָ֖ה תִּכּוֹנָ֑נִי, says the prophet: you will build yourself up through righteousness. Whether she was right or wrong or both, Judith Malina knew how to hear her godly inner voice that cuts through time and space, and so must we.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Full (and Wanting More)

Dear friends, 

Rabbi Abby was dancing in the corner. Frank was showering notes on the heavens with his trumpet. The band banging away a Moroccan rhythm. Not a face to be found in the house without a big smile. The emergence of an ecstatic happiness in the final minutes of the fast. When the gates close in such celebration you know the God we created and invoked is smiling and hopping with us.

I emerge from these High Holidays full: of gratitude to all of you for bringing your best, honest selves; of gratitude to the many community members who helped with every aspect of these special days; of so many moments in which the inner tides rose to the surface; of deep thoughts and feelings from the incredible speakers; of melodies offered by our incredible musical team; of pride in the beautiful young people who led prayers (ATHENA!!!!) and chanted Torah (ADELINE WOW!!!!); of amazement at the ease and beauty of a new collaboration with Daphna and Beineinu; of a building sense of love and community among us; of a deeply rewarding sense that Teshuvah happened this year at The New Shul.

I was especially moved by so many of you who were moved into action on the Day of Atonement. I heard about people calling old friends to smooth out a painful problem, of people reaching out to family members to reconnect or re-establish roots, of sincere apologies between community members. I also heard from several of you who have found ways to improvise in moments of difficulty. I'm sure those of us with basements will need that improvisation today....

Sukkot, which begins this evening is the holiday of joy and impermanence. I don't remember another year in which I felt so ready to embrace those two, so full of a non-verbal understanding of the connection between them, so ready to sit in the Sukkah.

One of my takeaways from these holidays is that I want more of what went down at VCS and Brooklyn Bridge Park. I want to keep singing with you guys, making ritual happen, finding the newness in the ancient and the ancient in the new. I want more music in my life. A week from today we're going to gather on a Greenwich Village rooftop for a Shabbat/Sukkot concert. Our own Dana Herz, who filled the skies with her singing of Kol Nidrei on Sunday night (no wonder it's pouring today) will perform some of her own music that she's been touring the world with, and some Shabbat melodies. I'm looking forward to breaking bread with you all there.

Last thing. I would love to hear from you about what you liked or didn't like these High Holidays, and how we might make this funky community the coolest, most worthwhile experiment in Jewish life it can be. I'm planning on spending much of the next few weeks hanging or talking with folks about all that, so please send a shout out my way.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha

Opening and Repenting

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha