G🎶d couldn’t be everywhere, so the Eternal created judges. Shof’tim reflects the still-modern reality of G🎶d needing humans to complete divinely holy work, especially if the work entails mess and heartache. We are to set up courts with judges, justices, and magistrates who must decree with fairness, impartiality. Today, we serve on juries. We must decide cases based on the evidence before us. We must determine innocence, or guilt, based on what we see and hear. We must base our decisions on a person’s deeds; actions; behavior. Not on what they intend to do. Not on what they meant to do. Not on what they decided to hold back on for a crucial moment, and strategically show later. According to the old deodorant slogan, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Every iceberg shows its ten percent; this is the portion we see. The iceberg’s other 9/10ths percent is submerged, and we must judge the top part above the surface. No mitigating factors such as wealth, poverty, nor penury, can make a guilty person innocent; that’s Torah. Talmud comes later and the rabbis are somewhat more lenient. Somewhat.
Justice, Justice, shall you pursue. Chase after it, run to catch up with Justice, because a repeated word in the Torah means business, and there’s no room for mercy yet. But Jewish teaching marries justice with mercy; this combination is also reflected in the image of the law profession: a set of balance scales. If mercy absents itself from Shof’tim, how are we to humanize the distribution of consequence when faced with guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?
We continue to love our neighbor even when we don’t like him very much. Even when we don’t like what she did. We develop systems where we can creatively, constructively mete out restorative justice, where the convicted serve time while learning skills that will enable them to build better, richer, more creatively constructive lives than they led before. We must find methods to teach the steps to making better executive choices and show them the value of making better choices. All the while, love your neighbor as they learn to live a healthier life, as they train to serve society; to pay back what they have taken away to the best possible degree, if such a degree exists (in many cases it doesn’t: love your neighbor anyway) and learn to live and thrive in the outside world.
We may not hand out a verdict based on the part of an iceberg we don’t see. We may, however, love the hidden and the mysterious; the unrealized potential that we can uncover and tease out into constructive change. We can, by degrees, discover someone’s hidden potential; consider the small positives that pop up during their rehabilitation; and possibly assist in the miracle of someone growing into something stronger, gentler, harder-working and more talented than they ever were before.
In the face of such possibility; in the gentle beam of so rare and mighty a miracle, justice and mercy will take hands and smile. The scales will sway gently. Torah will be just a bit more fulfilled. May it be so.
I hate this day. I’ll bet it’s not for the same reasons as you do.
Last night at sunset began Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. This is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar year, when it seems all the “best” Jews despairingly commemorate the worst, worser, worsest catastrophes that have befallen us:
the First and Second Temples’ respective downfalls due to sinat chinam (baseless hatred) from within and from without
captivity to Babylonia
return from Babylonia for many of us; forced capture to Iberia for the rest of us. Or was it the other way around? Please don’t tell me until tonight, if you must at all.
Inquisition/ exile from Spain, then Portugal, 🇵🇹 Netherlands, 🇳🇱 all to be backed into a deathful corner in England 🏴. -taking the blame for spreading the Black plague. I can certainly see why: we were the only ones who didn’t get it, because we were the first people known to wash our hands 🙌🏻 before we [could bless our food, then] eat. How can anyone spread a disease we ourselves don’t have??
On and on, from the middle-Ages’ ghettos to 19th-c. Haskalah (enlightenment; thanks Napoleon). Now we could attend university and apply for the same jobs as gentiles (which by no means meant we were accepted or got the employment). So we continued to study and learn. To survive, we put our money in our heads and our pockets, learning fiduciary trades so we could take our work with us from move to move to uprooting to more moves under threats of death and extinction.
Enter more sinat chinam from within as newly-born Reform Judaism sought to mitigate the conflict between staying religious and living secular lives. The further splintering-off into Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionism, Jewish Renewal and post-denominational Pluralism (the movement that ordained me Rabbi) highlighted our potential for diversity and inclusion, but all too often crack and crumble into the opposites of these virtues. Such can happen when zealotry throws us off balance; our vision fogs; and our windshield narrows.
After WWI we took the blame for Europe’s economy going kaput (not the first time nor the last for that one, sadly). The horns others saw growing out of our heads (wanna feel mine?? Just kidding: they’re neurosurgical scars. Not kidding about those)
And presto: it’s 1933 and 1938 and 1942 and 1945 and 1/3 of us have disappeared off the face of the earth. That doesn’t count our descendants who never got to be born. How many mathematicians out there can figure out by what further percentage the world Jewish population would have grown by 2026 if not for Shitler the First? Get your abacus 🧮; I’ll wait.
I won’t even touch the political, spiritual and ideological $#%&storm that has brewed, bubbled and exploded in Israel and the rest of the middle-East since 1948. And on and on and on until “Seven-Ten” (how Israelis pronounce October 7, 2023) and beyond.
I will say this: How many countries in that region embrace LGBTQIA 🏳️🌈 marriage? How many have medics who will treat, heal, and cure (if possible) patients from any nationality, religion or philosophy? How many offer welcome to refugees in danger who need life-saving asylum? The answer to all of these questions is: 1️⃣.
She’s far from perfect. She is making, and continues to make, deadly errors. But she’s family. Tell me you never have broygess (angry conflict) with your family. I’ll know you’re lying.
So…I haven’t learned yet to grieve for all of the horrors perpetrated against (by…?) our family with a wide-bristled brush. I haven’t learned to save just one bitter day out of an otherwise seemingly holy year for such a paint job.
I’ll never understand why (and I don’t want to) 9Av is both a fast day and a work day, not only for rabbis and cantors. If one both fasts and puts in a full day of work, doesn’t that potentially endanger the body? Aren’t we supposed to “live by the commandments, not die by them?”
I am not refuting anyone tonight; I am struggling. It’s not only okay to struggle; it’s required of “Yisra-El” [struggle(d)-with-G🎶d]. Struggle resolves in any of several ways: pent-up emotion; violence; acts of lovingkindness; or prayer. Tonight I choose the latter.
Please fast responsibly for the sake of all who love you. Stay hydrated. After sundown tomorrow, may we move forward together with intentions and actions of “ahavat chinam” – baseless love. V’nomar (and let us say): Amen.
When humans followed God’s directive to name the animals, we elevated them to a higher level. Each unique moniker creates an “I / Thou” relationship between people and the creatures with whose care and well-being we are charged. Torah neglects to name many female characters. both human and non-, including Balaam’s donkey Numbers chapter 22; simply referring to her as “Balaam’s donkey.” Rabbinic tradition has taken up the naming of nameless Torah femmes, such as Na’amah for Noah’s partner, and Batyah for the child of the Pharaoh who “knew not Joseph.” My dear frolleague Rabbi Yossi Feintuch calls her “Balaam’s Jenny” after one of Sefaria’s available translations. I like that distinction, despite Jenny’s eventual misfortune, regardless of her name.
This week’s story highlights Jenny’s ability to speak and her attempt to take leadership by forcing her master Balaam to do the right thing. Jenny wants Balaam to bless the Israelites instead of curse them as King Balak wants him to do, but she is so fearful he will cave that she does everything in her power to prevent him from continuing on his journey. Jenny’s determination to carry out God’s work, and for Balaam do the same, is evident in her interaction with Balaam and an angel. Even the tragic consequences of her courageous actions, Torah does not assign a proper name. Such is the reward of women throughout Jewish history even and especially today.
Rabbi Feintuch is an animal advocate of the highest degree. Just as he elevates Balaam’s Jenny by naming her, so have I delved into GoogleTrans to check out its modern choices for the name of an historically brave four-legged woman who deserves to be remembered for not taking the easy way out:
At’on (אָתוֹן): the specific Hebrew word for a female donkey.
Ayirah עָיִרָה .This is my preferred name for Balaam’s donkey. Now she has two rabbinic names; Jenny in English; Ayirah in Hebrew. As a musician, I cannot love Ayirah enough. As you read this name aloud, lean aurally into its onamatopeia: Ah-YEEEEE-rah! This is Jenny’s bray. It’s her song. It’s a blessing that rings louder than any curse could possibly echo. Ayirah is who she is; Ayirah is what she does; Ayirah is what she commands us all to do throughout eternity: Speak up. Open a mouth. Sing out in favor of doing the right thing, and then do that right hing… no matter how many makot (beatings) we have to take for it.
Shabbat Shalom! Happy Pride Month. Pride many, many things to many, many people. Best-case scenario is feeling free to live authentically in one’s finest colors. Sometimes that’s Out of the Closet. For anyone who finds comfort in not coming out yet, a closet doesn’t have to be a cramped space.
The Hebrew word for closet is “Aron” (emphasis on second syllable). Aron covers a closet for clothes, for anything in storage, or that which you want to keep safe. A synagogue’s “Aron haKodesh” known for short as its Ark, houses our precious Torah scrolls; first to be rescued in case of G🎶d forbid, fire, flood, or worse. An Ark is beautiful inside and out. When the Torah scrolls rest within, between public readings, they are at home.
Note the difference between “Aron” and “Mitzrayim”: Hebrew for “Egypt” whose literal meaning is “from narrow spaces.”Those who still find comfort in their personal “Aron” have choices that a “Mitzrayim” doesn’t afford:
-A person may choose to come out; all the way, or step by step.
-A person can let their closest beloveds in; all the way, or by degrees. It’s part of a fluid process that only the person in charge controls.
if I could gauge, or bless, another’s personal Aron, I would fill it with soft light, cushiony spaces, one or more clerestory windows, comfy furnishings, and a door that opens wide, solely at the occupant’s behest, to let love in.
In this week’s Torah, G🎶d commands Aaron to light a seven-branched menorah (note that this image is still a symbol of modern Israel). Seven is a prime number in Judaism (see what I did there?). Every week has seven days, which I infer that every day has the potential to illuminate someone’s life. Every day we have the opportunity to be lit, and to light up [banish!] darkness. Every day is a day to walk your walking music so you glow from within, That is Pride.
Aaron is commanded to let the lit menorah face the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. This sight showed the people, “You made it to the right spot.” I’d like to interpret this further as a sign of welcome, but however much I may mean it, it hasn’t always been so… and sadly, still is not.
Torah doesn’t get effusive about welcome or inclusion (especially inclusion!) or the stuff of which hugs are made. But we, as students of Torah,can do that. We can study what the Good Book says, to reference Tevye the Dairyman. That’s written Torah. We can discuss, debate, redact, and compare Torah with current events: that’s oral Torah, an ever-developing entity. It has become so surprising that’s no longer a surprise, how often our written Torah connects to oral Torah in our all-too-eventful solar 31st century.
G🎶d commands Moses and Aaron to wash and cleanse the Levites as part of their consecration. This sets the Levites apart from the rest of the people – not for the first, nor last time – and G🎶d takes the Levites for “my own.” High honor indeed, but does this setting-apart essentially queer our own par’sha? Not everyone is a Levite, and not all Levites are Kohanim (priests). These distinctions will erupt with a great deal of anger, shame, and jealousy in the next few weeks of our desert journey.
Meanwhile let’s marry written Torah to oral Torah, and beautify the union with another step in elevation: CHECK ON YOUR LGBTQIA+ friends, family, colleagues. You might be knocking at a door that opens as easily, as gently, as the “parokhet ” (curtain) mentioned in this week’s Torah; opening easily at your loving touch. Or you might be knocking at the thick door of someone’s Aron of safety. Knock, or tap, anyway.
Some things you might say:
”Hi, it’s me. I’m loving Pride month with all its colors and sparkle. Can I come in for a bit, just to be with you, to celebrate 🎊 our friendship? You mean so much to me and I want you to know that. I know it’s tough out there. I would love to listen to you and hear how you’re doing.” Truth is, you might be more forthcoming than the person you’re talking to. If they allow it, simply sit with them in their silence.Get comfortable with the quiet as a piece of peace. Stay just this way as long as you and your host are at ease. When you leave their presence, offer a hug. Don’t take a refusal personally. Let your dear one know that you see them just as they want to be seen. Tell them how proud of them you are at any and every step of their path. Tell them you love them. And let them know beyond a shadow of a doubt: Whatever you need, even if you’re unsure what that is right now, I am there for you and here for you.
That’s Pride. No big secret here. It’s live. It’s acceptance. It’s love. It’s inclusion. It’s love. It’s the right to take care of yourself and your family no matter its size, its shape, or how it got together.
It’s love. It’s love. It’s love.
Happy Pride from your favorite queer, asexual, panromantic cantor rabbi.
[Delivered at Temple Emanuel of Gastonia, Shabbat Beha’alot’cha, 5 June 2026 / 21 Sivan 5786]
Behind every strong woman in the Torah is an even stronger man who eclipses her…usually. Not so with Rivkah (Rebekah). Sure, there were standout men in Rivkah’s lineage; I’m talking about the niece of Abraham who inherited his hospitality gene. I’m talking about the daughter of Nahor (deceased) and sister of Laban (a paskudniyak),who initiated that hospitality to represent her household in welcome to Eliezer, a traveler with many camels. I’m talking about a woman strong enough to handle the care and watering of ten visiting camels, yet compassionate enough to intuit and respond to the thirst of said camels. I’m talking about the only woman in the Torah whom we see choose her spouse; Rivkah makes up her own mind to follow Eliezer on a long journey to his young master Isaac, who will be her life partner. I’m talking about the only woman in the Torah who will later initiate a dialogue with G🎶d with the oh-so-Jewish exhortation, “WHY DO I EXIST??” during her tumultuous pregnancy with twins: and G🎶d answers.
Meanwhile, Rivka is still a girl; a young woman. Her assumption of responsibiity and executive decision is so keen that the word the Torah uses to designate Rivka’s girlhood is na’ara. We don’t often encounter this word; a feminization of na’ar. Torah has several words to designate young persons. For a girl we often see “bat” (daughter) or “betulah” (young woman; often misunderstood as “virgin.”) There is also yaldah, from the verb laledet, to give birth. All of these translations connotate the person as a reflection of another’s primary identity: “bat” precedes the name of a parent; yaldah implies “born of…”; and betulah has become a social construct for assumption (and value) of a woman’s sexual inactivity. A na’ar is a boy who hasn’t fully matured, as in the Yiddish pejorative “naarishkayt” for childish nonsense. But even as a feminized term, na’ara describes a stand-alone role because its etymology lacks the suggestion of a reflective relationship to anyone else. Nevertheless, if we want to understand Rivkah, we have to talk about Isaac: the overlooked patriarch.
Isaac has known a lot of personal trauma. His family is decimated when his parents evict his stepmother and older brother. His father nearly sacrifices him to G🎶d within an inch of the slaughtering knife at the base of Isaac’s throat but for the intervention of an angel. His mother has suddenly died in the aftermath and he is in all likelihood still grieving. Isaac’s seminal experiences have happened to him rather than decided by him: thus which many scholars dismiss as weakness simply by dearth of mention. History would leave Isaac danging in the cleft of the covenential rock that his his father Abraham helped establish and his son Jacob would continue to hew.
But Isaac’s strength and stay come from Rivkah. The couple first meet at sunset when Rivkah, still atop her camel after her long trek with Eliezer, notices a comely young man walking toward her from the nearby fields. As she gazes in his direction and asks Eliezer his identity, she is so taken with him that she falls off her camel. The Torah doesn’t use emotional adjectives like “sad” and “angry,” but rather, “his face fell” or “his nose burned” or “they fell on their faces.” Well, if people can fall on their faces in despair, they can fall off a camel in response to love at first sight.
But Isaac now picks up the initiative, as Genesis 24:67 relates: “Isaac brought [Rivkah] into his mother Sarah’s tent, and he made her his wife, and he loved her.” For the very first time, Torah introduces love as a romantic concept in the active tense. Isaac is the actor, the generator, the bringer of that love to the strong woman who wrangled the camels, who made her own life-altering decision to take a husband, and who undertook the long trek to meet her spouse. Isaac, whose name means “he laughed,” is the yin to Rivkah’s yang. By loving, and allowing himself to be loved, Isaac has a force at his fingertips that transcends fire, water, wind; even death. Isaac is truly a strong person, and he’s not afraid to show it. So may it be with us.
What drove G🎶d to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? People have cited sodomy as anal penetration during sex. The townsmen of Sodom who aggressively rap on Lot’s door in pursuit of Lot’s guests “that we may know them” (Genesis 19:5) lend a soupçon of credence to this theory: twenty generations earlier, the first “knowing” between two Torah characters resulted in the births of Cain and Abel. While the hostile Sodomites fully mean to rape Lot’s guests, the sages teach that their thwarted intention is merely part of a greater wrongdoing: lack of hospitality.
Blinded by angelic light: the hostile men of Sodom cannot see to assault Lot and his guests.
As VaYera begins, we find Abraham lounging on his veranda (actually, the door of his tent) on a warm day. He suddenly rises to his feet at the approach of three strangers. Without knowing who they are or why they have come, Abraham jumps to his feet, welcomes the guests, and begs them to stop inside for refreshment. He musters his wife Sarah and his household to prepare veal stronganoff (pre-Kashrut), foot-washing, and full-service dining with himself as waitstaff. This grandiose hospitality appears in a clearer light when we scroll back to the end of last week’s par’shah, Lech l’cha: Abraham isn’t just relaxing in his tent door. He is recovering from his self-administered b’rit milah, after having circumcised his entire male household as a sign of their covenant to G🎶d. Welcome to the first Jewish family.
Abraham’s three guests are heavenly messengers. Although malachim means both angels and messengers, the guests are described in the Torah as anashim: people. Therefore we may be angels anytime, or meet them unexpectedly. Many commentators interpret the anashim‘s visit as G🎶d’s messengers doing bikkur holim (visiting the ill) during Abraham’s recovery.
Mishna Peah 1 teaches a list of the deeds we should undertake in order secure a place in the World to Come. Besides bikkur holim, hakhnasat or’khim is listed: to welcome the guest. When the messengers leave Abraham’s tent to visit his nephew Lot in Sodom, Lot receives the guests just as enthusiastically as his uncle did, but has no time to extend the same courtesies: The problem lies with the not-so-friendly Sodomites, who make no bones about their distrust for new folks in town. This animosity extends to Lot and his household, who settled in Sodom not long before. When the townsmen bang on Lot’s door and threaten his guests, they display a blatant lack of bikkur holim. G🎶d’s messengers witness all this and intervene to prevent violence, but this time there are only two of them. What happened to the third angel? Midrash (rabbinic fable) teaches that the first angel destroyed Sodom and the second angel rescued Lot. Back at Abraham’s tent, the third angel broke the news that Sarah would bear a son within a year. Having delivered the message, the third angel simply disappeared offscreen like an Alfred Hitchcock cameo.
Two angels missing their buddy. I kept this magnet on my locker at HUC-JIR.
If lack of manners consitutes the true Sodomy, or sin for which G🎶d destroyed the town, then anyone who infers otherwise points three fingers at themselves for every finger they point at somebody else. TaNaKh (Bible) is a lot like a car: if handled recklessly, it can cause harm. Interpretation of TaNaKh can result in wisdom and kindness. Conversely, it has also resulted in systemic baseless hatred against the LGBTQAI+ community for far too long. Hakhnasat or’khim need not mean you just let anyone in your house, or your life, to ransack your resources. It means, don’t be afraid of what you don’t understand. With every new encounter, you just might meet an angel or three.
Alex, my child in Torah, our time has come around once more. It’s the week of Lech L’cha, our shared B’Mitzvah Torah portion. Some will think me maudlin for considering your life, and your death, two of many touchstones for my favorite par’sha in the Torah. I know who they are, and to them I say… Lech l’cha. Get going.
Avram remains a figure of critical acclaim, both for and against. That’s fine; if you’re going to feel some way about anybody, feel it strongly. For now, we meet Avram as the actively supportive head of a non-nuclear family and thriving ovine herd. Avram and his wife’s Sarai are childless, although they have raised their nephew Lot in the absence of Lot’s father, Avram’s late brother Haran. We briefly met Avram at the end of last week’s Torah portion, Noah, in the list of “begats” leading to Avram from his eponymous 10th-great-grandfather.
The rest of Avram and Sarai’s household consists of Avram’s majordomo Eliezer, as well as numerous employees / servants / slaves (in Hebrew, “acquired souls”). In 5000+B.C.E., these souls were considered family even if and when they worked their kishkes to the bone.
At age seventy-five, while juggling work and family, Avram gets the call from G🎶d, without preamble: “Lech l’cha. Get yourself going. Git. Leave everything, everyone, and everyplace you’ve ever known. Ever. Keep going until I tell you to stop and settle. That’s the only map you get.”
One modern midrash has Avram responding to G🎶d, “I want to take my family with me.” The Torah shows that he indeed does take Sarai, Lot, and their entire household. That may well be the point of G🎶d’s choice; Is G🎶d’s elevation of Avram from walking partner to covenant partner, due to Avram’s track record of caretaking? Avram further takes shalom bayit (peace at home) to the next level when he strategically brokers a loving property division with Lot before they or their respective servants can come to blows over land boundaries.
Avram’s life and legacy will ring by no means peaceful. He is far from perfect, and his choices will cost him dearly before he rests. But he may well be the ancestor who accomplishes the most through diverse combination of listening, dialectic, nurturing, and innovation that would serve the toolbox of any modern executive. Avram / Abraham proves a successful diplomat with ordinary humans, with foreign royalty, and with the Holy One G🎶self, each as he receives them. We should try it sometime.
Alex, love, I speak to you wherever you are as well. I listen for you often. Last month I spent valuable time with someone to whom you will always be dear, and I hope you knew it. It’s good to study Torah with you. Shabbat Shalom. I’ll get going… for now.
image: a stunning tabernacle. Temple Beth El, Las Cruces, NM
When Noah began to walk with G🎶d, the world already contained creatures and natural elements; sky and sea; minerals and celestial bodies; fauna and flora; flagrancy and fallen angels. The Holy One observed that all was not always good. Action was necessary. But first, a bridge must span between partners.
Stained-glass sea vessel image; Temple Beth El, Las Cruces, NM
Ten generations in, the Eternal already wearied of human folly, the downside of freedom of choice. G🎶d lamented, “I should have revealed a bit more of Myself. No one can see Me and live, yet they do not know how to call Me.”
In truth, G🎶d had created the first humans without so much as an introduction or a howdy-do. Simply, “All the trees in My garden are food for you, and food for the animals, e crept for That One.” Ten generations hence, G🎶d would call Abram with the admonition, “Get going.” In another ten generations, a Burning Bush would call Moses by name, and share one or two of Gd’s own names. But now was now, and the Holy One needed Noah’s attention quickly: “I am going to erase this world I made, and start over. Build Me an Ark to My specifications.”
Noach, whom G🎶d named for his humble, simple demeanor, came to quickly. But he did not know his name, nor the name of the unseen One Who addressed him. Destroy the earth? Build a giant ship? Where are we going? Didn’t we just get here? Labels matter. They increase clarity , lessen confusion,
Noah finished the Ark. G🎶d began to weep giant tears. Tears at having to destroy the earth. Tears for the innocence of Noah. Tears that flooded the earth. Tears that wiped out everyone and by everything in its path.
Noah and Na’amah, their sons and their partners, each held out their palms to feel the tears. It was the world’s first rainstorm, and the last one the old world would ever know. Soon its intensity, and the salt it contained, would siphon the life of everything and everyone unsheltered.
Together, they turned and walked up the planked ramp, ready to board the giant ship of gopher wood and pitch. More words were needed. They would come later.
🎶In the beginning, Berei…sheet In the beginning, Berei…sheet There was no sun…. there was no light. There was no day, there was no night. In the beginning, Berei…sheet In the beginning, Berei…sheet”🎶 -Children’s Bible Song
Can you imagine nothingness before the world we now know? What was there before? Genesis 1:2 describes the beforehand as Tohu va-Vohu. I thought Tohu va-Vohu was a hapax legomenon until I discovered its appearance in Jeremiah 4:22. Tohu va-Vohu has diverse translations, depending on whom you consult: Unformed and void. Formless and void. Confusion and Chaos (à la Marvel Comics’ Phantom Zone?). Disaster and nothingness. Empty and desolate. Astonishingly void. Does Tohu va-Vohu have quiet, meditative atmosphere, like a bariatric chamber, or is it loud and clanging like a bowling alley, or a construction site in Manhattan? What does Tohu va-Vohu smell like? Feel like? How did it get there? Did G🎶d create Tohu va-Vohu, or was it there when the Holy One came to be?
The propensity for creative description of unimaginable lack entice the imagination with a tinge of oxymoronic irony: Imagining the unimaginable, picturing the unpicturable; seeing what is not yet there or perhaps never was. Yet artists have been doing just that: Google “Tohu vavohu artwork.” You’ll find many pieces and images to tickle the cortex; I won’t show them here lest I violate copyright. But my dear friend Ronni Radner, aka Ronni Sue Rambler, Ronni Sue the Country Jew, there’s just no telling what she may do, has designed a chamsa whose shapes and colors spark my brain as Tohu va-Vohu has done for centuries.
I wouldn’t call this painting chaos by a long shot. There’s a lot of rich, shapely color to grok and enjoy. The face is looking forward (Remember, we read Hebrew from right to left) while the cheek marking swooshes indicate a sweep from left to right. Hearkening backward from where we came? A third eye appears to protrude from the forehead: a symbol of omniscience? Looking ahead, knowing nothing, in order to make room for everything and anything? The lips appear to nuzzle a partial heart. Is it love, or is it nourishment?
The letter Shin ש appears on the left temple, above the eye. Shin stands for Shadai (Almighty), Shalom (wholeness), and Shemesh (sun). An elongated articulation of “shhhhhin” produces a sound very much like how we might imagine “the breath of G🎶d fluttering over the deep (Genesis 1:2b)”
Deep what? G🎶d hasn’t created the seas yet: a new, titillating brain tickle to ponder. Jewish Pubication Society defines “deep” as “waters.” I find that unsatisfactory: “waters” is “mayim” and again, water hasn’t yet made an appearance. Who says the deep has to be wet? It’s Tohu va-Vohu! Before we break our heads assigning meaning (or blame) across the centuries, let’s look at Bereisheet , and Tohu va-Vohu, as a space that invites opportunities. Lean into the chaos. VIsualize the negative space, as in any venue of creation. We may never figure out, and we will certainly never all agree, on the exact meaning of Tohu va-Vohu. But isn’t that the beauty of new beginnings and second chances? Tell me what you see. I see that it is good.
I have a problem with the word anti-Semitism. It doesn’t sound like what it really is. Semites are desert people. They could be Arabs, they could be Druze, they could be Bedouins, or they could be Jewish. I’m sure there are more items on the list. But when we think of anti-Semitism, we know we don’t mean anti-desert people. We mean anti-Judaism; we mean anti-Jews.
I think of myself as a person with a very good vocabulary. It’s rhetoric that often throws me. I chafe at niche terminology. I’m fed up with assigning a gracious-sounding, outdated name to a nasty entity. For example, to label the Nazis anti-Semites feels, to me, like labeling the devastating California forest fires a contained brush fire.
Most of you know that I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor, which means, in my case, that my parents escaped Hitler’s Germany, may his name be erased, and made it to the United States with most of their family. My sister and I were born here. My experience as a child of survivors has been fraught with emotions and random thoughts that shake up my monkey-mind in unexpected ways. I jump at the unexpected ring of the doorbell or knock at my door; my wonderful next-door neighbor knows to text me when she wants to reach me. My heart stops for a nano-second when I see a police car driving behind me, even if I’m not the object of its focus. And even though I make them for a living, sudden loud noises scare the be-Moses out of me. Then there are the nightmares, in which a Nazi has one or both of my children, and I am given Sophie’s choice, without the choice.
As for my parents, the true survivors, they always said they were some of the lucky ones. I was born only fifteen years after the end of WWII and the Shoah’s madness. By the time I grew up, my parents were fully bilingual, culturally American, and living full lives and livelihoods outside our home. I marveled at their grit and determination to build new lives here; wonderful lives for my sister and me. We never lacked for anything we needed. No avenue seemed closed to my father’s job; my mother’s volunteer work; or their social life. As far as they were concerned, we had completely escaped any kind of bias for being Jewish. For them, anti-Semitism simply didn’t exist anymore. This was America.
So how could I tell them about the strange feeling of being the only Jew in my class, and one of only a handful in the whole school? We lived in a town of many Protestant churches; many of them Southern Baptist. I didn’t know how to describe the confusion of having my neighborhood playmate weeping hysterically on my backyard swing set, begging me to become a Christian so I wouldn’t go to hell. The other neighbor who never allowed me inside her house to play with her daughter; she only allowed her to play outside with me for short intervals.
There were other incidents. The flute and piccolo stolen taken from my band locker, broken in pieces, and then returned to my locker so that I would see them. There were no other thefts from the band room. My senior year in high school, our mailbox was filled to the brim with cow dung from a nearby farm. My parents took care of that one quickly and quietly and never discussed it with me; as if it had never happened. Because anti-Semitism, anti-Jewishism, baseless hatred through ignorance and lack of understanding, simply didn’t exist anymore, and hadn’t since 1945. My mother and father didn’t want me to feel bad, and I didn’t want them to feel bad, so we just ignored the biased elephant in the room.
We now know that not only is anti-Semitism here with a vengeance, but it also never truly went away. In 2024, the AntiDefamation league recorded the highest number of incidents nationwide since it began tracking them annually in 1979, with a 16% rise in North Carolina alone, having 175 incidents. 31 of these incidents took place on college campuses.
-In Chapel Hill, a mile from my home, a UNC student had a Jewish slur written on their door days after their mezuzah was stolen. 53 of these incidents took place in the Raleigh-Durham area. There was a death threat to a Jewish business owner, and name-calling at Meredith college campus, in which students called a Jewish classmate a “Zionazi.”
Nationally:December 2019, Monsey, NY: Grafton Thomas invades the home of a Hasidic rabbi during a Hanukkah celebration, stabbing multiple people. Rabbi Joseph Neumann, age 72, dies in March 2020 after three months in a coma.
–El Paso, November 2020 – Angel Alvarez fatally attacks attorney El Paso, November 2020 – Angel Alvarez fatally attacks attorney Georgette Kaufman and her husband. Police and court documents tell how Alvarez stated he was “executing and exterminating the Jewish Satan worshipers.”
Washington, DC 2025 – Two Israeli embassy employees are shot dead outside the embassy, ironically after an event to plan how to to get food and supplies to Gaza. Yaron Lischinsky was planning to propose to Sarah Lynn Milgrim the following week in Jerusalem so they could spend the rest of their lives together. Instead they lie in separate graves continents apart; Yaron in Israel; Sarah Lynn in Kansas City.
I only have to mention cities and towns to evoke other similarly horrific incidents: Boulder, Colorado. Charlottesville, VA. Congregation Tree of Life in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the brutal attempted murder on Governor Josh Shapiro and his family by firebombing.
Elsewhere in the world: In Bavaria, Germany, a pizzeria posted a sign saying Israelis were not welcome here. Germany’s antidiscrimination chief ruled that the owner acted within the law, which doesn’t protect against discriminating toward nationalities.
This morning in Manchester, England: two Jews were murdered outside a synagogue by a person who first rammed into the crowd with his car, then stabbed people who had been waiting to enter the synagogue for Yom Kippur services.
In five days it will be October 7. As with September 11, one need not even clarify the year or the location. Two years. 727 days. Jewish lives have been destroyed. Jewish lives continue to hang in the balance. And for all that, we still have to defend our right to be, our right live and celebrate, our right and Israel’s right to defend ourselves against attacks, never mind retaliate! I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of justifying my right to exist. It’s not only heartbreaking and scary, it’s exhausting. And I don’t have any bright ideas for how to stop it. But I have some suggestions for continuing to thrive.
-Embrace joy. Celebrate whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. Whether it’s a holiday, a personal triumph, a simcha in your family, or just that you made it through another day ending in a “y” (or beginning with a Yod), we are commanded to rejoice. Sorrow is inevitable, joy may be fleeting, but we’ve got to grab it where we find it. The real tragedy occurs when we neglect it.
-If you are a hopeful person, don’t lose that. Hope is baked into our Jewish core. Israel’s national anthem – Hatikvah, the hope – is a testimonial to optimism. The consensus among the Israelis who taught us last month at the rabbinic seminar I attended in Tel Aviv is that optimism allows us a flexible view through a choice of windshields through which to view your situation. Pessimism allows only one constricting view.
-If you see something or hear something, say something. Go to people you trust and let them know what’s happened to you. As Mister Rogers always taught us, look for the helpers. Sometimes we forget to do that. There are good people in this world. There are good people in your wheelhouse. Sometimes we forget that they are there.
–Speak up in order to educate. A Methodist acquaintance who calls herself a “recovering evangelical” said, in a public forum, “I don’t pay much attention to the Old Testament because it’s full of smiting.” I said“We prefer Hebrew Bible, or TaNaKh, to Old Testament, which labels our sources as obsolete, and they are definitely not. Sure, we have the first murder on record. It’s a fratricide and that’s a mighty smite. But there is also geography, spirituality, genealogy, psychosociology, architecture, costumebuilding, archaeology, interior design, poetry, philosophy, fiscal planning, thirty generations of families who put the fun in dysfunction, and even a recipe.”
-Educate yourself. Not for nothing did our Muslim neighbors in Spain call us People of the Book. Find out more about who we are, who you are. I didn’t become a rabbi at age five, but I could tell back then that my Christian classmates knew why they believed the way they believed. It didn’t matter whether they were right or wrong. It mattered that they were secure in what they knew. That’s when I became a “Geek for G🎶d” and resolved to learn as much as I could: not because I owed anybody an explanation, but to affirm that I was indeed grounded in my own ethical monotheism. And yeah, maybe I wanted to impress them a little bit with my self-awareness and teach them something new and valid.
–Keep informed, but don’t doom-scroll. Moderation is key.
–Self-care. Keep brushing your hair and your teeth. Rest, eat, and exercise to balance the outside buzz and to boost your endorphins.
–Create. Compose. Paint. Write. Dance. Sing, or whatever it is you do that makes your corner of the world beautiful. Leonard Bernstein wrote the following after the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
Remember that you’re not alone. On Erev Rosh HaShanah I spoke about community. It’s there for you. We are there for you. And in the words of Lisa Levine, sung so beautifully last night by Cantor Ellen, “Together we will be a shelter through every storm.”
Marxisma 