Month: July 2025

This past week I was looking through a drawer at home and came upon a piece of paper that was folded up. I opened the paper and discovered the last birthday letter my dad wrote to me. He had typed it out as his penmanship was not so good and had handed it to me on our birthday (we shared the same one) not knowing it was the last time we would celebrate together. I sat on the floor dumfounded and amazed. I thought of how he must have felt while he wrote the words. I wondered if he was thinking that it may be the last time he would write me a card on our birthday. I wondered if he was crying when he wrote it or if he was smiling. I wondered all of this, and I treasured that moment sitting there and reading these words from my dad to me.

As Jews, we have a tradition called ethical wills. The idea is that we sit down and write our story, our ethics and our values and bequeath those items to our loved ones. This is not some new age idea but something that’s preserved from generations back. While we might see the origin of this practice in יעקב’s/YaAkov’s/Jacob’s assembling his sons and speaking to them on his deathbed, the better origin is the entirety of the book of דברים/Devarim/Deuteronomy, which we begin this week. For some time, the Jewish People have held the belief that the entire book of דברים is משה’s/Moshe’s/Moses’ ethical will to our people. It’s filled with his parting words and his memories. He retells our story to our people and recaps many of the מצות/Mitzvot in this final book of the תורה/Torah. It is, in fact, the origin of the ethical will. I never had the chance to sit with my dad and ask him to write his ethical will. I regret that lost opportunity. This letter I rediscovered allowed me the beautiful opportunity to connect and reconnect and learn from my dad in a way I didn’t know I could.

The great Sephardic scholar Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon, who was famous for being a translator of Jewish texts from Arabic into Hebrew, and for being a physician, wrote of the most famous ethical wills. In his will he wrote: “Avoid bad society, make thy books thy companions, let thy book-cases and shelves be thy gardens and pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If thy soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from sight to sight. Then will thy desire renew itself, and thy soul be satisfied with delight.” He wrote a great deal about the importance of books and of learning. This excerpt from his will recalls to me the days of going through my dad’s belongings. His library was the most daunting task. His books were sacred to him and I’ve kept many of them. In fact, we now have a bookcase in our home library filled just with his books. Having been raised in that mentality, books are immensely sacred to me.

We are the “people of the book”, and as such, our books are not only holy, they’re also our lifeline and our birthright. At the root of our people is our relationship with our central book, the תנ”ך/TaNaKh or the Jewish Bible. We focus on the תורה or the Five Books of Moses most of the time, but the תנ”ך is composed of 24 books. This Saturday night and Sunday morning, we’ll read the words of the saddest and darkest, איכה/Eicha/Lamentations. This book, which was written about the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, begins with the profound question of איך/Eich/How. How did this happen? How tragic is this? How profound is this loss? How do we move forward? How??? How??? How??? In our grief, we’re often stuck with questions like “who,” “what,” “where” and “when.” We are often stuck with the hurt of the “why.”

It’s when we begin to unravel the “how” that we begin to grieve and we begin to live. The “how” is not the mechanics of how someone died, or how a tragic event occurred, but it’s the “how” of how are we going to move forward? It is the “how” of how did someone live their life and how can it still impact us. It’s the “how” of how do we continue to find meaning in a world that’s so painful for us to live in. Our answers to these, and other questions, are found in the words and testaments of those who came before us. The answers are found when we look for our loved ones in all we do. Our grief is not overcome by this but rather managed. Our grief is still immense and still unresolved, but when we find our loved ones lives as a guiding light, we find ourselves able to see HOW we can continue to go on.

This שבת/Shabbat, we’ll be observing the second of three שבתות/Shabbatot/Shabbats that are part of the three weeks of mourning for the Jewish People. Each summer, we grieve and mourn as a collective. Certainly, each of us has a different take on what we’re mourning. Certainly, it’s clear that grief is an immensely personal endeavor, but we’re also intimately aware of the need and power of communal grieving. It’s been less than two years since we were thrown into this continuing cycle of the stages of grief with the terror and savagery unleashed on our people on October 7, 2023. To add to our grief, we were met not with open arms, love and support, but with condemnations, antisemitism and violence around the world and here at home. We witnessed too many people celebrating the “freedom fighters” who terrorized, maimed, raped, mutilated, kidnapped and murdered people simply because they were Jews or associated with Jews.

Every time we feel we can move forward in our grief, something comes along and pulls us backward. Two employees of the Israeli Embassy were murdered at a Jewish Museum in Washington DC. The Jewish governor of Pennsylvania had his house vandalized on Passover. People in Colorado who were running to raise awareness for the plight of the hostages were attacked with crude Molotov cocktails. These are not the totality of what has happened. We’re all too familiar with the plight of our college students. We’ve seen too many demonstrations across the US and the world against us and our homeland, and it’s been awful. Just this week on the Isle of Rhodes, a place many of our members trace their roots to, Israeli youth were harassed and chased at knifepoint by people who claimed to be supporters of the Palestinians. Please read the Times of Israel article here https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-teens-say-anti-israel-mob-armed-with-knives-attacked-them-on-rhodes/ to learn more about the attack. This was on the heels of a cruise ship from Israel that wasn’t allowed to dock in Greece because of protests against Israel. There’s so much to grieve, to throw our hands up about, and to wonder why this is how things are.

The rabbis of the Talmud and other texts made clear that while the outside enemy, the Romans and before them the Babylonians, were responsible for the destruction, but that we, the Jewish People, needed to see ourselves not as blameless but as having work to do. The rabbis blamed us for having been weak, too enmeshed in infighting, too committed to a black and white worldview, and so much more. The blessing they gave us was to allow us to grow and change because of the destruction. They enabled us to see that we too have agency and need to be aware of how we use our agency.

We must mourn the terror victims and all our people who’ve had their worlds upended. We must grieve the loss of life and innocence, and the pain we’re in. We must not give an inch to the perpetrators or pardon anything they’ve done to our people. At the same time, we must be willing to mourn the cost of being Jewish and having a Jewish State. We must mourn that our people are the ones in charge who are making hard choices that have awful consequences for others. (This is not to say the actions aren’t necessary, but that the outcomes of those actions have an effect, and we should feel a sense of bewilderment and grief because the outcome for others is so awful). We must mourn that sometimes we hear words from people on our side, and from our leaders, that don’t sit well with us.

We all know words aren’t empty and meaningless. In this week’s פרשה/portion: מטות – מסעי/Matot Masei, there’s a great deal of information about oaths and the need not to take them, and when they are taken, the need to follow through on them. Why is this so important? Because words have meaning and value and cannot just be rattled off. The Talmud goes to great lengths to discourage people from taking oaths, because in the end words have meaning and it’s dangerous to allow words to just be thrown around.

We mourn all these things. We mourn a world that just won’t let us be who we are. We mourn a world that doesn’t want to allow us the basic rights all other people have. We mourn our people who have been lost or have had their lives irreparably damaged. We mourn the number of people who died defending our country. We mourn the hurt and destruction that’s been necessitated in our defense of our homeland. We mourn the words used by some of our leaders in defending our people. We mourn that with independence, comes a great deal of hard choices. We mourn that the world simply doesn’t look the way we wish it did.

A number of months ago I attended an interfaith clergy meeting and experienced my worst nightmare. I came with an open heart and open mind. I came for dialogue and with the hopes of building bridges. As the meeting went on, somehow the subject changed to college campuses and to Israel and the conflict. I took a deep breath and got ready for what would come next. Finally, I said “this is getting uncomfortable” out of exasperation and that had no impact on the room. After I held up the white flag, one of the ministers in the room explained that her friend works in Gaza at a hospital where “Hamas ‘supposedly’ hides.” Another minister explained he took classes on this in seminary and that a rabbi and teacher in the seminary explained that “the creation of the State of Israel made the Jewish people a violent people.” He also told me originally religious-minded Jews were not in favor of the creation of the modern state of Israel. Thankfully, the meeting ended shortly after. I stood my ground the entire meeting and never gave them an inch. Before leaving, they asked me if I would be open to coming back and I said the following: “so long as you agree that the Jewish people have the right to a nation on their ancestral homeland then perhaps I will…”. Unfortunately, they didn’t answer my question.

Something that’s come back time and time again when I recall that meeting is the false charge that Israel made the Jewish people violent. I’ll give them a bit of ground on that charge, but not for their intended reason. Prior to 1948, the Jewish people were perpetually without defense. The Jewish people were the great eternal wanderers and had no place to call home. Prior to 1948, we were susceptible to expulsions, inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, othering, genocide and so much more. Prior to 1948, we had no means to defend ourselves and so the image of the helpless Jew was the predominant way we were seen throughout the world. When we began to return to our homeland, we built means of self defense in the form of militias, namely the Irgun and the Haganah. These two groups differed in tactics and in philosophy but at the core was a deep conviction that we needed to defend ourselves. In May of 1948 when the State of Israel came into creation, these militias were merged to form צה”ל/TzaHaL/the IDF. We chose the name IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, to assert that our army existed for the sole purpose of defense and not to make war. One can assert that this is propaganda, but when we dig deep into history, we find few if any cases of Israel and the IDF initiating wars with its enemies. The IDF has always maintained a defensive posture and it’s for this reason that Israeli soldiers have never been deployed anywhere other than in their own neighborhood of the Middle East. We’re not an army that makes war but rather one that ends them with the sacred act of defending our people.

I’m rehashing this conversation right now in response to this week’s פרשה/parsha/portion: פינחס/Pinchas. It’s one of the few פרשה’s to be named for a person, in this case פינחס. But it’s a bit troubling to understand the praise of פינחס because his action was one of violence. At the end of last week’s פרשה we find this episode of rebellion of our people. The details don’t matter but what does matter is that פינחס acted as a zealot and put an end to the rebellion through violently killing. The question that needs to be addressed is why does God commend him at the beginning of this week’s פרשה? In the תלמוד/Talmud we find the rabbis had issues with this as he took matters into his own hands. They question the greatness because the people he killed could have killed him in self-defense and they wouldn’t have been guilty of anything. It asserts that a בית דין/Beit Din/Court would not have permitted this.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained in his book Morality that this was a case of morality and national need being in conflict. פינחס acted on our national need and cast morality to the side. God seemed to not take notice of this when God gave פינחס the ברית שלום/Brit Shalom/Covenant of Peace in this week’s פרשה. God seems to be praising the actions rather than condemning them but perhaps that’s not right. Perhaps God saw that this action prevented worse things from happening. Perhaps we need to look at the word שלום as being the specific covenant that was being made. פינחס needed something to counteract his rage. He needed something to assert that this is just not how a society can be run. We need to act with a court without zealotry. Perhaps the ברית שלום was to teach פינחס, and the rest of us, that we all need to pursue the peaceful course at any time that we can.

Where does this leave us with regards to the meeting I attended, and the charges lobbed against Israel and us? Many of us have posed for pictures with Israeli Soldiers. Many of us have IDF shirts and hats we proudly wear. At our summer camps we do army activities where we do “basic training” for the IDF. Many of us of send money to help Israeli soldiers and their work. Is this us glorifying violence? Is this us being a violent people? The answer is a resounding no. We don’t wear this clothing and show this support because we want the army to harm other people. We don’t have this affinity because of some violent urge within ourselves. We have this love and adoration for the sole reason that we know our history of being defenseless and we know what it means to be Jewish in the world today. We know we have no choice but to defend ourselves. Today we take pride in knowing we don’t seek war and don’t want war but we’ll be able to hold our own in any war brought our way. Our affinity for the IDF and for Jewish self-defense is not a sign of a violent people but a sign of a people who, like all people, demand the world respect our presence and our existence. We demand that we have the same rights as the rest of humanity, and we’ll defend that right. That’s not a violent declaration but one of resolve and one of love for our people.

Carrie, Galit and I arrived back home this week from our month at camp. Ayelet will be there for another month since it’s her last year as a camper. I want to thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to go to camp each summer. It might sound crazy to have a rabbi in his mid-forties spend four weeks each summer at a summer camp, but it’s so important. Each summer, I’m immersed in a laboratory of Jewish life. Each summer, I get to experiment and learn new approaches to Jewish prayer, teaching and observance. Each summer, I get to connect with colleagues and deeply connected lay leaders. Over our time together we brainstorm, problem-solve, and explore how to make our communities stronger and more connected. Each summer I have the chance to learn and prepare for the upcoming year. I spend a great deal of time at camp strategizing for my year of speaking and teaching. In addition to all these professional gains I amass each summer, I’m also able to spend a great deal of time on my own growth as a person and as a Jew. I get to work on my spirituality. I get to learn for the sake of learning. I get to connect with friends. I get to create art, climb the climbing wall, hike, swim and more. I also have the opportunity to spend meaningful and irreplaceable time with Carrie and Galit. And while Ayelet is in a cabin each summer, I get to see her every day and spend precious moments with her as she continues to grow and develop into her own Jewish person. All I can say are two important words: thank you.

In פרשת חקת/Parshat Chukat we witness the beginning of the end of a legacy. Towards the beginning of the פרשה/Parsha we see the death of מרים/Miriam and towards the end we see the death of אהרן/Aaron. The three siblings, מרים, אהרן, and משה/Moshe had been leading our people since the days of our enslavement. This week, we start to see the beginning of that ending. With the death of מרים at the beginning, and the death of אהרן at the end, we no longer had them to lead us. In-between their deaths, we also learn of the eventual demise of משה. Our ancestors were complaining about not having water to drink and God told משה and אהרן to talk to a rock to get water from it. Instead of doing that, משה struck the rock twice with his staff. God told משה that because he didn’t have enough faith in God, he would not get to cross into the Promised Land. With that, we learn of the transition of our leadership from one generation to the next. The proper way to transition is displayed when there’s a public transfer of the power of the High Priest from אהרן to his son. This act is necessary to show that we are part of a continuing chain of tradition and legitimacy.

Each year at camp I witness the continuation of this process of generation to generation. We continue to transmit our legacy from one generation to the next. I watch as all my fears of the future are abated by the full display of joyful Judaism that Jewish Summer Camp gives us. My fears are brushed to the side each year when the campers return and say “hi Rabbi Josh” and show me I’m making an impact and transmitting my legacy to them. Each summer I’m reminded we have a bright and sunny (pardon the pun) future in our youth. We always have this same opportunity with or without summer camp. Each of us has the chance to transmit our legacies to future generations. Each of us has the opportunity to pass along the gifts we’ve inherited, or chosen, to those coming after us. This is the greatest and most attainable form of eternal life and one we all must seize the chance to have.