Author: Nicole Feldman

I’m a big fan of, and advocate for, therapy. I think every human should have a therapist to meet with and talk to. Some might need more sessions, and some might need fewer, but all would be well served by having a moment to sit with a professional and dig deep into their souls. I make time each week, or sometimes every other week, to meet with my therapist. I disclose this not only to be transparent, but to also destigmatize mental health care for all of us.

Over the years, my conversations with my therapists have been on all sorts of issues. I’m sure when I was much younger, I spoke more about my relationships with friends and teachers and my parents. As I got older, there were conversations about relationships, marriage, career and eventually about being a better parent. Over the course of all these years, I’ve unearthed an enormous amount of regret and have plunged headfirst into trying to find a path to self-forgiveness. It turns out we humans are very tough on ourselves and when we look into the magic mirror that shows us the within, we often see things we’re not happy with or proud of.

In the תורה/Torah we find the golden rule we’re all familiar with:לֹֽא־תִקֹּ֤ם וְלֹֽא־תִטֹּר֙ אֶת־בְּנֵ֣י עַמֶּ֔ךָ וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ אֲנִ֖י השם/You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against members of your people. Love your fellow as yourself: I am ה’. (ויקרא יט:יח) When looking a bit closer at this text, we find something very deep, we’re not allowed to hold a grudge against others, and we are to love others as we love ourselves. If the recipe for not holding grudges to other people is loving them, then perhaps the recipe to not holding grudges against ourselves is self-love. In order to love others, we need to love ourselves. We know that and we live that. We know the more hurt and wounded we are, the less we’re capable of compassion and understanding of others. We know the more lost and wandering we are, the less capable we are of seeing people and how lost they’ve become. It’s when we sense we have value, and the ability to come back from bad things, that we become strong and capable of great love and support of others. This is an essential aspect of self-growth and self-realization.

In the words of Psalm 51:12: “Create a pure heart in me, God; and renew a true soul within me.” We come to God when we are crushed or when we need to be uplifted. We come because coming to God shows we matter. If God is concerned with our state and our behaviors, then we have value and worth to God. We turn to God because we recognize we can be better. The optimal word there must be “can” as in “it is 100% possible for us to be better”. It’s when we’re deflated and unable to see past our pain that we fail to recognize we have the power to be better and not drown ourselves in self-loathing. Earlier in the same Psalm (51) in verses four and five the psalmist states: “(4) Wash me thoroughly of my iniquity, and purify me of my sin; (5) for I recognize my transgressions, and am ever conscious of my sin.” We often find ourselves unable to move forward and are stuck in our own hurt and pain, which is the ever consciousness that’s being spoken of. When that happens, we would do well to look in the same mirror again and tell ourselves we’re not alone. We’re in good company with people all around us who have messed up. We need to look into the mirror and see the spark of Divinity that’s within all of us. We need to look and recognize that God is with us when we do wrong so we can change and do right.

I’d like to leave you with the words of my colleague, Rabbi Alan Lew, from his book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared:

[I.] Self-forgiveness is the essential act of the High Holiday season. That’s why we need heaven. That’s why we need God. We can forgive others on our own. But we turn to God, Rabbi Eli Spitz reminds us, because we cannot forgive ourselves. We need to feel judged and accepted by a Power who transcends our limited years and who embodies our highest values. When we wish to wipe the slate clean, to finalize self-forgiveness, we need heaven – a sense of something or someone larger and beyond our self.

[II.] Self-forgiveness is difficult largely because we hold ourselves to such high standards, higher than it is possible to live up to. And it is precisely when we are hardest on ourselves that we are most tempted to bury our misdeeds – to hide from our reality, to deny weakness, to deny that we’ve done anything wrong.

[III.] The relentlessness of the High Holidays – the long days in synagogue, the constant repetition of the prayers, the fasting – wears down our defenses and helps us open to the truth of our lives. The aspect of the High Holidays that is most helpful in this regard is their holiness. The sense of the sacred is attenuated in the modern world, to say the least. Still, these are and have never stopped being the High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, the days that convey a quality of holiness we can all feel, even if we feel it only dimly. It is precisely this holiness that helps us forgive ourselves. These days create a context of holiness, and if we pay close attention, we begin to notice that everything in our lives is suffused with holiness, even those “faults” we thought we had to forgive ourselves for. Even that behavior we took to be wrongful, we now realize, has a holy spark at its center waiting to be released. This is the essence of self-forgiveness.

Pages 126 – 127

I wrote the following on Facebook a month ago: How many times have you seen someone on the worst day of their lives? Have you felt their pain, or did you laugh at them for their pain? Every one of us has experienced our worst day so far. They vary in magnitude and cause. But none of us would ever want to be judged by that. None of us would want to be ridiculed or be the butt of every joke. Just a thought. Not that I approve of infidelity in any way shape or form. Just some perspective about our culture.

These words were in response to the numerous memes and satires of the infamous Coldplay Concert Kiss Cam incident. I wrote these words because I was tired of the joy and laughter at the expense of others great misfortune. I was tired of the humiliation and the inability to recognize that lives had been destroyed by that awful choice and awful night. Nobody seemed to think of that, but perhaps each of us should be a bit more careful to judge less harshly and to minimize how we laugh at people and cause them pain.

We have a custom that when we fill our קידוש/Kiddush Cups with wine, we add a drop of water. The reason is the wine is seen as the substance of judgement, and the water the substance of kindness. We need to have kindness in the way we judge others, and ourselves. That’s of the utmost importance. We should never judge people when they’re living their worst day as that’s not who they are… that’s not the totality of their existence. When שבת/Shabbat concludes this week, we’ll begin the month of אלול/Elul which is the final month of the year and the one that leads up to the New Years celebration, ראש השנה/Rosh Hashana. Each morning we’ll say סליחות/Selichot and blow the שופר/Shofar. All of this is to awaken within us the power to change and to be better. Each of us is a work in progress… none of us is a final product. Each of us has work to do to make ourselves better… to make our relationships better… and to make our community and world better.

Jonah ben Abraham Gerundi was a 13^th century rabbi from Spain who’s best known for his book: שערי תשובה/ShaArei Teshuvah/Gates of Repentance. Early in his career he had been an opponent of Moses Maimonides and his philosophies. The tradition is that he witnessed the burning of volumes of the תלמוד/Talmud in 1240 and saw this as Divine displeasure for having joined ranks against the רמב”ם/Rambam/Maimonides. He wrote this book on repentance to find a way to repent for his wrongs in the past. In the 28^th entry of the “First Gate,” the first section, he wrote: “The would-be penitent should take a lead from the Sages with regard to humble behavior. They said: ‘And be lowly of spirit before all people.’ (פרקי אבות ד:י) From this, one may deduce that one should neither become angry nor deal strictly with one’s associates. One should pay no mind to anything one hears spoken against oneself. One should view any personal injury caused by others as an atonement for one’s sins. Such action would confirm what the Sages said: ‘Were one to overlook injuries, one’s sins would be forgiven.’ (תלמוד בבלי ראש השנה י”ז:א)”

We must be careful when we judge other people. When we judge other people, we must be aware we’re going down a road that is difficult to navigate and hard to find a way to exit. But perhaps each of us needs to see that Jonah ben Abraham’s instructions to us can help us understand that every person will be hurt in this world and will need to find a means by which to forgive the person who has injured him or her. Each and every person must see that repentance is essential, but so is the act of forgiveness. Each of us needs to look at this אלול as an opportunity to begin to repent for what we’ve done wrong and to start down a new path. At the same time, we all need to find the chance to forgive and let go, since that’s the way we can move forward to a better tomorrow together.

All too often we judge people by their singular wrongs. All of us have had bad days and all of us know what it means to be judged by our poor decisions on those days. Those actions, however, aren’t the totality of our existence and thus each of us needs to open our hearts to the power of forgiveness. Let us begin this אלול in such a fashion.

I once had a teacher with a comic strip in their classroom that said “as long as there are tests there will always be prayer in school.” This has always made me laugh because it’s so relatable. Think about all of the times we had our tests returned to us and we sat there saying to ourselves: “please let it be an A, please let it be an A, PLEASE LET IT BE AN A.” As we aged, we turned this truism into many other places like medical tests, phone calls from relatives and so much more.

We quietly utter prayers to ourselves time and again because deep down inside we have fears and think that these moments of “prayer” and reflection could alter the reality sitting there before us. In the תלמוד/Talmud, there is actually great concern about such prayers as they’re an example of a ברכה לבטלה/Beracha L’Vatelah/wasted blessing. The rabbis talk about the idea of praying for a pregnant woman to be carrying a certain gender, or for the screams we hear when we’re not home to not be from our own houses (ברכות נד:ב). All of these are examples of things that have already occurred, the decision has already been made, this is the same thing as our prayers in school or our spontaneous prayers today for all sorts of issues.

These prayers may be “wasted prayer” but we need to lean into the act of prayer a whole lot more. We need to incorporate prayer into our daily lives. There’s a very interesting read on this week’s פרשה/Parsha/portion: עקב/Eikev by the Ben Ish Chai, an Iraqi scholar from 1835 – 1909. In דברים י:י”ב/Deuteronomy 10:12 we read:

וְעַתָּה֙ יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל מָ֚ה ה׳ אֱלֹקֶ֔יךָ שֹׁאֵ֖ל מֵעִמָּ֑ךְ כִּ֣י אִם־לְ֠יִרְאָ֠ה אֶת־ה׳ אֱלֹקֶ֜יךָ לָלֶ֤כֶת בְּכׇל־דְּרָכָיו֙ וּלְאַהֲבָ֣ה אֹת֔וֹ וְלַֽעֲבֹד֙ אֶת־ה׳ אֱלֹקֶ֔יךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ֖ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשֶֽׁךָ׃

“And now, O Israel, what does your God ה׳ demand of you? Only this: to revere your God ה׳, to walk only in divine paths, to love and to serve your God ה׳ with all your heart and soul.”

This פסוק/verse has been used to talk about everything that’s known to God, aside from fear of God, in many sources. This means God knows everything and all is predetermined, aside from our faith and our belief in God.

For now, let’s look at the viewpoint that the Ben Ish Chai favored which is that the verse needs to be read a bit differently; we should not read it as מה/Mah/what, but as מאה/meah/one hundred. That would mean that the verse would read: “And now, O Israel, your God ה׳ demands 100 of you? Only this: to revere your God ה׳, to walk only in divine paths, to love and to serve your God ה׳ with all your heart and soul.” If we read it that way, the question of what is this “100” is answered right after as fear and love and service are the answer. The Ben Ish Chai, and others, hold that this alludes to the idea that God requires us to each make 100 blessings a day.

This concept seems daunting at first glance but perhaps it doesn’t need to be… perhaps it’s aspirational rather than reality. Perhaps we have an obligation to stretch and reach to be cognizant of God and all our myriad blessings as often as humanly possible. Perhaps we need to find opportunities in our daily lives to connect with ourselves, with those around us, and with God. Perhaps we can rise to the occasion to sanctify the ordinary and make it sacred. Perhaps we can hear these words and find blessing all around us. If God is asking for 100 blessings a day from us, we can and should meet God in the world and find those blessings.

 

 

The watch words of our people are the words of the שמע/Shema and they’re found in this week’s פרשה/Parshah: ואתחנן/VaEtchanan (דברים ו:ד). In the תורה/Torah there are many peculiarities in the way the words and letters are written. Sometimes it’s a matter of how they’re laid out and sometimes it’s the unique way a word is spelled. There are times where whole verses are bracketed with letters, and there are times when letters are extra big or extra small. In the case of the שמע, the verse is bookended by two large letters. In the word שמע the letter “ע” is extra big and in the word אחד the letter “ד” is also extra big. The two words look like this שמע and אחד. While the most realistic reason for this is that there’s a concern that the letters could be mistaken for look-alike letters. A “ד” could be mistaken for a “ר.” An “ע” could be mistaken for a “צ” or perhaps for its partner silent letter “א.” Any of these mistakes would cause a total misread of this major central verse of our people. In the case of the “ד” if it were mistaken as a “ר” the word would not be אחד/Echad/One but rather אחר/Acher/Other. God would not be One but rather God would be “other…”

In looking for other, more poetic, reasons for these enlarged letters, we can find deeper value and meaning. For instance, if we take these two large letters and put them together, “עד,” we would have either “Eid” or “Ad.” “Eid” means witness and “Ad” means forever. Let’s take the word as being “עד” a witness. When we say the שמע, we’re testifying to the unity of God. When we say the שמע, we’re standing with fellow Jews from before us, with us and those who will come after us. When we say the שמע, we’re pledging allegiance to our people and to God. It’s a powerful lesson for all of us to understand.

But what does it actually mean to be a witness? In עשרת הדיברות/Eseret HaDibrot/The Ten Commandments/Statements we learn in the ninth (דברים ה:יז) that we shall not bear false witness. We shall not lie about what other people do. But there’s a deeper false witness and that’s the institution of the עד זומם/Ed Zomem/”Scheming Witness” that’s explained in the תלמוד/Talmud in מסכת מכות/Maseket Makot. It’s there we learn about these extra awful false witnesses that are considered scheming, not because they’re lying about what they saw, but they’re lying because they were not even present at all. When I was learning this part of the תלמוד, we took to calling them non-present scheming witnesses. These extra terrible people are considered bad because they were not even there… they didn’t even show up in the first place. The punishment they receive is whatever punishment they were trying to have placed on the person they were testifying against.

So, when we put this all together, we see a picture of what we as Jews need to do when we live by the שמע… we need to show up and be present. We need to stop phoning in our Jewish lives and begin to show up in person and for real. We need to be active and engaged so we can testify we are, indeed, active and engaged and thus thriving. To say the שמע without actively being a part of our people is to be an עד זומם, a non-present witness that has no ability to testify about any of this at all. The שמע is thus calling on all of us to be good upstanding witnesses about God, the תורה, the Jewish people and about our relationship to all the pillars of our religion.

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.

Click here for a video message from Rabbi Hearshen.

Wilderness and Desert are the two English words we use to translate the word במדבר/BaMidbar. Well, more accurately, in the wilderness or in the desert. Why do the Israelites spend so long wandering in the desert or the wilderness? Why does our history begin in a place that lacked so much? It’s as if we began our story with a blank canvas and have painted it ever since.

This week, we begin the fourth book of the תורה/Torah called במדבר. Again, our story only happens when we’re in a place that we have to fill with experiences and meaning. Our story only begins when we’re in a place where we can transform without others. It’s in the wilderness where the magic happened.

Sunday night we’ll celebrate the transformational moment in the wilderness where we went from being newly freed former slaves to a people in a covenantal relationship with God. We’ll stand together as we receive the תורה anew. As Jews, the תורה “wasn’t” given, but rather it “is” given. The תורה is continuously given to the Jewish people on a daily, minute by minute basis. Revelation is continual and eternal. While we celebrate the giving of the תורה on שבועות/Shavuot, it needs to be seen as the beginning of Revelation, but not the entirety of Revelation. All of this took place at an ordinary mountain in the wilderness.

I’m often asked why I spend a month every summer at a summer camp. I’m asked about why I spend “time-off” working. The answer is there’s no greater laboratory of Judaism than Jewish summer camp. There’s no better place to experience the Jewish People and Judaism than summer camp. To begin with, we transplant city dwellers into the wilderness. Every day we’re with the trees. Every night we’re with the stars. Our services are held in spaces not designed by humans, but decorated by God. We have the opportunity to experience the closest thing to the wilderness that our ancestors were in when our people formed.

Last summer, the holiday of שבועות/Shavuot fell a bit later than normal and this meant we celebrated Shavuot at camp. We were concerned about what this would mean for the campers and their fun and enjoyment, but what we actually discovered was that it was an enormous opportunity for all of us: campers and staff. On the first day of שבועות last year when we arrived at the תורה reading, I led all the campers up the mountain at camp for the תורה reading. We ascended the mountain to receive the תורה and it was majestic. Not everyone appreciated my creative flourish, but those of us who leaned into the experience were blessed with a new way of celebrating שבועות.

As I prepare to leave for my month at camp, I want to remind you that I’m just two hours away and continue to be available by email. I won’t be able to respond as quickly as I’d like to, but I will work my way through my emails as the days move along. As summer begins, I want to encourage all of us to take time outside to connect with the wilderness. Connect with the sunrises and sunsets. Connect with the stars and trees. Connect with the world as God created it, and through the creation, connect with the Creator.