Escaping from Laban the Aramean

The period since October 7th has been the hardest one of my rabbinic career. Each week has had a tenor of its own, and the past week, alone, has felt like a month. Within it, I, along with so many of you, have found myself mired in local politics around Israel, with the Seattle City Council and within the Seattle Jewish community. The rise in antisemitism has hit very close to home now, with the vandalism of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Synagogue on Mercer Island this week (oy!), on top of suspicious packages received over the last weeks by multiple local Jewish institutions. And last but not least, for days now, we have been waiting with bated breath for a ceasefire to take effect and for hostages to be released from Gaza. On this day after Thanksgiving, it is wonderful to be able to give thanks for the 25 individuals -- 12 Thai citizens and 13 Israeli women and children -- who were just freed from captivity, even as we wait to bring home the scores of other hostages still being held by Hamas.

As we continue in our Torah cycle this week with Parashat Vayetze, we follow the patriarch Jacob as he journeys in and out of the land. Sandwiched between two chapters of the ongoing family conflict between Jacob and his twin brother Esau is... yet another family drama: this one between Jacob and his uncle, Laban. 

At the start of this week's Torah portion, Jacob is fleeing from Esau, fearing revenge after having tricked him out of his blessing and birthright. He sets out to the birthplace of his mother Rebecca in Haran (modern-day Turkey). There, he immediately falls in love with Rachel at a well, who turns out to be the daughter of his uncle. Laban promises Rachel to Jacob as a wife in exchange for seven years of labor. However, when this period of indentured servitude is up, Laban tricks Jacob, switching out Rachel for Leah at the wedding and requiring Jacob to work yet another seven years in order to be granted Rachel's hand in marriage.

For some twenty years, Jacob continues to work for his uncle Laban. During this time, Jacob amassesses quite the entourage: four wives, twelve children, camels, donkeys and flocks. Following the birth of Joseph (son #11), Jacob decides it's finally time to leave and head back towards his home in the land of Canaan (modern-day Israel). He says to Laban: "shalcheini v'eilcha el m'komi ul'artzi; t'na et nashai v'et y'ladai asher avad'ti ot'cha" -- "release me that I may go to my place and my land; give me my wives and my children, for whom I have served you" (Gen. 30:25-26).

In this call for release from servitude, the ancient rabbis hear a foreshadowing echo of the Exodus story from Egypt. Based on this connection, Jacob's uncle "Laban the Aramean" (as he is called in this week's parasha) features prominently in Passover haggadah:

"Go out and learn what Lavan the Aramean sought to do to Ya'akov, our father; since Pharaoh only decreed [the death sentence] on the males but Lavan sought to uproot the whole [people]. As it is stated (Deuteronomy 26:5), 'An Aramean was destroying my father and he went down to Egypt, and he resided there with a small number and he became there a nation, great, powerful and numerous.'"

You may well recognize this passage from the Passover seder. Although the full story of Laban and Jacob is rather complex (and worth a read in its entirety, if you aren't already familiar with it), in the rabbinic imagination, Laban is transformed from a simple trickster and liar into a quintessential enemy of the Jewish people. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, does not mince words when he claims that "Laban is, in effect, the first antisemite" (click here if you'd like to read his full essay). 

As to what we learn from this narrative, Rabbi Sacks draws out the following conclusion: "If Laban is the eternal paradigm of hatred, then Jacob is the eternal paradigm of the human capacity to survive the hatred of others." 

This is a beautiful and important sentiment to remind ourselves of as we move into this particular Shabbat. As much as these recent weeks have been filled with obstacles, horrors, and heaviness, they have also highlighted our community's strength and resilience. 

On a webinar last week, Joel Migdal and Peggy Brill, speaking from their home in Israel, described the inspiring ways that Israeli civil society has mobilized since October 7th. Although the Israeli government has widely been described as "missing in action" during these recent weeks, the Israeli protest movement that had been organizing weekly anti-government demonstrations for nine months transformed overnight into a well-coordinated volunteer network, filling nearly every void. Some 60% of Israelis have volunteered in the last month. Here in the American Jewish community too, we are trying to figure out what solidarity and resilience look like. In the wake of the awful graffiti at Herzl-Ner Tamid, volunteers showed up to power wash and repaint the exterior of the building, and interfaith colleagues have reached out to express their solidarity.

Today, I am so very grateful for the release of this first large group of hostages. We are reminded that in our Jewish tradition, pidyon shevuyim, the redemption of captives, is considered a highest-level mitzvah; we can recite the blessing: Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam matir asurim; Praised are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who releases the captive. In addition, I am thankful for the temporary ceasefire, and very much supportive of efforts to bring in more humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people of Gaza, who have suffered in ways that are unimaginable over these last weeks.

Without a doubt, there will be more hard days to come. We will continue to pray - and push - for the release of the many hostages who remain in captivity. We will do everything in our power to speak out against antisemitism, along with all other forms of hatred and bigotry, in America and around the world. This week, may we find strength in Jacob’s escape from Laban and the continuation of his journey, as we continue our own. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Rebecca, Philosopher of Tragedy

“But the children struggled in Rebecca’s womb, and she said, “Why - this - I am?” She went to inquire of God, and God answered her: Two nations are in your womb…” (Genesis 25:22-23)

“It is much easier to live in a world in which one side is good and the other evil than it is to embrace complexity…Listening to and reading many of the folks [who see this conflict as between an all-good side and an all-bad side], I’ve been tempted to excoriate them for their moral and intellectual laziness. But under that laziness lies something many of us can actually relate to - a fear of encountering the world as fundamentally tragic.” Rabbi Shai Held

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy.” W.B. Yeats

Oof. I know that’s a gloomy way to open a teaching. Yet at the heart of our ancestor Rebecca’s experience of nurturing new life is a painful awareness of likely enmity between her two children. She is literally conceiving life as a tragedy. 

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg notes Rebecca’s “enigmatic cry…a bare, rudimentary three-word riddle: Lama zeh anokhi - ‘Why - this - I am?’”

Many commentators try to solve the riddle, mostly by reading it as a form of existential angst. Rebecca struggles to make sense of the multiple narratives she embodies. In being unable to clearly see herself as whole, unified, and coherent, she questions her own being. 

Zornberg, though, brings in a remarkable teaching from the Maharal (16th century, Prague). “Maharal…expresses some dismay at [these teachings’] existential skepticism. He suggests a modulated translation of anokhi: “Why am I sitting passively, why do I not investigate? It is my task to seek out explanations - and she went to seek God.” In Maharal’s reading, Rebecca confronts the despair of the self, and discovers that the question of meaning has a dynamic force. Her despair is not to circle hollowly upon itself, but to launch searchings and researching, inquiries for God.”

Through Zornberg’s interpretation of Maharal, we discover Rebecca the Philosopher. The experience of feeling torn - of seeing a tragic world rather than one with obvious heroes and villains - has the potential to awaken in us, as in Rebecca, the urge to investigate nothing less than the meaning of life itself. 

I don’t want to valorize tragedy in any way. But what I see in Rabbi Shai Held’s comment, in the line from William Butler Yeats’ autobiography, and in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s essay, is a sense that naming tragedy as part of our experience helps us see more clearly. A heroes-and-villains worldview (which is clearly compelling across a wide political spectrum) motivates us to act but doesn’t connect us to reality. It is a story-telling version of spiritual bypass, "the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks". 

There’s a seemingly comedic commentary on why exactly the twin fetuses were struggling with each other, from the Tur HaAroch (14th century, Spain). He notes that Esau is described as hairy, while Jacob is smooth. Obviously, then, Esau’s hairs were poking Jacob in the womb and causing all the agitation! 

I shared this teaching at a staff meeting earlier this week, and after some (mild) laughter, Rabbi Rachel plucked some profundity out of the interpretation: At the root of their conflict was a feeling of discomfort. 

I don’t know a single person in Jewish circles who is feeling particularly comfortable right now. When I think about what wisdom Rebecca Imeinu, our ancestor, teacher, and guide, might offer, these words come to mind:

May your discomfort lead you to inquire. 

May your inquiry lead to learning. 

May your learning never lapse into too much comfort. 

To encounter the world as it is with all its pain and promise, is also to encounter the Source of Life. Hold the pain tenderly, and pursue the promise as honestly as you can.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Isaac - and Ishmael

Parashat Chayei Sarah opens with the death of the matriarch Sarah. Many classical commentators connect her passing to the Akedah (the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac) from last week's Torah portion. In doing so, they make the claim that Sarah dies because she is either unwilling or unable to live in a world that is as dangerous, unreliable, capricious and cruel as the one she experiences around her. 

In contrast to Sarah, the other characters in the story must live on. They (like we) must forge a path forward from a dark and hard place, in the midst of a grand narrative featuring dramatic family dysfunction. After all, Abraham has now nearly killed a son not once but twice: first Ishmael and then Isaac. Both Isaac and Ishmael, it seems, bear the scars of their past traumas. And, with the tension between their mothers having pitted them against each other literally since before they were born, it's hard to imagine that these half-siblings could possibly want much to do with each other again.

For all of these reasons, the conclusion of this week's Torah portion feels surprising. In a book-end to Sarah's death at the beginning, at the end of Parashat Chayei Sarah, Abraham dies at the ripe old age of 175.  The text records: "vayikb'ru oto yitzchak v'yishmael banav," "and they buried him, Isaac and Ishmael his sons" (Gen 25:9). Imagine... that by the time Abraham dies, Ishmael and Isaac have somehow reconciled with one another, enough that they can take on a shared task of working side-by-side to dig their father's grave. (Noting that the text explicitly mentions that Abraham dies "contented," the Etz Hayim Chumash asks: "Can we see this as a model for family reconciliations?")

Not only do Ishmael and Isaac come together to bury their father, but a close reading of the text reveals that Isaac has arrived to his father's funeral from a very specific location. A few verses before Abraham's death, we learn that "Isaac had just come back from the vicinity of Be'er-lechai-roi" (Gen 24:62), and as soon as the funeral is over, he returns to that place: "After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac. And Isaac settled near Be'er-lahai-roi" (Gen 25:11). Be'er-lahai-roi is not just any place; this is the name of the well where God had saved a thirsty Hagar when Sarah first became jealous and expelled her from the household, some 90 years prior, according to the Torah's internal chronology. This special place is also connected to Ishmael's birth story, as it's the spot where a messenger of God first announced to Hagar that she would bear a child and should name him Ishmael (Gen 16:14). 

Pause for a moment to consider what this means. Isaac - having narrowly escaped his own killing - has been living his adult life in the very place that is associated with his brother Ishmael's existence in the world. The Torah doesn't give us more details than that about what Isaac been doing in Be'er-lahai-roi, but we can imagine that, during the intervening years, these two trauma survivors, Isaac and Ishmael, have taken refuge with one another, perhaps swapping stories of their tough upbringings, complaining about their parents. Maybe their own traumatic pasts have created an opening for a real relationship to form between them, such that the fresh loss of their father Abraham at the end of our parasha is enough to bring them into explicit reunion as they work together to complete a shared task of mutual importance.

I have been thinking about Ishmael and Isaac a lot over the past few weeks. As I've shared previously, I believe we're currently seeing an unprecedented degree of polarization around the events happening in Israel and Gaza. Social media feeds only seek to reinforce beliefs that this horrible moment we're witnessing now is all the fault of "one side"; many oppressive voices -- on both the extreme right and left -- insist (incorrectly) that if you believe X, you must also do, say, or support Y. It's coming to feel more and more to me like there are smaller proxy battles playing out within the American Jewish community too -- one that is largely (although not entirely) generational. I continue to believe that binaries and zero-sum-game thinking don't serve us at this moment -- it's not how we've ever practiced spirituality or Judaism in this community, and it doesn't ring true with the lessons of our Torah.

The more polarizing and toxic the American discourse has become, the less grounded it feels to me in the realities of the Middle East. Recently, I'm finding myself drawn towards Israeli and Palestinian voices, in an attempt to center the experiences of the human beings who are living through violence and trauma in their day to day (in a way that we simply aren't, here). I am also finding real data helpful. For example, this week I attended a webinar with Professor Khalil Shikaki (a preeminent expert on Palestinian public opinion) and learned that Hamas's approval ratings/popularity were at a historic low-point among both West Bank and Gazan Palestinians just prior to October 7th; I also learned that polling from recent weeks shows that 4 in 5 Israelis blame the Netanyahu government for the mass infiltration of Hamas terrorists on that day. These inputs support my deep convictions that the only future for Israelis and Palestinians is one in which both peoples can live in peace and security, with justice, freedom and dignity. Their fates are inextricably linked. It's not a contradiction to want to see hostages returned to Israel AND to want an end to the bombing of Gaza, to condemn Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups as terrorist organizations AND to condemn the far-right-wing Israeli government (which has allowed both settlers and its own army to kill hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank in recent weeks).

I am appreciating the voices of Palestinians and Israelis who "get" that the descendents of Ishmael and Isaac seem destined to need to find a way to live together in the small strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (Pro-Palestinian calls of "from the river to the sea" that demand Jewish erasure and the Israeli government officials who promote the idea of "Greater Israel" and support policies that result in Palestinian erasure both feel equally morally repugnant to me.) In last week's New Yorker magazine, a long-form article by David Remnick (entitled "Letter from Israel: In the Cities of Killing") featured two such voices. Retired Israeli army general Yair Golan is quoted as saying: "The most frustrating thing to me is the inability of anyone to envision how these two peoples can live together. We are not going anywhere. And they are not going anywhere. Occupation is not a solution. Our peoples should both be led by sensible majorities, but both people are being led by their extremists. This is the challenge of Israel." Palestinian scholar Sari Nusseibeh, similarly, explains that Hamas and violent extremism, in general, will not recede without a political resolution; in his words: "No matter what, we will end up where we started, with the Palestinians and the Israelis living here together and needing to find a proper formula."

I have no illusions that finding a path forward will be simple. The horrors of October 7th for Israelis (and for Jews everywhere) and the national grief and trauma of every day since in Israel -- as rockets continue to fall across the country, some 240 civilian hostages remain in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of reservists have been called up for military duty -- cannot be overstated. Nor can the casualties in Gaza (some 40% of which are children), the mass displacement of an estimated 1.6 million people, and the enormous scale destruction of homes, buildings and infrastructure... the Palestinians of Gaza are suffering at levels we here in the U.S. cannot even begin to fathom. And also, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this moment rests upon mountains of pasts traumas: the Holocaust, expulsion from Arab countries, pogroms and more on the Jewish side, and massacres, the Nakba ("catastrophe") of 1948, the mass displacement of 1967, and more for Palestinians. 

And yet, there are still bold leaders trying to articulate a vision for a shared future. Like many of them, I find hope in the observation that so many times in the past, unexpected openings and overtures towards peace have happened in the wake of great tragedies and violence (for example, the peace agreement between Israel and Sadat/Egypt was signed in 1977, still in the wake of the 1973 war between the two countries; the First Intifada of the 1980s gave way to the Oslo Accords). In order to get there, we must make space in our world -- both here and there -- for a wide range of non-extremist positions, so that we can build coalitions to combat extremism everywhere it manifests, whether it is Jewish extremism or Muslim extremism, Israeli extremism or Palestinian extremism, extremism on the political left or extremism on the political right.

If you are interested in learning more, there are many organizations committed to such work. Here are but two such examples/invitations from organizations that Kavana has partnered with many times in the past:

• This Sunday at 5pm Pacific Time, the New Israel Fund is sponsoring a conversation with the Arab-Jewish grassroots movement in Israel called Standing Together (Omdim Beyachad / Naqif Ma'an). At a time of extreme tension and strife, leaders Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green are as committed as ever to promoting a message of a shared, equal and just society, and real work and organizing to make it so. Click here for more info and to register.
  

• Last week, Combatants for Peace hosted a conversation entitled "Solidarity: A Path to Liberation," featuring their Palestinian and Israeli co-founders. Souli Khatib encouraged listeners to hold fast to their values, especially now, saying: "I feel this can offer an alternative to other people - rather than the voice of darkness or the voice of us vs. them." Click here to watch the recording anytime.

As we enter into this Shabbat, I am clinging to the hopeful ending to Parashat Chayei Sarah: the one that features Isaac and Ishmael hanging out together in Be'er-lahai-roi and uniting together to bury their father Abraham. I hope and pray that if they could find healing and reconciliation in the wake of their loss-upon-trauma, we can be courageous enough to learn from their example today. I hope and pray for an end to the terrible violence we are witnessing now. I hope and pray that we can hold fast to our values as we build a "big tent" that can combat polarizing forces and extremist tendencies in our society. I commit to doing my part from here in America to support the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael who live together in the Holy Land, such that someday -- God-willing -- they will be able to work together, side-by-side, as they undertake the task of building a shared society where there is space for all.

Wishing us all a Shabbat of comfort and healing, prayers and hope, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

P.S. For the past few weeks, Rabbi Jay and I have been focused on providing pastoral care for the Kavana community. The email above represents a conscious pivot: an invitation to engage with Torah, with current events, and with the Israelis and Palestinians who are most directly involved in a sensible, non-extremist, non-proxy way. And yet, we know that many folks in our community are still struggling mightily under the weight of this time. If you need pastoral support, please know that you're not alone and don't hesitate to reach out to either of us.

What Do I Know?

“On October 6 I knew so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Rabbi Shira Stutman said on a recent episode of her podcast Chutzpod!, “…and now what I feel at my core is that I just. don’t. know.”

In an awful synchronicity, Jews have been processing Hamas’s pogrom against Israelis and the resulting war through reading chapter by chapter from the beginning of the Torah. October 7 was Simchat Torah, the “joy of the Torah”, which marks the moment we finish our sacred book only to start reading it all over again, even as this year we felt the world had changed forever. 

Each parashah holds lessons - the origins of violence when Cain kills his brother Abel, the lonely isolation of Noah’s ark, the moment when God tells Abraham to journey to his new home, what will be known as the land of Israel. 

There are many possible lessons in this week’s parashah, Vayera, but what caught my heart’s attention as I read through it was the repetition of the Hebrew word yada, “to know.” It appears ten (10) times, yet each time it seems to mean something slightly different. As if “knowing” isn’t so precise, or perhaps there are many ways of knowing, many practices of knowing. 

I want to focus on the first and last instance of knowing in this Torah portion, because they are both about God knowing Abraham, but in very different ways.

The very first instance of “knowing” is strange. God is about to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gemorrah, but first shares the plan with Abraham, to test how he would react. God muses, “For I have known him, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of God by doing what is just and right, in order that God may bring about for Abraham what has been promised him” (Genesis 18:19).

What does it mean that God knows Abraham? Of course God knows Abraham! God and Abraham have been talking for quite a while by now!

Rashi clarifies: “This is an expression denoting "affection"... Still the primary meaning of these terms connected with the root yada is really that of knowing, for whoever holds a person in affection attaches them to himself, so that he knows him well and is familiar with him.”

God knowing Abraham isn’t about facts first, but about the primacy of relationship. God cares about Abraham, and therefore gets to know him better. Caring about someone precedes knowing or understanding them. 

When knowing precedes relationship, however, we don’t encounter a human being but just a data point. 

The final appearance of knowing comes after Abraham follows God’s directive to sacrifice his son Isaac. At the last moment, a ram is substituted for the child, yet the story leaves a horrifying aftertaste. God sums up the results of this test by saying, “Now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). 

Rashi again offers a fascinating perspective: “From now I have a reply to give to… the nations who wonder at the love I bear you: I have an opening of the mouth (i.e. I have an excuse, a reason to give them) now that they see that you are a God-fearing man.”

God knows Abraham, meaning God has a particular affection for him. By the end of our story, God knows that Abraham is God-fearing, which is a useful excuse to explain why God has affection for him. Here’s the thing: if Rashi is right, God’s affection for Abraham is not actually tied primarily to his “worthy” character!

Many of us are furiously working on knowing more right now, about the history of Israel-Palestine, about how to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza or how to protest them, how to define antisemitism and fight against it, how to see hope for the return of hostages, how to acknowledge the suffering of so many Palestinians who have no love for Hamas, how to find a path forward for safety and sovereignty for all peoples living there.

All of that is very important, and I’m engaged in it too. But I feel like quite often this form of knowing is focused on finding “worthy” reasons to support what you already hope to be true. 

I want to follow God’s example here, and prioritize love over knowing. The world will change when we know our people, not about our people. The world will change when we dedicate our time to affectionate love for them (whoever they may be) and practice that love ferociously. When we send care packages and have conversations. When we listen for stories and not for statistics. 

Practicing love creates more capacity for love. Practicing love creates more capacity for love. So love your people ferociously. And then start to ask if there are others you can bring into your heart. 

Let me be clear. I think there are people deserving of our hate right now. But I think that number is smaller than our first instinct might assume. Yehuda Amichai once wrote in a poem, “The place where we are right / is hard and trampled / like a yard. / But doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a mold, a plow.” 

What do I know? I know a hope that enough of us will turn to love, and cultivate humble uncertainty out of which something new and unexpected might grow.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Reflections from Rabbi Rachel: Pluralistic Community at a time of Brokenness

As we prepare to move into Shabbat, it's a gorgeous fall day here in Seattle -- I'm currently looking out my office window at leaves of every shade of green, gold, and red against the backdrop of a crisp blue sky! And yet, this continues to feel like a very heavy time. In the hopes that this approach is still feeling valuable and helpful, I'd like to continue holding up a mirror to the Kavana community and reflecting back some of what I am seeing from my vantage point.

This week, it does feel like we are turning a corner, emotionally. In the Kavana office, we had already been talking about the need to move from "sprint" into "marathon" mode, as we continue supporting our community in the wake of a still-evolving crisis for Jews worldwide. The visceral shock, rawness, and anguish of the days immediately following October 7th have for most -- although admittedly not all -- members of our community given way to a different kind of existential sadness and grief. I saw an Instagram post yesterday with the text: "We need to tikkun the f*%k out of this olam," which made me laugh but also gets at the deep and true reality that for so many Jews, the world feels profoundly broken right now, perhaps more than ever before in our lifetimes.

The pastoral concerns that Rabbi Jay and I were fielding a few weeks ago -- individuals reeling from the news of Israeli relatives and acquaintances having been killed or taken hostage, many reports of insomnia and numbness, etc. -- have given way to new ones. This week, I have fielded literally dozens of phone calls, texts and emails, most of which relate to questions of what it means to engage in the world, in this moment, as Jews. 

A number of you have reached out for support as you've worked to draft internal memos for your companies, organizations, or departments; others have shared some very poorly drafted (sometimes just disappointing, and sometimes scary or provoking) such memos and statements. Some of you are fearful; others are lamenting the loss of friendships or seeking advice about how to maintain relationships with relatives with whom you profoundly disagree. 

I've received many videos from Kavana folks, via text message and WhatsApp, of pro-Palestinian rallies and protests, ranging in location from downtown Seattle to college campuses around the country; these videos have been accompanied by either explicit or implicit boundary questions, about when speech and activism shades into antisemitism and becomes dangerous for Jews. (If this is indeed your question, I am pleased to re-share an article I've recommended before, entitled "How to tell when criticism of Israel is actually anti-Semitism," by Rabbi Jill Jacobs.) 

Others of you are watching American politics carefully, sharing with me videos and statements (including Barack Obama's "Thoughts on Israel and Gaza," which I found particularly eloquent), and noting, with a variety of emotional responses, how various elected officials have voted with regard to U.S. aid for Israel. Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis (who represents Queen Anne, where Kavana is headquartered) reached out to me this week to hear about how our local Jewish community is navigating this time, and we had a productive discussion about the role that local government leaders can play in ensuring the safety of all of Seattle's residents, including and especially members of the Jewish and Muslim communities and those of Palestinian descent.

Shifting gears somewhat, several members of our community have also wondered out-loud this week whether Kavana will take a specific stance on what Israel should do next, or whether the community has signed onto any petitions or advocacy statements. In short, the answer so far is no. Over the last few weeks, Kavana has maintained a posture that has been largely communal and pastoral.... which is to say that first and foremost, we see it as our core mission to take care of our people and to forge local Jewish community. We do understand the urgency of this moment, though, and since the question has been posed several times, I want to offer a bit more context:

In contrast to most other Jewish congregations, Kavana is a non-denominational and explicitly pluralistic community. On the religious front, this means that our folks come from a wide range of backgrounds and have very divergent practices and preferences -- and we like it this way! This is the reason, for example, that we offer different "flavors" of Shabbat services on different weekends of the month, and a whole array of options to choose from on the High Holidays. Our goal is to support people in navigating the landscape of Jewish tradition and finding what's meaningful to them, without assuming that the answers have to be the same for everyone. Sometimes we talk about this aspect of Kavana's approach as "personalized Judaism in a community context." Admittedly, holding political differences with a single spiritual community can be harder, but here too, we aim to support a wide array of viewpoints. 

Historically, Kavana's responses to social justice issues of all sorts have emerged in a grassroots way; whenever there's been sufficient consensus around a particular issue -- as we've had, for example, around immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and racial justice -- we've been able to do solid legislative and advocacy work as a community. Around the "hot" topic of Israel/Palestine, though, we probably see a wider range of perspectives and views than in any other arena. I do believe that our intentional community is founded on many shared values. I'm certain, for example, that everyone within the Kavana community longs for peace and justice, cares deeply about the future of the Jewish people, and sees the humanity of -- and empathizes with the suffering of -- both Israelis and Palestinians. Right now, though, this is translating into some very different "calls to action." From dozens and dozens of conversations, my impression is that most Kavana folks currently seem to support some kind of Israeli military operation to root out Hamas, while simultaneously urging Israel to try to curb the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. (This is my personal take, at least for now; earlier this week I signed onto T'ruah's "Open Letter from North American Rabbis and Cantors Responding to the Crisis in Israel and Gaza" as an individual.) That said, there is also a passionate voice from within Kavana calling for a total ceasefire and an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza. These disagreements about which policies are most likely to succeed in helping Israel and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace, and about which are most realistic, are not insignificant. Somehow, we must learn how to live in community with one another across these political differences, just as we have navigated religious differences in our pluralistic framework.

Over the coming weeks, we will continue working at this in a number of ways:

• We will connect Kavana folks up with one another for activism. If you're looking for "your people" with whom to gather and take action, let us know. There are Kavana folks who are showing up at the Federal Building daily on weekdays for a "Bring Them Home Now" campaign (UnXeptable, the organization that had been rallying for democracy and against judicial reforms has now morphed into this work to free the hostages). There are others who are organizing a local IfNotNow chapter and mobilizing to demand that President Biden and Congress call for an immediate ceasefire. Whatever your interest, if we know of others within Kavana who are like-minded, we're happy to link you up.
  

• We urge you to invest in face-to-face community-building and relationships, in a way that's supportive of your needs. This might mean showing up for the special Singing/Healing Circle this coming Monday evening, a learning event, or Kabbalat Shabbat next Friday night. I especially want to plug the "Unlearning Jewish Anxiety" weekend with Dr. Caryn Aviv that's coming up the weekend of November 10-12 -- this event was already planned, but the content feels more relevant than ever in this fraught moment. Additionally, I recommend reaching out to a friend and taking a walk together, or grabbing coffee, or setting up a Zoom call... and if you need a new connection, ping us and we'll try to help you find one. Whatever you choose, I highly recommend that you make it a face-to-face interaction, as social media is a particularly polarizing and awful place to be interacting right now.
  

• Once you're ready, practice engaging in a conversation with someone whose politics are different from your own. Some people have seen their previous views affirmed and strengthened over these last few weeks, but in very divergent ways; many others are feeling shaken, and are now questioning long-held axioms and truths. Deep listening to someone else in our own Jewish community, but whose views diverge from your own, can help to strengthen a muscle that will be very important for Kavana as we continue in the "marathon" phase of this time. 
  

• Soon we'll be turning communal attention to supporting one another. This idea emerged at last week's Kavana board meeting, that so often we have gathered to cook for others (whether that's community members at times of illness or loss, or residents of a Tiny Home Village), but that right now, perhaps what we really need most is to tend to one another. Stay tuned for some special opportunities for Kavana partners to participate in cooking parties and communal meals, as we seek positive outlets and offer mutual support to one another at this time of great hurt and need. 

Lastly, we continue to turn to Torah for inspiration and to ground ourselves in our tradition. This week, we read Parashat Lech Lecha, the beginning of Abraham's journey. This Torah portion is chock full of tensions and contradictions. In Genesis 12, the land is promised to Abraham and the text also acknowledges the presence of other inhabitants ("the Canaanites were then in the land"). As we explored this Wednesday evening in Living Room Learning through words of Rabbi Shai Held, this parasha also pairs a warning that the Israelites someday will be "strangers in a land not theirs" and oppressed (Gen. 15:13-14) with a cautionary tale about how they (we?) also possess the capacity to oppress the other (see story of Sarai/Hagar - Genesis 16:3-13). 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my read on this is that Parashat Lech Lecha brings us complexity and nuance, and resides in the messy gray space between black and white mode of thinking. We can uphold interpretations of this Torah portion -- and also beliefs about the world around us -- that are simultaneously true, yet live in tension with one another. To quote Rabbi Jay this week, we can "hold some grace for them not being mutually exclusive."

One way or another, though, Abraham is mandated to "be a blessing" and promised that "other nations will bless themselves through you" (Gen. 12:2-4). So may it be, that his offspring -- both the children of Sarai and the children of Hagar -- will someday merit to live side-by-side in peace and with justice and dignity for all, in fulfillment of this promise. 

And meanwhile, may we find the strength and courage we need to hold our tent of community open wide, so that we can continue to be a blessing to one another.

With hopes for a Shabbat of wholeness at this moment where so much still feels broken,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

From Care to Compassion

The last two weeks have been harrowing, and while there have been moments that have felt clarifying, the most consistent theme I’ve heard from others and felt myself is a deeply unsettled anxiety that oscillates between sadness, fear, and anger. Who are we to be as Americans, as Jews, as people connected to Israelis (or Israeli ourselves), as people committed to justice and solidarity, as students of history and dreamers of a brighter future? 

As Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld wrote recently (and we quoted last Friday), “I have no road map for this moment, and I am wary of anyone who says they do… Let yourself be uncertain about what Israel should do next in this impossibly painful and frightening moment… I trust that every member of this community longs desperately to do what is possible to prevent further suffering and death of innocent civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli. I hear the same longing from my Israeli friends and family as well. Let us be very, very humble as we share ideas about how best to do so. Beware of facile answers.” 

I want to share with you a story, drawn by Martin Buber from Hasidic sources. This is a hard story about our yearning to alleviate suffering. It is called, “The Angel and the World’s Dominion.”

“There was a time when the Will of the Lord, Whose hand has the power to create and destroy all things, unleashed an endless torrent of pain and sickness over the earth. The air grew heavy with the moisture of tears, and a dim exhalation of sighs clouded it over. Even the legions that surround God’s throne were not immune to the hovering sadness. One angel, in fact, was so deeply moved by the sufferings he saw below, that his soul grew quite restless. When he lifted his voice in song with the others, a note of perplexity sounded among the strains of pure faith; his thoughts rebelled and contended with the Lord. He could no longer understand why death and deprivation need serve as connecting links in the great Chain of Events. Then one day he felt to his horror that the eye of All-Being was piercing his own eye and uncovering the confusion in his heart. Pulling himself together, he came before the Lord, but when he tried to talk, his throat dried up. Nevertheless, the Lord called him by name and gently touched his lips. The angel began to speak. He begged God to place the administration of the Earth in his hands for a year’s time, that he might lead it to an era of well-being. The angel bands trembled at this audacity. But at the same moment Heaven grew bright with the radiance of God’s smile. He looked at the supplicant with great love, as He announced His agreement. When the angel stood up again, he too was shining.

And so a year of joy and sweetness visited the Earth. The shining angel poured the great profusion of his merciful heart over the most anguished of her children, on those who were benumbed and terrified by want. The groans of the sick and dying were no longer heard in the land. The angel’s companion in the steely armor, who only a short time before had been rushing and roaring through the air, stepped aside now, waiting peevishly with lowered sword, relieved of his official duties. The earth floated through a fecund sky that left her with the burden of new vegetation. When summer was at its height, people moved singing through the full, yellow fields; never had such abundance existed in living memory. At harvest time, it seemed likely that the walls would burst or the roofs fly off, if they were going to find room to store their crops.

Proud and contented, the shining angel basked in his own glory. For by the time the first snow of winter covered the valleys, and dominion over the earth reverted into God’s hands, he had parceled out such an enormous bounty that the people of the earth would surely be enjoying his gifts for many years to come.

But one cold day, late in the year, a multitude of voices rose heavenwards in a great cry of anguish. Frightened by the sound, the angel journeyed down to the Earth and, dressed as a pilgrim, entered the first house along the way. The people there, having threshed the grain and ground it into flour, had then started baking bread – but, alas, when they took the bread out of the oven, it fell to pieces, and the pieces were unpalatable; they filled the mouth with a disgusting taste, like clay. And this was precisely what the Angel found in the second house and in the third and everywhere that he set foot. People were lying on the floor, tearing their hair and cursing the King of the World, who had deceived their miserable hearts with His false blessing.

The angel flew away and collapsed at his Master’s feet. “Lord,” he cried, “help me to understand where my power and judgment were lacking.” Then God raised his voice and spoke: Behold a truth which is known to me, and only to me from the beginning of time, a truth too deep and dreadful for your delicate, generous hands, my sweet apprentice – it is this, that the Earth must be nourished with decay and covered with shadows that its seeds may bring forth – and it is this, that souls must be made fertile with flood and sorrow, that through them the Great Work may be born.”

Like all stories, this one cannot be reduced to a single lesson or point. But I particularly appreciate what the writer and activist Parker Palmer sees in the story. “Though some people see the angel as being compassionate from the outset of the tale, I do not. Compassion means, literally, the capacity to be with the suffering of another. Though the angel was ‘deeply moved’ by human suffering at the beginning of the story, the text says that he was moved only by ‘the sufferings he saw below.’ His relation to that suffering was both visual and vertical: he saw it rather than touched it, and he kept himself above it rather than entering into it… If the angel had proceeded differently - if he had asked at the outset to become a pilgrim on earth [rather than earth’s chief executive officer for a year] so that he could share the plight of the people - he would never have planted the seeds of false hope that grew into false wheat and were baked into false bread. It may be easier to act from a distance than to practice true compassion, but such action rarely results in anyone being fed.”

In this week’s Torah portion, Noah builds an ark in order to survive a flood that destroys the rest of the world. It is said he was a righteous man, blameless in his generation (Genesis 6:9), a curious qualification that leads Jewish tradition to wonder if he could have been an even better person. Noah follows God’s instructions, and honestly I often feel a similar impulse - when the flood of sorrow and violence and vicious words become too much, I want to build an ark and float away with the meager number of people who think exactly like I do. I want to close ranks, tend wounds, and disconnect. 

But no - Noah’s story, like Buber’s Angel, is a cautionary tale. Noah “did not reach the [spiritual and ethical] level of sharing in the sorrow of human beings” (Nosson Tzvi Finkel). According to the Torah, Noah simply built an ark and survived. According to the Talmud, Noah spent 120 years chastising the people and urging them to change. (They didn’t). But he never once tried to visit them in their pain. 

May we encounter each other not as arguments with legs and social media accounts, but as humans with hearts and hopes and heaviness, and care for and about each other’s pain. May we care for ourselves with kindness, and when we have capacity may we turn to curiosity and compassion. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Another Invitation from Kavana

Over the past few days, Rabbi Jay and I have continued to hear from many of you, and we are grateful for these conversations and messages. Our community, together with Israel and with Jews everywhere, is still reeling in the wake of last Saturday's barbaric attacks in Southern Israel. We are continuing to witness (and experience ourselves) quite the range of intense emotions: sadness, grief, anger, worry, fear, and more. And, of course, events are still unfolding in heartbreaking and horrifying ways: as funerals are conducted for the slain while the fate of hostages remains uncertain, as Israel mobilizes for a ground invasion of Gaza, as a humanitarian crisis of enormous magnitude looms for Palestinians, as Jewish institutions brace in the face of threats of a day of violence against Jews worldwide. This may be the hardest week I can remember in my lifetime, and I expect future generations will look back on this as a watershed moment in both Jewish and human history.

On some level we are -- of course -- "in this together." But, it's also been interesting to me to note that even within the Kavana community -- a small subset of a small subset of the American Jewish community -- our responses to this week's events have varied considerably. Perhaps this is to be expected -- that with a tragedy so enormous and multifaceted, different individuals are focusing on different pieces and processing in very different ways. This week, I've observed that within our community, we have folks who are drawn to rallies and those who need quiet vigils; those who've been glued to the videos and images on their screens, and those who can't bear to look. Our Kavana community includes Israelis-in-America and American Jews who once made aliyah, lots of individuals with relatives in Israel, and also a handful with Palestinian roots and/or deep ties with Gaza... and these personal backgrounds and relationships absolutely lend themselves to different lenses on the world, different opinions about this fraught moment.

This week, as we encounter Parashat Bereishit, the first portion of the Torah, I am thinking once again about a famous midrash that appears in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38a). It entertains the question of why God only created a single human being, adam ha-rishon. Here's a piece of that midrashic text:

The Sages taught in a baraita (Tosefta 8:5): The fact that Adam the first human was created alone serves to declare the greatness of the supreme King of kings, the Holy Blessed One, as a person stamps several coins with one seal, and they are all similar to each other. But the Holy Blessed One stamps all people with the seal of the first Adam, and not one of them is similar to another. As it is stated: “It is changed like clay under the seal and they stand as a garment” (Job 38:14). 

This midrash underscores that -- while we all share common ancestry (in adam ha-rishon, the first human being) -- we are minted as individuals, and "not one of us is similar to another." 

Kavana has always aimed to hold difference well. We have proudly built a diverse community, and we've been particularly successful at establishing a wide tent when it comes to religious practice and theological belief, offering an array of options and celebrating the "multiple entry points" into our Jewish community. Holding a spectrum of political views, particularly on Israel, has always been more challenging but we have managed. Right now, though, we are fragile and our sensitivities are heightened. We may have to work harder to be compassionate and tender with one another, to give the benefit of the doubt, to maintain the close community bonds about which we care so deeply. 

My colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous wrote the following to the IKAR community earlier this week, and I echo her sentiments as I share these words with our Kavana community: "And lastly, please let us be tender with ourselves and each other. Take a break from social media when it becomes too much. Instead, reach out to one another to check-in. Call your family and friends in Israel and let them know you stand with them in sorrow and solidarity. Call a Palestinian friend and share your hope for a better future. We can’t take each other’s pain away, but we can make sure none of us navigates the pain alone. Let us hold each other with love and grace."

With prayers that this Shabbat will bring us closer to the shalom (peace) and shleimut (wholeness) that we and the world surely need right now... and I look forward to sharing hugs and tears with many of you in the morning,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

News from Israel: We Acknowledge, Hold & Invite

Kavana does not normally send emails on Shabbat or chag, but today is far from a normal day. We awoke this morning to gut-wrenching news out of Israel, and feel so very heavy and sad. We wanted to send a quick note to our community to do a few things:

1. We acknowledge: We are horrified and heartbroken about the violent and deadly attacks, unleashed by air, land and sea by Hamas against Israel. The personal accounts that are starting to emerge now from the Southern Israeli communities surrounding Gaza – of killings, kidnappings and carnage – are particularly shocking and terrifying. We stand in support and solidarity with our Israeli siblings, grieving the hundreds of lives already lost; we wish for healing for the thousands of wounded; we pray that those who are missing or are currently being held hostage will emerge safely from their ordeals. As the situation escalates to war, we lament the loss of innocent Palestinian lives as well, and decry the extremism which has fueled this violence.

2. We hold: We are here to listen if you need to talk, and here to sit with you quietly if you need to be in the presence of another human being who can share in your pain. We know that these events are bound to stir up a huge range of emotions in our community, and will touch different individuals in different ways. As more information becomes clear, we will try to convene spaces in which folks can process, learn, and join together in action. Please let us know what you need so we can offer support.

3. We invite: It feels hard to imagine dancing with joy this Simchat Torah while such tragic and scary events are unfolding for our fellow Jews across the world. And yet, we are drawn to gather with our Jewish community tonight, to be together and to muster whatever joy we can in community, for ourselves and on behalf of so many of our friends in Israel who found themselves in bomb shelters when they might otherwise have been celebrating. True joy is possible only when we also name and honor our shared horror and sorrow. In addition, we refuse to let extremists claim Torah… this is precisely the time for us to celebrate and hold fast to a Torah of peace, of truth, of healing and of love! Whether you’re already registered or not, we hope that you will join us this evening for Kavana’s Simchat Torah celebration: click here to register.
   

With gratitude that – especially when the world is so awful – we have the support of community to help us through,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum & Rabbi Jay LeVine

The Chain of Blessing

This Saturday night, we will celebrate a holiday called Simchat Torah, “The Rejoicing of the Torah”. On it we traditionally read the final portion of the Torah, called V’zot Ha-Berachah, “And this is the blessing.” We hear Moses’ final blessing of the Israelite tribes, and read the description of his final ascent up a mountain, where he dies in an unmarked spot overlooking the land of Canaan. These chapters lean heavily into nostalgia and poignancy, describing Moses as a prophet unequaled before or since. 

The early sages who created midrash amplified the deep emotion in this portion, building up Moses as a unique and gifted leader while also placing him in a chain of great leaders. In Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:1, the sages claim that the ancestors would start their blessings to the next generation only from the place where their predecessor left off in the blessing they had offered. 

In the description of Abraham blessing Isaac, the final phrase begins “And he gave…” (Genesis 25:5). When Isaac prepares to bless Jacob, the midrash imagines him saying, “From the place where my father left off, there I shall begin. My father left off with ‘giving’; I shall begin my blessing with giving.” And the Torah records that Isaac began with these words: “And may God give you…” (Genesis 27:28). 

The account of Isaac ends with the phrase beginning, “And he called…” (Genesis 28:1). Jacob similarly chooses to start his blessing of his twelve sons with “calling”, as it states, “Then Jacob called for his sons” (Genesis 49:1). 

The Torah’s narrative of Jacob’s blessing ends with the phrase, “And this is what their father spoke to them” (Genesis 49:28). So Moses, according to the midrash, chooses to begin the account of his blessing with the phrase “this” - And this is the blessing… (Deuteronomy 33:1). 

If that was a little confusing, don’t worry about it! The midrash has found a neat linguistic pattern that was almost certainly unintended by the editor of Torah, and even then the pattern requires a great stretch of imagination to fit the story the midrash tells. And yet, the story holds great power.

Here is the story without any of the midrashic distraction: The chain of leadership (or learning, or whatever chain feels important in your life) forms because each new leader chooses to link themselves to the one who came before. The new one picks up where the old one left off. The choppiness of the midrashic account reminds us that in real life, disruption and rejection are just as common if not more so than smooth and graceful transitions. Nevertheless, imagining and practicing intergenerational partnership and respect, whether as leaders, teachers and students, biological and chosen family, or anything else, can restore us to a greater wholeness, where any one moment forms a complete blessing only because of words spoken in ages past, and words that will be spoken in times yet to come.

We are part of a vast and ongoing project, we humans. May we commit to our part of the blessing. 

Shabbat Shalom!

Yom Kippur to Sukkot: The Jonah Bridge

One of my favorite moments at Kavana this Yom Kippur was our late-afternoon study and discussion of the Book of Jonah (this has become a beautiful annual tradition in our community!). This year, we delved into the second half of this biblical book, where the reluctant prophet completes his mission. After having been swallowed and then spat out by a giant fish, Jonah makes it to the wicked city of Nineveh and gets the people of the city to repent with only a few words. This could be a happy ending to the story for God, for the people of Nineveh, and to the reader. Jonah, however, is not satisfied.

These are the concluding verses of the Book of Jonah (picking up with Chapter 4, verse 5) -- which I invite you to read closely if you aren't yet familiar with this text: 

"Now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city. He made a Sukkah there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city. 

The ETERNAL God provided a kikayon plant, which grew up over Jonah, to provide shade for his head and save him from discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant. But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered. 

And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind; the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, “I would rather die than live.”

Then God said to Jonah, “Are you so deeply grieved about the kikayon plant?” “Yes,” he replied, “so deeply that I want to die.” 

Then GOD said: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well!”

Needless to say, this is a strange ending to the book. It's unclear whether the prophet has learned any lesson at all from his ordeal. Instead, as the curtain falls on the scene, we observe Jonah sitting in a Sukkah/booth, seemingly resentful of what he doesn't have and frustrated that God's compassion has been extended to Nineveh.

Sukkot -- which begins tonight at sundown -- comes very quickly on the heels of Yom Kippur. In many ways, the Book of Jonah provides a bridge between the two holidays. Like Jonah, we are invited to sit in an outdoor booth. However, our Sukkah is meant to be an antidote to his, and the holiday practices of Sukkot are intended to leave us in a very different place emotionally than his story leaves off. For example:

• As Jonah sits in his Sukkah, he seems to be eagerly awaiting the destruction of the city of Nineveh and positioning himself to watch and gloat as this misfortune goes down (schadenfreude... not a good look for a prophet!). In contrast, those who observe the holiday of Sukkot today by moving outside and sitting/dwelling in a Sukkah are invited into a posture of vulnerability. There's a historical echo, as the Torah reminds us that God brought our ancestors out of Egypt in Sukkot ("ki va-Sukkot hoshavti," Leviticus 23:32). And, many modern-day interpreters point out that being exposed to the elements should help increase our sensitivity towards those who lack warm, dry, and secure shelter on a regular basis. In other words, Sukkot helps us foster greater empathy towards our fellow human beings (not less!).

• Jonah sits under a kikayon plant, a growing vine of some sort. When the plant dies, he is frustrated because it has been providing him with functional benefit. (In our discussion this year, most felt that his response was immature and whiny.) Today, Jewish law/halakhah holds that the material on top of a Sukkah (schach) must be natural in origin but no longer growing; the same is true of our lulav and etrog, made of four species of plants that have already been harvested and are therefore destined to shrivel up over the course of the week-long holiday. Jonah seems to believe that nature exists to serve him, whereas the holiday of Sukkot as observed today reinforces the power of nature's cycles and our subservience to them. Sukkot helps us cultivate humility, then, as we acknowledge that we too are part of the natural world and subject to its seasons.

• The final verse of the Book of Jonah is a rhetorical speech by God. God reserves the right to care deeply about the residents of Nineveh, even if they "do not yet know their right hand from their left"), and about animals. Even if Jonah misses the point, I've always felt that it's supposed to be obvious to the reader that God's compassion also extends to us. The holiday of Sukkot reinforces this idea, with Rabbi Eliezer arguing, in the Talmud, that a Sukkah is a stand-in for the "ananei kavod," God's "clouds of glory" that followed the Israelites and offered them Divine shelter and protection through their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. As we sit in the Sukkah today, we are meant to feel ourselves to be the beneficiaries of God's compassion. 

With only four days separating Yom Kippur from Sukkot, the Jewish calendar expects us to pivot quickly from "Days of Awe" towards the "Festival of our Rejoicing." As the Book of Jonah helps us to see, the bridge from the High Holidays to Sukkot necessarily passes through themes like empathy, humility, and compassion, en route to gratitude and joy.

Wishing you a chag sameach -- a joyous Sukkot -- in which the many themes of our Jewish tradition come to life in ever-new ways,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

A Partnership of Meaning

This is a season when many of us feel an extra call to show up - to ritual, to prayer, to text study, to community. These are the Days of Judgment, Days of Awe, Days of Repentance, Days of Joy (Sukkot). In short, these are days of Meaning with a capital “M”. So what happens when we show up but the Meaning doesn’t? What happens when we yearn to feel inspired, uplifted, spiritually challenged, ethically transformed… but nothing seems to happen? 

On Shabbat Shuvah, in between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, we read Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 32), a poetic castigation of future Israelite disobedience. Moses hands the people a flowery warning to do better. Seemingly, a fitting if harsh message for the season. (“Is this how you repay the Creator, O dull and witless people?!”) 

After reciting the poem, Moses tells the people to take his warning seriously. “This is not an empty word for you (ki lo davar reik hu mikem). It is your life! (ki hu chayyeichem)” (Deuteronomy 32:47). A midrash reworks the phrase “empty word for you” to mean “if the word appears empty - it is from you”, suggesting Meaning isn’t absent, it just requires more effort to discover (or create). Meaning is a cooperative project between texts and rituals on the one hand, and the people who study and practice them on the other. 

This isn’t to say there aren’t harmful texts and poorly done rituals. I do not believe we are obligated to suffer through them if it compromises our well-being. But I do think it is helpful to push ourselves into active partnership with the Jewish tradition wherever we find opportunities to do so. When something feels confusing, boring, uncomfortable, obvious, too familiar or too unfamiliar, imagine the experience as a desert well. If you dig a little deeper, you may unleash living waters, the unpredictable vitality surging underneath Jewish words and actions. It isn’t empty - it is your life! 

We often try to reconnect with vitality by seeking newness - new places, new melodies, new translations and interpretations. An innovative interpretation is called a chiddush, something new. The impulse to seek lost vitality through newness might be captured by the phrase chadesh yameinu k’kedem - make our days full of newness [so we feel the spark] as of old. If the well of meaning has dried up, move on and find new ones!

But if we take the sages seriously when they say the words can never be fully emptied of possible meaning, we can try the spiritual practice of abiding. Writer Maggie Nelson captures the delight that can emerge from stubbornly sticking by the same old things. “I know now that a studied evasiveness [i.e. seeking the new] has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again - not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

Whether you are innovating or revisiting in this season, may each word draw you in with endless curiosity, may each melody stir yearning and awe, and may each ritual fill you with meaning.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

L'Chaim and Shana Tova from Rabbi Rachel

Tonight at sunset, we will simultaneously move into Shabbat – the final day of the week – and into Rosh Hashanah. I’m excited for all the potential that this New Year of 5784 holds for the Kavana community. 

After a few years of pandemic-related disruptions and a solid year of working to strengthen Kavana’s organizational capacity, we are now ready to return our focus to the people and programs that have made this community sparkle in all the ways that it does. We enter this new year keenly aware of all the brokenness that needs fixing in the world around us. Coming together in community to celebrate both Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah will help us re-center ourselves individually, forge meaningful connections with one another, and together find the strength we need to do this work of repair. In this, Kavana’s 18th year of existence, we will embrace life together with renewed energy and brightness!

Over this Rosh Hashanah at Kavana, across all of our different programs and services, we will be drawing on the (second) Creation story of Genesis for inspiration. This story – of the first humans in the Garden of Eden – holds so many rich lessons about what it means to be human, to exercise responsibility, find companionship, make mistakes, and more. 

At the beginning of Genesis chapter 2 – the chapter we’re going to be playing with the most over this holiday – we find the “vayechulu” text which is also recited liturgically as the prologue to Kiddush on Shabbat. This is the passage in which God concludes the work of creation and then rests and is restored on the seventh day: “shavat vayinafash.” Like God, during these High Holidays – not only Shabbat itself, but really the whole window of time from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – we aspire to make metaphorical contact with the Garden of Eden, to rest through prayer and reflection during time away from our daily routines, and to reinvigorate our lives through this soul-work.

In halakhah (Jewish law), there’s a famous question about what to do when Shabbat and a holiday coincide on the calendar. The ancient rabbis wonder: which observance takes precedence? For them, this is a practical question; for example, when we recite kiddush tonight over a cup of wine, do we bless God who has sanctified Shabbat and then the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, or Rosh Hashanah and then Shabbat? On a more abstract level, they are also asking about relative importance and how we should prioritize our holy time and our lives.

The rabbinic principle that emerges in answer to this question is: “Tadir v’she’eino tadir, tadir kodem” - “[In the case of] a more frequent and less frequent event, the more frequent takes precedence.”

This is a surprising answer. Instinctively in our society, we often give great prominence to special or less usual occurences: life cycle events, birthdays, vacations, and the like. Without a doubt, these peak moments are important in adding joy to our lives, and particularly memorable. The rabbinic principle, though, reminds us that our focus on the special cannot be at the expense of the everyday. We should strive to put more emphasis on the regular patterns of our days and weeks, to consider the minutiae of our lives as we re-set our course, to think most about how we spend most of our time. This year, as Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah coincide, we get a helpful reminder: that these High Holy Days are only valuable insofar as they help us reflect on and make commitments about how we want to live – in ways both big and small – throughout the whole year. 

Tonight, as we enter both Shabbat and the New Year simultaneously, I will recite the words of Kiddush, praising the Holy One who sanctifies Shabbat, the Jewish people, and also Yom HaZikaron (“the holiday of remembrance” aka Rosh Hashanah). May we all find the pathways we need in this season to rest, reflect, and renew our lives. May these holy days prepare us to embrace the next year of life with gusto. 

L’chaim (to life!) and shana tova,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Embracing Life through the Tree of Life

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5784 (Sept 2023), Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Shana tova. It’s so sweet to be here, together, in a new space, entering into the new year in community. As we embark on this period of time - Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur - I want to share a few framing thoughts for this High Holiday season. I’ll walk you through my thought process. Kavana is in its 18th year. The Hebrew word chai is the numeric equivalent of life (chet = 8 and yod = 10). So this is a year for embracing and re-embracing life. 

Life comes up in so many ways in the liturgy. The Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, we read Parashat Nitzavim, in which God says: “I am placing before you life and death, blessing and curse. U’vacharta ba’chayim - choose life, in order that you and your descendants may live.” On the High Holidays, of course, we also have the image of the sefer chayim, the Book of Life. We say “l’chayim tovim u’l’shalom” - asking to be inscribed for a life of goodness and peace.

What does it mean to choose life, to embrace life? All roads lead to the creation story, where human life begins. It is the paradigm for our human experience - our creation myth (not in the sense of text that isn’t true, which is what I thought a myth was when I was a child, but in the sense of a text that perhaps didn’t happen in historical time but has deep truths to teach us about who we are and how the world works). This year, the Kavana staff decided to play with this text across almost all of our Rosh Hashanah services and programs. 

Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning of Genesis 2:

4. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 

5. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a human to till the ground. 

6. And a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 

7. And the Lord God formed the human of the dust of the ground – “Vayipach b’apav nishmat chayim, vayehi ha-adam l’nefesh chayah.” – and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living being. 

8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there God put the human whom he had formed. 

9. And out of the ground made the Lord God every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; with the etz ha-chayim, the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is going to be the one that gets the first human beings in trouble. (Messing up, feeling guilt and shame, and suffering consequences for our actions are all themes worth revisiting as we get to Yom Kippur.) For today, though, on Rosh Hashanah, where we celebrate the creation and birthday of the world, I’ve been musing on the relationship between the human being and the other tree, the Tree of Life. 

In the Torah story itself, do you know what happens to the Tree of Life? This tree is mentioned just two more times at the beginning of Bereishit. Once humans eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, their eyes are opened and God worries about what will happen if they also eat from the etz hachayim… vachai l’olam, and live forever. The Tree of Life, it seems, is the secret to mortality and immortality. Perhaps that’s why, at the end of chapter 3, the human beings, Adam and Chava (Adam from Adamah - the earth-being - and Chava, the em kol chai, mother of all life), are exiled from the Garden, and k’ruvim - fiery angels - and a fiery ever-turning sword are set up “lishmor et derech etz ha-chayim” - to guard the way to the Tree of Life. The first humans are exiled and cannot return to the garden. They are no longer immortal; they no longer live in a place of blissful protection. There is nothing they want more than to return to the Tree of Life, but that is precisely what they cannot do. 

You won’t be surprised to hear that the Tree of Life is a jumping off point for lots of midrash, rabbinic interpretation. For example:

Bereshit Rabbah 15:6: And Adonai Elohim made every pleasant tree sprout from the ground: [With regard to the Tree of Life,] It was taught that this was a tree that spread over all living things. R Yehuda bar Eliai said: The tree of life extended over a journey of 500 years and all the waters of Creation divided into streams beneath it. Rabbi Yudan said in the name of Rabbi Yehudah bar Eliai: It is not only the boughs that extend 500 years, but also its trunk that extends 500 years.

In the midrash, the tree has dimensions of mythical proportions: it is 500 years tall and 500 years wide, as big as the world itself!

Several medieval commentators – notably David Kimchi and Rabbenu Bachya – notice and comment on the placement of the tree “b’toch ha-gan”. Reasoning that only one tree could truly have been located in the center of the garden, they decide that the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are, in fact, one in the same. Two trees emerging from a single trunk – an interesting image.

The mystics especially love the Tree of Life. If you’ve ever studied kabbalah - Jewish mystical tradition - even a little bit, you’ve doubtless seen an image of a map of the sefirot, the 10 different emanations of God. That map is also nicknamed – you guessed it – the Tree of Life.

So, returning to our story, we human beings come – at least on a mythic level – from the Garden of Eden. Once upon a time it was our home, and the Tree of Life was at the center. Our human yearning is and has always been to return to the tree. The tree has dimensions so huge that it encompasses all of life – we want to connect to the earth, to Oneness, to life itself. On some level, the tree represents God, and the deep-seeded desire in us all to connect not only to Creation but also to the Creator. Lastly, returning to the garden – connecting to the tree – means re-connecting to ourselves way back when, when we were in our most pristine human state, before anything got too complicated, before mistakes had been made. Our journey this time of year is a journey of return.

How frustrating, then, that in chapter 3, Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden and told that they can’t live in proximity to the Tree of Life any longer. 

The world we find ourselves living in today is as messy as could be. Each of us is a flawed and complicated human being. The High Holidays strips away any pretense about that… we all have individual work to do, and there are no hierarchies, no one is better than anyone else in that regard. Each of us comes from or is part of a complicated family tree. The stories we read over this holiday – about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac – certainly model that complexity. We live in an imperfect society, one where injustices large and small are part of the fabric of our society, so much so that sometimes it’s hard to see what’s right in front of our faces. We live at a moment when politicians are trying to claim lies as truth and truth as lies, when there are many trying to ensure that democracy crumbles. Watching these dynamics play out in the US (as we head into an election year) and in Israel is painful and hard. We also live on a planet where we’ve forgotten that it was once our responsibility as human beings to till and to tend the garden! We human beings have used resources of this planet with abandon, with disregard for the impact we are having, and the consequences are starting to be felt in earnest with natural disasters and smoke-filled skies, with many of the hottest days ever on record this summer. 

Accepting mortality and imperfection – of ourselves – and accepting that we live in an imperfect world – is part of the work of the season. This is what it means to choose life. 

Torah can come from anywhere, and I found this theme, of all places, in the Barbie movie. The film begins with Barbie living in a pink paradise of sorts, a version of a Garden of Eden… boring but perfect on some level and predictable. When a problem arises, she travels from Barbie world to the real world and then back again, trying to fix it. At the end of the film, the Torah of Barbie is that, even knowing the messiness of it all – that life is complicated and people will be mean and she will grow old and die, she chooses to live in the real world.

That’s us this time of year. We understand, acknowledge and accept the imperfections of ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our world. We get that we have been exiled from the garden and no longer can access the Tree of Life, and that there’s a flaming sword blocking the path back to the garden and since we’re stuck out here, all we can do is make the most of it. Can we, too, choose and reaffirm and embrace life in this real and broken world?

There is one more Jewish tradition about the Tree of Life that we haven’t talked about yet, and perhaps this is the very tool we need. The Tanakh brings up the Tree of Life again – and you know this one, a quote from Proverbs (3:18):

(יח) עֵץ־חַיִּ֣ים הִ֭יא לַמַּחֲזִיקִ֣ים בָּ֑הּ וְֽתֹמְכֶ֥יהָ מְאֻשָּֽׁר׃ (פ)

(18) It is a tree of life to those who grasp her, And whoever holds on to it is happy.

You may recognize this verse as the one we sing liturgically every time we put the sefer Torah back in the ark at the end of every Torah service. In this Proverb, what is the Tree of Life? Torah! This Proverb functions as a promise that, in fact, there is something eternal that we can hold onto… something that is forever with us, right here, right now, in this world.

This is the grand paradox that animates these High Holy Days. We want to better ourselves and try to be the most perfect beings we can. We want to return – return to ourselves, return to the Creator, return to what it means to be human, return to the Garden of Eden. We cannot return; on some level we know that the entrance to the garden is forever blocked by a flaming, ever-turning sword and by fiery angels. And yet, the Tree of Life is also right here with us and all around us. It is life itself, it is God, it is Torah, it is the tools we need, it is everything we look to for guidance and sustenance and we can plug into the source anytime we need to, on a regular basis. The paradox extends to the work of the season: we are destined to be imperfect, yet we must strive towards perfection. We must try to return, and also we’ll never be able to return. 

We seek God’s presence, but we can’t actually stay in it. We are destined to live in the flawed, imperfect world that we do, and we move in and out, getting closer and getting further away. We search for where we’ve been, and as soon as we grasp it, we lose it again. We move in and out of seeking and finding and losing and yearning. There’s a constant movement between ourselves and the tree – which looks like an infinity loop.  I heard Joey Weisenberg teach last year about what happens musically in a niggun, and it’s very similar but on a vertical axis. Every niggun begins grounded, with a part A that’s a low part, usually repeated, and then we climb and the melody explodes into a higher part B – as though we’re trying to reach the Divine. But we can’t stay there… what goes up must come back down. We move up and down Jacob’s ladder, in and out of contact with the Divine, in and out of being able to find ourselves.

This High Holiday season, I hope this framing and imagery is a helpful one to you. We are each Adam and Chava, the earthling and the mother of life. The spiritual work of these holidays is to ground ourselves again and again in what it means to be human on the most fundamental of levels. We try to remember what it was to live in the Garden of Eden and hold it up for ourselves as a model, even as we know that we can never fully return to there.

This is why we say, over and over again in this season, the line from Psalm 27:

Achat Sha’alti me’eit adonai otah avakesh: Just one thing do I ask of God, for it is the one important thing that I seek: Shivti b’veit adonai kol y’mei chayai – and that is to dwell in God’s house (or to be settled in life), all the days of my life.

This is my prayer for us, as we embark on these Days of Awe together: that each of us individually, and all of us communally, are able to engage in seeking the Tree of Life. Despite the impossibility of the task, may we grow closer in this season to who we were in the beginning and to who we are in our core and to who we are meant to be. May we hold fast to Torah – also our Tree of Life – and find that we already have access to the accumulated wisdom of our tradition that will help us make our way in this mess of a world. May we choose life in this season, and find a way to make our lives count. Shana tova.

Two Sock Teshuva

“When all these things befall you - the blessing and the curse that I have set before you - and you return to your heart…” (Deuteronomy 30:1)

“...and you return to your God…then your God will return your captivity…and you will return and hear the voice of God…when you return to God with all your heart and soul.” (Deuteronomy 30:2,3,8,10)

This section of the Torah portion Nitzavim is obsessed with teshuva, return. With the probability that we will mess up, stray from our commitments, get knocked off balance by hardship, and still greet the possibility that we can return to God, to whole-hearted and soulful embrace of our purpose. 

A while ago I was watching my toddler learning to put socks on. He quickly slipped a sock onto his left foot and tugged it up past his ankle. Success! Then he grabbed the second sock, attempted to put it on his right foot, but got stuck with an uncooperative big toe firmly outside the opening. After tugging with some frustration for a few minutes, a lightbulb went off. And so he started to put the sock on his left foot, where he’d experienced success just moments before. Two socks on, no problem! Granted, they were both on the same foot, but toddler logic insisted the job was done. 

I was struck by this strategy as an apt metaphor for how many of us go about improving ourselves. We find something we know how to do, and we double down on it, rather than suffering clumsy efforts at developing the aspects of our behaviors that we have a harder time with. As if two socks on one foot will keep the other foot warm and safe!

The same with our hearts. We learn strategies for dealing with emotions that no doubt served us when we first developed them. But as our circumstances change, sometimes we double down on old strategies and get frustrated when we discover they no longer protect us from pain or causing harm. This passage of Torah suggests that when we encounter both blessing and curse, and then “return to our heart”, we will ultimately end up with “all our heart.” A wonderful midrash collects all of the biblical descriptions of what a heart does: “The heart sees, the heart hears, the heart speaks, the heart goes, the heart falls, the heart stands, the heart rejoices, the heart cries out, the heart is consoled, the heart grieves, the heart hardens, the heart softens…” It seems, if we want to do heart-work, we need to be open to the whole spectrum of human experience and feeling. An image of balance emerges - a heart with socks on both feet if you will. 

The commentator Sforno has a striking commentary on what “returning to the heart” entails. “You must discern the contradictory parts, and return them to the heart together, to understand the truth from the lie, and in this you will recognize how far you have become from God in awareness and practice that aligns with Torah.” 

I think Sforno is teaching about holding paradox, apparent contradictions that when held in a “both-and” spirit can actually give us more of a glimpse of truth than if we prematurely resolve the tension and choose one perspective over another. Torah can be understood as containing simplistic rules - do this, not that - and teshuva functions as our way of recognizing our failures and returning to observance of the rules. But Torah seems much more compelling to me as a guide to developing complex thinking and a subtle and rich way of moving through the world. One balanced by numerous contradictions and tensions. Are we free, or obligated? Are we concerned with our self, our tribe, or with all of humanity? Is God just, or just powerful? How do we hold political power and ethical values at the same time? 

Whether I’m watching my toddler delight and struggle with putting socks on both feet, or talking with one of you about whatever blessings or curses we are encountering in life (and we all experience them in one way or another), the poet May Sarton has words that I want to offer for our hearts this season: 

The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance
To be perfectly human(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us. 

May your teshuva return you a bit closer to balance and wholeness. Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Unhewn Stones and Gun Violence

"ARE YOU SAFE? WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU ALONE? GUYS I'M SO FUCKING SCARED. HEY COME ON SWEETHEART - I NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU. CAN YOU HEAR ANY GUNSHOTS? PLEASE STAY SAFE." 

These and many more messages -- real texts, sent in the midst of an on-campus shooting earlier this week at the University of North Carolina -- were published together in a striking cover image of the student newspaper, The Daily Tarheel. Sadly, this killing of a faculty member at UNC was far from the only deadly shooting in the U.S. this week; other shootings happened locally (in neighborhoods like Lake City, Capitol Hill and Belltown) and also on the far side of the country (including the shooting in Jacksonville, which felt particularly horrific because it was racially motivated). While homicides garner more media attention, data shows that suicides actually account for the majority of gun deaths in this country. Easy access to lethal weapons and a dearth of sensible gun legislation makes the United States an outlier with regard to gun violence of all kinds.

This week, perhaps because this topic was already at the forefront of my mind, I stumbled across an important nugget of Torah that I think is germane to our national conversation about gun violence.

In our Torah portion, Parashat Ki Tavo, Moses instructs the Israelites that when they eventually cross over to the other side of the Jordan, they should build an altar out of stone. "Do not wield an iron tool over them," the text reads; "you must build the altar of Adonai your God of unhewn stones" (Deut. 27:5-6). This is not the first time that the Torah has given a command like this. In Exodus 20:22, God had instructed, similarly (albeit in slightly different language): "And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool upon them you have profaned them." 

Commentators throughout the generations have wondered: What is so problematic about iron tools? Why is it so important to build an altar of unhewn (literally: "whole" or "complete") stones? While there are many different interpretations and explanations, I am drawn this week to the answer offered by medieval Torah scholar Moses ben Nachman (a.k.a. Nachmanides or Ramban, 1194-1270). He writes:

"According to our Rabbis, the reason for the commandment [against building an altar of stones which have been touched by iron] is the glorification of the altar: [It is not right] that that which shortens life [i.e., iron] is to be lifted up against that which prolongs life. ... I say that the reason for the commandment is that a sword is made out of iron and is the destroyer of the world. In fact, this is why it is called cherev (sword) [which is of the same root as churban (destruction)]... It was for this reason that there was no iron in the Tabernacle, for even its pins, which would have been better if made of iron, were made of copper."

Ramban's explanation is that -- because iron can be used as a weapon to threaten human life -- it has no place, even as a helpful tool (like a chisel or a pin) in the building of an altar or in the mishkan itself. He is well aware that the words "whole stones" ("avanim shleimot") in our verse are not taken literally to mean uncut stones; there is an old midrashic tradition that a worm called the shamir could, in fact, cut/eat through stone and this was how the stones used to build Solomon's Temple were cut to size. But, he argues that when we build holy places, we should go to great lengths to avoid symbols like iron pins that even hint at violence, weaponry or potential harm to human beings. Keeping potential weapons far away from our holy places helps us orient ourselves towards shleimut (peace, wholeness, completion).

Parashat Ki Tavo is always read during the month of Elul, in this window of time leading us towards the High Holidays when we're taking stock of our lives and our communities and beginning to realign our priorities. In this season of this particular year (2023/5783), we would do well to take Ramban's commentary about the construction of the altar to heart and apply its principles to the crisis of gun violence in our country. We must believe that where there is a will, there is a way to create policies that safeguard lives by keeping potential weapons (particularly the most dangerous ones) out of the hands of those who would use them to harm themselves or others. There are many real obstacles to sensible legislation -- the gun lobby, cries for individual rights, etc. -- but with each shooting, messages like the texts of terrified UNC students and staff are penetrating the national consciousness more and more deeply. The generation of our nation's children, who have grown up with lock-down drills, absolutely "get it." If you're interested in making a difference, so many organizations doing important work in this arena would love your financial support (The Alliance for Gun Responsibility here in Washington State, Everytown for Gun Safety, Sandy Hook Promise, and Giffords Law Center, just to name a few), or I encourage you to check out the learning resources offered through Jewish organizations like the Religious Action Center and the National Council of Jewish Women.

A few years ago, one of the churches in Queen Anne that Kavana partners with hosted a program called "Guns to Garden Tools," bringing in an artisan to help their community take items that were once used for violence and transform them into instruments that cultivate peace. This was an embodiment of the prophetic words of Isaiah 2:4 (the "lo yisa goy" verse): "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." I love this image of planting gardens with tools that were formerly weapons... somehow it seems to take Ramban's idea that iron must be shunned and instead grant the materials of violence the power of teshuva/change. 

May this Shabbat be one of comfort and healing... for the families of this week's victims of gun violence, and for our whole society, which has grown too numb to the assaults that happen so frequently that this was "just another week in America." I pray that -- inspired by Torah -- we will find the power and courage we need in order to speak with a moral voice and make change happen in our society. Just as our ancestors once built altars free of iron tools and hewn stones, so too may we continue to build our society in ways that ensure that all are safe from the weapons of our day. 

Wishing us all a year of peace and wholeness, as we work together to build a world in which students can go back to school without fear of campus violence,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Building on Mindfulness and Mitzvot

In the past decade, mindfulness meditation has become increasingly “mainstream”, as various advances in scientific understanding of the human mind and body confirm the various benefits of a mindfulness practice. One of the most important early translators of Buddhist meditation practice for American secular culture is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who formulated the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) technique. In a world that increasingly feels urgent and hyperconnected, MBSR is a way of tapping into a slow, attentive wisdom for its health benefits, without overtly religious or philosophical claims. 

“To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in; long enough to actually feel the present moment, to see it in its fullness, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know and understand it better.” 

This quote comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 1994 book titled, Wherever You Go There You Are. The idea that we can’t actually escape being ourselves, no matter how desperate we might sometimes be to change the scenery and thereby change ourselves, has been an important one in my spiritual journey. Once we stop trying to be somewhere else, someone else, some idealized version of ourselves, or some nostalgic return to who we once were, we are finally free to inhabit ourselves in the present - the only moment where we can learn and grow. 

I was struck while reading Torah commentaries for this drash by a teaching that instantly made me think of Kabat-Zinn’s book title. A midrash on Deuteronomy reads: “Rabbi Pinchas bar Chama said: Wherever you go, the mitzvot (commandments) accompany you. When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof (Deuteronomy 22:8). If you make a door for yourself, the commandments accompany you, as it is said (Deuteronomy 6:9), 'You shall write them on the doorposts of your house.' If you wear new garments, the commandments accompany you, as it is said (Deuteronomy 22:11), 'You shall not wear a garment of diverse kinds.'...”

Wherever you go, there you are. In whatever situation you find yourself, not only are you there but there are opportunities (or obligations, depending on your framework) for meaningful action, whether ritual, spiritual, practical, or ethical. Not sure what to do? Follow Jon’s guidance and pause to really notice what is in the present moment and the present experience. Then follow Rabbi Pinchas’s guidance and begin to notice which mitzvot, meaningful or moral acts, have accompanied you. In other words, this is a mitzvah-based stress reduction technique for moving through life attuned to sacred possibility, healing, and justice.

Let’s examine one of the mitzvot a little closer. “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it” (Deuteronomy 22:8). On its surface, this seems pretty clear - you have to make reasonable safety features part of your home, otherwise you are liable for injuries caused by your negligence. 

The medieval commentary Chizkuni asks if this is only the case for new houses, but concludes that if a house comes into your possession by sale or gift (or any other way you come to be in possession of it, presumably even by stealing it!) you are still responsible for installing balcony guardrails and other basic safety features. 

We get a sense here of being mindful as not only about calm awareness, but of diligence and caution, in the vein of the phrase “mind the gap”. 

Yet, there’s an even deeper awakening into awareness that our verse hints at. The Degel Machaneh Ephraim, an 18th century Chassidic master, teaches that this verse “hints at the Day of Justice, yom ha-mishpat, which is Rosh HaShanah. For it is known that this is the day when God began the works of creation, and on every Rosh HaShanah the world is renewed, all of the things return to as they were of old, and the essence of the day awakens this [process] every Rosh HaShanah… ‘When you build a new house’ - this is on Rosh HaShanah, when the time comes to awaken [the awareness] that the world will be built into a new building!” 

The Degel continues with gematria play, connecting the numerical equivalent of the words “and you will build a parapet” with the Kabbalistic quality of gevurah (judgment) and “your roof” with the Kabbalistic quality of God’s name havayah, which stands in for compassion and kindness. So “build a parapet on your roof” means, kabbalistically, to join together judgment with compassion. 

If you’ve stuck with me this far, let me try to extract a useful message from this dense teaching! It seems to me that the Degel Machaneh Ephraim reads our verse as a metaphor for the spiritual work of Rosh HaShanah. On this sacred moment, we hope to be awakened (by the shofar, the prayers and music, each other’s company, the still small voice of the divine, meditation, however it might happen). When we are awakened, we notice that this is a potent moment for rebuilding, both ourselves and our social structures. Adding a parapet to the roof joins discipline with vision, judgment and its solid lines with compassion and its larger perspective, safety scaffolding to our spiritual ascent. This is deep work of Rosh HaShanah, one that the Degel insists will end up being “sweetened” if we balance those qualities wisely. 

Wherever you go, may you feel the blessing of being yourself, may you become aware of the mitzvot of the moment, and may you play your part in constructing new and better worlds in the coming year. 

Shabbat Shalom, and Shanah Tovah!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Justice, Justice

I've enjoyed continuing to sink back into my Kavana rhythms over these last couple of weeks. As I noted in last week's newsletter, coming back from sabbatical, I have felt the passage of time acutely and am happy to be stepping back in during this window of preparation for the High Holidays. 

I have also felt this passage of time in terms of news and world events. When I began my sabbatical back in the spring, the former president had been indicted only once; now that number stands at an astonishing four indictments. While I was away, the Supreme Court also made news repeatedly... not only for their rulings, but for serious ethics questions concerning particular justices who have routinely accepted (and neglected to report) lavish gifts. During these same months, Netanyahu's coalition continued its assault on the Israeli judicial system by abolishing the "reasonableness standard," thus strengthening the power of the legislative and executive branches (which, in Israel, are one in the same) by severely weakening the judiciary. In both American and Israeli societies -- as in many other countries around the world -- we are currently witnessing dramatic struggles between liberal democracy and extreme authoritarian rule. Sometimes it feels like the judicial system is the only floodgate holding us back from chaos... which is precisely why it is under attack. As we head towards the New Year, swirling around us are profound questions about justice: around who has the power to judge, who will and won't be held accountable for their actions in courts of law, whether justice can be carried out impartially, and more.

This week's Torah portion tackles many of these topics of justice head on. Parashat Shoftim opens with these lines (Deut. 16:18-19):

"You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that Adonai your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall not judge unfairly: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just."

These are powerful lines, advancing a rigorous and clear-headed vision of justice. The third line of the parasha is even more powerful -- it's arguably one of the most famous quotes in all of Torah (and one that is worth committing to memory if you don't already know it): “צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף, / tzedek tzedek tirdof” — “Justice, justice you shall pursue!”

This three-word Hebrew phrase -- tzedek tzedek tirdof -- has been analyzed and interpreted from many angles. "Pursue" is such an active verb that it demands action from us. But the most ink has been spilled over the doubling of the word "tzedek,": "Justice, justice." The rabbinic hermeneutic rules that govern Torah interpretation hold that no word could possibly be extraneous; therefore, each "tzedek" must have a distinct meaning. In a Talmudic conversation (in Sanhedrin 32b), two ancient sages probe the twin uses of the word for meaning. As Rabbi Menachem Creditor explains: "Resh Lakish draws a comparison to other calls for justice in the Torah, asserting that the repetition underscores the necessity to scrutinize trials meticulously. ... Rav Ashi proposes an alternative approach: the first "Tzedek" refers to the act of judgment, while the second pertains to the delicate art of compromise." Many centuries later, the Chassidic rabbi Simcha Bunem offered yet a different explanation, translating the phrase "to pursue justice justly." According to his reading, the verse comes to teach us that justice can never be achieved by unjust means. These commentaries offer but a taste of what we might learn from this short but powerful phrase.

The words "tzedek tzedek tirdof," "Justice, justice you shall pursue," are so very powerful. And yet, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat points out, the verse doesn't end there. She writes: "Torah continues, 'in order that you may live and inherit the land which Adonai your God is giving you.' We pursue justice in order that we may truly live. In order to live life to its fullest, we need to work toward a world that is just..."

As I reflect on the lessons Parashat Shoftim might teach us this year, I'm also cognizant that today is Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of the month of preparation for the New Year. Exactly one month from now, we will arrive at Rosh Hashanah, also known by the name "Yom ha-Din," Day of Judgment. During this whole season, we are called on to scrutinize our own deeds and actions, considering how they might stand up in a heavenly court of law. We think about orienting our lives towards justice -- of strengthening our personal relationships through fairness, of working together to build communities that operate on the principles of justice, and of forging a just society.

During the month of Elul, my teacher, Rabbi Steve Sager (z"l), had a tradition to read Genesis 18 with his congregation. That chapter contains the story in which Abraham bargains with God over the fate of the people of Sodom. The dramatic climax of that text comes when Abraham asks the rhetorical question: "ha-shofeit kol ha-aretz lo ya'aseh mishpat", "[Is it possible that] the Judge of all the earth would not deal justly?!" Reading this text liturgically in the lead-up to these days of awe and judgment adds yet another layer: even God must be held accountable for justice at this time of year.

As we move towards New Year 5784 -- against the backdrop of breaches of justice, threats to justice systems, and more -- may we strive to employ the lessons of Parashat Shoftim and its call to pursue justice. May we know just when to be meticulous in our approach and when to compromise in our pursuit of true justice. May we pursue justice only through just means. May we work to support and uphold judicial systems characterized by the highest standards of ethics and fairness. And may all of our endeavors draw us closer to the vision of living together in society with justice for all. 

Chodesh tov -- wishing you a meaningful month of Elul, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Sabbatical Reflections from Rabbi Rachel

It feels great to be back, following a three-month sabbatical. I can feel the passage of time acutely right now: as I stepped out of the Kavana office in the spring, we were still counting the Omer, and as I re-enter now, the New Year of 5784 is just around the corner! 

The modern concept of a workplace sabbatical is, of course, modeled after the biblical rules about letting land lie fallow for one year in every seven-year cycle. The idea of punctuating our time with periods of profound rest and rejuvenation is deeply Jewish. This notion is baked into the Torah's creation story, into ideas about agriculture and the remission of debts, and into our calendar as we count days, weeks, and years. As Ezra Klein and Judith Shulevitz name so articulately in a beautiful podcast ("Sabbath and the Art of Rest" - I highly recommend a listen!), “implicit in the practice of the Sabbath is a stinging critique of the speed at which we live our lives, the ways we choose to spend our time, and how we think about the idea of rest itself.” 

My sabbatical was designed carefully, with intention (kavana), and the time was indeed restorative for me on a personal level. I managed to pack a lot into three months, including one-on-one weekend trips away with each of my three children and quality time with friends and family members across the country. While my kids were otherwise occupied at their respective Jewish summer camps in June/July, my husband Noam and I traveled to Scandinavia, where we explored Stockholm's great museums and beautiful archipelago of islands, and enjoyed Copenhagen's canals and urban design with good friends. Throughout the three months, I also read books just for pleasure, visited Jewish communities/synagogues in other cities, and sought out great food and coffee everywhere I went. I had hoped that stepping out from my usual day-to-day rhythm would help me gain new perspective, recharge my batteries, and re-enter my work at Kavana feeling reinvigorated. Truly, I gained all of this and more, as I found that reconnecting with people from every chapter of my life helped me reconnect to parts of myself I had been missing. Mission accomplished!

According to the Durfee Foundation, “sabbaticals not only provide needed respite to nonprofit leaders, they increase organizational capacity, aid succession planning, and strengthen governance.” This line certainly feels relevant to my experience of the last three months, as well. My sabbatical had been approved by Kavana's board several years ago, but we waited until the timing felt right -- meaning, the crisis moment of Covid had passed, and we finally had the staffing in place -- to make it actually happen. I am deeply grateful to the board for championing this idea, and even more grateful to the entire Kavana staff for stepping up in my absence. In particular, I couldn't have taken this time off were it not for Rabbi Jay LeVine, who provided rabbinic coverage (for lifecycle events, pastoral needs, holiday programs and more!), and for Liz Thompson, our Director of Operations who took on interim Executive Director responsibilities (budgeting, development, working with the board, etc). As I re-integrate into the Kavana staff team, we will be distributing some responsibilities differently, which will boost professional development for our staff and ultimately benefit the greater Kavana community. Lastly, I want to note once again that I am grateful to R&R for their grant funding, supportive guidance, and for the work they do to promote the idea of sabbaticals in the Jewish nonprofit world. Their permission for each grantee "to rest, travel, reflect or renew in whatever manner they propose" felt incredibly supportive as I planned my time away.

I re-enter now ready to recommit to this work, to this community, and to the shared vision we've developed over the past 17 years, for how Kavana can support the building of Jewish community and the creation of meaningful Jewish life and positive Jewish identity. And, it's a good thing I'm feeling ready, because this is a very busy time to be re-entering the Kavana office! 

This week’s Torah portion, Re’eh, talks about how the Israelites will enter into the promised land when they finally arrive. For them, their choices feel stark, with potential blessings and curses proclaimed loudly from two mountains as they pass between them. Re'eh reviews the terms of the covenant between God and the Israelites, rehashing all sorts of laws that will inform the society they will build together... the foods they can eat, the festivals they must observe, and even laws governing the remission of indentured servants every seven years (there's that sabbatical cycle again!). As the Israelites prepare to enter into the next phase of their collective life, they are instructed to pause and consciously reaffirm their prior commitment. This kind of intentional recommitment resonates so deeply this week, as I return from sabbatical and affirm my role in the Kavana community. I actively choose this work over again.  

I know that it may take some time for me -- and for our staff and organization -- to continue to glean the fruits and lessons of this sabbatical time…and I look forward to continuing to share reflections with you over the coming months. Meanwhile, I hope that this year, I'll be able to figure out ways to continue to reap the benefits of the spaciousness, reconnection and fun that these months of sabbatical brought. I also look forward to drafting a brand new sabbatical policy for our organization, so that all of our full-time staff members can look forward to similarly beneficial periods of renewal and reinvigoration. And, I will encourage rest - in cycles both small and large - for each member of our community, so that we all can benefit from opportunities to gain perspective on how we spend our time. 

It's exciting to be stepping back in as Kavana embarks on our 18th year. Like the Israelites of Parashat Re'eh, we will move into Kavana's "chai" year reaffirming our vision and embracing life and blessing. I return with renewed energy, ready to work together with you to make the magic happen!

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Consumed with Care

“V’achalta, v’sava’ta, u’veirachta” (Deuteronomy 8:10). “And you will eat, and you will be satiated, and you will bless!”

With these three words, Moses outlines how the Israelites are supposed to retain a sense of humility in the “good land” they will soon enter. Wandering in the wilderness created a sense of dependency in the people, unmoored and relying on God for manna and direction. Once they are settled, though, and contributing their own labor to cultivate the land, Moses worries they will over-inflate their role in creating the abundance they will experience. And so, when they eat their fill, they should bless God as their ultimate benefactor. Blessing is intended to decouple having full bellies with having (overly) full egos. 

In Jewish halakhic tradition, these three words establish the blessing after meals, birkat hamazon, and give shape and substance to the blessing as well. 

I also see in these words an inner dynamic that functions beyond our relationship to food. The word for “eat”, achalta, is also used to describe what fire does to things - consumes them. God is described as an esh ochla, “consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24). In the Talmud (Sotah 14a), the sages struggle to reconcile this image with another image of walking after God (Deuteronomy 13:5). How are we supposed to walk after fire? Doesn’t that sound dangerous? Instead, they describe following God as modeling our behavior on God’s - to clothe the naked, visit the sick, to console mourners, etc. What they are describing is practicing care. And I think the experience of caring and the feeling of a consuming fire are not so far apart after all. Often, it is a spark of empathy that ignites a sense of responsibility and energizes our acts of care. Acting with care often leaves us feeling warm inside. 

But acting from a place of care can also leave us burnt out. Which leads us to “satiation / saturation / too-much.” There is a fine line between feeling satiated and feeling sick. Medieval commentator Chizkuni defines sava’ta as when “one’s soul becomes disgusted by food.” When you have taken in so much - of work, family care, attention in one area or another, news - that you cannot possibly imagine biting more off, something has to change. The fire has gotten out of control.

Poet and critic Maggie Nelson writes that, “while we may fantasize about our care as limitless - and it may even be so, in a spiritual sense - in our daily lives, most of us run up against the fact that care, too, is an economy, with limits and breaking points… [Art critic Jan] Verwoert goes to note that, to stay engaged in the ‘disciplines of care’ that matter to us most in a media environment and economy dedicated to exhausting time and attention, one has to learn how to set limit. In some situations, Verwoert observes, ‘to profess the I Can’t’ can sometimes be ‘the only adequate way to show that you care - for the friends, family, children or lovers who require your presence, or for the continuation of a long-term creative practice that takes its time…’ It may sting when you get (or give) an I Can’t, but it likely indicates that care is engaged elsewhere.” (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint). 

At the point of being consumed and saturated, burnt out from the infinite demands of care, we have two levels of response. First, set limits. We are only human. Second, bless God. By that, I think we are talking about acknowledging the fullness we are feeling and re-orienting to something larger than ourselves, perhaps to the Source of Compassion (av harachaman), the orchestrator of care in myriad and mysterious ways beyond any individual’s capacity to accomplish. 

V’achalta, v’sava’ta, u’veirachta. Let us be consumed by care, satiated and saturated to the right degree with how we tend to each other, and resting in the blessing that it isn’t all on our shoulders, even if at times it feels like it. 

Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine

Looking Out from the Mountain

On Wednesday night, thirty of us gathered on a hilly Queen Anne park to chant and read the book of Lamentations, whose Hebrew name (and first word) Eicha more accurately rephrases its content as a bereft question - “how [could it be]?” That book contains haunting poems written in the aftermath of the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem and exile of the ancient Israelites to Babylon, over 2,500 years ago. The observance of Tisha B’av began after the destruction of the second Temple nearly 2,000 years ago. 

As we peered back into the depths of time, we also had a distinctly beautiful view over the city of Seattle, glimpsing sailboats in Lake Union, the Space Needle rising up between the newer skyscrapers that make its futurism seem quaint. A soft moon peered over the evergreen trees, as if it too were sharing our perspective from this overlook. There were locals admiring the view as well, but for me at least, being on a hill for Tisha B’av wasn’t about beauty but evoked instead the peculiar melancholy of seeing the immensity of the world, its joys and sorrows all mixed up and bittersweet. 

A little over 3,000 years ago, another Jew climbed a mountain in order to get a bittersweet view. After over forty years of leading the Jewish people, Moses is destined not to enter the Promised Land, and in this week’s Torah portion, Vaetchanan, he reveals that he pleaded with God to let him into Israel, “to see the good land on the other side of the Jordan” (Deuteronomy 3:25). God tells him he will not enter, but to ascend Mt. Pisgah and look out at the entire land. 

When I think of modern Israel, I think how incredible it is to be able to enter a reconstituted Jewish country, to do with relative ease what Moses could not. Of course, most of the time I am right there next to Moses, looking from a distance at a place I am deeply invested in. Like Moses, I yearn to see a “good land” - a land in which Jews live out the values of Torah and Judaism (the Talmud, Berachot 48b, connects “good land” to “good teaching” in Proverbs 4:2). 

I yearn to see a land where Jews take seriously not just security concerns but “love the stranger”, not just the desire to reclaim every possible inch of ancestral land but “hinei ma tov- how good it is for siblings to dwell together”, not just great care of ritual observance but practicing “who is wise? One who learns from everyone”. Since last November, when the current government coalition formed, we have seen the leaders of Israel preach a Torah of violence, exclusion, racism, ideological rigidity, and above all - power. We have also seen historic protests within Israel, and solidarity protests organized by expat Israelis all over the Diaspora. At the core of this crisis of democracy in Israel is the Knesset’s push to reform the judicial system. For a few good resources to understand the context and stakes, learn more here:

• The Promised Podcast (including Linda Gradstein, who has talked about Israel with Kavana before)

• Identity / Crisis Podcast 

• On Israel’s lack of a constitution

• A really interesting conversation on how the protests got started

Standing on the mountain (living in Diaspora), some of us convince ourselves “this is an utterly good land”. No wrong can be done here!

Some of us walk back down the mountain, and live our lives immersed in our localities - because what is happening in Israel now as well as the occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank is overwhelming or confusing or frustrating.

Some of us look out and, like Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai emerging from a cave, scorch to the ground with fiery eyes every person and organization and government that doesn’t meet our standard of justice.

Honestly, I understand each one of these reactions. These days, I’m mostly interested in bittersweet conversations, ones that the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai might have described in his poem, “Inside the Apple”:

You speak to me. I trust your voice

because it has lumps of hard pain in it

the way real honey

has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

To talk of Israel / Palestine and lack either honey or the lumps of hard pain…

Now is the time, if ever there were a time, to support protesters within Israel who are fighting for democracy. Now is the time to live your vision of Judaism with passion and persuasion, to say to those in the government who would define Judaism narrowly that our tradition pulses with pluralism. Now is the time to learn from and with Palestinians, to sow the seeds of peace even in seemingly salted earth. Now is the time to climb mountains and look out bravely, honestly, and compassionately at a land full of honey and pain, and then do our part, like Moses, to help make it a Promised Land full of goodness.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Jay LeVine