Shabbat Weekly Dvar Torah

My husband’s family has a story they have been telling for generations about an ill-fated investment. One late summer, his grandfather, was returning to New York from Mandatory Palestine and had an idea. Sukkot was approaching, and good etrogim were precious commodities in New York. So before leaving Palestine, he invested a small fortune in crates and crates of etrogim, intending to sell them when he arrived home. It was a perfect plan - with one rather significant problem. The ship did not arrive on time.

Anger can frighten people. It can destroy trust. It can make cruelty feel righteous. But anger is not itself the problem. Sometimes anger is the appropriate response to betrayal, injustice, humiliation, or harm. The moral question is not whether we become angry -- It is what we do once anger arrives. Parashat Ha’azinu, Deuteronomy 32:1–52, is filled with anger. Moses’s final song describes a relationship between God and Israel damaged by betrayal.

So many of us can relate to the particular loneliness of wanting something everyone around us seems to already have and feeling invisible in the wanting. Hold onto that feeling. It turns out to be the reason we open the new year with not one but three stories of infertility. Generations of Jews have wondered why the Torah readings and the Haftara on Rosh Hashana revolve around childlessness, and, more pointedly, around women left utterly alone in it? On the first day, we read the story of Sarah’s infertility with her husband Abraham. I say Sarah with Abraham deliberately, because Abraham had a child, Ishmael, with Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar, all while Sarah was still childless. The Haftara is Chana’s story, her infertility with her husband Elkana. And again, I say Chana with Elkana, because Elkana had children with his other wife, Penina. On the second day, the Haftara is from the Book of Yirmiyahu, about Rachel weeping for Israel (referred to as her children) as they head into exile…

One of the great challenges facing rabbis, teachers and educators today is how to communicate the Torah in a language that is relevant. Moses, the greatest teacher of all, was faced with the same conundrum. Can stories, which are just words, help people feel as if they had lived it themselves? Could the Torah ever be as relevant for future generations as it was for the Jews who experienced Sinai firsthand? For the last five weeks of Moses’ life, during which the entire book of Deuteronomy takes place, he reviews, rebukes, exhorts and even pleads with the nation to remember and constantly relive those moments. And he saves the best for last, the final mitzvah of the Torah, No. 613, is for every Jew to write their very own Sefer Torah (Torah scroll). In the words of Maimonides (1135-1204), writing a Torah scroll is not just for the purpose of study, rather it is a sacred rite for everyone to accomplish in their lifetime.

The Jewish people are often referred to as "the chosen people," but Parashat Ki Tavo flips this concept around. Here, the Israelites are described as "choosing God." But what does that look like for us today, especially when we have so many different ideas about what God means to each of us? What does it mean to choose God? As Jews, we so frequently hear the phrase, "the chosen people." Parashat Ki Tavo offers a different approach. Deuteronomy 26:17 describes the Israelites ‘affirming God’: “You have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God…” Essentially, this is describing us as choosing God. But what is this God that we're choosing? "God" means many different things to different Jews. Some of us are fervent, deep believers; some of us believe in an imminent God, one whose presence is felt in this world; others believe in a transcendent God, a God that exists, but whose presence is not felt directly.

It is serendipitous that as we approach Rosh Hashanah, the day of reckoning, the weekly Torah reading presents us with laws that help us to train in noticing and weakening our tendency towards willful ignorance (Deuteronomy 22:1-4). Both sets of laws, those of returning a lost animal and those of helping our fellow to reload his animal and ease its pain, stress that when we see we must not ignore… But why would we choose to ignore? The answer lies in the fact that both situations involve inconveniencing ourselves, ruining our good day by having to go out of our way to do something unpleasant... the Torah commands us to train in approaching discomfort, bringing it close as an act of compassion.

Every rabbi eventually learns an uncomfortable truth: it is much easier to condemn the sins of others than the sins of our own. The prophets of Israel understood this. Nathan did not rebuke the Philistines; he rebuked King David. Jeremiah did not devote his ministry to the moral failures of Babylon. He called his own people to account. Covenant begins with self-examination. That is why I found myself nodding in agreement as I read Bret Stephens’ recent column in The New York Times warning that Jewish terrorism in the West Bank poses “a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”

I took my six-year-old daughter to see Aladdin on Broadway, and as I watched, I realized: here was a street thief who steals from the rich to feed the poor, a candidate the DSA could run tomorrow, and the show’s answer to poverty and to longing is a magical genie. And then this week many of us watched, with dread, magic of a scarier kind: a monumental primary election in Michigan, where El-Sayed’s victory, celebrated loudly by Mamdani and his movement, rode the promise of tearing down what is and conjuring a utopia in its place.