About a month ago, I wrote about Pesaḥ Sheni, the second chance opportunity to celebrate Pesaḥ set aside for those unable to make their Passover offerings at the proper time. The source for this holiday comes from this week’s Torah reading, Parashat B’ha’alotekha. What I find most interesting about the Torah’s narrative around Pesaḥ Sheni, especially this week, is that it describes a holiday in formation, one whose story is in the process of being created. 

In the Torah’s telling (Numbers 9:1-14), those who are unable to make the Passover offering at the appropriate time due to being ritually impure are at first left out of the command to celebrate Pesaḥ in the second year of their journey. They are then given an alternate date for celebrating, complete with specific rules and rituals. They get a Passover do-over, which, through the passage of time, has become a holiday in its own right. 

This week when we read about a new holiday in the Torah, we also celebrated a newer holiday as Americans - Juneteenth. This day, which marks the day in 1865 when General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, finally enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation that had become the law of the land two and a half years earlier.

Juneteenth was for a long time observed in Texas and spread throughout the country as an important day in the African American community in the years following the Great Migration - although it still wasn’t always widely known or marked. It wasn’t often a part of the American history curriculum taught in schools; people often found out about it as young adults. Most recently, Juneteenth gained national attention as it became an official federal holiday in 2021. It is a day with real significance for the African American community and for our nation as a whole, a day whose celebration and observance are also continuing to evolve.

I want to highlight an article I read in Tablet Magazine this week, “Jewish Juneteenth,” by Shoshana McKinney Kirya-Ziraba. Rather than restate and interpret Kirya-Ziraba’s words here, I strongly encourage you to read the article, which I’ve linked above. However, I do want to highlight a couple of points she made that were illuminating for me. 

She spoke about how Juneteenth is being celebrated in some Jewish communities, inspired by the work of Black Jews to give expression to all aspects of their identity in their sacred spaces. One person featured in the article, Tameika Minor, brought a Juneteenth celebration to her synagogue in New Jersey. Unsurprisingly, she and her fellow planners first promoted the event celebrating African American culture as a summer solstice celebration, due to their uncertainty about how something directly tied to Juneteenth would be received by other members of their synagogue. The success of the event gave them the confidence to celebrate Juneteenth more openly in their Jewish community ever since; however, that story highlights the challenges of building truly open communities.

Another person featured in the article, Rabbi Heather Miller, is a direct descendant of people freed on the first Juneteenth - and this connects us back to our parashah this week - and is the author of The Juneteenth Haggadah. The Juneteenth Haggadah, much like the Haggadah for Pesaḥ, tells a story of liberation through ritual, food, and song. It takes the themes of Pesaḥ, freedom from enslavement, a journey toward a promised future, themes that are essential to Jewish identity, and refracts them through the lens of the African American story. It seems a powerful, uniquely current way to give Passover a do-over. 

Shabbat shalom.

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This past Sunday, we held our spring community meeting. Each of the agenda items for our meeting connected, on a conceptual level, to this one idea: planning for our future. There was the budget discussion and approval, allowing us both to articulate and achieve our goals and plans for the coming year. There was voting in our new slate of officers, offering gratitude to our outgoing Chair and Vice-Chair and welcoming our new Chair and Vice-Chair. There were our round-robin committee conversations, helping everyone learn more about the incredible work of our committees and bringing new people in to serve on them, enriching them with new energy to keep moving forward. And indeed, this final part of Sunday’s gathering was full of excitement and forward-thinking energy.

The parallels between our community meeting and the events of our parashah as we start the book of B’midbar present themselves readily. The Torah reading begins with a census, the accounting for which matches the accounting from the census back in the book of Shemot, when each person made a donation to support the work of the community. That’s the budget. In counting the people in each of the tribes, the text calls forward the head of each tribe by name. That’s our leadership transition. Later in the parashah, we learn how the different tribes were arranged when encamped and how they marched when the people traveled. It describes the organization of the community and the different roles that each segment performed. That’s our committee round-robin. Both the parashah and our community meeting demonstrate the importance of seemingly mundane details for ensuring the sustainability and vitality of a sacred community. 

I want to zoom in on one aspect of the census from the Torah reading. B’midbar 2:33 notes: “The Levites, however, were not recorded among the Israelites.” Although the various essential tasks and roles of the Levites are well enumerated in the parashah, the actual Levites are not counted together with their fellow Israelites. They are the leaders of the community in many ways, yet they are also invisible. This detail of our Torah reading speaks to something deeply true about serving in a leadership role. 

Good leaders - the Levites, our own officers and committee chairs, and many others - do not serve in positions of leadership for accolades or attention. They are motivated by a sense of purpose, obligation to the community, love for the work that they do, among other things. Often they work behind the scenes, making the trains run on time, as it were. Their role in supporting the life of the community is sometimes only noticed when the “trains” are late, which is inevitable. When things are running smoothly, their skilled leadership can remain invisible. But without the Levites, the spiritual core of the nation would be hollow; there would be no one to manage ritual matters or inspire connection to the Divine. Without our officers and committee chairs, so much of what makes our community special would similarly be missing.

It is with this in mind that I want to offer my gratitude to all who serve our community. From those who think about our financial future to those who care for us in times of grief, from those who plan programs and events that express our most deeply held values to those who seek out opportunities to engage folks on the margins, from those who bring us stimulating speakers to those who manage our communications (and hock me a tshaynik to get this weekly message in on time!) - I say thank you, and we see you. We count on you, and your tremendous contributions count beyond measure. 

Shabbat Shalom. 

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As a Torah reader who likes the long ones, I regularly find myself in the rotation to read the tochechah, the litany of curses that appears at the end of the book of Vayikra, which we read from this week. (A longer tochechah section appears toward the end of Devarim, in Parashat Ki Tavo - I frequently read that one too.) As you might expect, reading this section is a troubling pursuit. Reading of the horrifying punishments that will befall the Israelites, and us by extension, if we do not follow God’s ways is bad enough on its own. But to chant those words to the community in my own voice is another proposition altogether. 
Recently, I learned that one of my children didn’t understand how the threat of negative consequences was supposed to work. After offering him lots of opportunities to correct a particular behavior, and after him not taking me up on any of them, I would tell him that he would be losing a privilege if he didn’t stop whatever he was doing *now.* I was surprised time and time again that this threat often didn’t get him to stop the offending behavior. Instead, he would break down, becoming extremely upset at the thought of losing the privilege, as if he had no power to stop it. Some good conversations taught me that he believed that the threat of negative consequences wasn’t meant to inspire a change in behavior. He thought it was simply a tool for punishing him, and that there was no turning back from it once it was raised as a possibility. What an amazing insight into the way my kid was thinking! 

While our conversations have helped significantly in these kinds of situations, the whole matter is really making me think about the value of negative consequences overall, whether they are actually imposed or merely meant to inspire change. As a teacher, I typically stay away from them. Assigning punishments like detention doesn’t really make sense to me and I only give them out in response to the most egregious behavior. Looking at the text of the tochechah, I am always reminded of the times throughout Jewish history when our people have undergone these kinds of devastating experiences and seen them as God meting out punishment. Framing political upheaval, war, famine, and natural disaster as punishment puts our relationship with God in a precarious position. This is not the way I want to relate to God. 

As a parent, teacher, and person of religious sensibility, logical and natural consequences seem so much more appropriate and can be so much more effective. Using a toy as a weapon? You can’t play with that toy. Neglect to study for your vocabulary quiz? Earn a poor grade. Why then, does the Torah provide us with not one, but two, lengthy examples of curses and punishments that will come if we disobey God’s commands? 

On a basic historical level, the Torah is often similar to other texts of the time and place. Law treaties of the Ancient Near East ended with hyperbolic lists of curses. This was done so that both parties felt the significance of their agreement as well as the promise of utter destruction if they did not follow through on their part. At the very least, the inclusion of curses and punishments in these treaties sent a strong message about the irrevocable nature of the agreement. 

This may have been effective at that time, but it strikes a dissonant note for my contemporary ears. Remaining faithful to God’s ways out of fear of unspeakable consequences is not a theology that works for me. The threats are indeed terrible and they don’t support the development of a relationship with the divine that I want for myself or my community. At the same time, I’m not advocating for excising the tochechah from our public readings. 

Here’s how I make my peace with it: I find meaning in this section in the way we read it. Traditionally, the Torah reader chants each tochechah in an undertone, making their way through the text quickly and quietly. You’ll hear me read it this way on Shabbat if you’re able to be in shul. The tochechah is also bookended on each side by promises of blessing and success. We read these sections at full volume and regular speed, sharpening the contrast between the punishment and the reward. Our way of chanting this section serves as a reminder - to us and perhaps even to God - that our preferred way of being in relationship with each other is not built upon a foundation of threats and curses, but one of blessing and love.

Shabbat shalom.

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We’re now in the period of the Jewish calendar sometimes called “The Yoms.” After the conclusion of Pesaḥ, we have a number of modern commemorations and celebrations that happen in quick succession: Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, Yom HaAtzmaut, and Yom Yerushalayim. All four of these days mark events in the more recent history of the Jewish people. And all of them feel different this year. 

Gil Preuss, the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, picked up on the complicated nature of these days in a recent piece he published. He wrote: “This year, we will gather a little over seven months after the horrific attacks of October 7th. The war in Gaza continues amid significant loss and suffering. There is a deep sense of instability and insecurity in Israel and Jewish communities around the world. Moreover, the politics dividing Israel, the American Jewish community, and the broader American public are becoming more complicated by the day.”

We are weathering a time of heightened sensitivities and intense emotions. It’s only natural that this impacts our observance of these special days. And it has. 

On Yom HaShoah, our national day of remembrance and mourning for the horrors of the Holocaust, we couldn’t help but notice the parallels between the pogroms of early 20th-century Europe and the pogrom of October 7, 2023, between the rising antisemitism we see in the world today and what we saw as the Nazis were coming to power. Yom HaShoah’s call of Never Again felt more urgent this year. And our ability to heed that call felt somehow less in our control.

Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s memorial day for those who fell in battle and in terrorist attacks, memorialized losses far more fresh and painful than in recent memory. With the weight of the current situation being felt so deeply, we needed both to grieve together and to try to find glimmers of hope and solidarity. At the Krieger Schechter memorial ceremony, our students sang Latzeit MeDika’on, by Yagel Oshri, a popular Israeli song that both acknowledges the painful feelings of this time and also expresses hope that good days will yet come. 

Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s independence day, also felt different this year, more subdued, more complicated. Here in our community, we gathered for an erev shirah, an evening of singing together, which allowed us to celebrate our connection to Israel through classic songs, while at the same time giving soulful voice to our current fears and feelings. It was uplifting to be together, in a space where it felt safe to hold the complexity of this moment. 

It’s not only the Yoms that have been impacted by our current crisis. Our more established holidays, those that originate in the biblical tradition, also felt different this year. We slowed our dancing on Simḥat Torah, paid attention to the existential fear underlying Purim, focused on the elusiveness of freedom during Pesaḥ. 

Reading of the holidays in Parashat Emor this week, we are reminded, however, that our Torah holidays have set rituals and customs associated with them. On Pesaḥ we eat matzah; on Shavuot we offer our first harvest; on Rosh Hashanah we have the shofar; on Yom Kippur we fast; on Sukkot we dwell in the sukkah and take the lulav and etrog. The text prescribes clear to-dos for each holiday. While the holidays feel different to us each year, particularly when something significant is happening in our world, the specific rituals provide a sense of stability for each holiday, serving as a constant that links our celebrations this year to those of all the years before and all the years to follow. 

Being newer observances, the Yoms have no biblically ordained ritual or liturgy like the holidays we read about in the Torah this week. I have to acknowledge that, with so much feeling like it’s up in the air right now, it would be comforting to have firmly rooted practices to structure our journey through this time in the Jewish calendar. These days are so filled with uncertainty and pain that it can feel overwhelming to figure out exactly what to do to participate in them meaningfully. At the same time, their status as modern holidays gives us the flexibility to respond authentically to our current situation, to create new rituals and transform older ones, tailoring our observances to match the emotions of this moment. So this year, the Yoms this year are different - as they should be. May next year find us able to mark these days in peace and in unity. 

Shabbat shalom. 

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My love/hate relationship with my kitchen always rears its ugly head around Pesaḥ. First, the hate: both taking my kitchen apart and putting it back together right before and after the holiday. The seemingly incessant schlepping of dishes off of shelves and out of cabinets, plus having to figure out where to put it all to leave enough room for my Pesaḥ supplies only serves to highlight for me any dissatisfaction I have with my kitchen setup and my anxiety about preparing for Yom Tov. Dragging it all out again just over a week later, usually at some ungodly hour of the night after the conclusion of the holiday, is its own stressor, as I can never quite remember where everything goes, or where I stowed every item. Nothing ever fits exactly as it did before, and even when I remember to take pictures before unloading my cabinets the first time around, I still can’t get it to go back quite right.
Next, the love: when my cabinets are empty and wiped out, my countertops rid of any appliances or chazerai that seems to accumulate there of its own accord, I look at my empty kitchen and feel the promise of a new beginning. The same happens at the end of the holiday, after I’ve packed away all of my Pesaḥ supplies and am ready to reclaim my kitchen until next Passover. I appreciate the space I have, how I’m able to celebrate the holiday in line with my religious orientation, and how my kitchen can accommodate my family’s needs. And once I’ve successfully put everything back together, I even find appreciation for the slight differences in where everything lives in the cabinets. I always manage to come out of Pesaḥ with a little more space and slightly better organization than I went into it with (although I still can’t find that one dairy pasta pot…). 

Looking over Parashat HaShavua in these few short days between Pesaḥ and Shabbat, I didn’t expect to find a connection between my lingering engagement with all things Passover and the themes that run through our return to our weekly Torah reading cycle, particularly since Parashat Aḥarei Mot begins with the elaborate atonement ritual of the Kohen Gadol for a different holiday, Yom Kippur. And yet, it was my continued focus on the emotional impact of reassembling my kitchen that helped me find something to highlight for us this week. 

The details of the atonement ritual from the beginning of our parashah, Leviticus chapter 16, focus entirely on sacrifices. Aharon, the Kohen Gadol, offers several sacrifices throughout the ritual to atone for his sins, the sins of his household, and the sins of the entire community. There is fire, incense, and blood. And while these visceral rituals may no longer resonate with our approach to atonement, they are right in line with the rest of the book of Vayikra. But the entire ceremony is not merely about the sacrifices themselves. Aharon must also purify the sanctuary - the altar, the covering for the Ark, and the Tent of Meeting. In order to effect full atonement for himself, his household, and the entire community, Aharon must clean his kitchen, as it were. 

Like the intense clearing out that accompanies Pesaḥ, the goal of atonement is a clean slate, a fresh start. Especially given how we live and relate to our tradition today, largely in the realm of the cerebral and symbolic, it’s easy to keep our focus on these ideas in our minds, and pay less attention to the role of the physical spaces we inhabit. Both Pesaḥ and our parashah remind us that what’s around us matters. It both reflects our emotional state and impacts our spiritual well-being. 
May our post-Pesaḥ spaces bring us joy and peace this Shabbat.

Shabbat shalom!

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​The opening verses of our Torah reading this week, Parashat Metzora, detail the ritual for helping a metzora (one who has been afflicted with the skin disease tzara’at) return to the community after their period of confinement. 

This disease is a perplexing one - it can affect people, buildings, and fabric. It has no clear cause or explanation and seems to be easily spread. It is typically translated as “leprosy,” which is medically inaccurate, but socially on point. The experience of the metzora parallels that of lepers until more recent history, an experience of isolation and exclusion, which is understandable given the mysterious and contagious nature of the illness, but which is also difficult to encounter as modern readers. As a community, we often teach the Torah of inclusion; the rules for dealing with the metzora seem to be oriented in the opposite direction. 

While the Torah gives us verses upon verses of descriptions of tzara’at and of its treatment, it tells us nothing about how to prevent it and leaves us wondering as to the genesis of the disease, as I noted above. Enter the midrash (Tanḥuma Metzora 1:1), which declares: Anyone who speaks lashon hara (gossip, slander, etc.) will be struck with tzara’at. How do we know this? From the verse: This shall be the rite for a metzora, תּוֹרַת הַמְּצֹרָע. Do not read it as ‘the metzora,’ הַמְּצֹרָע, but rather as ‘the one who slanders,’ הַמּוֹצִיא שֵׁם רָע. 

The midrash goes on to detail places throughout the Bible where people have been afflicted with tzara’at and similar ailments after having said things that could be construed as gossip or slander. According to the midrash, if we want to avoid tzara’at, then we must be careful about our speech. 

In giving us a tidy explanation of the cause and prevention of this devastating illness, the midrash also gives us bad theology. It is simply not true that people were afflicted with tzara’at (or are struck today with other devastating diseases) as a result of their propensity for gossip. And we also know that many people who are not careful with how they speak about others live long and healthy lives. 

Let me be clear - I believe that our words matter deeply. As a teacher of  middle schoolers, I spend a great deal of time, both through my teaching and through the relationships I build with my students, working on this skill set. I’m a fan of curbing our urge to gossip and talk about others. But I must also acknowledge that the midrashic take on the cause of tzara’at has problematic consequences.

As someone who lived through the AIDS epidemic and spent my college years volunteering for organizations that worked with homebound people living with HIV, I saw the way people who contracted the virus were ostracized by society. In the early days, it was mostly an offshoot of homophobia. As the epidemic wore on, it became more about fear of contagion. The message, however, remained consistent: If you had HIV, then it was the result of something very, very wrong that you had done. Your behavior caused your illness.

More recently, in the early days of the Covid pandemic, we saw pieces of this same phenomenon. People who contracted Covid in those first terrifying months, or who refused to wear masks, were often seen as careless, as pursuing their own comfort at the expense of the health and safety of those around them. 

The emotion behind the midrashic interpretation of the metzora, the desire to understand something so that we can prevent it, is natural. For us today, living in the wake of a global pandemic, we should aim to take a different approach, one of compassion and recognition. Rather than looking at those whose illnesses place them on the margins of our community and wondering what failure led to their suffering, we can look at them and see their humanity, finding ways to help pave a path away from the margins and back to the warm embrace of others. This is truly תּוֹרַת הַמְּצֹרָע, the rite for a metzora. 

​Shabbat shalom.

This past Monday, together with countless people around the area and the country, I looked up at the sky. While I remember the last solar eclipse, from 2017, pretty well, this was the first significant natural phenomenon I witnessed surrounded by young people. 

Being with my students for the eclipse was quite the experience. Even before we left our classroom and left the building, the exhilaration in the air was palpable. The hallways were positively vibrating with the students’ excitement and curiosity. As the afternoon wore on, students began to notice it getting darker outside, the shadows on the ground outside our windows becoming more pronounced. 

By the time we went outside, my students couldn’t wait to put on their viewing glasses and look at the sky. They had discussed how eclipses work in their science classes earlier in the day and were prepared for what they would see, but then they looked at the sky and were blown away. 

After a moment of awe-filled silence, middle school excitement took over, with students calling out updates on the moon’s transit across the sun. We soon began playing with our phones, figuring out how to hold the viewing glasses over our camera lenses and adjust exposure levels to get the best shot, and sharing our best pictures with each other. 


When I teach about tefillah - to students of all ages - I speak about the different emotions our traditional prayers express. There are the prayers that say, “Please…” And those that say, “Thanks.” There’s also, “I’m sorry.” And, “Wow!” This one was definitely a “Wow!” moment.

When we have “Wow!” moments, especially when those moments center on things we experience in the natural world, we often give voice to them through the modality of reciting berakhot, blessings. Over the past few weeks, there has been much debate and discussion in a number of rabbinically-minded groups I participate in about the proper berakhah to say upon witnessing the eclipse. 

It’s not such a simple question. Our earliest sources, similar to many other ancient cultures, saw eclipses as a potentially bad omen. They were meant to be endured, hoping that they would not be harbingers of difficult times ahead. Later sources discuss the possibility of reciting blessings for a wide variety of natural phenomena, with a number of suggestions for which blessing to say for which event, and not a tremendous amount of consensus.


I knew that I wanted to mark the moment of seeing the eclipse by saying a berakhah. For me, reciting berakhot is a regular part of my practice, a moment of mindfulness I take many times a day. So when I was outside looking up at the sky on Monday afternoon, I spent a few moments watching the eclipse as it moved toward totality, allowing my “Wow!” to build, and then I said: 
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳  אֱ׳לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, עוֹשֹה מַעֲשֹה בְּרֵאשִׁית.
Praised are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, Author of Creation.

In that moment, as I saw the moon and the sun in close interaction (at least from my vantage point), I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Torah’s account of the fourth day of Creation: “God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night…And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth…and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that this was good.” (Genesis 1:16-18) Reciting the blessing I chose helped me give voice to my sense that I was witnessing something ancient and mysterious, something that reminded me of the earliest days of the world. 

I’d love to hear from you about your eclipse experiences. What was your “Wow!” moment? What were you feeling and thinking as the moon passed in front of the sun? How did you give voice to it? Please drop me a line and let me know!

May we keep the memories of our “Wow!” close at hand as we close out our week. Shabbat shalom.

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