Embodied Torah

Divre Harav – September, 2025

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“U-netaneh Tokef, Let us speak of the sacred power of this day – profound and awe inspiring.”

This quotation is from one of the most well-known High Holiday prayers, renowned both for the power of its descriptive images of passing before God in judgement of who will live and who will die, and for the stirring and emotionally resonant quality of its music. This opening line of the poem lays out the proposition that the days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have sacred power. This is both true and not true. The days themselves have no inherent power. If you wake up on the mornings of September 23 and 24 and go to work or to the gym or go about your normal daily routine, then for you, Rosh Hashanah does not have sacred power. If, however, you alter your routine and consciously recognize the day by your behavior, it begins to have power in that the day itself motivates you to deviate from your expected actions. If you spend some part of the day at the synagogue, if you read specific pieces of literature and contemplate certain prayers, the day begins to have sacred power in that your mind is traveling down a different set of pathways and is opening up to a different set of thoughts about who you are and how you can best fulfill your life’s purpose.

It is only when you throw yourself in the traditions and liturgy of the day that you give it its full sacred power to inspire awe. When you hear the shofar, imagine the sound waves blasting through your heart, breaking down the callouses that build up over time which insulate you from being sensitive to the cries of the world. When you hear the melodies of the Torah reading, imagine yourself as the obedient servant of God or as offering yourself freely as an agent of God’s will. When you taste the apples and the sweet honey, imagine what your life might be like if you consciously removed jealousy, hatred, resentment, and excessive ego from your heart. When you hear U’netaneh Tokef, imagine how you would behave if your life depended on taking the best possible moral action at every decision point.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur can act on agnostic and skeptical Jews, Jews who call themselves non-religious, and Jews whose synagogue affiliation is motivated by little more than nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. But it all begins with a single step, a single mitzvah. It’s like the old joke, “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. But the light bulb has to want to change.” The single mitzvah is to be fully present with an open heart. This single mitzvah may be prompted by a different single mitzvah, of putting on tefillin every day or giving tzedakah every day or carrying energy bars in your car to give away at stoplights or lighting candles or saying Kiddush every Shabbat. The only way through the door to profound and awe-inspiring experience is to awaken your soul and teach it how to engage in a single mitzvah at a time.

Pirke Avot (4:2) teaches, “mitzvah goreret mitzvah, one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah.” May your hearts be open to the wonders of the transformative power of Rosh Hashanah, a single mitzvah at a time.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • teshuvah – repentance
  • tefillah – prayer
  • tzedakah – giving, acts of righteousness
  • gezerah – decree

“Teshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedakah have the power to lesson the severity of the decree against us.”

Divre Harav – May, 2025

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Passover, which we celebrated last month, is act one of a drama in two acts. We’ll celebrate the second act next month, beginning on Sunday night, June 1. It takes place seven weeks after Pesaḥ and is known as Shavuot. It is the holiday of the revelation of Torah at Mount Sinai. The 10 commandments, and more. Shavuot is a celebration of the 613 mitzvot of Torah. That’s a lot of rules!

In my synagogue growing up, we played a game called the “no rule game.” We put a group of students in a room, gave them a beach ball, and told them that we were going to play a game with only one rule. “The rule of this game is that there are no rules.” Do whatever you want.

The staff then sat back and watched to see what would happen. At first, they didn’t know what to do. And then a student or two would begin to throw or kick the ball around. After a while, they noticed that it was more fun if they didn’t let the ball touch the ground. At some point, one student would sit on the ball and not let anyone else touch it. Other students would say, “You can’t do that, it’s not fair.” Other students would break in and say, ‘you can’t say that the ball can’t touch the floor! That’s a rule, and making rules is against the rule of the game.’ And, ‘you can’t say that I can’t sit on the ball. That’s another rule!’ Eventually, they noticed that games are more fun if there’s a little competition, and they divided into two teams, awarding a point for kicking the ball into a goal. 

The point, as the students learned though their experience, was that a game with no rules is not much fun. And in a larger sense, the complete freedom to do anything you want is not as fun as it sounds. It’s no fun for anyone if one person just sits on the ball. Rules serve a purpose. They enable us to live, work, and play with groups of people and have fun. And rules like traffic lights, stop signs, and speed limits allow us to get from one place to another safely.

The Exodus is the event creating the Jewish people, but Shavuot is the event creating Judaism. Our holidays, our life cycle events, our food customs, the content of our prayers, these are the rules that define what it means to live a Jewish life. Mitzvot give Judaism its transcendent meaning.

I invite you to join me on the first night of Shavuot (Sunday, June 1, 6:30 p.m.) to explore the role of Torah and Mitzvot. Elsewhere in the Voice, you’ll find information about a potluck dinner at my home, following by a series of study sessions. You are welcome to come and go as you please. The sessions are intended to be informal and participatory.

And join us at the synagogue Monday and Tuesday morning to help make the minyan as we reenact the revelation of the 10 commandments (Monday) and as we incorporate a Yizkor memorial service to honor those who came before us (Tuesday). There might even be cheesecake or blintzes, as it is customary to enjoy sweet dairy foods on Shavuot, representing the milk and honey of Torah.

Hag Sameah!

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • yom – day
  • shavuah – week
  • ḥodesh – month
  • Shanah – year

Divre Harav – April, 2025

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We’ll sit around the table in Mid-April and tell the story of Israel’s oppression in Egypt and subsequent redemption by God. And we’ll talk about a series of 10 punishments God sent on the entire Egyptian people until their leader finally let us go, despoiling the Egyptian on the way out of town, and trapping their army in the sea to drown.

Is this revenge or is it justice?

The Torah (and associated Midrash) portray the plagues as carefully measured punishments against that which the Egyptians worshipped as gods; the money taken from the Egyptians as reparations for many years of slavery, and drowning the army as a measure for measure justice for drowning Israeli baby boys.

Sitting around the table, it’s hard to imagine the Egyptians as innocent victims of Pharaoh. They are the overseers, the enablers of the oppressive, vicious, enslavement of the people who once saved them from famine. The Haggadah contains a passage in which several rabbis almost gleefully imagine multiplying the ten plagues – there were not just ten, there were 10 plus 50 more on the way out! No there were a total of 240! No, there were 300 plagues! The suffering is multiplied over and over, as if the plain sense of the Biblical story isn’t enough to achieve justice.

In the 2009 film “Inglorious Basterds,” director Quentin Tarantino gives us a Shoah revenge fantasy, in which a young Jewish refugee witnesses the slaughter of her family by the Nazis, and arranges a gathering of prominent Nazi officers for a movie premier at the theater she operates, coordinated with a ruthless band of Jewish guerrilla soldiers planning to blow up the theater.

Both the seder and the film play with the Jewish trope of being powerless against evil. We are not in fact powerless. In the seder, God is on our side, fighting for us. In the film, we’ve learned to take up arms and fight back. But the line between justice and revenge is blurry. We don’t defeat the enemy by hurting them exactly as much as they hurt us. We need to burn them to the ground, drown them, blow them up, punish them so thoroughly that they only have enough strength to lay down their whips and chains, shower us with gold and silver, and and wish us well on our way out of town. And the brave among them follow behind us because they see our way of life and the power of our God as far superior to Egyptian gods and civilization.

In the Bible, the stories attribute Israeli victories to God. Revenge and justice both belong to God, and human armies are God agents. Real life, however, and the fantasy of film. is messy. We don’t have a voice of God telling us exactly what to do. Instead, we have a collection of pundits and military analysts and politicians and soldiers acting, we hope, with integrity and sense of justice, not revenge. And when they mess us, sooner or later there will be a commission of inquiry to tell us how they erred and what we can do in the future to prevent such disasters.

And we pray: Next year in Jerusalem of God, Jerusalem of Peace!

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • zedak – justice
  • nekama – revenge

Divre Harav – March, 2025

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As I write this article, my heart is heavy, awaiting the release of the rest of the hostages from phase one of the Gaza cease fire agreement. There are 15 more presumably living hostages and the bodies of eight hostages who are no longer alive yet to be returned. There is no indication of how many of the remaining 65, whose return will, God willing, be part of a phase two agreement, are still alive.

At the same time, I rejoice with relief at the images and video of the hostages who have been returned and reunited with their families. In particular, I am grateful that Gadi Moses, the hostage whose picture has occupied a chair on the Bima during our services and a chair in the meeting room during Kiddush and meetings, has been released.

According to interviews following his release, while held hostage by Hamas for more than 15 months in Gaza, 80-year-old Gadi Moses ate mainly a piece of bread and an olive twice a day. He lost 15 kilograms, about 33 pounds during his captivity. During that time, he was given a small bowl of water to wash himself every five days and had to ask to use the toilet. He moved frequently and was mostly alone, typically held in a room about 2 meters square (slightly more than 6 feet square). He calculated math problems in his head to distract himself, and walked up to 11 km (six miles) a day, measuring the distance by walking the perimeter of his room.

Gadi Moses helped build Kibbutz Nir Oz with his bare hands. A passionate agronomist and farmer, he used the knowledge he found studying the ground and how to make things grow to help foreign countries grow crops. Gadi adored explaining the fine details of agriculture to people coming to the Israeli kibbutz for instruction. In his retirement, he built a communal garden there. A lover of fine wines, he grew grapes as a hobby. He loved nothing more than nature and his family, his three children and his grandchildren.

I have reached out to Gadi to offer my gratitude that he is back home and to invite him, if and when he is able to travel, to visit us in Grand Rapids, sit in the chair we had designated for him, and speak to us about his experience and his plans to rebuild his beloved Kibbutz community.

As we celebrate Purim this month and Pesah next month, let us remember that the evil represented by Haman and Pharaoh are not just stories; they are a real part of the world in which we live and a real threat to our continuing ability to publicly live out of Judaism in the world today. Gathering to hear the Megillah and to celebrate a Seder is our way of saying, “No matter how hard you try to prevent us from embracing our Torah and living our Jewish lives, we will persevere!”

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • ne’edar – missing
  • nishbah – taken captive
  • ḥatufim – hostages
  • m’shuḥrar – freed

Divre Harav – February, 2025

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The changing religious shape of Jerusalem and Israel

I had dinner with some friends in Israel who made aliyah last year. They are a typical religious family living in South Jerusalem in the neighborhood of Arnona-Talpiyot, not too far from the future site of the American Embassy. Their children, two of whom I met at dinner, had preceded them in moving to Israel. I spoke to the two daughters about their post high school service to the country. As a matter of law, young women are obligated to do military service. However, religious women are automatically exempted from any service. One daughter accepted the exemption from the army and did alternative national service. She explained there wasn’t even a question in her mind of whether to volunteer for national service. Israelis serve their country after high school and that’s why she didn’t take full advantage of the exemption. The other daughter, who served in the army, explained that she didn’t qualify for the exemption because she wasn’t religious. I was impressed by her honesty. She lives with her parents in a religious household, so she basically conforms to religious norms. She could have signed a statement to this effect and accepted a full exemption. But she felt the strong pull of a young Israeli to do regular army service.

From what I observed and from what other friends told me, this is typical of the fluid religious atmosphere of South Jerusalem and other parts of Israel where religious and secular live side by side. The lines between religious and non-religious are not as clear as they once were. Religious families need not be ultra-nationalists living deep in Judea and Samaria in order to feel a sense of patriotic duty to the state. The non-Orthodox gather in small groups for Shabbat and to celebrate holidays. The Conservative/Masorti movement is growing slowly, but the number of informal, grass-roots, egalitarian, minyanim is exploding. People want community and if the official state rabbinate is not going to provide a type that fits their needs, a Jewishly well-educated, Hebrew-literate, public need only gather ten or more like-minded people in a public or inexpensively rented space and create it themselves. Best of all, it is fueled largely by native Israelis as much as North American immigrants.

A generation ago, common wisdom suggested that every Israel was Orthodox, even if they were completely non-observant. Today, they may not be familiar with the non-Orthodox movements, but they understand what it means to be shiv’yoni, egalitarian. The founding generation of Israel was militantly secular, and society clearly divided Ashkanazi and Mizrahi from one another. Today’s generation has thoroughly mixed Jews of European, Asian, and North African descent (central African Jews are still working towards full inclusion), and the secular population has an appreciation of Judaism from a secular school system infused with Jewish texts and traditions. There are still neighborhood and isolated areas populated by a kind of 18th and 19th century Judaism, but for the most part, socially and religiously, Israel has leapt gracefully from the 19th to the 21st century.

In a visit overshadowed by the dark cloud of war and the gloom of hostages held in Gaza, the energy of Jerusalem’s religious life was a beam of sunshine.

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • Tz’va Haganah L’Yisrael (typically abreviated as Tzahal) – Israel Defense Force
  • Sherut Le’umi – national service
  • Masorti – “traditional.” The name of the Conservative movement of Judaism in Israel and worldwide.
  • Shiv’yoni – “egalitarian”