Dvar Torah for Chukat Balak 2026

 A decade and a half ago I had a blog called Elisha's Double Portion. It was part food blog, part parsha blog. Every week I paired the Torah portion with a recipe I cooked, photographed, and shared. My father was always one of the first people to read each post, and he would gently point out the little corrections that needed to be made. In my excitement to get my posts out into the world, I would sometimes overlook those details. On certain weeks, it was a bit more challenging to feel excited about the parsha in my kitchen. But that was not the case with this week's double portion. With its mentions of figs, grapes and pomegranates I had so many options. Somehow, back in 2010, I decided to make tabouli because of the grains mentioned in the text.

But I barely mentioned the most important ingredient of all: water. Because it’s true that water wouldn’t be so compelling in a food blog. However, water is really the center of Parshat Chukat.

The people cry out, "There is no water to drink." Moshe turns to God, who tells him to gather the people and speak to the rock. As we know, instead, Moshe strikes it. The water still comes, but something has changed. And in one of the most heart breaking passages of the Torah, God tells Moshe that he will not lead the people into the Promised Land, that he himself will only be able to glimpse it. After everything Moshe has done for the Jewish people until this point, and everything that he will continue to do for the Jewish people beyond this moment, it seems like an incredibly harsh punishment. And that the deep partnership between God and Moshe seems to break down in their communication. Was it because of his behavior, or the words he said at the rock - not honoring God - either way it is so final.

When I was in high school, though, I had an amazing Tanach teacher, Rabbi Natty Helfgot. And he taught a different interpretation of this text that has stayed with me ever since. The generation standing before Moses is not the generation that left Egypt. That prior generation all died out. But 40 years ago when they were still alive, God told Moshe to strike the rock when they were complaining about not having enough water. And when Moshe did so, he learned a certain behavior and a particular approach to leadership. And now at this moment, in front of the new generation he can’t get away from those old patterns, he can’t give them what they need. He was no longer able to be the leader who this generation needed. They required something different - they needed a leader who could speak where once force had been necessary.

If you look at the story this way, Moses' departure is not simply a punishment. It is a recognition that every generation needs the leadership that speaks its language.

And then this week I learned another chidush (new idea) when I read Rav Claudia Kreiman's weekly dvar torah that she writes for her TBZ community in Brookline. I love that no matter how familiar one can be with Tanach, to know all the stories - new details and connections are waiting for an aha moment - Sam and I love sharing those with each other. So this was my aha moment.

Rav Claudia taught that right before we get to the Israelites complaints that set off this story, Miriam dies. And the Torah text doesn’t tell us about any mourning rituals or reactions other than that they buried her. But this was surely a huge loss. Miriam, who watched over Moses as a baby in the Nile. Miriam, who led the women in song after the sea split. Miriam, whose well, according to tradition, accompanied the Israelites throughout the wilderness. Moses loses his sister. The people lose a leader, and their source of water. They're not just physically thirsty, there is some spiritual parch they are afflicted with. And maybe in the face of that personal grief, Moshe's patience disappears. Any human who is gripped by a strong emotion, especially when carrying other people's burden, can reach a moment when that emotion overwhelms their judgment.

And that brings us to our second parsha of the day because King Balak is also overwhelmed by an emotion that clouds his judgement - fear. He sees Israel approaching and imagines catastrophe for his own nation. And that fear makes him formulate a plan to not just physically confront them but to try to spiritually overpower them. He hires Bilaam to curse Israel and before he is willing to understand the situation, that God will not allow Bilaam to curse them, Balak keeps trying a million solutions, moving an alter to new vantage points and asking Bilaam to try again and again. But every curse becomes a blessing as God transforms Bilaam's words:

Mah tovu ohalecha Ya'akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael.
"How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob; your dwelling places, O Israel."

There is another line in Bilaam's prophecy that has always intrigued the rabbis:

הֶן עָם כְּלָבִיא יָקוּם וְכַאֲרִי יִתְנַשָּׂא לא ישכב עד יאכל טרף

"A people rises like a lion cub, stands up like a lion, and doesn’t lie down until it has consumed its prey"

The Midrash Tanchuma hears an echo of the Shema: וּבְשָׁכְבְּךָ וּבְקוּמֶךָ "When you lie down and when you rise." 

The rabbis imagine that Israel's true strength is not found on the battlefield but in the quiet rhythm of daily faith—rising each morning to declare God's oneness and lying down each night placing ourselves in God's care.

I learned this midrash from Rav Avital Hochstein’s dvar Torah from Hadar, who points out that Jewish strength has always required both physical courage and spiritual discipline. Sometimes we need the strength of the lion. But without humility, prayer, and moral purpose, strength alone is never enough.

Perhaps that is the lesson these two parshiyot have for us. Sometimes we are like Moshe, exhausted beyond our capacity. Sometimes we are Balak, imagining the worst and reacting from fear. But can we find a balance between our strong emotions? Later in the parsha when Moshe looses his other sibling Aharon, and afterwards the nation again complains about not having water, God gets so angry he sends snakes to bite the people. But this time Moshe is able to see through his grief for a brief moment and pray for their healing and safety and God ends the plague. So we may not get the balance right in every moment, but can we come back from one mistake and try again.

The prophet Micah, whose words conclude the haftarah for Balak, offers us the answer: 

הִגִּיד לְךָ אָדָם מַה טּוֹב, וּמָה יְהוָה דּוֹרֵשׁ מִמְּךָ - כִּי אִם־עֲשׂוֹת מִשְׁפָּט וְאַהֲבַת חֶסֶד וְהַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת עִם־אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃

"What does God require of you? Only to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

Perhaps when we live that way, grounded in our values, we can fully experience our strong emotions of grief and fear, but also make time to lean into the other strong emotions we experience of love, or the joy or a blog post, of the joy of our community. And then our own personal internal tents, and the tents of our homes, and the tents of our communities truly become beautiful spaces of gathering and dwelling. 

Shabbat shalom.

Sermons from 2024 High Holidays

Sermons from 2024 High Holidays

I had the opportunity to share words of Torah and comfort in my communities at the high holidays and wanted to put them in a more public space as well.

Yom Kippur 2024 Dvar Torah  - Elisha Gechter

 

Eight days ago I stood in the middle of this room leading our community in tefillah, feeling swept up in the powerful words and melodies unique to the Yamim Noraim. But I’m also so moved by the part of the service that we sing on our regular shabbat gatherings - the words of the torah service stir me and I try to sing them extra slowly on our auspicious days. I was so caught up in them this year, davening with my eyes closed, my mind on the current state of the world and the deep need for our tefillot, that I ended up making a mistake. Maybe you caught it, probably you didn’t - it was one letter off but it changed the meaning for me. It came after the first paragraph of Ein Kamocha - having just said words where we exalt God as eternal, incomparable and state that God will give strength to our people and will bless us with peace. My mouth was next supposed to say “AV Harachamim,” Father of Mercy, but instead I said “AZ Harachamim”  - IF you give us strength and blessing only THEN you will be considered merciful. This mistake not only shifted the meaning to a less gendered tefillah, but it made it a conditional tefillah. I smiled at myself in that moment as I try to be kind to myself around mistakes, and take care with self-talk, but then it hit me that there was something in that mistake that reflects the way that many people are feeling right now, which is torn between emotions. Between sadness and hope, between hate and love. Between feeling sure about praising God and being unsure or even angry. At this tender spot in our calendar and our hearts it’s not just the day of atonement but the week we marked a year since Oct 7. So no wonder that we’re continuing to experience mixed emotions that leave us feeling unsure about ourselves and our world.

 

I want to offer us several ways to possibly think about dealing with feeling torn or imbalanced at this moment. Mostly I’m sharing things that I’ve recently found to be inspiring, and maybe they will be helpful to you too.

 

This week Rabbi Avi Killip, Executive Vice President at Hadar in NY, shared her Rosh Hashana sermon on MyJewishLearning.com in an article entitled “Praying for Permission” and she gets at this notion of vacillating;

“I want permission to spend some time this holiday season thinking about my own life — my failures and goals, and how I might change and grow this year, even when my struggles feel small compared to the things I could be praying about. I want permission to sometimes forget about those bigger things and focus only on my own small life. And I want permission to not focus on myself this year. I want permission to say that teshuvah might be too small a framework for the challenges of this moment.”

 

This push and pull of how big and messed up the world is feeling right now, with the knowledge that our own internal lives are also big and full and yes, messy, reminds me of pulling two white paper tabs from the golden contraption at Lehrhaus, our local Tavern for Jewish learning. One says bishvili nivra haolam - for me the world was created, and the other says ani kaafar vefer - I am but dust and ashes. This is in homage to the Chasidic Reb Simcha Bunem who always carried two slips of paper with him with these quotes, one in each pocket, in order to live a balanced life. Rabbi Shai Held, Dean of Hadar, in his new book Judaism is about Love talks about actively balancing these ideas - balancing a sense of humility with knowing our worth. I’m not sure our liturgy today is the best about helping us with such balance. I have spoken here before about the second set of viduy that I recite on Yom Kippur that my Rabbi, Avi Weiss, wrote that are all positive, listing the wonderful things we have done in the last year like Ahavnu, we have loved, Berachnu, we have blessed. I feel that this addition helps me stay more balanced today. Shai Held emphasizes that knowing our positive qualities and abilities isn't arrogance but rather is self awareness and notes that 

“The desire to change and do better depends on a robust sense of self-worth. Many people who engage in introspection assume that what it means to work on ourselves is to dwell incessantly on our flaws. But to probe our shortcomings…is only HALF of what is required - and to be conscious only of our shortcomings is a prescription for failure and despondency...Woe to the person who is unaware of their shortcomings because they will not know what to work on, but even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues because they don’t even know what they have to work with.” 

 

If that is true year round, today we should also be striving for balance between dwelling on our mistakes, and on our merits. If you’re not someone who has spent much time recently thinking about your strengths, I’d humbly suggest using part of tefillah today to consider your virtues, naming for yourself what you like about yourself, what you know you bring to the world, even, or especially, in everyday interactions. And if that feels hard to name, maybe ask someone in this room who knows you for some help - especially if they are someone you asked for forgiveness on the approach to this holiday. As much as we tell people we’re in proximity with what they can be doing better, we should tell people what they are getting right and leave them feeling acknowledged so they can better understand how they show up for other people.

 

But making an inventory of our own merits to compliment the other things we focus on today, may lead us to consider another addendum needed to our Yom Kippur tefillot/conversations. And that is thinking about where God has fallen short. And if God isn’t what grounds you today or ever, I invite you to replace that with a word or concept that works for your view. And I don’t think that would be heretical, certainly not this year.

 

There is precedence for such an accounting in a Chasidic tale which describes the practice of a simple pious Jewish tavern owner. Every eve of Rosh Hashanah, (let’s say she) would sit down to do an accounting of the business and of her life in 2 separate books - one for her own actions—where she had achieved or missed the mark over the past year and a second book for God's actions—the blessings as well as the sufferings endured by her family and community.

The very first time the tavern owner completed her entries in her own book, she added up the total of her sins and she felt ashamed: she had been quick to anger, forgot to check on her elderly aunt, and she didn’t express gratitude to her customers. Then, she opened the second book and when she looked at everything she felt God had done wrong in the past year, that part of the list wasn’t short either: her crops had failed, the tavern business suffered, her family faced illness, and misfortune had come to her community.

In a rush of inspiration she lifted both books and spoke directly to God:

“Ribbono shel Olam (Master of the Universe), I see that both You and I have made many mistakes this past year. I have committed sins, and You have given hardships. Let’s make a deal. I will forgive You for all the troubles and misfortunes You have given me this year IF You forgive me for all my wrongdoings. We’ll just wipe both accounts clean and start fresh in the new year.” And with that she swung the books over her head as kapparot (attonement) and threw them into her fireplace.

 

Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz of Temple Bnai Brith in Somerville recently shared a reference to this story on facebook along with an alternate version of Mi Sheana that she was inspired to write this year. The traditional version translates to “who answered” and is a piyut we sang last night enumerating all the times in our history God answered those who called out for help. Her version is made up of stanzas of Mi Shelo Ana - who did not answer, and recounts the times in history when God did not answer us. In explaining her motivation to do so she said “There is something powerful and healing in going to the place that is angry with God and demanding a better present and a better future. The place of sadness and grief is a helpless place, and this year we need to reclaim our agency…I hope you will find this version empowering and hope-giving and that it will be received with love and rachamim by God.” I’ll share 2 of them with you;

 

מִי שֶׁלֹּא עָנָה לְחַנָּה סֶנֶשׁ בְּבֵית הָאֲסוּרִים, הוּא יַעֲנֶנּוּ

May the one who did not answer Hannah Senesh in prison, answer us.

מִי שֶׁלֹּא עָנָה לִילָדֵינוּ בְּפֶסְטִיבַל הַנּוֹבָה, הוּא יַעֲנֶנּוּ

May the one who did not answer our children at the Nova Festival, answer us.

 

So far I’ve quoted ideas that encourage us to allow contrasting emotions to complement one another - to balance each other out, to lead us to something more complete; our sins and our merits, our greatness and our humility, our anger and our hope, our shortcomings and God’s. But what about integration? Is there a way to bring together the 2 slips of paper that Reb Bunim kept in his pocket?

 

Rabbi Toba Spitzer of Dorshei Tzedek in Newton who wrote a beautiful book this year called God is Here - Reimagining the Divine which I highly recommend as a tool for spiritual direction - wrote something for a past Yom Kippur Dvar Torah about this

“Most of us… fall somewhere between these two pockets, sometimes knowing that the world was created for my sake, sometimes feeling like dust and ashes. It is good to move back and forth between the two pockets… perhaps best of all is to experience both at the same time…We can spend Yom Kippur seeking that integration, trying to cultivate both of these qualities within ourselves.”

 

OK but how, Rabbi Toba doesn’t tell us. She invites us into our own process. Integration is a very personal thing that doesn’t come with a recipe. And sometimes instructions or words can fall short. Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, Dean of Hebrew College, sent a pre Rosh Hashana email in which she shared that

“There is a Hasidic teaching of Rebbe Nachman.

He said, ‘When two people speak simultaneously, there is dissonance.

But when they sing together, there is harmony.’

When the world loses its ethical compass, it needs beauty to recalibrate.

When words fail, what is left to us but to sing?”

 

I want to suggest that the songs we use today might be an access point to integrating that which we feel is in tension in ourselves and in the world. 

Between sadness and hope, between anger and love. If we’ve dwelt too long on one emotion or the other, in one pocket or the other, it’s not too late to sing ourselves back from that place.

 

I used a tune last week that is an old Chassidisuh niggun that I learned with words from Joey Newcomb - you fall down you get back up. It’s a powerful reminder to not stay stuck and that falling down happens often.

 

On this day of atonement how can we achieve at-one-ment?

 

Looking back on this year,

We have made mistakes 

And we have watched many others make mistakes

On a grand scale

On a small scale

And we have made wonderful moments happen as well

We have wrote alternate forms of prayer

We have articulated gratitude

We have shown up for each other 

We have tried to see many sides of ourselves and of situations

 

So, may it be a year going forward of BOTH AND

May it be a year where we give ourselves permission

May it be a year where we sing ourselves and others into kindness

Into balance

Into integration

Gmar Tov

 

Elisha Gechter

Shmini Atzeret 2024

 

When I was in 1st grade my class of 60 kids in SAR, a modern orthodox day school in NY, dressed in matching white tops and blue bottoms with paper crowns on our heads. We held our brand new siddurim with felted covers designed by us, singing tefillot for a crowd of smiling parents. My school called this production a “siddur play” and it was a milestone to mark receiving our first siddur. What I remember most was the entenmann's donuts we all got to eat afterwards. Now as a parent, I’ve attended similar events each year at JCDS. I love that they call them “milestones” and they have a slightly different flare. Yes I get to watch my children dance and sing, but also they teach midrashim they have created, share powerpoints, posters and dioramas that showcase questions they are grappling with in collaboration with their teachers. These milestones mark their love of learning in a communal and deeply personal way. 

 

I want to offer several ways of thinking about milestones generally and the milestone that today marks particularly.

 

The word milestone has come to mean many things; a literal roadside marker that lists the distance to a particular location,

a significant event in one’s life, like graduating from school, getting a job, or starting a family, a specific point within a project, a developmental achievement of a skills that tracks human growth such as taking a first step, and they can also be anniversaries of occasions, happy or sad.

 

So if these all count as milestones, how do we prepare for one? Sometimes we use ritual to mark the moment - since a milestone is a social construct, we also have agreed on norms around how we mark them and make them feel significant. But what happens when we have no script, or when the process of trying to create one feels overwhelming?

 

I think that’s what was going on for many people leading up to this holiday. Last year people were preparing to celebrate Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, and as they think back on that planning experience they may reflect that it was the last time they felt normal - before their world went to hell on Oct 7. Despite that feeling, people wrote suggestions for how to mark this 1 year milestone. Many are doing so from an Israeli lens where the two holidays of Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah overlap, and call for balancing the joy of Torah dancing with the tragedy of the enormous loss of life. Here in America these two holidays are distinct - so how should we have prepared for this day on its own, and now that we are here, how should we be using it as a day to reflect on this anniversary, this milestone.

 

Last year on Shmini Atzeret we were in the room below when we started to hear reports of the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel. It was scary, almost otherworldly, and without a direct connection to a news source, and given how early it was in the day, we had only slices of information. I had signed up to give the dvar torah that day - before I went up to speak I asked my husband Sam if I should change what I was going to say in light of what we were hearing. He said - we don’t know enough, just stick with your message. Looking back on those words I shared, they still feel relevant;

 

Shmini Atzeret is a day with contradictions, a day that marks the difficulty of separating from a big experience. 

As much as Shmini Atzeret gives us the gift of mindful lingering which we can carry into the rest of the year, I think it can also give us the gift of asking; where else in my life do I need to build in time to frame and mark a transition? Today helps us cap all of Tishrei with ritual and allows us right now to also ask, what am I doing to ritualize other things in my life that are winding down, that are restarting, that are changing?

   

We’ve struggled this year to process such a big experience - people have worn masking tape on their shorts over their hearts with numbers of days the hostages have been missing, counting up from that tragic overwhelming day. Have we asked where else we should be putting a mile marker - and not just for the bad but for the good we have done for each other this year, even if that has been a struggle to hold onto this year as a war has raged and ravages two peoples. Maybe this milestone feels so fraught because its not at the point where something is winding down.

 

We read the words of Kohelet in this room last week; “A time to mourn and a time to dance.” We have heard survivors of the Nova festival bravely declare - “We will dance again” but are we ready, is this moment of milestone ripe for perseverance or for brokenheartedness and being ok not being ok?

 

My friend, artist and fellow minyan goer Josh Meyer shared a Yehuda Amichai poem with me last week that contained some very timely words - in fact they were painted on a sukkah at the Vilna shul by local artist Caron Taub;

A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.

 

A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history takes years and years to do.

 

And we haven’t nearly had enough time to digest, as Amichai says, how this year impacts our Jewish history so how could we really plan for this milestone? We don’t have the perspective of much time, and we don’t have a script. This made planning especially hard - but we looked to each other and to our leaders for inspiration, for multiple possible ways forward.

 

On a play of those words from Kohelet, the Hadar Institute crafted a reader for this milestone called “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance,” where inspiration can be found and I want to share some of those who specifically address Shmini Atzeret; 

In one of the first entries Dr. Renana Ravitzky Pilzer, of Kehillat Shirah Hadashah in Jerusalem writes “The war drums still echo, and the future remains uncertain, but the end of a year of mourning is a Jewishly significant time to pause, and to

shape memory, commemoration, and longing.” One of her colleagues Oshrat Shoham, of Kehillat Hakhel in Jerusalem, states simply “This year, let Shemini Atzeret be a time for reflection and remembering.” Mishael Zion of  Kehillat Klausner in Jerusalem adds; “If there is joy on Simhat Torah, it will be joy that emerges from sorrow and mourning. Shemini Atzeret, which the midrash tells us is entirely based on Godʼs desire for “one more day of intimacy” with the Jewish people, is no longer a day of peak closeness and love. It is a wounded day, and any joy that occurs on it must be built from within that wound.”

 

Living in that space of both woundedness and joy I heard the words of a local yoga teacher Leah Broder I’ve been practicing with at Lotus studios in Somerville; she quoted Christine Valters Paintner, a female monk from NY living in Glasgow who said;

 

At the heart of autumn’s gift are these twin engines of relinquishing and harvesting

It is a season of paradox that invites us to consider what we are called to release and surrender, and at the same time it invites us to gather in the harvest, to name and celebrate the fruits of the seeds we planted months ago. In holding these two in tension we are reminded that in our letting go we also find abundance.

 

It can be so hard to let go. To stop planning, to stop controlling how we want to be intentional, how we want to mark any milestone, or this milestone. And while I do appreciate the planning and how thoughtful our greater Camebrville Jewish community has been about what tomorrow will look like, it sometimes feels like it removes the possibility for spontaneity and that attracted me to a Mary Oliver poem that a friend shared online this week called Don’t Hesitate 

 

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

 

I want to circle back to the way we think about milestones. Scott Stephens is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's religion and ethics editor. On the anniversary of the 100th episode for the podcast he co-hosts, The Minefield he wrote a piece with Lisa A. Williams on the essence of Milestones. His focus is less about how we should prepare for them and more about how we should grow from them.

 

Much like the way physical landmarks demarcate meaningful locations, temporal landmarks demarcate meaningful junctures in time. They interpose themselves between the past and a hoped for future. Research in psychology bears this out, by demonstrating that we perceive temporal landmarks, like a decade birthday or New Year's Day, as a division between a past self and the present self who has the future in reach...

But this is not the whole picture. Such a characterisation works when we are talking about milestone achievements, but what about the commemorative or even the evaluative dimension of milestones bound up, say, with the amount of time that has passed since an historically significant or egregious event - like …seventy-five years since the massacre at Babi Yar, or one-hundred years since the start of the First World War?

Such milestones don't mark achievements, but they do arrest the flow of time, even if for a moment, and allow us to give time elapsed a kind of ethical inflection: how have we - as moral agents, as a society, as a community of nations - changed in the interim? Has the passage of time transformed us, or have we squandered it?

Milestones aren't simply goals that we achieve but rather points to which we and our friends - in the fullest moral and political sense - are summoned to return, to revisit, from which to learn and to deepen the quality of our life together, and through which to rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of goals and goods in common that will outlive us. Milestones then are expressions of our common commitments and nurture us along the way.

 

So perhaps on this Shmini Atzeret we can make headspace to consider which commitments are important to us and how we are doing on those commitments.

 

On Shmini Atzeret last year I also spoke about Unity. I shared a different reading of the words from the Midrash that Mishael Tzion drew from. My Maharat classmate Rabbanit Leah Fine shared that the Hebrew - “קָשָׁה עָלַי פְּרֵדַתְכֶם” “your separation is hard for me” is not about God and people separating, otherwise it would have said “our separation.” Rather, she says, the Midrash depicts God as eager to have the Jewish people not separate from one another. After a week of togetherness, what’s bothering God, what God is hoping to delay is the threat to our opportunities for unity. “Everyone goes back to their day-to-day, segregated existence… this… is the tragedy that God seeks to postpone by holding onto the unity for one extra day.”     

 

It has certainly been a year of struggling when it comes to unity. Unity doesn’t mean we all do the same thing all the time, it means we make space for how we’re feeling within one community - maybe some of us feel like dancing, maybe some of us don’t but we can still be together. Throughout history when we’ve become deeply divided it has often had negative consequences - from Korach to judicial reform. Maybe one of our deepest commitments could be to find some unity - though not uniformity - at this milestone, and going forward. What would it look like to commit to being in community and conversation with those we deeply differ in opinion from? Rather than shutting each other out or down, what would it look like to stay as open as an Ahron Kodesh during  today’s tefilat hageshem?

Chag Sameach.

 

 

Sermons 2023 High Holidays

 Sermons 2023 High Holidays

 

Sukkot Dvar Torah 2023

Elisha Gechter 

Tishrei, the Hebrew month which we now find ourselves in, is full of dichotomies. We start with High holy days - the days of awe - which are now behind us, and we’ve entered into a week of festivities termed “the time of our joy” - “zman simchateynu.” We’ve gone from a much more spiritual part of Tishrei to a much more physical part of Tishrei. Maybe you could even say from a heaver, more serious time to a lighter or more lighthearted time. In fact we will read the Book of Kohelet next week to remind us not to let the lightheartedness get to our heads too much, and to remember to stay grounded during our time of joy. Tishrei bridges from the ethereal experiences of praying, fasting and reflecting on who we are being in the world, back to the physicality and the practicality of everyday life. We build an outdoor space to eat in, we take lulav and etrog, we’re marking the harvest, our gratitude, our history of living in sukkot in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt in this very tangible manner.

And this bridge from the spiritual to the physical mirrors in many ways our ancestors’ experience. The physical sukkot were present at a time when the Nation of Israel transitioned from the miracles of the Exodus to the practical side of surviving in the desert for 40 years. Commentators explain that there would have been no way that the Israelites could have taken a direct and fast route to Eretz Yisrael, they would never have been ready to enter the holy land without such a transition. I said the physical sukkot they lived in, but you may be familiar with the Talmudic debate about whether sukkot references actual huts, which is Rabbi Akiva’s opinion in the debate, the machloket, or references the ananei hakavod -God’s protective clouds of glory, which hovered above the Israelites throughout their sojourn in the wilderness which is  Rabbi Eliezer’s opinion. Another dichotomy in Tishrei.

Now maybe for you, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur wasn’t so different from sukkot and this second half of Tishrei. Maybe for you, those days were a time of joy, and maybe this binary I am setting up is false. It was a great joy to me that this year my children sat next to me for most of the High Holiday prayers. My 11 year old daughter Zoe made a comment to me in the middle of Yom Kippur when the minyan burst into jubilant song - “wait Ema aren’t we supposed to be sad today?” and I explained it is serious, we are pleading for our lives, but that Judaism has always been good at holding competing emotions and complexity and the Day of Atonement is about our fragile future but isn’t only solemn. 

It is false to say that there is a true dichotomy between the spiritual and physical in Judaism, rather we are anchored on the idea that we can have both at every moment and they aren't in competition with each other. We’re invited to bring holiness into any moment with our rituals, our kavanot/intentions, our brachot/blessings, our very chagim/holidays. Some people don’t see sukkot as wildly distinct from Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Instead, they use the structure of the sukkot as a place to practice the things they said they expressed wanting to change on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. There is a custom that is said to have started with the 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Moses Cordovero to be careful with the words we utter under the roof of the sukkah, the schach. If we perceive that we are sitting right beneath shechina/ananei hakavod, God’s presence, Rabbi Eliezer’s view, we should engage in positive even spiritual exchanges, that leaves us and others honored. It’s almost like a sophisticated version of playing house - when you were young and you got to try out different roles in imaginary play, on sukkot you get to be an adult who is striving to be your best self and to test drive in a focused manner what that can feel and look like, even by just starting with something as simple but as foundational as speech, or as deep as our al chet’s took us in our Yom Kippur liturgy. And maybe that is what can bring us so much joy - the chance to live intentionally into our teshuva/repentance for a whole focused week.

Rav Kook beautifully writes in his book Ma'amrei HaRa'ayah about the sukkah as a place of practice, of imagination and of tikkun, repair, when it comes specifically to unity, to bringing together disparate factions of people, bringing together disparate parts of ourselves. 

He quotes from Torah and Gemara - 

“Every Israelite citizen shall dwell in Sukkot” (Vayikra 23:42) – “This teaches that all Israel

should dwell in one Sukkah” (Talmud Sukkah 27b).

And goes on to say “that as long as the chains of our wrongdoings are tied to our lives, it is not possible to hope for harmony between divergent perspectives, or for the unity of Shalom.

…But after the light of Teshuvah has appeared in our world, through the sanctity of the holy day, Yom Kippur, and all Israel are purified from the illness of wrongdoing, the purity

of our souls strengthens within us, and the divergent perspectives are unified more and

more.

And when the holy festival of Sukkot comes, the light of Torah, the illumination of awe for

the Divine and love of the truth suffuse our entire essence, and unify all perspectives and

Ideas.”

A very mystical approach around how the holidays of Tishrei prepare us for bringing together community, for being our true and full selves. After atoning, with our clean slates, we’re ready to be present to difference, because we’ve cleared away the noise that usually gets in our way for such tolerance. 

Now, my children told me that the best dvar torahs are ones that include stories, so I want to share a story with you about tolerance. The 18th century Ukranian Hassidic Rabbi, Reb Zusha, and his family were rather poor. Once, before Sukkot, he didn’t have any money at all to buy the four species so he sold his pair of very precious tefillin and bought an incredible etrog with the money. When his wife found out, she was really upset. She said to her husband - “how could you sell your precious tefillin, which you wear every weekday, for a mitzvah that lasts only one week?” And in that moment of frustration and upset she took the etrog and bit off its end, rendering it ritually useless. So let’s all imagine ourselves in Reb Zusha’s place and how upset you might be in that moment, or how defensive. Well we are not Rebbe Zusha. Because Reb Zusha, did not react with upset, but rather with calm and with love. He stood before his partner and he understood where she was coming from, and he didn’t defend himself. And since this is a Chassidic tale, the end of the story is that a message from Heaven reached Reb Zusha,  saying that his silence after what his wife did was more special in Heaven than his devotion in selling his tefillin to purchase the etrog. The story teaches us an amazing way to think about people and about mitzvot - even though Reb Zusha now couldn’t fulfill the mitzvah of arbaat haminin - the four species, nor tefillin for that matter, his intentions were not only about making sure he could do what was correct with the laws, but making sure he could try and do what was correct by the people in his life.

This story which teaches tolerance, love and understanding, is in contrast to a famous midrash that compares the plurality of the Jewish people to the arbat haminim, the four species. The etrog’s good smell and taste represent good deeds and good learning, and the aravot’s, the willow, lack of taste or smell represents no good deeds nor any learning. In Yeshivat Chovivei Torah’s Sukkot Reader this year Rabbanit Yaffa Aronoff of Jerusalem looks at the midrash with discomfort, saying it might be teaching us a negative lesson to be in the business of assessing ourselves and others for good deeds - that’s God’s job not ours. And even more so, Rabbanit Yaffa says, we can’t actually think of people like plants - we’re not a part of nature that can be neatly categorized. We are messy, we aren’t all good or bad, we are all on a journey. However, she notes that the midrash concludes with God saying that everyone should join themselves into one group in order to atone for the other. So if the perfect etrog, the perfect person, needs to atone, then we can understand that no one is actually perfect, because we are real people, and we are complex. You can’t put us in a box, that is not the idea of dwelling in sukkot either.

One last story - this one from my father’s childhood. He grew up in Philadelphia and leading up to his 1955 Bar Mitzvah his parents sent him to lessons with the rabbi at the Conservative shul. But that Rabbi must not have ever heard a dvar torah like this because he did not treat my father with much care. Instead he would push play on a tape recorder and have my father listen to that in his office while the rabbi took a phone call in the same room and turned his back. When Sukkot time rolled around my father heard that the rabbi was inviting only his favorite students into the sukkah - and my father was not in that group. This rabbi was in the business of categorizing people, putting them in boxes, and he missed an opportunity to include someone creative and soulful like my Abba. It wasn’t until my father was an adult that he learned a sukkah is open to everyone, and is not supposed to be an exclusive place, but rather an inclusive one. And luckily he was able to let go of that past and bring into his present a very joyful approach to the holiday, getting wrapped up in the idea of beautifying the mitzvot of Sukkot.

I think we all know that a sukkah is not built for favorites, and that a sukkah is just a shell without people in it. Without our welcoming posture, without our tolerance for those who are different, without our striving to be the best versions of ourselves, this holiday is meaningless.

So I’m stepping away from the dichotomy of Tishrei that I started with, and instead I’m stepping into its name of Chodesh Hashvii, the 7th month. The Lubavitcher Rebbe says that  in addition to meaning simply the “seventh month,” chodesh hashvii also means the “sated month” from the root of the word sheva, related to the word sovah, satiation. 

I want to bless us that we can bring that feeling of enoughness, of joy, of complexity, of balance, tolerance and pluralism - of our need to be with each other, to be in it together, to the rest of the chag and to the rest of our year.

 

Shmini Atzeret 2023 Elisha Gechter

 

Last Sunday, we sat in our Somerville sukkah with guests, lingering over a meal, and pondering, when we finished, if they would brave the 45 minute walk back to Cambridge port, or stay till the end of yontiv, the holiday, for us to drive them home. One friend asked, “well, what time is it?” and the other 4 adults in the sukkah all had the same response - “it’s yontiv o’clock,” - meaning, what does it matter what time it is today, a day when we’re resting from our normal modes of being?

 

The way that we use our time on Shabbat and Chagim stands in sharp contrast to the way we are often in relationship with time on a non-holy day. And yet, for some of us we don’t even feel free of such constraints on a day like today. Last night I was rushing to light candles by 5:59, today I rushed my family out the door to get to shul, and after this we’re going to scurry back home to meet someone in our sukkah for lunch. Now as you can tell from what I just said, I am someone whose usual mode is rushing, however, I do get present to the cadence of our holy days - case in point, I get my best reading done on Shabbat and yontiv.

 

If this invitation to a slower pace is the gift of any chag (holiday), that’s even more true for Shmini Atzeret. Rosh Hashana has shofar blowing, Yom Kippur has atonening, Sukkot has shaking the four species, and Shmini Atzeret has lingering. During Chol Hamoed I was in a sukkah with my friend Ben Soloway and he said he loves Shmini Atzeret so much, maybe more than is normal, because it’s about taking time to come down from the high of all the chagim, and just hang out with God, with each other, for one more special day. To stay a little longer, to linger. This concept of the holiday is based on the famous Midrash from Rashi’s commentary (the medieval French rabbi) where he interprets atzeret to mean holding back. The parable is that God is like a royal parent saying to a child who has been for a visit and is about to leave “Please, stay with me for one more day; it is so hard for me to part with you!” (Rashi on Lev. 23:36). We, and Rashi, can imagine the times when there was a Beit Hamikdash, the holy temple, and Sukkot was a pilgrimage festival when people flocked to Jerusalem. Then the addition of Shemini Atzeret delayed their departure by one more day, allowing them to revel in such an ingathering.

 

While that is a beautiful understanding of the holiday, it’s not something that we get straight from the text of the Torah, and the rabbis of the Mishna, Talmud and beyond weren’t totally sure what to make of Shmini Atzeret. There is no explanation for the meaning or reason behind the holiday other than the word atzeret, and there are multiple ways to interpret that word. Some say it means “solemn gathering,” or “assembly,” or that  it comes from the word atzar, meaning “stop,” referring either to the commandment to not to any work, or to the idea of stopping/ending the holiday of Sukkot. Or Atzeret in this context can mean an extension of the prior seven days. Our earliest rabbinic reference to Shemini Atzeret calls it yom tov aharon shel ha-hag, the last day of the festival, however the Gemara (Taanit 20b-31a) later categorizes it as a festival in its own right, distinguishing Shmini Atzeret from Sukkot by noting the 70 temple sacrifices given throughout Sukkot and only 1 given on Shemini Atzeret.

 

We get yet another interpretation of atzeret from Samson Raphael Hirsch, a 19th-century German Orthodox rabbi, who translates it as “to gather” or “to store up.” On this eighth day of Sukkot, he says, it’s our last day of celebration for quite some time, and we need to store up the feelings we’ve been experiencing throughout Tishrei to get us through the next 6 months, at which time we’ll be able to celebrate Pesach. 

 

But if this image of storing up leaves you feeling more frenzied than tranquil, like a squirrel preparing for winter, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, President of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, has a podcast called Soulful Jewish Living where he gives us some tips on how to get into the mode of Shmini Atzeret, the holiday teaching us to slow down and linger. I want to offer you his practices of lingering that we might be able to take on today; Perhaps over your lunch you want to try slowing down as you eat, noting the color, texture, taste of your food. Or maybe you want to slow down as you walk out of or home from shul - as you change your pace, notice what moving a little slower feels like. Or maybe today is a day you want to try and linger with a friend or a significant other for a moment of connection, of listening, before rushing off to where you think you need to go.

 

Similarly, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat Renewal rabbi and author in the Berkshires, views Shmini Atzeret as “one more chance to engage in intimate connection with Shekhinah, the immanent and indwelling Presence of God. This is a day for spaciousness, a day of pausing, a day to celebrate the white space which cradles and contains all of the texts and teachings and observances of the holiday season now ending.”

 

For some people, staying connected to the shechina, or to the white spaces that hold our texts together, means being in the sukkah for a last day of meals. But not for everyone. I grew up in a home where we wanted to savor every moment in the sukkah, even though we depended on the kindness of friends or the shul sukkah since we lived in an apartment building. We often held our breath to see if our hosts would at least say kiddush in the sukkah, if not eat the whole Shmini Atzeret meal there. Correspondingly, there is a Talmudic debate about eating in the sukkah on Shmini Atzeret, and if one can say a bracha, a blessing, for doing so. The Rif, 11th century Talmudic commentator (Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi), says that making a bracha on Shemini Atzeret would lead to a contradiction: If it is a day of sitting in the sukkah, then it is not Shemini Atzeret, and if it is Shemini Atzeret, then it is not a day of sitting in the sukkah! Since there is a doubt, we act stringently on both fronts - we eat in the sukkah, but make no bracha  (Sukka 22b-23a). 

 

It’s a day with contradictions, a day that marks the difficulty of separating from a big experience. 

When Sam and I got married we upheld our family tradition of having a brunch the next morning for our family and out of town guests. It wasn’t the main event of the weekend, but it very much felt like a continuation of the previous day's celebration. It felt like we had a chance to linger with each other a bit more as we came down from the intensity of the wedding ceremony and reception. The brunch was a transition to our lives as newlyweds, starting to practice what we learned about healthy relationships. It basically encapsulated all of the atzeret interpretations we covered today. It was a day we did no work, it was a day of assembling and uniting with many people in our lives, it was a time to store up the feeling of being surrounded by so much love. But most importantly it helped us to transition.

 

As much as Shmini Atzeret gives us the gift of mindful lingering which we can carry into the rest of the year, I think it can also give us the gift of asking; where else in my life do I need to build in time to frame and mark a transition? Today helps us cap all of Tishrei with ritual and allows us right now to also ask, what am I doing to ritualize other things in my life that are winding down, that are restarting, that are changing? As a lover of Mayyim Hayyim, the community mikvah/ritual bath and education center, I know that to be a place that helps me immensely in doing transitioning intentionally.

I want to end with one final take on something we already discussed because I came across a new interpretation of Rashi’s Midrash about the parent and children. Dr. Susan Hornstein, a fellow rabbi-in-training at Maharat, cites a close reading of the words in Hebrew - “קָשָׁה עָלַי פְּרֵדַתְכֶם” “your separation is hard for me.” If it was about God and people separating it should say “our separation.” Rather, the Midrash depicts God as eager to have the Jewish people not separate from one another. After a week of togetherness, what’s bothering God, what God is hoping to delay is the threat to our opportunities for unity. “Everyone goes back to their day-to-day, segregated existence… this… is the tragedy that God seeks to postpone by holding onto the unity for one extra day.”                                 

May we be blessed to hold onto that opportunity for longer than today. 

Chag Lingering and Transitioning Sameach