Before Shabbat

There are weeks in the Jewish calendar when two Torah portions are read together. These doubled parshiyot help fit the full Torah reading cycle into the lunar year, with adjustments for leap years. This Shabbat is a double reading: Acharei Mot and Kedoshim — After Death and Holiness. The pairing is stirring.

Acharei Mot raises a profound question: what are we supposed to do after witnessing tragedy? How do we orient ourselves in the Universe when we have been buffeted by loss? How do we acknowledge the brutal questions: who by fire and who by water? How do we cut through the thickening thicket of antisemitism? How do we cope with the dramatic disaffection expressed by our own young Jews?

Acharei Mot: after death, then what?

Up to this point in the book of Leviticus, where this double Torah portion appears, the text has primarily focused on sacrifice and temple ritual. It’s about how we serve God and what we bring to God for purposes of expiation and thanksgiving. But Acharei Mot forces us to pull over and refocus. After death, then what?

This question the parsha has been quietly asking turns out to have a startlingly un-theological answer in the following paired Torah portion, Kedoshim, where it says that life is made of small and ordinary things. Leave the corners of your field for the poor. Pay the worker before sunset. Do not curse the deaf. Do not place a stumbling block before the blind. Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love the stranger as yourself — for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You do not explain. You do not construct a theology of loss.

I think often, especially on Yom Hashoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – of the men and women of the OSE, the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants — “Organization for the Rescue of Children” or “Children’s Aid Society.” It was a Jewish humanitarian organization that saved thousands of Jewish children, including my father, during the Holocaust, particularly in France. His Jewish and Christian rescuers were not theologians. They did not have a doctrine of the Shoah. They had a root cellar, a forged document, and a quiet neighbor willing to lie to a gendarme. They were doing Leviticus 19 without necessarily knowing the verse. Death was all around them — the Nazis killed people who hid Jews. And yet, they refused to stand idly by.

Irwin, a dear colleague of mine, and his wife Annie were the first couple in our rabbinic school class to get pregnant. Liza and I were about 6 weeks behind them, as were a few other couples. Annie gave birth, and we celebrated. But something went wrong, and the infant died. Our entire rabbinic cohort was devastated by the news. This awful tragedy broke our hearts.

I remember so clearly when Irwin came back to class some weeks later. We all gathered to welcome him back into our midst gently. He asked to speak and thanked us for standing by him and his wife. I will never forget when he said, “I’m trying to learn the lesson of this week’s double Torah portion: acharei mot – kedoshim. After death, we must find the holy in deeds of lovingkindness and tender empathy.”

After death — after every death, collective and intimate, ancient and still raw — there is no theology worth its weight that does not walk itself into ordinary ethical life. Kedoshim tihyu, the parsha commands. You shall be holy. It is not an aspiration from the sanctuary. It is the only way forward.

Going online and rolling through articles, journals, and Substack essays feels to me the way others describe hiking. It’s exhilarating. Inspiring. Occasionally terrifying — steep drops, sudden exposure, vertigo-inducing rabbit holes. But so endlessly, irresistibly interesting. I come home exhausted and never regret the trip.

I know many people I love and respect would prescribe an actual hike in the actual woods over my particular brand of armchair adventuring. They’d say the forest floor is far more salubrious than the internet, and they’d be right. But here I am.

It was on one of these recent expeditions that I stumbled across Yuval Harari in a Facebook reel — appropriate, somehow, that one of the most searching thinkers about the digital age should reach me through the most algorithmically mundane of digital corridors. Harari is an Israeli historian and public intellectual best known for Sapiens, that sweeping, audacious attempt to narrate the entire human story in a single volume. He thinks in centuries and civilizations. Some find this thrilling; others find it reductive. I find it indispensable.

Whenever Harari speaks, I lean in. He has a rare gift for identifying the megatrends hiding in plain sight — the tectonic shifts we’re standing on but rarely see. And he said something in this reel that stopped me cold:

For the first time in history, we have no idea what the world will look like in ten years. Processes that used to take centuries are now happening within decades — maybe even years. For most of history, the big changes took longer than a human lifespan, so people had the impression that things were more or less as they always were. Grandparents and grandchildren inhabited essentially the same world. But now the acceleration is so extreme that even people in their thirties and forties feel their children are living in a fundamentally different reality.

I feel this. Viscerally. Regularly. I’ll share a memory — a film, a cultural reference, some formative moment — with my staff, and I watch them exchange that quick, polite, baffled glance: What is he talking about? We are not merely different generations. We’re wearing different lenses entirely, looking at different landscapes and calling them the same world.

And yet — I’m not sure Harari’s “first time in history” claim survives scrutiny. Did Americans in 1942, with the world burning on two fronts, have any reliable picture of what 1952 would look like? Did Jews in the newly declared State of Israel in 1950 — exhausted, surrounded, still counting their dead from the Holocaust — dare to imagine what lay ahead? Did Japan, in the rubble of August 1945, have any conception of what it was about to become? History is full of moments when the fog was total, when the future felt not merely uncertain but actively hostile to prediction.

What may be different now is not that we lack foresight — we’ve always lacked foresight — but that we know we lack it, and that we’re drowning in real-time information that somehow makes the uncertainty worse rather than better. The internet doesn’t illuminate the future; it amplifies the noise of the present until the noise becomes its own kind of blindness.

This is, I think, what I’m grappling with — not just the pace of change, but the sheer messiness of trying to hold multiple truths at once. That a war is both necessary and devastating. That antisemitism is real and so is Palestinian suffering. That technology is miraculous and corrosive. That I am both exhausted by the news and unable to stop consuming it. Acknowledging that complexity, sitting with it rather than collapsing it into a single clean narrative — this is hard. Genuinely hard. But it strikes me as healthier, in the long run, than picking one plotline and riding it into the ground.

Still. The miasma of the Iran–Israel–America–Lebanon tangle is something else entirely. It’s not an intellectual puzzle; it’s a blanket of harsh nettles. Clarity feels not just elusive but almost obscene to wish for, given the relentless toll on innocent lives. No one — not the analysts, not the generals, not the leaders who ignited this — knows what comes next.

And so I wonder, honestly, whether the forest trail might offer more than the feed. Not answers. Just a little peace. A little silence. Some perspective that doesn’t come in a reel.

Maybe the hikers are onto something.

This evening, after Shabbat services, the Artemis II will decelerate from nearly 24,000 mph to a gentle 17 mph — in about fourteen minutes — and splash down off the coast of San Diego. The four astronauts aboard will have traveled farther from Earth than any human beings in history. When they charted their course, there was no “Thar be dragons!” scrawled at the edges of the map—only the dark void: the vast, airless, silent emptiness between our world and the moon.

I imagine they spent most of their time with numbers — oy, the numbers! — equations tracking speed and gravity, approach angles and oxygen consumption, more variables than most of us could hold in our heads for five minutes. Yet, as they hurtled toward the far side of the moon, I hope they also felt the wonder and curiosity that come from venturing into the unknown, inspiring us all to embrace our own sense of discovery.

The sheer chutzpah of it takes my breath away.

Four people made that journey: a Canadian, a seasoned spaceflight veteran, a fighter pilot, and the first Black man to fly a lunar mission. There’s no punchline here. It’s simply an improbable gathering of souls bound together by a sacred commitment to exploring the universe — and that, all by itself, is worth a moment of awe.

It calls to mind a passage from Genesis. Abraham is brooding in his tent, weighed down by doubt. He is supposed to become the father of nations, yet that promise seems utterly beyond reach. God notices his wavering faith and, gently, issues an invitation: Leave your tent — this closed, confined space you now occupy — and look up at the sky. Count the stars, if you can. And then: So shall your offspring be. The unthinkable, God is saying, becomes possible through faith and perseverance. But first, you have to step outside.

If we stay within our familiar enclosures, surrounded by people unwilling to look beyond what they already know, we will stop growing. When Galileo built his telescope and trained it on Jupiter’s moons, he discovered that not everything in the universe revolved around us. When he brought his findings to church officials, they refused to look through the lens. They had their story, and they were going to stick to it. The cost of that refusal — to curiosity, to truth, to human understanding — was enormous.

Jewish history has been, at its best, a long argument against that kind of willful blindness. From generation to generation, our thinkers, poets, and artists have dared to leave the tent and look up. We have reimagined the nature of God, wrestled with Torah, and reinvented what it means to be Israel. We have never been content to let the story stay fixed. Our shelter, as one tradition reminds us, is less a sealed tent and more a sukkah — open to the air, open to others, its roof intentionally parted so we can look up and find the moon and stars overhead.

Now, having just celebrated Passover — the holiday of liberation, of crossing from the narrow place into the wide open — we carry that same spirit forward as we lift our eyes to the heavens. If human beings can fly to the far side of the moon and return safely home, surely we can summon the courage for smaller but no less urgent journeys: toward justice, toward deeper connection with one another, toward a more honest relationship with God.

Shabbat shalom to the crew of Artemis II, and to all who got them there and back. May your voyage remind us that the most important expeditions often begin the same way Abraham’s did — by stepping out of the tent, looking up, and daring to believe that what seems impossible is not.

I am a night owl: always have been. Even as a little kid, I hated going to bed. Sleep just didn’t make sense to me. Why waste my time closing my eyes when I could be up reading or watching television? That remains a part of my thinking even now — even after I’ve read all the reports that getting a good night’s sleep is foundational to good health. I suppose I’ve confirmed the wisdom of those warnings. But still.

I used to be able to get things done late at night. I could write a sermon, draft notes for a class, review a Bar Mitzvah speech — any number of intellectually ambitious projects. Sadly, those early-morning hours are no longer so productive for me. My mind slows down, though I can still read for pleasure at one in the morning. And I must confess, for full disclosure, a little scrolling on TikTok… or Instagram…

So it’s just round midnight — Wednesday morning, technically — and I’m looking at the three long tables that stretch from our living room across the foyer into the other room. My wife, Liza, always sets up the house for Passover. She stills the chaos and makes everything special — dare I say, sacred. I look at it all and I reflect on every seder I’ve attended, every person I’ve had the privilege of singing with and laughing with and arguing over the Haggadah with. It’s really quite extraordinary.

We’ve had a lot of people come through our house for Passover. I believe our largest crowd was 46, maybe twelve years ago. I look at the plates and glasses and silverware laid out along the tables, and the seder plates sitting empty, ready to be loaded in just a few hours.

Last week I went shopping for all the necessary Passover supplies. I love having my supermarket — I know where everything is, I trust the quality. As I slowly cruised the aisles, I was suddenly struck by a question: how much longer will I be doing this? How many more years will I be standing here looking at brisket, reaching for another box of matzah?

It was not a sad moment. But it was poignant. Poignant comes from the Old French poignant, the present participle of poindre — “to prick, to sting” — which in turn comes from the Latin pungere, “to pierce.” There is something fitting in that etymology. The best poignant moments — in music, in memory, in liturgy — really do feel like a small, precise wound. A pinch. And I felt it: the slight seismic rumble of mortality.

Which is ironic, because Passover is a transcendent story that never ends. And I find that reassuring. We will all come and go, but the story of our journey — the foundation of our faith, the record of our tenacity — will not disappear. Even if, Heaven forfend, there were no more Jews, someone would still be studying our culture, our courage, and saying: those people knew how to live.

So here I sit in my very quiet house, which in just a few hours will be full of noise and singing and laughter and the clinking of glasses. I’m counting place settings, anticipating who will be here — and remembering those who used to share this table with me and are no longer. On Passover, time briefly collapses into an eternal present, and we catch glimpses of hope through the darkness.

I hope you will have a moment tonight to look up and truly see whoever is sitting beside you. Let them know. Remind them that the Passover seder is never singular — it is always, and only, plural.

Jump into the cosmic drama. Reenact the Exodus. Whether your seder runs three hours or ends at the Four Questions, we are all part of the same story.

Rules! There are so many rules for Passover, and it all begins with chametz. The Torah explicitly forbids chametz—any of the five grains (wheat, barley, oats, spelt, rye) that have come into contact with water and been allowed to ferment or rise for more than 18 minutes. This includes: bread, pasta, most cereals; beer, whiskey, most grain-based alcohol; crackers, cookies, and cakes made with these grains; most soy sauce (which often contains wheat); and anything with these grains as ingredients.

The prohibition is so strict that not only are we forbidden from eating chametz, but we are also forbidden to own it. “No chametz shall be seen with you, and no chametz shall be found in your possession” (Exodus 13:7). Violating this is considered a serious transgression. So, what do you do with a full liquor cabinet, or a restaurant owner with thousands of dollars worth of whiskey, or a grocery store with an entire bread aisle? You have to sell it!

But do you take a loss? Here, a clever rabbinic loophole comes into play. Most people don’t arrange this themselves; instead, you authorize a rabbi—through a simple form or, nowadays, often online—to act as your agent and sell your chametz on your behalf. The rabbi conducts a single transaction, selling the chametz of the entire congregation to one non-Jewish buyer. There are rabbis who specialize in this, and major Jewish communities have designated buyers who perform this every year.

Once the transaction is complete, the chametz in your home or business must be hidden away. In our own unkosher home, my wife takes all our chametz and puts it in the pantry, sealing off the door with crime scene tape. It has a sort of resonance for her—put it aside! Turn away from it!

So, what does chametz symbolize? What’s so distasteful—almost toxic—about this substance? This is a sub-theme in our Passover observance. It’s not discussed directly in the Haggadah, but it’s there—hidden in my pantry! The main interpretation is that chametz represents ego, pride, and puffed-up-ness. What makes bread rise? Gas—air puffing it up, making it seem larger than it really is.

Matzah, in contrast, is what it is—no inflation, no pretense.

Matzah (מצה) and chametz (חמץ) differ by just one letter: matzah has a heh (ה), chametz has a chet (ח). They are nearly identical words separated by the thinnest orthographic line—something rabbis see as deeply meaningful. Freedom and slavery, humility and pride, are closer than we often realize.

At a deep level, the Passover purge is about removing the ego from our lives. It’s a spring cleaning of our inner selves. The strictness of the prohibition—not just “don’t eat it,” but “don’t own it, don’t even see it”—reflects the spiritual truth that ego isn’t just about minimizing it; it must be rooted out completely.

Certainly, recognizing moments of hubris and removing them should be an everyday practice. Passover reminds us to search our souls. The chametz fast helps recalibrate our self-awareness and how we might grow over time. Just as our Yom Kippur fast can lead to atonement, Passover can bring us back to our moment of liberation. We can free ourselves from chains and find redemption—all contained in a breadcrumb…

You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”

David Byrne’s lyrics to “Once in a Lifetime” have been rattling around in my brain lately. Not just because it is an exquisitely composed melody. It’s about the disquieting realization that strikes us from time to time: whatever tools we’ve used to better understand the world in which we live, are utterly inadequate.

This is a crazy time, one for which we’re utterly unprepared. How do we find our way forward? How are we to understand the current war in Iran and Lebanon? Are we supposed to be cheerleaders? Do we care about the way it all began? Is the Israeli incursion into Lebanon “the right thing?” Are the actions by the military in Gaza and the obstructing of food aid justifiable through our American Jewish lens?  What about the current Israeli settlers’ actions in the West Bank?

Facing so many questions, you may ask yourself, “How do I feel about this?” Or, “How is this ever going to end?” Maybe you wonder, “Is this good or bad for the Jews?” There’s also concern: Will we be blamed, from both the left and right, for this war? Is our role in America to become apologists for Bibi? Will American Jews become pariahs?

The chorus in the song repeats over and over again: “Same as it ever was,” in a highly ironic, almost mocking way. Because nothing is the same as it ever was. We are in utterly new territory, and there are no signposts ahead.

I had hoped that after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed last October, the temperature would die down. I so wanted to see the region slowly de-escalate, so that life could slowly return to normal for all parties. The possibility of a March 2026 trip to Israel looked promising, so we booked it, never imagining that there would be, once again, travel bans and missiles and air raids and destruction.

I don’t have too many answers, just more questions. I’m worried about how all of this will pan out: for America, American Jews, Israeli Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Persians – in fact, the whole world! As fuel prices soar and as the war becomes less and less popular in the USA, what will this all look like?

Not having answers is uncomfortable. Most of my life has been spent offering wisdom to navigate life’s rapids. Facing this tsunami, I find little guidance from the American and Israeli news I read.

But, for what it’s worth, I can venture a few thoughts. First, keep informed. I know – I know – reading the news feels like a Charley horse is inbound. But get over the cringe and the ache and read. Listen. Watch. And then consider. You will probably not find answers to the questions I posed earlier, but you’ll know why the Strait of Hormuz is so important, and how Lebanon is falling apart, and how it is that Iran still has armaments, and what Israelis are doing amid all this.

Second: Come to your temple. Feel the warmth of the family, the sense that we’re going to get through this – whatever this is. Third: have faith in our millennia of training for hard times. We know a lot about struggle and pain. We know it’s dark, and we also know: Or Hadash al Tzion ta-ir. A new light will shine upon us. I know that sounds vaguely Messianic, but it’s really all about faith. Same as it ever was.

My father came to America from Berlin in 1941. He had spent months with other children from his German-Jewish orphanage, hiding out in France, waiting to be smuggled to Portugal through the auspices of Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants — the Children’s Aid Society, known as OSE — one of the most remarkable rescue networks of the Holocaust. Like his peers, my father knew what it felt like to be hunted. He knew hunger, and the cold of a French winter, and the fear that attended every day — because he was a Jew.

He never told me any of this directly. I pieced it together years after he died, fragment by fragment. And it left a deep, lasting mark on me — as the son of the sole survivor of the Stern family, as a Jew, and as an American.

Six years ago, in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists marched with lit torches, chanting *Jews will not replace us.* They wanted to frighten us. They wanted to assert their dominance, to drive us back behind locked doors and shuttered windows. Beneath their chant was an old and ugly theology: that Jews are a superseded people, that we have been cast aside by history, that we are nothing. They were, in their way, echoing arguments that serious philosophers once made — that Judaism had no living future, that we were frozen relics of a dead past.

Our history has always had other ideas.

I became a rabbi with an unwavering belief in the destiny of the Jewish people. We have survived empires that tried to erase us, ideologies that tried to philosophize us out of existence, and violence that tried to finish the job. We are not only here — we are alive, generative, and irreplaceable. This is my inheritance. This is my truth.

When the torchbearers shouted Jews will not replace us, I knew my answer: No. You will not replace us.

After centuries of fear and coercion, we will not knuckle under to threats and epithets. We will not hide. We will not make ourselves smaller. We will not be silent. We will not live by the rules of ignorant, hateful people. We will continue to embrace life, dignity, and the hard work of hope — because hope is stronger than fear, and always has been.

The attack at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan last week was sickening. It is a reminder of how quickly hatred moves from ideology to violence, and of how the twisted logic of antisemitism links Jewish lives everywhere to events in Israel, as though we are collectively guilty, collectively exposed, and collectively responsible for whatever grievance the hater carries. This is the oldest lie. It is also, still, a dangerous one.

I won’t pretend I know how to cure the world of antisemitism. I don’t know how to reach people who have no interest in understanding Jewish life, Jewish history, or the complexity of Israel and the Diaspora. It feels large and ominous. I won’t minimize that.

What I know is this: we are not passive. TBA has security in place every time we gather — not because we live in fear, but because we refuse to be naive. Our team is trained to respond. Our doors are secured. After the Michigan attack, Newton Police reached out promptly to reaffirm their commitment to our safety, and I am grateful for that partnership. We will continue to review and strengthen our procedures, as we always have.

But security is not our identity. Community is. Hope is.

My father was hidden by strangers, smuggled across borders by people who risked their lives because they believed Jewish lives mattered. He made it. He came to America and he built something. His story is my story. And his survival — partial, painful, improbable — is the reason I stand here, writing these words, refusing to be afraid.

So yes, I am sad. Yes, I am angry that we are navigating this in 2026. But I am not afraid. I am more committed than ever to our presence in this world — visible, strong, and full of purpose.

We stand together. No one will ever force us into hiding again.

I’m composing this late Thursday afternoon. And because my mother’s DNA surges in my marrow, I’d already be at the airport for our 8:30pm flight to Israel. I’d be poking around the duty-free shop looking for bargains — which, if you know anything about such places, is the one thing you won’t find. Unless you smoke.

As our tour group—the Hell or High Water team—arrived, we’d hug, greet, and decide where to eat in the E Terminal at Logan.

But now, everyone knows the conflict in the Middle East has ruined our plans. The Hell or High Water team was hit hard. And I feel it.

I love going to Israel. I love being inside that extraordinary old/new land, the one that makes me feel like I’m home. My Hebrew starts flowing. My awareness of Jewish wisdom and Jewish shortsightedness sharpens. I can’t get enough. I want to look at all the shades of Israelis — Ethiopians, Swedes, Yemenites, Russians, Anglos — all speaking Hebrew, all loving and hating and pushing and embracing each other. I’m really going to miss that.

More than that, though, what makes me saddest is that I don’t get to share Israel with our group. I don’t get to introduce the first-timers to that kaleidoscopic tumult the moment you walk into Ben Gurion. I don’t get the thrill of watching this land reveal itself through their eyes. I won’t get to walk through the Old City with them, won’t get to witness their awe at the Wall, the Dead Sea, the maktesh, Tel Aviv, Yad Vashem, or…

We plan to reschedule, but right now, I’m simply feeling the loss. The HHW team is just delayed—not deterred.

In the meantime, my key concerns revolve around understanding what this conflict will ultimately bring: Will it end in peace and reconstruction, or further destabilize the region? Will Iran move away from extremism, or intensify it? Is this Israel’s opportunity to address the Iranian nuclear threat, or could it result in even graver consequences? Wars are unpredictable, shaped by accidents, personalities, and changing fortunes. The outcomes are not set; I am left questioning, uncertain, and searching for clarity.

The deepest question I have right now concerns Americans’ appetite for this current conflict. The majority of Americans do not approve. More critically, how many of them believe that Bibi pushed Trump into it? Because if this entanglement grows costly in treasury and in American lives, the possibility of antisemitism rising on the dark wings of the historical imperative to “blame it on the Jews” becomes a specter to fear.

Sitting in my chair, far from Jerusalem, I’m staring through lenses clouded by the fog of war and the haze of the unknown. As the tech asks me at my eye doctor’s office, “Is this one better? Or is this one?” And I say to him – and to you – I can’t tell… I honestly can’t tell.

I just brought my big suitcase downstairs to start packing. For a long trip, I tend to start throwing items in as I think of them, a week or so before I travel, and then scale back the night before. It’s a ritual I love — but this time, standing over that open suitcase, I felt something I don’t usually feel: a low hum of anxiety beneath the excitement. Because we are going to Israel in 6 days.

This trip has been postponed and rescheduled a few times. The October 7th Massacre and the conflagration that ensued threw us off the tracks. It was deeply disappointing to pull the plug on our best-kept plans. More to the point, what led to the cancellation was so sad and so tragic. But the airlines weren’t flying, and the missiles were. We mourned the trip even as we mourned so much more.

As the crisis in Gaza mitigated, we decided to regather our travel group and try again. There were eager travelers still waiting in the wings. Now we have 35 people flying off 6 days from tonight. As we began planning this trip, I thought it was brave and funny, in that Jewish-humor way, to name our juggernaut The Hell or High Water Israel Tour. Little did I know that current events on the eve of our trip would require waders…

There is no clarity from Washington or Jerusalem about what comes next. The administration has not explained what it wants, what it will accept, or what it is prepared to do. Is the goal regime change? Nuclear disarmament? Getting rid of Iran’s ballistic missiles? Some diplomatic breakthrough no one has yet articulated? No one knows. Least of all the forty Hell or High Water travelers from Temple Beth Avodah, who are watching the news with focused dread.

Here is the truth of it: most of us in this country live at a comfortable remove from the world’s violence. We grieve Ukraine. We agonize over Sudan. These are real moral wounds. But they do not, most days, touch us directly. We live in what I’ve come to think of as a blessed and insulating bubble — protected by geography, by privilege, by sheer distance from the fire.

That bubble does not travel to the Middle East.

And so here I am, folding shirts and sorting socks, doing the ordinary things one does before a journey — as if everything were ordinary. Only it isn’t. My hands move through the motions of normal life while my mind tracks flight paths, geopolitics, and the unpredictable calculations of men not known for restraint. I am, I’ll admit it, a little dizzy. The world is brewing something enormous, and this time, I will be standing close enough to feel the heat.

And yet.

Our trip will offer what no news cycle can: the chance to stand inside the story, not just read about it. To walk the land. To hear the people. To touch what is ancient and find it startlingly alive. To sit with a bus full of seekers — first-timers and veterans alike — and feel the strange, irreducible weight of belonging to this people and this place. I have made this journey more than a dozen times. It never stops being extraordinary.

As Hillel put it with characteristic impatience: If not now, when? Not next year. Not when conditions are perfect, because conditions are never perfect. The only scenario in which we do not board that plane — God forbid — is if El Al stops flying. That’s it. Short of that, unless Robert Kraft is feeling unusually generous (anyone have his number?), the HHW team is wheels-up in six days.

I will keep praying that cooler heads — somewhere, somehow — prevail. That the men with their fingers near the triggers pause long enough to imagine what comes after. I can’t control any of it. What I can do is close my eyes and picture the stars blazing over Mitzpeh Ramon, the strange, heavy silence of the Dead Sea, the smell of falafel on Ben Yehuda Street, and the feeling — enormous and quiet at once — of being exactly where history placed you.

Kadima. Forward.

Like many Americans, I’ve been tuning in to watch the Olympics. There are several reasons I am motivated to do this. The most honorable of them is to appreciate the spectacle of it all. I’ve never been on ice skates – ever. I’ve gone skiing twice. The first time was cross-country skiing in the Sierra Nevada with my newly married spouse, who is, by the way, an extraordinary skier, the kind that causes people to stop and watch as she comes down the mountain. Liza was sprinting up the hills minutes after we got fitted with the boots and skis. And I… well, it was just so embarrassing. I could not figure out how to coordinate movement on two sticks. I spent more time on my butt than upright. And while it didn’t end our marriage (still here after 45 years…), it was a rather rocky acknowledgement of my gross motor skills as opposed to her graceful, enthusiastic embrace of the sport. The other ski experience is not even worth talking about, except to say it was the final nail in the coffin of my skiing ambition.

It’s also true that I’ve never curled, been in a bobsled, or on a snowboard. So I watch the athletes with child-like admiration. I don’t know how they do what they do, stunts in the middle of the air in a snowstorm, turning upside down and back around without dying. The slaloms, people travelling on those 2 fiberboard skis at 80 miles an hour? In flimsy outfits and helmets and no body armor? I cannot even vaguely imagine being in one of those skating pairs, speeding around the ice, twirling and jumping and gliding, small women tossed into the air and caught with grace. The curling? I watched for about 25 minutes without understanding the sport, the broom, or the stones. It was like watching a cricket match: incomprehensible. It’s all incomprehensible to me. They all live with a precision I do not possess in anything I do anywhere.

Another reason I watch, and this may be revealing a character flaw, is anticipating the agony of defeat, always included as a likelihood in the Wide World of Sports telecasts. I don’t wish for accidents and miscalculations to happen. But inevitably, they do. I have no experience akin to what a gold medal winner feels. To win anything due to physical prowess is just not in my wheelhouse. But when someone falls or slips or miscalculates or freezes or just gets it wrong – that I can feel. Not the physical pain or the sudden loss of endorsements and Wheaties boxes, but rather the shame and the crushing truth of that moment: there’s no rewind, no award for trying hard.

I think about the vast majority of Olympic athletes who win nothing, who aren’t fast enough, big enough, small enough, talented enough… They spend endless hours practicing, not to mention endless dollars: Estimates suggest that raising an Olympic-caliber skier from youth through the Games can cost families $500,000 to over $1 million across a career. Some estimate the annual cost for a competitive teenage racer at $50,000–$100,000. And then, they win nothing. I can’t imagine what it feels like on the winners’ platform. But I do resonate with the folks who are packing up, being thankful for the experience, and then moving on: to coaching, teaching, working in AI, on a car lot, or back to school.

Sure, some Olympians come back to try again, and sometimes they make it and rise to the top. And sometimes it’s a quixotic gesture, doomed to fail due to age, anxiety, malfunction, or any number of reasons. As Paul Simon once sang, “How many nights do you think that you can do what you’ve been doing? Who do you think you’re fooling?”

Alan Kildow watched his daughter Lindsey Vonn mount a comeback. He watched her crash 13 seconds out of the gate. When interviewed after the debacle, he said, “She’s 41 years old, and this is the end of her career.” I understood his definitive fatherly perspective. She may or may not have learned much in that terrible fall – but he did, and he said it with the intensity every parent feels when they realize how seriously they misjudged the moment. It’s not always about getting up and trying to do the same thing again. It’s about getting up and asking, what’s next. What do I do now?

Life hurts. We fall and then, God willing, we get up again. That’s called being human. Living with loss. Hopefully, we learn a lesson in the process of getting up again. About humility and limits and what motivates us. About what counts.