Before Shabbat

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.