Before Shabbat

In the midst of working with my grandson Caleb on his dvar Torah for Parashat Shelach Lecha — my Torah portion almost sixty years ago, his father’s almost thirty years ago, his own on June 13th — he turned to me, as he is often wont to do, and asked a characteristically deep question: “So Bebop, what does it feel like to be retiring in a couple of years?”

I was struck silent. Because I’ve preferred not to think about it.

“Caleb,” I said, “it’s one of the biggest moments of my life. There’s a part of me that feels happy to be ending my career in a place I love, with so many people I love. And another part that is sad about leaving a life so full of meaningful service.”

I knew that probably sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents in his ears. What does he know about retirement? Career? He’s in middle school. Meaningful service? Come on. But after listening thoughtfully for a few seconds — which for an almost-thirteen-year-old is noteworthy — he said, “It sounds hard.”

It is hard.

A colleague who retired a few years ago was incredulous when I told her I was retiring in June of 2028. I’d thought the long runway was helpful — for me and for the congregation — to transition to a new reality. “So that makes you a lame duck!” she said.

Lame anything sounds pejorative. The frame is borrowed from electoral politics, where authority drains the moment a successor is named. But a pulpit doesn’t work that way. My rabbinate is relational, not transactional. It fades when I stop showing up. And I have no plans to stop showing up.

One of the many reasons I’ve loved working with Caleb on his dvar Torah — besides the enormous helping of naches I get from it — is revisiting the text itself. There are copious topics and encounters in Shelach Lecha. The one I want to pinpoint is the moment the Israelite spies look out at the inhabitants of Canaan. The Canaanites appear gigantic and frightening. Ten of the twelve scouts return shaken, and they speak the line that has lodged in Jewish memory: “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes — and so we must have appeared to them.”

When the unknown loomed large, the scouts shrank. They lost confidence in their own stature, their own standing. The faith required to enter the promised land collapsed in the face of an opaque and frightening future.

But two of the twelve see it differently. Joshua and Caleb — yes, that Caleb — refuse the grasshopper frame. Vayahas Kalev et ha’am: Caleb hushes the crowd and says, “Let us go up and take the land. We can do this.” It is not lost on me that the grandson asking me what retirement feels like carries this name. The Torah is rarely so generous.

We have learned enough from this portion, and from the subsequent arc of Jewish history, to know that acquiescence has not served us. Passivity has not served us.

Our future is not about entering the land of Canaan. We are, right here, right now, every day, trying to read the future for Jews in America and throughout the Diaspora. The choices the Israeli government has made — without reckoning with how those choices reverberate from Jerusalem outward — have put us in an exposed and compromised position.

There is meaningful debate to be had among us about Israel, about Zionism, about statecraft, about the future of democracy here and there. I trust this community to have it. But whatever our personal positions, this much we share: Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, and now the war against Hezbollah, has dramatically altered how Israel is viewed in the world — and how we are regarded along with it. Most of us never expected antisemitism to be anything more than a history lesson. We are painfully aware now that it is not.

We are witnessing a true sea change. What happens next is frightening and opaque, and depends on factors none of us controls — the trajectory of regional war, the political direction of the Israeli government, the temperature of American public life, and whether anti-Zionism quietly slides into permissible antisemitism.

We are facing a slow-moving storm.

And we are not shrieking gevalt as our ancestors did in the wilderness. We are not rending garments. We are a resolute, robust community. Strength and determination are part of our DNA. We will not knuckle under to the ignorant or the intolerant. That is not who we are. Whatever we face, we face together.

We have carefully built a community that embraces everyone who walks through these doors. We shape the TBA zeitgeist to be inclusive. We believe in this temple’s capacity to give our children — and each other — a sense of confidence and self-worth as Jews. We cultivate curiosity. We sculpt an ethic of caring about the world we live in. We hatch baby chicks and butterflies in our ELC.

We are not raising grasshoppers.

We are all committed to the continued growth and strength of the Jewish people. And that commitment starts right here. TBA is blessed: with a great group of educators, with a soulful cantor, with a battle-tested executive director, with a staff engaged and determined to make this place feel like home — warm, safe, secure.

And you. Without you, none of it stands. Your presence in this room or streaming from your living rooms, your financial support, your soulful support — the dreams and promises we hold at TBA rest on you. This covenant, this brit, is strong and enduring.

There may well be tough times ahead. I am not afraid. I have deep faith in our work and in the path we are on. I have deep faith that our next steps will be taken with a resolute sense of hope and vision.

There are no grasshoppers here.

I happened upon a very old photograph of myself, standing next to my sister Marta, aleha hashalom. I looked at her — this cute, pudgy girl in a horizontally striped blouse. Every camera she ever stood in front of loved her; she was beyond photogenic. Then there’s me: skinny, unremarkable, perhaps vaguely uneasy at getting my picture taken. My sister Joan was either not yet born or just an infant, so she’s not part of this tableau.

I assume that’s me in the photo, though I have absolutely no recollection of the moment. But is it really me? Does that anxious seven-year-old have any connection to who I am now? Does that me still exist in some form, stored away in the folds of my neocortex? Can I find that child the way I can Google any question — say, where long-term memory is stored — and get an answer?

And what about Marta, who died almost nine months ago? Is she gone? Does she still exist in some noncorporeal form? If you’d asked me forty years ago, I’d have scoffed a hubristic scoff: “Of course not! Ashes to ashes…” But now? I keep returning to the writer Meghan O’Rourke: “A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?” And if Marta does exist, what is she now — and what makes that thing identical to the little girl in the picture? Can she remember that day, while I cannot?

It’s no more or less preposterous to imagine some transcendent link to our dead than it is to accept dark energy: we infer it from the way the universe is flying apart, yet we’ve never observed it directly and still have no idea what it actually is. So I scoff at nothing — not in the realm of memory, not in the stories we tell about ourselves and one another, the stories that define us. All we have is our stories.

I look at this little boy in 1959 and wonder: do he and I really share the same body? How can that be, when nearly every atom that made up that skinny child has long since cycled out — through breath and food and waste — and been replaced many times over? And if our bodies share so little, our points of view share even less. My perspective would be as inaccessible to him as his is to me now.

Now turn it around. A year from now, the world will be full of people, and one of them will have a peculiar, singular property: that person will be you. With any luck, a year from now someone out there will be you. But what is it about that person that makes that person you?

I don’t know. In fact, there is no definitive answer. But to wonder what my essence even is — how it links the boy of sixty-some years ago to whoever I’ll be a year from now — is thrilling and frightening and wild.

Particularly reassuring is a small piece of biology. A few parts of you barely change across an entire lifetime. The lens at the center of your eye. The enamel of your teeth. The neurons of your cerebral cortex are as old as you are.

So even as we wonder who and what we are, and who we will become, something is in here, consistent and present. The very parts of you that do the seeing and the remembering are, atom for atom, among the least changed of all.

Two months ago, I’d never heard of looksmaxxing. I thought it was a typo. It isn’t.

It makes sense that I was ignorant of this craze. It isn’t aimed at men in their seventies. Its audience is young men in their teens and twenties — discouraged, unseen, convinced they’ve been cheated of an authority and a respect they believe was their birthright.

They speak of being disenfranchised. Cheated by liberals and progressives who challenge the traditional power structure of Western civilization. They say women don’t respect their inherent historical position, that women ignore them. Many call themselves incels — involuntarily celibate. It isn’t a badge of honor. They wear it as a scar, one they believe women carved into them.

In what amounts to an “I’ll show you” act of retribution, looksmaaxers throw themselves at the project of the perfect physique. Hours of weightlifting. Steroids. Supplements by the handful. Some go further and pick up a hammer, believing — falsely — that they can pound their jawbones into a more sculpted shape.

The goal is to manufacture a body worthy of adoration. It is misguided. It is sad.

Watching clips of Braden Peters — better known as Clavicular, the unofficial face of looksmaxxing — I kept thinking what a narcissistic indulgence the whole project is. Doesn’t he know that when Genesis says God created humanity in God’s image, the verse is precisely NOT about the container we live in? God’s image isn’t visual. It’s the expression of the sacred: compassion, empathy, discernment.

Jewish tradition is full of warnings against the seductions of beauty, full of calls toward wisdom instead — wisdom, which doesn’t fade. Pirkei Avot, the Mishnaic collection of rabbinic aphorisms, puts it plainly: Al tistakel b’kankan, ela b’mah she’yesh bo. Don’t look at the vessel — look at what’s inside.

It breaks my heart to watch so much effort poured into beliefs so twisted, so empty of wisdom. The grievances, the enemies named, the appetite for retribution, the lines drawn by race, gender, and religion, the hierarchies of authority — all are symptoms of a world out of whack.

Maybe looksmaxxing is a flash in the pan, a blip that gives way to whatever TikTok serves up next. Maybe my concern isn’t warranted. There are bigger issues in the world.

My main concern is not with looksmaxxing as a fleeting fad, but with what it reveals about deeper issues: specifically, the desperation young men feel to find purpose and meaning, and how this desperation can become entangled with resentment and blame. The key point is that the search for meaning is distorted into a harmful cycle of self-blame and blaming others.

They have built a community of mirrors, surrounded by images of themselves, excluding everyone else. It’s sad. It’s also a pernicious sign of how twisted human longing can get when it has nowhere good to go. A deeper rot festers in the American soul: a callousness toward our neighbors, a me-first selfishness, a relentless focus on “getting mine”, that leaves us feeling empty and devoid of purpose.

Don’t look at the vessel — look at what’s inside.

There are some things we do as part of our Jewish practice that we assume are somehow, somewhere codified as halacha: Jewish law. Covering mirrors in a house of mourning is one such ritual. So is using the back of a shovel when burying someone at a Jewish burial. For Ashkenazi families, it’s transgressive to name a newborn after someone who’s alive.

None of the practices mentioned above are halacha. They are deeply rooted superstitions. Many have to do with a fear of death. In fact, one of the most common Jewish expressions is a prime example of such a superstition: kine hora! This phrase is an exhortation which means: don’t tempt the evil eye. It’s that convoluted magical thinking that warns us against saying the ‘wrong thing’: talking about one’s children, moving to a new home, detailing a new travel plan, even exclaiming “I feel great” or “It’s a beautiful day!” can bring disaster.

I’m not sure from whence this comes. Maybe it’s recognition of the tenuousness of life, how nothing is assured. Perhaps it also comes from living in the Diaspora, where our ancestors had so little control over their fate, and where a sense of vulnerability was acutely felt every day. Add to that an overall fear of death, and one achieves the perfect recipe for desperately hoping we might control the trajectory of our lives.

There is another Jewish superstition: never count people directly. If you need to know whether a minyan has gathered, you don’t point and say one, two, three. Instead, you recite the first ten words of the first morning blessing:  Mah-tovu ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael V’ani b’rov chasdecha Avo b’techa— and let the words do the counting. Each person gets a word, and when the verse runs out, you have your answer. Another approach for minyan gathering is to go around, saying, “Not one. Not two…” All the way to “not ten”.

We are, right now, in the book of Bamidbar — Numbers —when God tells Moses: Se’u et rosh kol adat Bnei Yisrael — “Lift up the head of the whole Israelite community.” Count them. And they do, elaborately, tribe by tribe, each man above twenty tallied with almost bureaucratic precision. The total: 603,550. The Israelites, freshly liberated, newly covenanted, on the verge of their long march toward home — counted, recorded, known.

But this census is not a headcount. Each person contributes a half-shekel, and the coins are tallied. The people themselves are never directly numbered. God commands the census, but even God’s census uses an intermediary object. The half-shekel stands in for the person. The coin is countable. The person, apparently, is not. This makes sense from a bureaucratic perspective: just count the coins rather than have people stand in long lines.

But there’s more here than bureaucracy or a kine hora. Not counting affirms the value of the individual. Judaism spends so much time in the world of the first-person plural. It’s all about us, the people of Israel. But to ignore the needs and thoughts of every individual, subsuming them in a corporate whole, steals from them – from us! A true sense of self, without which we become automatons, the masses.

In the Talmud it says, that each person contains an entire world. If that is true, then a human being is not, in any meaningful sense, a number. A number is finite. It can be added, subtracted, compared. But a person who contains a world? You can’t really count that. You can only approximate it, and every approximation is a kind of loss.

Philosophically, the half-shekel works as a ritual solution. It doesn’t pretend to capture the person. It stands in for them, modestly, as a placeholder. The coin says: I acknowledge your presence without claiming to measure your worth.

We live in an age that is extraordinarily good at counting people. Algorithms track us, data brokers sell us, institutions reduce us to demographics, metrics, risk scores, engagement rates. There is a census happening around us all the time.

This is our supreme balancing act: recognizing the needs of the community and considering the needs of the individual. This is why it’s hard to be a Jew. This is why it’s hard to live in a democracy. We are human and thus, vulnerable to pain and illness and confusion and anxiety. And every human deserves respect and concern. Kine hora.

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.