How to Find What We Are Seeking This Summer (Shelach 5780)

As this summer opens our country is reeling from the corrosive impact of centuries of racism from which many of us have looked away too often. The shadows of anger, resentment, shame, and fear are long. Those shadows cross with the more recent, shorter ones of anxiety and disruption coming from a worldwide pandemic. Alone or taken together these shadows threaten to swallow the light of summer. 

Perhaps an insight taken from this week’s Torah portion, can help us find light in the midst of these shadows. The Torah portion is suffused throughout with a single Hebrew verb latoor -- to explore, scout, or seek out. The Torah portion describes the assignment of selected scouts to confirm the divine promises awaiting our ancestors as they come close to crossing into Canaan.


The great scouting mission of Torah, however, fails to confirm the promises. Instead a huge majority of the scouts return from their mission terrorizing the generation of the Exodus about what perils await across the border. Their fear is so crushing they wish themselves dead, erased, zeroed out. Because of this botched scouting report our ancestors are set to wandering in the wilderness as punishment -- one year for every day of that failed 40-day mission. 

As a result, we sometimes ignore the Hebrew verb in this week’s Torah portion as a basis for naming the scouts. Instead we look toward the end of the Torah to find a different root word for the scouts. There Moses reflects on the scouts’ behavior this week by using the word la’regel. When put into noun form, it becomes “spies.” 

Which is it, “scouts” or “spies”?!?

Lifting Your Light (Graduation 2020 and Behaalot'cha 5780)

[JCHS Commencement 2020 was unlike any other affected by three months of sheltering-in-place due to COVID19 and two weeks of nationwide protests over centuries of racism. Here is some of what I said to our graduates via Zoom.] 

As each of us comes to this screen this afternoon our hearts are filled: with distress over the sadness and anger gripping our country because of the murder of people because of the color of their skin; with anxiety growing out of a worldwide pandemic along with its impact on each of our homes; with pride for this special class; with gratitude for our professional community; with the joy of completion; and with deep memories of those among our families and dear friends whose recent or long ago deaths are still with us. We take a quiet moment now for each of us to catch our breath and bring all that distress, anxiety, pride, gratitude, joy, and loss to mind. ... 

The Talmud teaches us in Bava Batra that when we build a new home, we leave a small patch of it unpainted or incomplete as a reminder that nothing in the work of our hands can be entirely perfect or complete. How true! So remember, as we build together this Commencement 2020 online, even if there are glitches or stumbles on screen or at home, we are all doing our best to celebrate the special Class of 2020. 

Turning Our Head to See: We Cannot Look Away Any Longer (Naso 5780)

Photo by Santiago Mejia for SF Chronicle 5/31/20 

At the end of last week the Jewish community observed Shavuot, the festival celebrating the giving of Torah and our responsibility to make real its lessons in every generation. One of Torah’s most powerful lessons is the inherent value and sanctity of each human life. From this the Sages declare that anyone who destroys a single life has destroyed an entire world. (Sanhedrin 4:5).

After two days of being away from screens through Shavuot, I turned on my phone and was shocked, but sadly not surprised, to see escalating turmoil and violence shaking our country. In recent weeks, we have seen whole worlds destroyed by the horrible deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Their names are added now to the overwhelming number of others. There has been a seeming advancing cascade of death, dehumanizing, and systemic racism experienced by people of color in our country.