The Courage to Be Yaakov

Twenty years earlier, in a tent dim with the haze of old age, a father asked his son a simple question: "Who are you, my son?"

The son, desperate for a destiny he felt he deserved but was not given, lied. “I am Esav, your firstborn,” Yaakov told his blind father, Yitzchak. In that moment, Yaakov stole a blessing that was not intended for him. He walked away with the prize, but the cost was exorbitant: the loss of his home, the hatred of his brother, and two decades of life spent looking over his shoulder, living in exile.

Now, in this week's parashah, Vayishlach, the bill has come due. Yaakov is about to meet Esav again. He is terrified. He sends gifts ahead, he divides his camp, but ultimately, he is left alone in the dark on the banks of the Jabbok River.

It is there that a mysterious figure—identified in the text only as ha'ish, "the man"—ambushes him. Our Sages debated who this figure might be. Some say it was an angel, others the guardian angel of Esav, yet Yaakov names the place Peniel, ‘I have seen God face to face.’

They wrestle until the break of dawn. The struggle is undeniably physical, Yaakov's hip is wrenched from its socket, but it is also something more. Before the stranger can depart, he asks Yaakov a question eerily similar to the one his father asked twenty years prior:

"What is your name?"

This is the pivotal moment of Yaakov's life. He could have lied again. He could have claimed to be someone stronger, braver, or more noble. But this time, he does not flinch. "Yaakov," he answers. He admits to being Yaakov: the heel-grabber, the supplanter, the trickster. He recognizes himself for who he has been.

As Rabbi Cheryl Peretz notes, this was a necessary prerequisite for his survival. "Did Jacob know who he was? After all, he had lied to his father... To have any chance of reconciliation with his brother, Jacob had to acknowledge that he had, in fact, done wrong; he had to wrestle with the guilt and disappointment in his own actions. He had to take an honest look in the mirror." [1]

Perhaps this is why the text identifies his opponent simply as "a man", because on the banks of Jabbok, Yaakov wrestled with more than an external adversary. He grappled with his own conscience, his fear, his shame, and yes, with God. The wrestling is both outer and inner, physical and spiritual at once. And it is only in the honest light of that confession of being "Yaakov" that he receives a blessing that is fully his. He is given a new name, Yisrael, one who wrestles with the Divine and prevails.

We often face similar moments that demand self-reflection. Like Yaakov, we wrestle with difficult questions: Who are we? What have we done? As Rabbi Peretz suggests, "Only through honest self-evaluation will we ultimately walk away renewed and transformed." [1]

The transformation, however, leaves a mark. The text tells us that when the sun finally rose, Yaakov limped because of his hip.

In our modern world, we are conditioned to view injury as failure and wholeness as perfection. But the Torah offers different, radical wisdom. Rabbi Yael Shy teaches that "although limping and in pain from the fight, Jacob emerges as who he is meant to be—Israel." [2] The limp is not a defect; it is a record of the experience. It is proof that he stayed in the fight. As Hannah Weizman (Plotkin) beautifully puts it, "That limp is not a sign of defeat but of blessing; it represents the profound change born from struggle." [3]

I suspect many of us carry our own limps, visible or invisible. Old mistakes we cannot undo. Harsh words that cannot be unsaid. Ideals we failed to live up to. Trauma that still echoes in the body. Some of those wounds came from things done to us; others, if we are honest, from things we did. Vayishlach does not promise that faith will erase any of that. What it offers is a different hope: that if we dare to wrestle, to answer truthfully when asked who we are, then even our limps can become signs of blessing.

This week, as we read of Yaakov walking into the sunrise, limping but renamed, perhaps we can ask ourselves a quiet question: Where in my life am I still trying to live on someone else's blessing? And where might God be waiting, in the dark corners of my story, to ask me one more time, "What is your name?"—inviting me to embrace my true self, walk forward, limp and all, into the light of a new day.

It is there, in our authentic, wounded, and wrestling selves, that we finally find the capacity to say: "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."

Shabbat Shalom

The Grammar of Tradition

During my first period living in Israel, I studied in a university Ulpan alongside a diverse group of immigrants and students. One of my classmates was a member of the US military, sent to Israel to pursue a master’s degree. He once shared a fascinating detail about his selection process. Before the military approved him for the programme, he had to pass an exam testing his aptitude for learning foreign languages. The exam, he explained, was not about knowing any specific language like Hebrew or Arabic. It was a test of structural flexibility, the ability to understand that the grammatical structures valid in one language might not exist in another. “That said,” he told us, “the more languages one speaks, the easier it is for that realisation to take hold.”

The same is true for Jewish tradition. We often grow up in a specific community, taking for granted that everyone in the Jewish world follows the exact same customs. It is only when we visit different communities that we realise our “dialect” of Judaism is just one of many. We discover that different communities, sometimes even within the same city, hold different traditions, and this variety is precisely what makes Jewish life so diverse, rich, and beautiful.

One of the main differences I encountered when I arrived in South Africa concerned how a wedding is officiated. I learned that here, the b’deken (veiling ceremony) is a separate ritual held a few minutes before the wedding starts, often in a private space with only the closest guests present. I had never heard of such a separation.

To be sure, the b’deken, which many sources relate to the episode in this week’s Parashah, Vayetze, where Yaakov marries Leah thinking she is Rachel, has been part of every wedding I have ever officiated.[1] However, in my previous experience, the veiling of the bride happened at the end of the aisle. It was the natural conclusion of the processional, witnessed by all the guests just before the couple stepped under the chuppah.

With time and experience officiating the South African way, I have come to appreciate the intimacy this separate ceremony offers. It provides a quiet, sacred space in the final, frenetic minutes before the chuppah, allowing the couple to be showered with blessings from their closest family and friends.

When I researched the origin of these differences, the “grammar” of the tradition became clear. Because the vast majority of South African Jewry traces its roots to Lithuania and Latvia, the “Litvak” model, which emphasises a clear separation of the wedding stages, became the dominant norm here.

In Brazil, however, the story is different. The Jewish community there (as well as in Argentina, France and parts of the US) is a true melting pot, formed by significant groups of immigrants from Poland, Russia, Romania and Germany, alongside a large Sephardic population from Morocco, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.

In many Sephardic circles, there is traditionally no b’deken at all. As these communities mixed in South America and elsewhere, the practice that became the norm was a compromise between the separate Ashkenazi b’deken (as in South Africa) and the Sephardic absence of one. The solution was a public, shorter b’deken at the aisle, a fusion that honours the Ashkenazi custom of veiling while maintaining the unified, seamless flow typical of Sephardic celebrations.

This brings me back to the Progressive approach to Judaism. One of our defining characteristics is the recognition that Judaism is not static. It is the product of the historical experiences of the Jewish people in the places we have lived. Our traditions developed in slightly different ways across the globe, interacting with different cultures and sociological realities.

Just as my classmate learned that different languages have different structures, we learn that Jewish tradition has different “dialects”. Recognising that ours is just one way of speaking this holy language does not diminish it. Rather, it highlights that this adaptability is part of what makes our culture so rich, so colourful and so strong.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Some commentators alternatively trace the practice of b’deken to Parashat Chayei Sarah (Genesis 24:65), where Rivkah lowers her veil upon seeing Yitzchak for the first time.

Dvar Torah: Finding Living Waters in Old Wells

In this week’s Torah portion, Toldot, we find Yitzchak in a peculiar position. He is a patriarch in transition, caught between the towering legacy of his father, Avraham, and the future turbulence of his sons, Yaakov and Esav. In the middle of this family drama, the Torah pauses to tell us a story about infrastructure.

We read that after Avraham died, the Philistines stopped up the wells that Avraham’s servants had dug. They filled them with dust. When Yitzchak returns to the region, he faces a choice. He could walk away from those blocked sources of life. He could try to dig entirely new wells in random places, rejecting the past. Instead, the text tells us:

“Yitzchak dug anew the wells of water which had been dug in the days of Avraham his father... and he called them by the same names that his father had called them.” [1]

This act of re-digging is a powerful metaphor for Progressive Judaism. We do not simply live off the water of the past, often, we find the ancient wells stopped up. They are filled with the dust of history, of irrelevance, sometimes of ethical problems that make the water inaccessible or undrinkable to us. Yet we do not abandon the tradition entirely to dig in foreign soil. We clear away the debris. We dig down through the hard earth to find the mayim chayim, the living water, that still flows beneath.

Tonight, I want to talk about a well that we, as a community, are currently re-digging: our mikveh, Mikvah Libi Eir, here at Bet David.

For many in our community, the word mikveh does not conjure images of spiritual refreshment. It conjures images of dust. It brings up associations of an intrusive, obsessive, and often sexist policing of women’s bodies. For many of us, the mikveh is a well that was stopped up a long time ago, and we have been quite content to walk on by.

We must acknowledge that discomfort. We cannot re-dig the well if we do not admit that there is dust in it.

The classical halachic literature about mikveh focuses almost entirely on laws for married women: counting days, avoiding touch, immersing in order to resume sexual relations. [2] There are spiritual readings there too, but the frame is clear: this is about policing sexuality, and it sits inside a male-defined system where women are often literally unnamed.

For centuries, the mikveh was almost exclusively associated with niddah, the laws surrounding menstruation. The book of Leviticus details a system of tumah (impurity) and taharah (purity). In the original biblical mindset, these were not moral judgments. You were not “bad” or “sinful” if you were impure; you were simply in a temporary state, usually involving contact with the mysteries of life and death, which prevented you from entering the Holy Temple. [3]

History, however, did not stand still. The Temple was destroyed. Most purity laws fell away, we no longer immerse after touching a lizard or attending a funeral. But the laws regarding women remained. And, as the feminist theologian Rachel Adler powerfully articulated, the system became distorted.

In her early career, in the 1970s, Adler wrote a famous essay defending the mikveh. She argued poetically that the cycle of immersion was a universal human experience of death and rebirth, a way to touch the divine rhythm. [4] But twenty years later, in a brave act of theological honesty, she wrote a retraction titled In Your Blood, Live. She looked at the reality of how mikveh was actually lived in the Orthodox world and realised her earlier theology was a “theology of lies”. [5]

She realised that in the lived reality of Jewish history, the laws of niddah were not a spiritual cycle shared by all. They became a system where women were the class of people designated as “impure”, while men remained “pure”. The mikveh became a place where women were inspected, where their natural cycles were treated with suspicion, and where the primary goal was to render a woman “kosher” for her husband’s sexual access. [6] You also have halachic treatments that, even when they try to be pastoral, still talk about menstruation with the language of danger, confusion, and suspicion, piling stringency upon stringency out of fear and ignorance about women’s bodies. [7]

This is the dust that the Philistines, or perhaps history itself, has thrown into the well. It is the dust of exclusion, the dust of treating a woman as an object rather than a subject, the dust of associating the female body with defilement. It is no wonder that for generations of liberal Jews, the mikveh was rejected as a relic of a patriarchal past.

But here is the challenge of Yitzchak: if we just walk away, we leave a powerful tool buried in the dirt. If we reject the mikveh entirely, we lose one of the few tactile, full-body rituals our tradition possesses. We lose the feeling of being held by the water, suspended in the womb of the world.

As Progressive Jews, we must avoid two extremes. On one hand, we must avoid the “fetishism of tradition”, the idea that we must do things exactly as they were done in 19th-century Europe for them to be “authentic”. That preserves the dust along with the water. On the other hand, we must avoid the “absolute rejection of tradition”, the idea that because a ritual has a difficult history it is irredeemable. Progressive Judaism’s path is not simply to stand in the middle between these options. Our task is to seek in the Jewish tradition those elements that align with our values, recognise the age in which we live, and add meaning and texture to our lives.

So, how do we re-dig this well? How do we find the mayim chayim, the living waters?

First, we shift our language and our theology. The old language of purity and impurity is broken. To the modern ear, “impure” sounds like “dirty”. Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz teaches that in a world without a Temple, we are all technically “impure” (tameh met), and that is fine. It has no practical consequence. [8]

Instead of purity, let us speak of kedushah, holiness. When we frame the mikveh this way, it ceases to be about “cleaning up” a woman. It becomes a moment to pause and sanctify the body. It becomes a way to say that our physical selves, our aging, changing, miraculous, sometimes broken bodies, are vessels for the Divine image.

Second, we democratise the ritual. In the traditional model, the mikveh is almost exclusively for women observing niddah and for converts. In the Progressive vision, the well is open to everyone. The water does not discriminate.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we expand the purpose. If we go back to Torah, the word mikveh appears already in the first chapter of Bereishit: “God called the gathering of the waters, mikveh ha-mayim, ‘seas’.” Water is not yet about purity or impurity. It is the raw material of life. One beautiful Progressive Israeli collection on mikveh reminds us that water appears in the story even before plants and animals, as the condition that makes life on earth possible. [9] Later, midrash and poetry connect water to Miriam’s well in the wilderness, to the tears and hopes of our ancestors at the be’er, to the rains that are a sign of blessing in Eretz Yisrael. [10] Water is promise, not punishment.

We must reclaim that promise, and the mikveh as a space where we can recognise that life changes all the time. We move from checking for spots of blood to checking the state of our souls. We move from a ritual of obligation to a ritual of transition. [11] This shift has been embodied over the last twenty years by Mayyim Hayyim, a community mikveh in the Boston area founded by Anita Diamant, which has transformed the way mikvaot are understood in the liberal Jewish world.

Think about the transitions in your own life. We are good at marking the beginning of things, birth, marriage, B’nai Mitzvah. We are less good at marking the middle, the end, or the healing.

Imagine a mikveh for celebration. A person marks a 50th birthday, a first year of sobriety, a new relationship, or a long-awaited retirement. They immerse to mark the passage of time, to thank God for Shehecheyanu, for keeping them alive to this season.

Imagine a mikveh for healing. A woman has just completed chemotherapy. Her body has been a battlefield for months, poked by needles, scanned by machines, filled with toxic medicines to save her life. She feels alienated from her own skin. She comes to Mikvah Libi Eir not because she is “dirty”, but to reclaim her body. She immerses to wash away the smell of the hospital, to weep in the safety of the water, and to rise up feeling whole again. [12]

Imagine a mikveh for closure. We know how to break a glass to start a marriage. How do we mark a divorce, or the end of a long relationship, or the decision to step away from a job that shaped our identity? Immersion can be a physical enactment of letting go. As the water touches every part of the body, it symbolises the washing away of anger, grief, and a past chapter, allowing the individual to emerge ready for what comes next. [13]

Imagine a mikveh for identity. A person marking a gender transition uses this ancient Jewish ritual of transformation to sanctify a new name and identity, saying to the community: “This is who I am, and this body is holy.”

This is what it means to re-dig the well of Yitzchak. We use the same physical structure, the gathering of living waters that must be natural, untouched by human hands in its collection, connecting us to the rain and the earth. [14] But we allow the water to flow for us. We reject the idea that the mikveh is a place of judgment. We reject the idea that it is a place where women are policed. We reclaim it as a place of mayim chayim, of living waters for living people.

This is the opportunity that sits before us at Bet David with Mikvah Libi Eir. We have dug this well. Now we must have the courage to use it.

I invite you, men and women, young and old, to rethink what this space can mean for you. Regardless of your level of observance, you can feel the power of water. You just have to be human. You just have to have a body that carries the stress, the joy, and the dust of living in this world.

Sometimes, we need to wash that dust off. Sometimes, we need to be held by something larger than ourselves. Sometimes, we need to hold our breath, go under, and emerge feeling like we can breathe again.

Yitzchak re-dug the wells of his father, but he drank from them in his own time. Let us do the same. Let us not leave the well stopped up. Let us clear the earth, and may you find that the water deep down is sweet, cool, and very much alive.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Genesis 26:18.
[2] Barbara Kadden, Teaching Mitzvot: Concepts, Values and Activities (A.R.E. Press, 2003), Chapter 15, “Immersing in a Ritual Bath”, pp. 89–90.
[3] Barbara Kadden, Teaching Mitzvot, Chapter 15, “Immersing in a Ritual Bath”, p. 89.
[4] Rachel Adler, “Tum'ah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings”, Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (Summer 1973).
[5] Rachel Adler, “In Your Blood, Live: Re-Visions of a Theology of Purity”, Tikkun 8, no. 1 (1993), p. 205.
[6] Adler, “In Your Blood, Live”, p. 199.
[7] Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz, “Reshaping the Laws of Family Purity for the Modern World”, teshuva for the CJLS (2006), p. 2.
[8] Berkowitz, op. cit., p. 5.
[9] Parashat HaMayim: Immersion in Water as an Opportunity for Renewal and Spiritual Growth (IMPJ, 2011), p. 11.
[10] Parashat HaMayim, p. 13.
[11] This approach aligns with the philosophy of Mayyim Hayyim around using mikveh to mark life transitions, as reflected in their published ceremony resources. Check www.mayyimhayyim.org
[12] Susan Grossman, “Mikveh and the Sanctity of Being Created Human”, teshuva for the CJLS (2006), p. 70.
[13] Parashat HaMayim, p. 72.
[14] Kadden, Teaching Mitzvot, p. 89.

When Scarcity Trades the Forever for the Now

If I want to get my kids annoyed at me, I just have to start criticizing their generation for their addiction to "instant gratification." When they have a doubt, they don't have to go to a library; they can Google it with a device in the palm of their hands. When they want to listen to a song, they don't need to wait for it to be played on the radio; they play it directly on Spotify. When they want to watch a TV show, there is no specified time to do it; they can binge-watch it on the many streaming services available.

Usually, this conversation ends abruptly when my kids point out a painful truth: while all of that is true, I am just as addicted to these mechanisms as they are. I, too, get anxious when a webpage takes three seconds to load.

This tension between waiting and consuming brings us to the famous "Marshmallow Test." In this experiment, children were offered one marshmallow now, or two if they could wait fifteen minutes. For years, the results were used to teach that "successful" people know how to delay gratification.

However, modern critics have pointed out a flaw in this interpretation: the test failed to account for context.[1] For a child from a background of scarcity, eating the marshmallow immediately is not a lack of character. It is a rational survival strategy. You eat what is in front of you because you do not know if it will be there later.

This brings us to this week's parashah, Toldot, and the most famous case of "eating the marshmallow" in our history: Esav.

Esav comes in from the field, famished, and sells his birthright to Yaakov for a bowl of red lentil stew. For centuries, Jewish tradition has vilified Esav, often associating him with the Roman Empire (Edom) to depict him as wicked and godless.

But if we look at the biblical text, we find no evidence that Esav was a "bad person." We simply see a person who is exhausted. The text says Esav came from the field "exhausted" (ayef). He begs Yaakov for food.

Yaakov demands a trade: "Sell me your birthright." Esav's response is heartbreaking: "Look, I am at the point of death, so what use is my birthright to me?" [2]

Esav is not a villain here; he is in a panic. Like the child in the Marshmallow Test who doesn't trust the future, Esav feels his mortality pressing down on him. In this moment, Yaakov has the food and the safety of the tents; Esav has neither. One brother is comfortable; the other is collapsing.

The tragedy is not that Esav ate the stew. The tragedy is that he felt he had to trade his future to survive the present.

And here is where the parashah turns personal. We may not be starving hunters, but we know that pressing urgency that makes the future disappear. We are often like Esav, feeling so pressed by the "now" that we sell the "forever."

Consider the "red stews" we consume daily. We check corporate emails on Shabbat, trading sacred rest for professional relevance. We rely on disposable utensils, trading the long-term health of the planet for the convenience of the moment. We lose ourselves in social networks, trading our privacy and mental space for a quick hit of dopamine. On the surface these seem like simple choices, but they are often driven by deep-seated fears.

Why do we check those emails? Often, because we fear that if we stop, we will fall behind. We are experiencing a scarcity of worth. But a community that celebrates rest reminds us that we are human beings, not human doings.

Why do we reach for single-use plastics? Often, because we are experiencing a scarcity of bandwidth. We feel too overwhelmed to care about the consequences of convenience. But a community that values Tikkun Olam reminds us that the world is a loan from our children.

Why do we doom-scroll? Because we are experiencing a scarcity of connection. But a community that offers real belonging removes the hunger that drives us to the algorithm.

The solution to our modern "soup" is not just better willpower; it is better community.

We need to build a place where people feel secure enough to wait. Where we support each other enough that no one has to choose between their birthright and their survival.

When we feel safe, we can plan for the future. When we are starving (spiritually, emotionally, or physically) we just want the soup. May we be a community that helps each other see past the hunger of the moment to the blessings that are ours to claim.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] https://bit.ly/4pfH8fq
[2] Genesis 25:32.

Dvar Torah: Shared Graves, Shared Grief

Over fifteen years ago, some Jewish activists launched an initiative they called Project Chayei Sarah. The idea was simple and uncomfortable. They wanted rabbis and rabbinical students to speak honestly with their communities, on this Shabbat, about the on-the-ground realities in the city of Hevron, in the West Bank.

The link between this week’s parashah and that project is clear. After Sarah dies, Avraham seeks a place to bury her. He ends up purchasing a cave from the Hittites, Me’arat haMachpelah. The text says: “Sarah died in Kiriath Arba, now Hevron, in the land of Canaan.” [1] At the end of the parashah, Avraham himself dies and is buried there by his sons, Yitzchak and Ishmael. This small piece of land becomes a shared family burial place, a place that binds together a deeply fractured family.

But that was then. What is the reality in Hevron now?

To answer that, we need to talk briefly about what happened in that area in the past century.

In 1929, during a period of growing tension between Jews and Arabs, sixty-nine Jews were murdered in what became known as the Hevron massacre. A few years later, the British authorities decided to remove all Jews from the city, in order, as they saw it, to prevent further massacres. After more than a thousand years of continuous Jewish presence, Hevron became a place where Jews were forbidden to live.

When Israel conquered the West Bank in the Six Day War of 1967, Jews began returning to the area, first to the settlement of Kiryat Arba, then into the centre of Hevron itself.

When I lived in Israel in 2010, I visited Hevron with a group of former Israeli soldiers called Breaking the Silence. In a city of roughly 250,000 Palestinians, there are fewer than a thousand Jews. The number is small, but the measures adopted to protect them are enormous. To defend this tiny population of settlers, the Israeli army has imposed rules that have closed the main commercial street, sealed the entrances to shops and residential buildings and forced Palestinian residents to improvise new, often humiliating ways of entering and leaving their own homes.

At the heart of the city stands the site that is so central to our parashah, the place we call Me’arat haMachpelah, known today as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Jews and Muslims follow a very choreographed and carefully negotiated script. On some days, Jews may pray in certain sections and Muslims are excluded. On other days, Muslims pray and Jews are excluded. It is a place that should speak of shared ancestors, yet it has also become a site of terrible violence. During Purim in 1994, an American-born Israeli Jew, dressed in Israeli army uniform, opened fire with an assault rifle and killed twenty-nine people, including children as young as twelve, and wounded one hundred and twenty-five others. [2]

These were the kinds of realities the organisers of Project Chayei Sarah wanted rabbis to speak about on this Shabbat. Until now, I have never really engaged with that invitation, because I recognise how divisive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become in Jewish communities around the world. I know that in any room there will be people whose hearts, histories and politics are very different from one another.

This week, though, following a significant increase in terror brought about by far-right Israeli activists against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, I began to feel that remaining silent on this is also a choice, and not a neutral one. For the first time, I decided to speak about it directly from the bimah.

Let me share how one Israeli journalist recently described what is happening. An article in the newspaper Yediot Acharonot reported it like this:

Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a notification buzzes in the Hilltop Youth Telegram group. The wording is always similar. “Arabs report that Jews attacked the village of Raba, in the Jenin district,” with a photo of masked men from Palestinian media outlets. The day before: “Arabs report that Jews attacked Arabs near Hevron,” or “Arabs report that Jews set fire to several vehicles in the village of Mukhmas, east of Ramallah,” with a video of burnt-out cars.

The asterisks are interesting: attacked. set fire to. The wording “Arabs report” is there to make sure the messages cannot be understood as accepting legal responsibility. It is only a report. By “Arabs”. From time to time there are messages of support for detainees, those held for questioning and then released.

This week, footage was released that stirred reactions: dozens of masked Jews torching a factory, a sheep pen and trucks in the Palestinian industrial zone at Beit Lid and in the village of Deir Sharaf. The sheer scale of the terrorist act managed to break into the news cycle. Yet, as the Hilltop Youth forums show, the attacks are a daily occurrence. They stretch from the Jenin area in the north all the way to Hevron. [3]

There was also a short video I saw on Instagram, in which Gilad Kariv, a personal friend, a Reform rabbi and a member of the Knesset, complains about Minister Itamar Ben Gvir handing out baklava in the Knesset plenary to celebrate these attacks. [4] This is an imitation of a practice we know from radical Palestinian militants, who sometimes hand out sweets to celebrate when terror attacks kill Israeli Jews. For many of us, that has always been one of the most painful and offensive images. To see a Jewish minister of internal security now mirroring that behaviour, rejoicing in Jewish violence against Palestinians, is profoundly shocking.

The dehumanisation of the other, which used to belong only to the radical margins of Israeli society and of Jewish communities in the Diaspora, is, tragically, moving closer to the centre. It is becoming, for many, the default way of thinking about how Palestinians should be treated.

I know some will ask why I'm speaking about Jewish violence when Israelis continue to face existential threats. The answer is simple: we are responsible for what is done in our name, under the auspices of our religious tradition. That responsibility doesn't diminish with the reality of threats we face, it is intensified by it.

Rabbi Waskow of blessed memory points to a curious moment in our story. After Avraham dies, the two sons he had set against each other, Yitzchak and Ishmael, come together to bury him. The Torah calls them "Avraham’s sons" only then, as if, Waskow teaches, "they became truly his sons... only by joining in their grief." It was only after mourning the father who had threatened both their lives that they could, as the prophecy says, "live face to face with each other."

Waskow then asks the question that we must ask today:

What does this weave of text and midrash have to say (…) about the lethal violence between the two families of Avraham in our own generation? (…) We might draw a lesson from the shared grief of Yitzchak and Ishmael. (…) Can Jews and Palestinians together share feelings of grief about the deaths of members of our two peoples at the hands of the other? (…) When either community mourns the deaths only of those on “its side”... the outcome is often more rage, more hatred, and more death. If we can share the grief for those dead on both “sides,” we are more likely to see each other as human beings and move toward ending the violence. [5]

Rabbi Waskow’s invitation is not a political programme. It is a spiritual practice. It begins with something deeply Jewish and deeply human and very difficult, the willingness to allow our hearts to break, not only for our own dead, but also for the dead of those who are counted as “the enemy”.

What we are witnessing is not just a political crisis; it is a spiritual sickness. The violence in Hevron and the West Bank, the celebration of it with baklava, is not just killing Palestinians; it is killing the Jewish soul. Our task, as Jews who love our tradition, is to reclaim it from those who would twist it into a weapon.

Yitzchak and Ishmael only become, in the Torah’s words, “Avraham’s sons” when they stand together at their father’s grave. They do not resolve every argument. They do not erase the past. They do not undo the harm that has been done. They simply show up, side by side, in grief.

I do not know if Jews and Palestinians will be able, any time soon, to stand together at our many graves, in Hevron, in Gaza, in the kibbutzim and in the refugee camps. I do not know when there will be leaders on both sides with the courage and imagination to make that possible.

But I do know this. If we, as Jews, cannot even allow ourselves to feel sorrow for Palestinian children, women and men killed by Jewish hands, then we are walking away from the Torah of Chayei Sarah. We are walking away from Avraham. If we are unable to weep for Israeli victims of terror without immediately hardening our hearts against Palestinians, we are walking away from Yitzchak and Ishmael as well.

It is easy to hear these stories from Hevron, from the West Bank, from the Knesset plenary, and to feel paralysed. What can we do, from Johannesburg, faced with such entrenched violence and hatred?

Perhaps the answer of Chayei Sarah is modest, but real. Avraham cannot undo what happened between his sons. Yitzchak and Ishmael cannot undo what their father did to them. Yet, at the crucial moment, they choose to act as brothers, not enemies. They choose to walk together, to carry the same body, to face the same grave.

We cannot dictate policy in Jerusalem or Ramallah. We cannot stop the attacks in the West Bank or the bombardments in Gaza. What we can decide is how we will speak, here. Will we join the dehumanising chorus, in which “Arabs” or “settlers” become faceless categories, fit only for hatred or contempt? Or will we insist on speaking of human beings, created in the image of God, whose blood is equally precious?

My hope is that this community will be a place where we can hold complexity. A place where love for Israel and horror at Jewish violence against Palestinians are not mutually exclusive. A place where solidarity with Palestinians does not require erasing Jewish fear and trauma. A place where, week after week, our Torah pulls us back from easy slogans into the hard, holy work of seeing God’s image in all the children of Avraham.

So my prayer for us, on this Shabbat, is simple and impossibly hard. That we keep our hearts open. That we grieve for all who are killed and terrorized, Jews and Palestinians alike. That we resist every attempt, from whatever side, to teach us that the other is less than human. That, in our prayers, in our words, in the way we talk about Israel and Palestine at our Shabbat tables, we choose the path of Avraham’s two sons, not perfect agreement, not naïve harmony, but the courage to stand, at least in our hearts, side by side in shared grief.

And may that be our contribution, small but real, to healing a land that both peoples love. May we be worthy descendants of Avraham, Sarah, Yitzchak and Ishmael. And may the One who makes peace in the high places teach us how to make peace, at least in our words, our prayers and our hearts, here below.

[1] Gen 23:2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre

[3] https://www.ynet.co.il/yedioth/article/yokra14579848– translation by ChatGPT

[4] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQ6QWQUgJMm/

[5] Second comment on this post: https://jewschool.com/project-chayei-sarah-27372

The Unbreakable, Complicated Bonds of Family

Families are hard work.

We might imagine that as a holy book, the Torah’s families would look like a stained-glass window: serene, harmonious, everyone in their proper place. Instead, what we get is something far closer to real life: jealousy, fear, distance, mistakes that cannot be undone, and, under all of that, a stubborn love that refuses to disappear.

Last week’s parashah, Vayera, and this week’s, Chayei Sarah, sit right in the middle of that tension.

First, we see the pain of rivalry. Sarah looks at Hagar and Ishmael and is afraid. Afraid of sharing Itzchak’s inheritance. Afraid of her own son being pushed aside. She demands that Avraham send them away, and Avraham, torn and distressed, does it. The text is honest about how much this hurts him. God has to reassure Avraham that Ishmael will also become a nation before he can bring himself to act.

Then, as if that were not enough, God demands something even more unthinkable: “Take your son, your only one, the one you love, Itzchak…”. A midrash refuses to let us pretend Avraham loved only one child, imagining a heartbreaking dialogue with God.

When God says, “Take your son,” Avraham replies, “I have two sons.” When God clarifies, “Your only one,” Avraham objects, “Each is the only one of their mother.” When God presses, “The one you love,” Avraham insists, “I love them both,” forcing God to finally say the name: “Itzchak.” [1] 

It is a heartbreaking scene. Avraham is being asked to choose, yet he insists, as many parents would, that his heart does not divide so neatly.

After so much brokenness, we come to this week’s parashah, Chayei Sarah, and we begin to see how, under all the scars, the love has not vanished.

The text tells us that just before Itzchak meets Rivkah, he is “coming from Be’er-lachai-ro’i”, the very well where Hagar encountered God. Why was he there? A stunning midrash suggests that Itzchak himself went to bring Hagar back to Avraham, so that his father would not be alone and she could become his wife again as Keturah. [2] The son who almost died on the mountain walks back into the story of the woman and child who were almost left to die in the desert, trying to mend that fracture.

Another midrash does the same work of repair in the other direction, telling that Avraham cannot simply erase Ishmael from his heart. After sending him away, Avraham travels into the wilderness to visit his eldest son, more than once, despite Sarah’s objections. He asks questions about Ishmael’s home, his marriage, and the way he is living. The relationship is damaged, limited, supervised, but it is not gone. Ishmael learns, in a very concrete way, that his father still cares enough to turn up at his tent. [3]

This undercurrent of love finally surfaces in the plain text. Avraham’s story closes with a grave, and the Torah reports, “His sons, Isaac and Ishmael, buried him”. For one moment, they stand side by side. The Torah leaves the rest of their conversation to our imagination.

One day, people will stand over our graves as well, and they will carry memories of us that we no longer have access to. Some will remember our mistakes. Some will remember the ways we tried, clumsily or courageously, to love.

We cannot rewrite the past chapters of our family story, but we can still shape the ones that are being written now. This Shabbat, perhaps the invitation of Chayei Sarah is to ask: when those who know me best remember me, what do I hope will rise to the surface? And what is one act of love, in the middle of all the complications, that I can choose this week that moves my story a little closer to the kind of blessing I hope to leave behind?

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Bereshit Rabbah 55:7

[2] Bereshit Rabbah 60:14

[3] Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer 30:6–7

Dvar Torah: Voices from the Akedah – A Bibliodrama

From amongst the pedagogical tools for teaching Torah I've encountered in my career as a Jewish educator, one of the most powerful is called Bibliodrama. It’s a technique adapted from psychodrama in which we inhabit Biblical characters to gain insight and empathy into their inner worlds. By hearing multiple perspectives, we read not only what the text states, but also what it implies and what it silences.

I'd like to use that technique—without the acting—to examine the story of the Akedah, the binding of Itzchak and his almost-sacrifice ordered by God, and see what this 360-degree approach reveals. What voices are missing from the narrative? What silences echo through the text?

Avraham:

We first encounter Avraham when God instructed him to leave behind everything familiar and go to an unknown land, following an unknown voice—and Avraham did just that. Then, in an emblematic story earlier in this very parashah, Avraham challenged God as no one had ever challenged the Divine. Avraham was not destroyed for his lack of decorum, as many might have expected. Avraham argued passionately for the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?".[1] Yet, in the end, all his arguments were incapable of convincing God not to destroy those cities.

This time, when God asked Avraham to offer his son as a sacrifice—not his only son and not the only one he loved, despite what the text affirms, but the one through whom the covenant Avraham had established with God would be continued—it would have been reasonable to expect Avraham to challenge the request immediately. But Avraham did not. No argument. No challenge.

We do not know whether this was out of fear, hope, or disappointment with a God who had destroyed Sodom and hadn't protected Yishmael when Sarah demanded his expulsion. A midrash portrays Satan approaching Avraham on the road: "Old man, are you out of your mind? You're going to slaughter the son God gave you at the age of one hundred?! It was I who deceived you and said to you, 'Take now your son...'" Rav Kook explains that Satan here represents Avraham's conscience, his internal struggle about whether he truly heard God's voice.[2]

Rabbi David Hartman observes: "We are not only amazed at the unintelligible demand of God, but dumbfounded when Avraham, who had so boldly stood before God and argued for justice, now submits unquestioningly".[3] Perhaps Avraham was waiting for God to change God's mind. Perhaps his silence was not obedience but paralysis—the inability to know what God truly wanted.

Itzchak:

Itzchak walked beside his father for three days, carrying the wood for his own sacrifice. His question was achingly innocent: "Father... where is the lamb for the burnt offering?".[4] Avraham's answer—"God will provide the lamb"—remains one of Torah's most ambiguous statements. Faith? Evasion? Desperate hope?

According to a midrash,[5] Itzchak understood what was about to happen and asked his father to bind him tightly "lest I tremble and cause you to make a blemish." But the text's later silences tell a darker story. After the Akedah, Itzchak disappears from the narrative. Avraham and Itzchak do not walk down the mountain together—only Avraham returns to the servants.[6] Ibn Ezra notes pointedly: "It does not mention Itzchak."

Itzchak is not present at his mother's funeral. The next time we see him, he lives separately from his father. How does a son rebuild trust with a father who bound him to an altar? The text's silence is itself an answer. Some wounds are too deep for words.

Sarah:

Perhaps the most disturbing voice in the Akedah is the one we never hear: Sarah's. God commands Avraham, Avraham obeys, Itzchak is bound—but where is Sarah? According to Midrash Tanchuma, Avraham deliberately concealed his intention from her, fearing her reaction.

Sarah was not consulted. She was not asked for consent. She was not informed. When she learned what occurred—the shock killed her. A midrash[7] tells us Satan went to Sarah and said: "Avraham took Itzchak your son and slaughtered him." Sarah cried out, making sounds corresponding to the shofar blasts, "and her soul burst forth from her and she died."

The text reveals: "Avraham came to mourn for Sarah".[8] He came—suggesting he was elsewhere when she died. The Akedah was at Mount Moriah, Avraham returned to Beersheba, but Sarah died in Chevron. The family was geographically fractured even before her death.

The American poet Eleanor Wilner imagines Sarah's voice in "Sarah's Choice”[9] after God approaches her asking for a sacrifice of Isaac (who is her only and beloved son):

"No," said Sarah to the Voice. "I will not be chosen. Nor shall my son— if I can help it... Shame," she said, "for thinking me a fool, for asking such a thing. You must have known I would choose Itzchak. What use have I for History—an arrow already bent when it is fired from the bow?"

In Wilner's midrash, Sarah refuses the test. She chooses her son over the covenant, humanity over History—asking what might have happened if Sarah had been given a voice.

The Ram:

One voice is rarely considered: the ram, caught in the thicket, immediately slaughtered in Itzchak's place. It has no story, no agency—it simply appears and dies.

Yet Jewish tradition remembers it. According to Pirkei Avot,[10] the ram was created at twilight on Creation's sixth day—always meant for this moment. Its horns become the shofarot we blow on Rosh Hashanah.

When we hear the shofar's blast, what are we hearing? Sarah's six cries? Or something else—the cry of the vulnerable, the voiceless, those sacrificed for purposes they do not understand? The ram reminds us that every one of our acts has a cost.

God:

The text begins: "God tested Avraham".[11] This should reassure us—it was only a test, God never intended Itzchak to die. But this raises more questions than it answers. What kind of test is this? What does it prove? At what cost?

One midrash in the Talmud[12] offers a troubling backstory: Satan approached God and said, "To this old man You graciously granted the fruit of the womb at the age of a hundred, yet of all that banquet which he prepared, he did not have one turtle-dove or pigeon to sacrifice before you!" God replied, "Yet were I to say to him, 'Sacrifice your son before me,' he would do so without hesitation." In this reading, the Akedah came about because of Satan's challenge—a cosmic wager not unlike the story of Job. Was Avraham's test, then, the result of divine pettiness? A need to prove something to Satan?

According to the Talmud,[13] God declares: "I never said to slaughter him. I merely said to 'raise him up.'" A midrash[14] imagines God explaining: "When I said 'take your son,' I never said to slaughter him." These midrashim suggest Avraham misunderstood God's intention.

But if so, why didn't God say so clearly? Why allow three days of anguish? Why permit the binding, the raised knife? Some say the Akedah taught the world that God does not desire human sacrifice. But surely there was a less traumatic way to convey that message.

The text is unclear whether Avraham passes or fails. He demonstrates obedience—but loses his wife, his relationship with his son, and never again hears directly from God. Perhaps the most honest reading is that we cannot know God's intentions. Was Avraham supposed to obey? Refuse? Argue, as he had done for Sodom?

A part of me wants to believe that this episode also changed the Divine, who, as a result, would not test the people anymore and would not instruct senseless acts of destruction. The rest of the Torah, though, proves that this is not the case. Maybe God was the One who failed the test….

After the Akedah: Can We Rebuild?

The Torah offers no tidy reconciliation. Avraham returns alone.[15] Sarah dies far away in Chevron, and only then does Avraham come to mourn her.[16] Itzchak is absent from both scenes. Later, however, he and Yishmael bury their father together.[17] The family is not restored, yet a thread of obligation endures. This is a truthful hope.

We cannot always mend what has been broken, but we can still choose presence, honour, and restraint. In the language of the Akedah, holiness is often the moment we lower the knife.

Perhaps this is the Akedah's most honest teaching: we can continue even when we cannot fully repair. But we can also choose—as Wilner's Sarah does—to refuse the test, to say "I will not be chosen." Sometimes the most faithful response is resistance.

The power of Bibliodrama is that it refuses single interpretations. When we inhabit Avraham, we feel his uncertainty. When we inhabit Itzchak, we feel his betrayal. When we inhabit Sarah, we feel her exclusion. When we sit with the ram, we remember all who are sacrificed for grand narratives they do not understand. When we try to understand God’s reasons, we remain baffled.

The Akedah lays bare the terrible costs of acting without considering impact upon others. It shows how decisions made in isolation—without consulting those most affected, without considering resulting trauma—can shatter families. It reveals the complexity of discerning God's will when voices compete and certainty eludes us.

As we read this parashah, let us honour all voices—spoken and silent, present and absent. Let us ask: What decisions are we making that affect others? Whose voices are we failing to hear? What trauma might result from our actions? Whose voices are we silencing in our certainty?

May we have wisdom to listen before we act, courage to question our certainty, and humility to acknowledge when we have caused harm by failing to consider the full impact of our choices.

Shabat Shalom.

[1] Genesis 18:25
[2] https://www.jewishideas.org/article/thoughts-akedah
[3] https://oztorah.com/2022/11/isaac-the-akedah/
[4] Genesis 22:7
[5] Leviticus Rabbah 20:2
[6] Genesis 22:19
[7] Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 31
[8] Genesis 23:2
[9] Sarah's Choice, University of Chicago Press, 1989
[10] Pirkei Avot 5:6
[11] Genesis 22:1
[12] Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 89b
[13] Talmud Bavli Ta'anit 4a
[14] Genesis Rabbah 56:8
[15] Genesis 22:19
[16] Genesis 23:2
[17] Genesis 25:9