Dvar Torah: The Audacity to Build a Bridge

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on the evening of the 4th of November, 1995. It was a Saturday night. I was living and working in Rio de Janeiro, and I had already made firm plans to move to Israel just two months later, to begin my Master's degree. That particular evening, I went to a magician's performance. I was completely offline, disconnected. I did not hear a thing about the murder.

The following day, Sunday, was my father's birthday. I called my parents in Sao Paulo to congratulate him. My mother answered, and her voice was filled with anxiety. "How are you?" she asked, in a tone that clearly implied she expected me to be devastated. "I'm fine," I said, "Why? I'm just calling for Dad's birthday." And it was only then, from my mother, that I learned what had happened. Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, had been assassinated.

Two months later, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport. The country I entered was a country deep in trauma. That raw, collective pain, the profound shock of a Jew murdering a Jewish prime minister, and the sudden, violent death of the fragile hope for peace, set the tone for the entire three and a half years I lived in Israel. The dream of the Oslo Accords, a dream of two states living side-by-side, died that night on the pavement of a Tel Aviv square.

This week, we read Parashat Lech Lecha. The text tells us, "God said to Avram, 'Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.'"[1]

The text tells us that Avraham was 75 years old when he heard this call. Seventy-five. This was not a young man seeking adventure. This was a man established in his life, his career, his worldview. And at 75, he is told to abandon everything: his geography, his culture, and most importantly, the ideology of his "father's house." He is told to leave behind everything that had defined him for three-quarters of a century and to follow a new, radical vision for the future.

This Shabbat, as we prepare to mark the 30th yahrtzeit of Yitzhak Rabin, I find the parallel inescapable.

Here was a man, Rabin, who was Israel's "Mr. Security." His entire life, his identity, was forged in the military. From the Palmach to IDF Chief of Staff during the triumphant Six-Day War, his "father's house" was the doctrine of military strength. His vision for Israel's future was, for decades, one secured exclusively by a powerful army.

And then, late in his life, like Avraham, he heard a different call. He was convinced by a different vision, a different hope for the future. He began a journey that was a complete 180-degree transformation from the man he had always been. He set out on a new path, one of diplomacy and compromise, towards a future that was utterly different from the one he had spent the previous 71 years of his life building.

Changing one's whole approach to life is frightening, and it is difficult. Regardless of your opinion on the Oslo Peace Process—and there are many valid and painful critiques to be made—one must agree that Rabin's transformation took profound courage. He wanted what he had come to see as the best, perhaps the only, path for Israel's survival.

But this kind of change is threatening. It threatens many of the narratives we tell ourselves about Israel, about the conflict, about our relationship to the land. And the reaction to his Lech Lecha was not just disagreement. It was visceral, poisonous hate.

What we now call "Hate Speech" was running rampant in Israel in 1995. I am sure many of us remember the images. The posters of Rabin in an SS uniform. The chants, at rally after rally, calling him a "בוגד," a traitor. Pamphlets were distributed in synagogues debating the religious validity of applying din rodef (the law of the pursuer) to Rabin and the Oslo Accords—pronouncements that, in essence, gave religious permission to kill him.

We pride ourselves, rightly, on a Jewish tradition that is open to debate. We cherish machloket l'shem shamayim—disagreement for the sake of Heaven. But nothing of that worked in this case. This was not debate. This was dehumanisation. Yigal Amir might have pulled the trigger by himself, but his action was the direct result of a political and religious climate that steeped itself in vitriol and made political violence acceptable.

This morning, I was listening to a HaAretz podcast interview with French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur.[2] She was speaking about the current war, but her words echo with chilling precision the events of 1995 and the legacy we still live with. She said:

"What very often comes to my mind is the image of bridges... I feel that I've always been someone who tried to build bridges... And I think one of the first effects or consequences of war... is that it destroys bridges. We actually want to get rid of bridges and of people who are trying to build them...

Suddenly, we are... unable to do what a bridge does, like to make a connection with the other's world. So it started with... empathy... people have a hard time being in empathy with the other. So sometimes the other is the other with a big O. I mean, you cannot find empathy for the enemy... and slowly, slowly this lack of empathy kind of contaminates everything in your life.

Because suddenly you lack empathy for your own tribe, for your neighbour, for the one in your own people who disagree with you. And slowly, slowly you lack empathy for the intimate... It's a pity and it's disastrous... how we can't manage to put ourselves one second in the shoe of the other. Not necessarily to agree with him, but just one second to see from another point of view..."

And then she said this, which struck me to my core:

"It's also what is striking for me is that for us Jews, it has been our absolute talent. I believe that the talent of interpretation, Jewish interpretation, which is the most sacred thing we do religiously, is an ability to step aside... an ability suddenly to look... at the text or at the word in another direction.”

Yitzhak Rabin, in his final years, was trying to build a bridge. It was a bridge to the "Other," yes, but to do so, he first had to build a bridge from his old self to his new one. He had to perform that most sacred of Jewish acts: interpretation. He looked at the same reality he had seen his entire life, and he had the audacity to "step aside" and see it in another direction.

The forces of hate did not just want to stop the Oslo process. They wanted, as Horvilleiur says, "to get rid of the bridge-builder." The assassination was the ultimate act of this "contamination" of empathy. It began with a refusal to see the humanity in the Palestinian people, but it "contaminated" sectors of the Israeli society until it reached the point where a Jew could no longer see the humanity in his own prime minister. The lack of empathy for the "other" became a lack of empathy for "the one in your own people who disagrees with you."

Thirty years later, we are living in the rubble of that destroyed bridge. The trauma I encountered in 1996 has not healed; it has metastasized. The refusal to see from another's point of view is no longer a fringe position; it is the mainstream.

The parallel legacies of Lech Lecha and Yitzhak Rabin's yahrtzeit present us with a stark choice.

Avraham's story teaches us that at any age, we can be called to leave behind the "father's house" of our old certainties, our prejudices, and our fears, and journey towards a new, unknown, but more hopeful future.

Rabin's story is the warning of what happens when we refuse that call. It is a testament to the courage it takes to be a bridge-builder, and a horrific reminder of the forces that will always try to tear those bridges down.

The question for us, 30 years on, is not whether we agree with the specifics of the Oslo Accords. The question is whether we can reclaim our "absolute talent" as Jews. Can we be brave enough to "step aside" and see the world, and the "other," from a different direction? Can we find the courage to build bridges, even when it is frightening, even when it is difficult, and even when others respond with hate?

May the memory of Yitzhak Rabin, and the eternal call of Avraham, be a blessing and a challenge for us all.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Genesis 12:1

[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2025-10-28/ty-article-podcast/rabbi-delphine-horvilleur-french-jews-dont-know-who-their-friends-are-anymore/0000019a-2a79-db3e-affa-bf7dd71d0000

From Idol-Breaking to Harm-Naming: What It Means to Be Ivri

What does it mean to be a "Hebrew"? Our tradition's answer is as much of an ethical challenge as an ethnic label. The name first appears in this week's parashah, Lech Lecha, when our ancestor is called "Avram ha-Ivri". [1]

While in modern Hebrew Ivri just means "Hebrew," the Sages saw something far more profound. In a famous midrash [2], they link the name to the word ever, which means "side" or "margin." Why was he called ha-Ivri? Because, they explain, "the whole world was on one side (ever), and he was on the other (ever)."

To be an Ivri, then, is to be an iconoclast, a spiritual contrarian. In a world steeped in polytheism, Avraham was willing to stand alone, to go against the entire world because he saw that the usual way of doing things was profoundly wrong. He challenged the status quo for the sake of truth.

And yet, this same iconoclast, this man of great faith and courage, has a profound and repeated moral failing. Almost immediately after arriving in the Promised Land, a famine drives him and Sarah to Egypt. Fearing the Egyptians will kill him to take his beautiful wife, Avraham devises a plan: "Please say that you are my sister". [3]

Let us be clear: he risks Sarah's autonomy and safety to secure his own. She is taken to Pharaoh's palace, and only a divine plague saves her, while Avraham is "treated well on her account". [4]

This is not a singular lapse in judgment. It is a disturbing pattern. Avraham and Sarah do it again, years later, with King Avimelech in Gerar. [5] The trauma is apparently so deep that their son, Itzchak, repeats the exact same behaviour with his wife, Rivka, and the same King Avimelech. [6]

These episodes are not footnotes; they are the Torah’s deliberate choice to preserve actions that place a woman at risk, even when the intention is self-protection. The text resists hagiography. It asks us to praise faith where it shines and to face harm where it occurs. This is one of the gifts of our tradition. We do not read our ancestors as flawless. We bless their courage and hospitality, and we also name their failures. That honesty is not a modern import. It belongs to a people in covenant, who tell the truth about harm in order to repair it. It trains us to examine our own habits, our own households, our own institutions, and to ask who is being protected, who is being exposed, and whose voice has not been heard.

This specific failing of our patriarchs—their willingness to endanger their wives for their own security—is not just an ancient story. It is a story about a blindness that persists today: the failure of men to truly grasp the risks that women face.

The global evidence is stark. UN Women summarises the prevalence plainly: worldwide, about one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime, most often at the hands of an intimate partner. [7] In South Africa, this is a matter of life and death. According to the World Population Review, South Africa ranks as the fifth worst country in the world for femicide, with a rate of 9 women killed per 100,000 women in the population. [8]

These are not just numbers. We, as a community, are the victims, but we are also the perpetrators. Until we have the courage to stand for what is right, to be the contrarian and point to Avraham’s conduct as unacceptable, to stop instinctively believing men we like over the victims of their harassment, and to realise that our community is not immune to the same dynamics that harm women elsewhere, then we will continue to be part of the problem.

What, then, does it mean to be an Ivri—an heir to Avraham—today?

Lech Lecha teaches us that being a "Hebrew" is not just about our theological inheritance. It is an ethical challenge. If Avraham was a contrarian who challenges the world's idolatries; we must be contrarians who challenge its injustices.

This parashah calls us to cross over, to stand where risk is greatest and safety is not assumed. For the men in our community, this is a clear call to action: to cross the divide of gender and privilege. It means actively listening to the stories and experiences of women, believing them, and seeing the world not just from our own perspective of safety, but from their perspective of risk.

Avraham's journey began when he left his father’s house. Our moral journey continues when we confront our ancestors’ and leaders’ failings and commit, in our own lives, our own homes, and our own society, never to repeat them.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Gen. 14:13.

[2] B’reshit Rabbah 42:8.

[3] Gen. 12:13.

[4] Gen. 12:16.

[5] Gen. 20:1–16.

[6] Gen. 26:1–33.

[7] https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2025-en.pdf

[8] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/femicide-rates-by-country

 

Dvar Torah: Not God in a Box, God in Covenant

Just like last week, I will start tonight with a confession: I am a heavy user of Generative Artificial Intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT and Gemini. It has got to the point that my 14-year-old son scolded me, saying I was getting too dependent on these platforms.

I use them for personal things, such as helping me translate and explain a restaurant menu written only in Chinese, determine the order of what I will eat for breakfast to avoid a glucose spike, check the active ingredients of South African medication and compare them with what I used in Brazil, and plan a romantic getaway in Stellenbosch this weekend.

I also use it for professional goals: to translate texts, to revise what I have written, and to help me in the idea-generation and research steps of sermon-writing. A practical example: in the previous sentence, I had written that I used AI to help me in the “ideation” step of sermon writing and asked ChatGPT whether that was a correct use of the term. Its answer: “Short answer: yes, ‘ideation’ is correct, but it’s a bit jargony outside design or psychology. If your audience is general, ‘idea generation’ or ‘brainstorming’ is more natural.”

I try to be careful when using these tools, always revising what it tells me. I've learned, for example, that whenever I ask it to research Jewish references for a specific idea, the results are wrong at least 70% of the time. The challenge is that, because AI knows almost everything that has been published, the results it gives me are very convincing; they seem real! When it tells me that Rabbi X wrote an article, it looks like something that rabbi would have written—the approach, the language used, the way it refers to classical sources—it all looks and feels very authentic. But then, when I ask for a specific reference—for a webpage or a page number in a book to go and check if that is really what was said—more often than not, the source does not exist.

Once I got into an argument with Gemini, Google’s AI platform. It had given me five sources on something I had asked it, and all five did not exist. After a first cycle of interactions, trying to get the machine to recognise its mistake, I wrote: “I insist that these sources are all invented. Please, retract these invented sources and bring me 5 recent real ones.” Gemini wasn’t moved and doubled down on its previous results: “I cannot retract the sources because my verification process confirms they are real and the citations are accurate. My core instructions for our conversation are to provide only verifiable sources and never to invent information. Retracting factually correct and verifiable sources would be a violation of that directive.” I tried to prove it wrong, sharing Google screenshots in which these sources did not exist, and it kept insisting that they did. Eventually, I gave up. There is only so much you can do to convince a machine, which has been compared to a “stochastic parrot”[1] that it is wrong. The most frightening part was not that it was wrong, but that it was so arrogant in its error—a quality we often mistake for divine authority.

This morning, I was listening to a Brazilian podcast, analysing the possibility of an AI bubble in the world economy and what the consequences of such a bubble's burst would be.[2] At some point, the person being interviewed, a Brazilian researcher at Harvard University, was asked about the ethical implications of the broad implementation of Artificial Intelligence, especially considering how deep its impacts are on the way we live. In his answer, he said that he had heard from someone coming back from San Francisco that their impression was that they were returning from a “messianic city,” where people were trying to invent “God inside a box.”

“God inside a box”—that expression stuck with me. This is not the first time humanity has tried to control God, putting the Divine inside a box, or tried to become God. Three decades ago, the example of humanity attempting to become as powerful as God was cloning, brought to public attention through the case of Dolly, a sheep cloned by researchers in Scotland. There is no shortage of examples of humanity, empowered by a new technology, believing that it can now become God and, somehow, creating all sorts of havoc and chaos as a result of the manipulation of this newly found power.

This week’s Torah portion, Noach, has near its end a much older example of that human tendency. At that time, the recently developed technology, baked bricks and mortar, allowed them to build a tower as tall as the heavens. And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; lest we shall be scattered all over the world.”[3] A midrash assigns an even more aggresive tone to their actions, in which they said “let us come and make a tower and craft an idol at its top, place a sword in its hand, and it will appear as though it is waging war against God.’”[4]

When that goal became evident, God did not like it at all, fearing that “nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.” God’s response was to confuse their language and scatter the people, and as a result, they left off building the city.

So, it seems that the instinct to abuse the technical instruments at our disposal to try and become God is, at least, as old as the Torah, which scholars date to around the year 400 BCE. Taking the extremely dubious step of quoting Spider-Man’s uncle Ben, I will say that “with great power, comes great responsibility.”[5] Unfortunately, these attempts have not been accompanied by a conversation about the ethical implications of these technologies; about who will win from the construction of high-rise towers following the improvement of construction techniques and who will lose; who will get new tools for sermon-writing and who will lose their jobs, replaced by the new functionalities of artificial intelligence.

In these actions, we keep making the same mistake regarding the attributes of what qualifies as Divine. We often think that power is what characterises God, but the Jewish tradition insists that God sides with the oppressed, with the underprivileged, with those whom the system has failed. In Psalm 146, we read that God is the One “who secures justice for those who are wronged, gives food to the hungry. Adonai sets prisoners free.”[6] In the Talmud, it is told that the Mashiach “sits among the poor who suffer from illnesses” and helps them with their bandages, undoing and redoing them with attention and care.[7]

And so, we return to the beginning of this week’s parashah, which says: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noach, ‘I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth.’”[8] In last week’s parashah, Bereshit, when humanity was created, it was entrusted with the role of working and protecting the land[9], and yet, we insist on believing that a God-like attitude is to exploit the land, to exploit the people, to exploit technology without thinking of the consequences.

This is the very essence of the sin of Babel. The builders saw the world as something to conquer. Empowered by their new technology, their impulse was to build a single, monolithic fortress up to the heavens, to “make a name for themselves.” It is the “God in a box” impulse, driven by a desire for power and a terrifying, uniform consensus—the same impulse as my AI chatbot, doubling down on its own error, insisting it knows best.

But our parashah does not end there. It pivots. It introduces us to Avraham.

And a famous midrash[10] tells us that Avraham, too, saw a construction. He was traveling and saw a birah doleket—a great palace. But this word, doleket, is beautifully ambiguous. It might mean that he saw a palace that was “illuminated,” dazzling in its intricate wisdom and design. It might also mean that he saw a palace that was “burning”—on fire with the chaos, corruption, and violence of the generations before him.

The midrash suggests he saw both. And this is the perfect metaphor for our new Artificial Intelligence. It is our modern birah doleket. It is a dazzling, illuminated palace of knowledge, so convincing it looks and feels very authentic. And it is burning with chaos—with hallucinations, with systemic bias, with the power to displace and divide. The builders of our modern Babel, our “God in a box,” are so impressed with their illuminated creation they want to keep building higher, faster, regardless of the fire and the chaos it brings.

But Avraham's response was not the response of Babel. He did not try to conquer the palace. He did not try to build his own. He stopped, and he asked a single, world-changing question: “Is it possible that this palace has no master?” It is a question that searches not for power, but for accountability. Not for control, but for relationship.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes,

After the two great failures of the Flood and Babel, Abraham was called on to create a new form of social order that would give equal honour to the individual and the collective, personal responsibility and the common good. That remains the special gift of Jews and Judaism to the world.[11]

Avraham’s entire life and his relationship with God are the antithesis of Babel. The Babel generation built a tower to consolidate power and make a name for themselves. God’s response to Avraham is, “I will make your name great.” The builders of Babel built a closed fortress to storm heaven. Avraham built a tent that was open on all four sides, to welcome the stranger, to care for the oppressed, to lift up those whom the system has failed.

Our tradition does not command us to smash the machine. It commands us to learn from Avraham’s example. Not God in a box, but God in covenant. Not a tower for a few, but a tent for the many.

The test of our powerful new tools is not “how high can we build?” but “whom will it serve?” Will we use this new power to build higher towers and walls, to “make a name for ourselves” while insisting on our own correctness? Or will we, like Avraham, look at this brilliant, burning world, seek its true Master, and use our new tools to open our tents wider—to fight the violence of our generation, to serve the world and protect it?

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
[2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mZrapsR4eYkNRzxJhGqsc
[3] Gen. 11:4
[4] Bereshit Rabbah 38:6
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility
[6] Psalm 146:7
[7] Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 98a
[8] Gen 6:11-13
[9] Gen 2:15
[10] Bereshit Rabbah 39:1
[11] https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/noach/individual-and-collective-responsibility

A Warning and a Sign of Hope: The Two Truths of Noah's Ark

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "A esperança que supera o desespero")

Some years ago, a very good friend of mine, Rabbi Ariel Kleiner, and I led a study group together on the parashah with midrash and art in my living room. In only the second week of the project, we encountered Parashat Noach, which tells the story of Noah's Ark and which we are reading again this week. Rabbi Ariel and I had radically different understandings of how the biblical text related to contemporary reality. For me, focusing on the Divine decision to destroy the world through a flood, this was a warning to our society of how the irresponsible behaviour of one generation had led the planet to its near-destruction; for him, focusing on the end of the story, when the waters subsided and Noah, his family, and the animals came down from the ark, this was a story about hope, an example of how, even after the worst catastrophes, there is the possibility of reconstruction.

Very much in the spirit of rabbinic debates, the truth is that we were both right! This story from the Torah is as much about destruction as it is about reconstruction; it is a warning and also a sign of hope, and in both these aspects, profoundly necessary in our times.

“The earth had become corrupt before God and was filled with violence” [1] seems like a description of the reality in which we live, which brings us dangerously close to disasters, whether through the depletion of natural resources, the worsening of social and international conflicts, or our inability to demonstrate empathy for the situation of others when crisis situations demand coordinated action, be it the coronavirus or natural disasters. We have been losing our sense of responsibility towards the collective; environmental devastation breaks records every year, without us managing to slow down the speed at which we destroy natural resources. After some decades in which it seemed the world had learned a lesson from the tragedies of the first half of the 20th century and sought to curb radical nationalisms, neo-Nazi movements and other currents based on hatred of the “other”, including many antisemitic movements, have reappeared in various parts of the world. Liberal democracies, based on civil society and respect for institutions, also seem to be experiencing a deep crisis. The multilateral system of international relations, which sought to avoid new conflicts through cooperation between nations, is crumbling, and conflicts between the major powers are increasing. Seen from this perspective, our situation is desperate.

In Jewish tradition, however, despair gives way to the possibility of t’shuvah, the transformation of our conduct which makes possible our return to the best version of ourselves. Despite acknowledging our tendency to be seduced by our eyes and hearts, there is an inherent optimism in the Jewish worldview that we will reform our conduct and, in this process, help to transform the world. Rabbi Ariel was right: the story of the Flood does not end with the destruction of the world, but with its reconstruction and with the hope, brought by the dove, of a very different life. Thus, the Torah does not allow discouragement at the current state of affairs to lead us to give up: it did not permit it in Noah's generation, and it continues not to permit it in our own day.

The Torah reading cycle is just beginning, offering all of us a new opportunity to re-engage with the central text of our tradition and, through this encounter, to seek to transform the world into a just place for all.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Gen. 6:11

Dvar Torah: Bereshit and the Big Bang: Two Stories, One Wonder

I want to start with a confession. I am terrible at putting together flat-pack furniture. You know the kind I mean, from those stores that require you to assemble the products you buy, like IKEA in the US and in Europe, or Mr Price Home and Decofurn Furniture here in South Africa. You visit the store or the website and you fall in love with a beautiful, sleek bookshelf. It looks so simple, so elegant. Then you get home with the box. You open it, and a cascade of wooden planks, mysterious plastic bits, and a bag containing approximately one million screws spills out. And then there’s the instruction manual. It’s all diagrams. No words. Just a series of pictures of a strangely serene-looking cartoon person performing impossible acts of engineering with a single Allen key.

This manual is the "how." It tells us, step-by-step, how to connect panel A to dowel B. It’s technical, precise, and utterly devoid of poetry. It does not, at any point, explain why we are building this bookshelf. It doesn't tell us about the dream of having a place for our books, about creating a home, about the warmth of a room filled with stories. The "how" is the instructions; the "why" is the home.

My frustration with a furniture manual is one thing, but our tradition has a much older, and far more profound, version of this very idea. A teaching from our sages in the Midrash, in Bereshit Rabbah, imagines how God created the world. It says that just as a human king would not build a palace from his own head, but would consult blueprints and plans, so too did God. The Midrash asks: what was God's blueprint? And it answers: "הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מַבִּיט בַּתּוֹרָה וּבוֹרֵא אֶת הָעוֹלָם" – "The Holy One, Blessed be [God], looked into the Torah and created the world."[1] For our Sages, the Torah was God’s instruction manual. It was the architectural plan for reality. I would like to offer a different take in today’s drashah: the Torah wasn’t the blueprint, it was the project brochure: back to our furniture assembly metaphor, it did not contain the image of how to put the pieces together, it gave meaning to a life in which that bookshelf was a part of. The tension between those who see Torah as blueprint or project brochure is not new and it has not yet been completely overcome.

And every year, when we turn back the scroll to the beginning, to Parashat B'reshit, we are back to that polemic. We read the opening words: "בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ" – "When God began to create heaven and earth,"[2] and for many of us, a tension immediately arises. We hold the Torah’s story in one hand, and in the other, we hold the story we learned in school: the Big Bang, the 13.8 billion years of cosmic expansion, evolution, natural selection.

One story speaks of six days. The other speaks of billions of years. One speaks of divine pronouncements—"Let there be light!"—and the other speaks of quantum fluctuations and genetic mutations. It can feel like we’re being asked to choose. It can feel like a battle, a war between science and faith.

But what if it isn’t a war at all? What if, like the furniture assembly manual and the dream of a home, they aren’t even trying to tell the same story? What if one is obsessed with the "how," and the other is dedicated to the "why?" As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks beautifully put it: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”[3] Just as science is the wrong tool to tell us what our purpose is, religion is the wrong tool to tell us how the universe was created.

The idea that science and religion are locked in a mortal combat is, as the Brazilian Jewish physicist Marcelo Gleiser, who teaches at Dartmouth College, puts it, "a fabricated war."[4] It’s a drama that we’ve created. Now, let’s be clear. There are sincere, deeply religious people who absolutely reject this idea. They believe the biblical narrative must be read as a literal scientific record. For them, the world was created in six 24-hour days, just a few thousand years ago. In this view, any evidence to the contrary—like dinosaur fossils and rocks that appear to be millions of years old—must be explained away. Some even go so far as to suggest that God may have planted those fossils to test our faith.[5] That is a path of faith. But it is not our path.

Our tradition has a long, proud history of embracing reason alongside faith. Science, at its best, is a magnificent, humbling, and awe-inspiring project. Its mission, to use Gleiser’s words, is to "explain the unknown with the known." It observes, it measures, it gathers data, and it builds a story of how the universe works. But religion’s mission is different. It seeks to "explain the unknown with the unknowable."[6] It addresses the questions that can’t be put in a test tube or observed through a telescope.

John Polkinghorne, who was both a brilliant quantum physicist and an Anglican priest, offers a beautiful analogy. He asks us to imagine a beautiful painting. A chemist could come along and analyze it. They could tell you the precise chemical composition of every pigment, the molecular structure of the canvas. They would give you a perfect, factual, and complete description of the painting's physical properties. But, as Polkinghorne says, they "would have missed the point of the painting.”[7] They could tell you how the painting is made, but they couldn't tell you why it is beautiful, why it moves your soul, what it means.

The Torah, in the opening chapter of Genesis, is not a scientific textbook. To read it as one is, with all due respect, to miss the point of the painting. Our sages understood this long before the Big Bang was a glimmer in an astronomer's eye. Maimonides, the great Rambam, writing over 800 years ago, insisted that the Torah was not a physics textbook. He argued that if a literal reading of the text contradicted established rational proof, then the Torah must be interpreted metaphorically.[8] For him, the question was never "Is the science right or is the Torah right?" The question was, "What is the Torah trying to teach us about God, about ourselves, and about the meaning of this world?"

So, what is the "why" of B'reshit?

First, it’s a radical declaration against a world of pagan chaos. The world of our ancestors was filled with capricious, warring gods who treated humanity as their playthings. The sun was a god. The moon was a god. The sea was a terrifying deity. Into this world, the Torah speaks a revolutionary message: there is one God, one source of everything, and the universe is not chaotic—it is orderly, intentional, and purposeful. The sun and moon are not gods to be worshipped; they are lamps, placed in the sky to give light. They have a job to do. The world is fundamentally, as God declares seven times, tov—it is good.

Second, it gives humanity a unique and dignified role. We are not cosmic accidents, not just clever apes clinging to a rock hurtling through space. The Torah tells us we are created B'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. And that statement applies to every single human being, without exception. This isn’t just a beautiful poetic idea; it is a profound ethical demand. It gives us an immense responsibility for how we treat other people. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: "You cannot worship God and then look at a human being, created by God in God's own image, as if he or she were an animal.”[9] But our purpose is not just ethical, it is spiritual. B'tzelem Elohim means we are partners with God in creation, the part of the universe that can look back in wonder, ask "why?".

But even this comes with a "shadow side," as Polkinghorne calls it. The very processes that allow for freedom and novelty in the universe also allow for brokenness and pain. He explains that if God created a world with the freedom to "make itself"—a beautiful description of evolution—then that same system allows for things to go wrong. The same process of genetic mutation that allows for incredible diversity and adaptation is the same process that can lead to cancer. The same tectonic plates whose movement replenishes the surface of our planet can also slip and cause devastating earthquakes. This doesn’t make God incompetent; it is the necessary cost of a world with genuine freedom, a world that is not a divine puppet show.[10]

And finally, at the end of this biblical Creation story, we get an additional "why". After six "days" of creative work, God rests. God creates Shabbat. Think about this. A star doesn't stop shining to appreciate its own light. A galaxy doesn't pause its spinning to reflect on its beauty. Only humanity, created in the image of God, is invited to stop, to rest, to bless, and to infuse the universe with holiness and in meaning. Shabbat adds new layers of “why” — we stop to celebrate that we are partners with God in the creation of the world. It is the moment we stop tinkering with the "how" of the world and simply experience its "why"—its goodness, its beauty, its sacredness.

The story of the 13.8-billion-year unfolding of the cosmos is an incredible story. It is a scientific poem of immense grandeur, and we should embrace it and teach it to our children. It fills me with awe. But it doesn't tell me why I am here. It doesn't tell me how to live. It doesn't tell me what my purpose is. It can’t. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

For that, we turn to our story, to B'reshit. We are not at war with science. We are in a dialogue with it. We bring our awe at the "how" and join it with our sacred story of "why." Because, as Marcelo Gleiser says, at their core, both the scientist and the person of faith are driven by the same impulse: a deep "relationship of wonder with the unknown," and a profound desire "to better understand who we are."

May this Shabbat give us the space to marvel at both stories, to see the intricate genius of the "how" all around us, and to feel, deep in our souls, the purpose and the meaning of "why."

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 1:1.
[2] Genesis 1:1.
[3] Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 2.
[4] https://www.fronteiras.com/leia/exibir/21-ideias-marcelo-gleiser-e-a-complementaridade-entre-religiao-e-ciencia
[5] This refers to the "Omphalos hypothesis," famously proposed by Philip Henry Gosse in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: John Van Voorst, 1857), which argued that the fossil record was created by God to give the earth the appearance of age.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N0pE6H-W8
[7] https://open.spotify.com/episode/46AgVZTyYny0zJYA1PQL9W
[8] Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Part 2, Chapter 25.
[9] Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Religion and Race," in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 86.
[10] https://open.spotify.com/episode/46AgVZTyYny0zJYA1PQL9W
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N0pE6H-W8

In the Divine Image: Judaism's Foundation for Human Rights

 (A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Bebendo na fonte judaica dos Direitos Humanos")

It was John Locke who first defined the concept of ‘human rights’, a set of fundamental protections to which all human beings are entitled. Although the Hebrew term ‘זְכוּיוֹת הָאָדָם’, z’khuyot ha-adam, is even more recent as a label for this idea, Judaism had already developed the notion of the inalienable dignity of every human being long before John Locke formulated his theory.

In the classical Jewish perspective, the creation of the human being ‘in the Divine image’, an idea developed in this week’s parashah, Bereshit, grounds the concept that every human figure is endowed with dignity and deserving of respect. Nahum Sarna writes that the likeness of man to God reveals the infinite value of a human being and affirms the inviolability of the human person.[1] The same author notes that in other cultures it was not uncommon for the king alone to be considered created ‘in the Divine image’, whereas only in the Jewish tradition is this idea universalised, making every human being a reflection of God’s image. This concept, which might have remained an interesting curiosity without practical application, receives concrete implementation already in the next parashah, Noach, when, after the Flood, God prohibits murder, stating that ‘Whoever sheds the blood of a person, by a person shall that person’s blood be shed, for in the image of God humanity was made.’[2]

This fact, on its own, would already secure the centrality of these texts in constructing a Jewish view of human rights. Indeed, in rabbinic tradition, the expression ‘בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים’, b’tselem Elohim, ‘in the Divine image’, is used to refer to concepts that would later be included within the definition of ‘human rights’.

There is, however, an additional dimension in this week’s parashah that is not captured merely by the idea of creation in God’s image. During the process of Creation, every time God brings forth a new category of living beings, the category is expanded through the expression ‘לְמִינֵהוּ’, leminehu, ‘each according to its kind’. So it is with vegetation, seed-bearing plants, fruit trees, great sea creatures, all the living beings that swarm and fill the waters, domesticated animals, creeping things and wild animals.[3] When God created adam, the first human being, however, the expression ‘each according to its kind’ was not used. Our sages understood that the absence of this phrase indicated that all humanity belongs to the same kind, even though we display different physical characteristics.

A midrash, noticing that people born in different parts of the globe have different skin colours, relates that, when creating the first human, God gathered soils of different colours from the four corners of the earth. In this way, when a person dies, the soil of that place cannot say, ‘Return to the place from which you came, since your soil does not belong here.’ ‘On the contrary,’ says this midrash. ‘The human being belongs to every place to which they go, and to there they may return.’[4] What a powerful expression of a worldview that recognises the humanity of every person and the dignity of the stranger, wherever that person may be found.

Today, however, there are not a few circles in which the idea of human rights is presented in opposition to a worldview based on biblical values, in which racism and prejudice are given religious legitimacy. May we, on this first Shabbat of the Torah reading cycle of 5786, recover Jewish religious perspectives that are deeply committed to the dignity of every human being, and commit ourselves to public policies that give expression to this value.

Shabbat Shalom,

[1] Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, p. 12.
[2] Gen. 9:6.
[3] Gen. 1:11, 21, 24–25.
[4] Yalkut Shimoni, Bereshit 1:13.

Dvar Torah: Tohu va’vohu to simchah: Creating light in a world of flux | Simchat Torah 5786

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Today, I think we are all being asked to have a first-rate heart.

If you are anything like me, your feeling today is… complicated. We are here to celebrate Simchat Torah, the moment of greatest joy in our calendar. It is a day for unbridled happiness, for dancing with the Torah, for celebrating the unending cycle of our story. And there is real joy. Today we celebrate the return of all living hostages held by Hamas for agonizing 738 days. It is a moment of light we have prayed for, a cause for genuine, heartfelt Shehecheyanu.

And yet. How can we not feel the shadow? Today is a day of memory, the second yartzeit, the second Jewish anniversary of a horror that tore a hole in our world and in our hearts. We hold the joy of return alongside the searing pain for those we lost, and the collective trauma of a nation that is not yet whole.

So, how are we supposed to feel? Are we meant to put the grief in a box and force ourselves to dance? This tension feels unbearable. The demand to simultaneously hold so much grief in our hearts and be happy is, quite often, too much.

But I want to suggest today that this feeling of living in the simultaneous realities of joy and pain is not a modern confusion to be solved, but a sacred inheritance to be embraced. It is the very essence of these holy days of Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. We are not doing it wrong. We are doing it exactly as our tradition taught us.

This holiday has duality built into its DNA. The great medieval commentator, Rashi, in his note on a verse in Leviticus that talks about Sukkot and Shmini Atzeret[1], captures the bitter-sweetness of this day with a beautiful parable. He imagines God as a king who has feasted with his children for seven days. As they prepare to leave, the king says, "קָשָׁה עָלַי פְּרֵדַתְכֶם”, "Your departure is difficult for me. Please, stay with me for just one more day." Think about that image. The great party is over. The crowds are gone. There is a sadness in the departure, a feeling of an ending. But in that sadness, there is a pull for one last, intimate moment of connection. It is both an ending and a precious extension. It is joy laced with the melancholy of parting.

This duality is also written directly into our Torah service today. In a few moments, we will reach the very end of the scroll. We will read of the death of Moshe, the greatest leader and prophet we have ever known. Midrash Tanchuma on the portion V’Zot haBerachah does not soften this blow. It describes Moshe’s final moments with heartbreaking detail: a leader who dedicated his entire life to bringing his people to the promised land, only to be told he can see it, but never enter. It is a moment of profound, national grief. It is an ending steeped in tragedy.

In response, we do not sit in mourning or reflect in silence. Instead, without pausing even for a breath, we roll the Torah back to its beginning (in our case, we will stake a second scroll). From the death of Moshe, we leap to the birth of the universe. From "in the sight of all Israel," we go to "In the beginning, God created…"

Why is this movement necessary? Sefer Yetzira teaches that the end is bound up with the beginning, and the beginning with the end. It is not a straight line from sorrow to joy, but a circle. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that the Torah ends with a lamed and begins with a bet, spelling lev, the heart, when we join the end with the beginning. Our tradition physically forces the moment of greatest loss to touch the moment of greatest creation. It commands us to hold both realities—endings and beginnings, grief and hope, together in one heart.

This is the spiritual work of our time. We are being asked to live in that lev.

The father of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, argued that this type of tension is core to the human condition. In his famous essay, Majesty and Humility,[2] he describes how we constantly oscillate between feeling powerful, creative and in control—and feeling frail, humbled and utterly dependent. We are, he taught, both at once. Today, we feel this with every fibre of our being. The majesty of our survival, our traditions, our resilience, our people dancing in shuls around the world. And the profound humility of our vulnerability, our pain, our brokenness. We do not have to choose which one is true. Both are true.

To demand anything else is to ask for a faith that is not fit for the world we live in. A robust, living faith makes space for the mess, for the contradictions, for the tears that fall as we sing. Today, our faith asks us to pay attention to everything, to the light and to the darkness.

And so, we begin again. Creation emerges from tohu va’vohu, a swirling chaos. A beginning is an act of courage, bringing light and order out of the mess.

That is our task. We are not starting again from a place of quiet and calm. We are being asked to begin again in the middle of the tohu va’vohu of our own time. We must create our future not in denial of the chaos, but directly from it.

Which brings us to the dancing. The dancing of Simchat Torah is not an expression of simple happiness. It is a declaration of faith. It is our ultimate act of defiance. Our enemies wished to write an ending to our story on October 7th. They brought darkness and chaos. And our response? We gather. We remember our greatest loss. We acknowledge our pain. And then, we pick up our story, our Torah, we hold it close, and we dance. We dance for the hostages who are home. We dance in memory of those who can no longer dance with us. We dance to declare, to the world and to ourselves, that the Jewish story, the story of life, will not have an ending written for it by our enemies.

So today, I ask you to embrace the impossible complexity of this moment. Let your heart be big enough to hold it all. Let the joy be real. Let the grief be real. Hold them together in the lev that connects the end to the beginning. And in that unstable, uncomfortable, holy space, let us find the strength to create, to begin again, and to dance.

Chazak, Chazak, v’Nitzchazek. From strength, to strength, may we all be strengthened. Amen.

[1] Lev. 23:36.

[2] https://traditiononline.org/majesty-and-humility/

Dvar Torah: The Courage to Mend

I want you to think, for a moment, about the last two years. Not about the headlines or the politics, but about the feeling in your own body. For two years, since the terrible attacks of October 7th, many of us have been living in a state of heightened alert. Psychologists call it the ‘fight or flight’ response. It is a state of chronic stress where our nervous systems are primed for threat. We become quicker to anger, faster to defend, our words sharpened into weapons before we have even had a chance to think.

Here at Bet David, we are a diverse community. Over these two years, each one of us has held and developed different positions and opinions regarding the conflict. Our anxieties have pulled us in different directions. But the one thing most of us have shared is that feeling of stress, that readiness to fight for what we believe, to protect what we hold dear. It has been exhausting. It has created distance between friends, tension across family tables, and cracks in relationships we once thought were solid.

But now, something is shifting. I fear to be too optimistic, but it seems there is a real, tangible prospect of a lasting peace on the horizon, and with it, the air is beginning to change. The constant alarm bell in our minds is quieting just a little. And this presents us with a new, and perhaps even harder, question. The question is no longer, ‘How do we fight?’. The question is now, ‘How do we rebuild?’. Not just the physical rebuilding of shattered towns and cities in Israel and in Gaza, but the delicate, intimate rebuilding of fractured relationships right here, in our own lives.

Our ancestors, standing at the foot of Mount Sinai in this week’s parashah, knew this moment. They were standing amidst the ruins of a shattered certainty. They had just committed the ultimate betrayal with the Golden Calf. In response, Moshe, in a fury of grief and rage, smashed the first set of tablets. Those tablets, the text tells us, were “the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.” They were a top-down, pristine revelation. But they were brittle. They could not survive their first contact with messy, flawed, complicated human reality. They shattered.

And in the aftermath of that shattering, what does God command? Does God create another Divine-only set? No. The process for the second chance is entirely different. God says to Moshe, “Pesal lekha, Carve for yourself two tablets of stone like the first.” Moshe, the human being, must hew the raw material. He has to do the difficult, physical work of preparing the vessel. Only then will God write the words.

This is the Torah’s model for repair. It is not a magical return to an unbroken, pristine past. It is a partnership. The second covenant, the second chance, is stronger and more resilient precisely because it has human effort, human struggle, and the memory of failure baked into it from the very start. It is made for the real world.

This idea, that what is repaired can be even more precious than what was never broken, is captured with breathtaking beauty by the late poet, Chana Bloch, in her poem, “The Joins,” which I have already quoted in another drashah a few weeks ago, when we read about the shattering of the tablets in the book of D’varim, Deuteronomy. The poem introduces us to the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. The philosophy is that the breakage and repair are part of the history of an object, not something to hide. The cracks are illuminated, turned into a source of beauty. The “scar tissue is visible history,” and it is magnificent. She writes:

What's between us

seems flexible as the webbing

between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible but isn’t;

what's between us

is made of clay

like any cup on the shelf.

It shatters easily. Repair

becomes the task.

We glue the wounded edges

with tentative fingers.

Scar tissue is visible history

and the cup is precious to us

because

we saved it.

In the art of kintsugi

a potter repairing a broken cup

would sprinkle the resin

with powdered gold.

Sometimes the joins

are so exquisite

they say the potter

may have broken the cup

just so he could mend it. [1]

“Repair becomes the task.” That is where we are now. For two years, our task was to endure. Now, repair becomes the task. Like Bloch’s cup, the relationships in our lives are made of clay. Many have developed cracks under the immense pressure. Some have shattered. And now, with tentative fingers, we are being asked to glue the wounded edges.

This is our challenge today. Can we become artisans of kintsugi? This is not a theoretical question. This difficult, sacred work is happening right now. I was listening recently to a Ha'aretz podcast about a powerful short documentary called The Path Forward. [2] The film showcases duos of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel who refuse to succumb to the cycle of hatred. It features people like Maoz Inon, whose parents were murdered on October 7th, yet who immediately chose to channel his grief into building bridges with Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah. Aziz’s own brother died of internal injuries after being released from an Israeli jail, where he had been detained for a year for stone-throwing.

These are people who have every reason to retreat into their pain, to build walls of anger. Instead, they are choosing to become artisans of repair. Their work sends a powerful message to us, right here. If they, who have suffered the ultimate loss, can reach across that immense divide to begin gluing the wounded edges, then surely, we can find the courage to do the same, each of us in our own context. Can we, like Moshe, take on the hard work of carving the stone, of initiating the difficult conversations, of reaching out across the divides that have grown between us and those to whom we were once close?

And can we find the powdered gold to sprinkle on the joins? In our tradition, that gold has many names, quite a few of them named directly in this week’s reading. They are known as the Thirteen Attributes of Divine Mercy, and you may recall them, since they were repeated multiple times during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: El Rachum (compassionate God), ve Chanun (gracious), Erech Apayim (slow to anger), verav chessed (abundant in kindness), veEmet (and truth), notzer chesed la-alafim (keeping kindness to the thousandth generation), nosse avon va-fesha (forgiving iniquity, transgression), ve-chata ve-nake (and cleansing sin). [3] These are not abstractions. They are a curriculum for how to mend. Compassion in tone. Patience in timing. Kindness in assumption. Truth that does not flatten people. Forgiveness that does not erase accountability. The gold is also in acknowledging the shared pain of the last two years, even with people with whom we have disagreed on fundamental aspects of what was happening.

This Shabbat, we sit in our sukkah, a structure that is, by design, fragile. The sukkah reminds us, as Chana Bloch’s poem does, that what is most sacred is often what is most breakable. But it does not leave us there. This week’s Torah reading gives us the blueprint for what comes next.

Our task is not to pretend the cracks do not exist. It is not to erase the painful history of these past two years. Our task is to find the courage of Moshe and the vision of the kintsugi artist: to see in the breaks an opportunity, to illuminate our scars with the gold of compassion, and to build a second tablet, a renewed community, stronger and more beautiful precisely because we had the courage to mend it.

Mo’adim le-simcha. May we all be blessed with the strength for the sacred work of repair.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] https://www.versedaily.org/2015/thejoins.shtml

[2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/4dZj1h9wVYi1BZMDCVT1Yi?si=b9806fde36a543bf

[3] Ex. 34:6-7.

Hidden Face, Open Heart

This Shabbat finds us in a place of tender and complex memory. We are nestled between two solemn anniversaries of the 7th of October attacks: the secular date which has just passed, and the Jewish date which arrives on Simchat Torah, this coming Tuesday. For so many, the emotional landscape is still fragile. The trauma of that day remains close to the surface. Yet, two years later, as the slow and difficult work towards peace in Israel continues, the first hints of solace may finally be emerging.

It is into this very space of fragility and yearning that our Torah reading for Shabbat Chol haMoed Sukkot [1] speaks with uncanny power. The portion is set in the aftermath of another national trauma: the sin of the Golden Calf. The covenant is broken, the people are lost, and the relationship with God hangs by a thread. It is from this place of communal despair that Moshe cries out with a plea that echoes our own: “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” It is a cry for reassurance, for a sign that healing is possible after the shattering.

What follows is a beautiful and complex choreography, a Divine dance at the cleft of a rock. God’s response is a lesson in how we might recover from trauma. A full, direct view of God's “face”, a reality in which the pain is erased, is not possible. Instead, God offers a protected encounter with goodness. “I will place you in a cleft of the rock,” God says, “and I will shield you with My hand... you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen.” This is a model for finding solace. We cannot unsee the horrors of the past, but we can create safe spaces from which to witness glimpses of hope: the resilience of a community, the enduring strength of our people, and the courage to believe in peace even after such an immense trauma.

This brings us to the very meaning of the sukkah this year. As Rabbi Michal Shekel points out, this dialogue between Moshe and God occurs at a moment of supreme vulnerability [2]. The firmest walls are often the ones we build to protect our hearts. Sometimes, those walls isolate us. The sukkah proposes a different kind of shelter, thin yet held by presence, porous yet capable of hosting blessing.

Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, cited by Shekel, puts it beautifully, “Sukkot reminds us that ultimate security is found not within the walls of our home but in the presence of God and one another… The walls of our sukkot may make us vulnerable, but they make us available, too.” These fragile walls “help us understand that sometimes the walls we build to protect us serve instead to divide us.”

This Shabbat, let us see the sukkah as our communal cleft in the rock. It is our safe space to sit with our fragility, to honour our memories, and to be shielded as we look for signs of goodness passing by. It is where we can hold our sorrow and still allow the possibility of peace to be a balm on our aching hearts.

Mo'adim le-simcha and Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Exodus 33:12–34:26

[2] http://bit.ly/4h2bj73

Dvar Torah: Holding Safety and Spirit in Our Sukkah

Tonight we will step out of sturdy rooms into a shelter that welcomes the wind and the stars. Sukkot tells us to live, for one tender week, with a roof that lets the rain in and walls that can sway.

The Talmud asks a deceptively simple question, what does the Torah mean by “sukkot”? On Sukkah 11b we find two voices. Rabbi Eliezer teaches that the sukkot were the Ananei HaKavod, the clouds of glory that wrapped our ancestors in Divine care in the wilderness. Rabbi Akiva answers that they were sukkot mamash, real huts of wood and brush, built with human hands.

These two teachings give us a map for Sukkot. Rabbi Eliezer calls us to trust, to cultivate a spiritual life thick with awareness that we are held. Rabbi Akiva calls us to responsibility, to build structures that keep people safe, fed, warm, and seen. Spiritual well-being and physical security are not rivals. They belong together in this fragile little house.

If we listen to Rabbi Eliezer alone, we might drift into a faith so airy that it forgets bodies. We could speak beautifully about God’s presence and ignore the person shivering in the night. If we listen only to Rabbi Akiva, we might build perfect huts and lose the reason we built them. We could win every battle for survival and forget what survival is for.

Sukkot teaches the choreography between the two. The roof must be porous enough to see the heavens, yet thick enough to cast shade. We do not sleep entirely exposed, and we do not close ourselves off completely. The mitzvah itself encodes the balance.

So what is this week asking of us, here and now? First, to say clearly that the mere physical survival of the Jewish people is not enough. Our tradition calls us to sanctify life with justice, compassion, humility, and joy. A people that survives without practising its values has missed its own destination. The clouds of glory are not nostalgia. They are a demand that our communities become canopies of care, places where the lonely are welcomed, the anxious are comforted, and the powerful are reminded that strength is for service.

Second, to say with equal clarity that values cannot be lived when existence is under threat. Rabbi Akiva’s huts are not optional. We need safe homes and neighbourhoods, initiatives that protect the vulnerable, and the courage to defend human dignity. We also need the communal infrastructure that allows Jewish life to thrive, practical systems of security and safeguarding, networks of hesed and mental-health support. There is no Judaism without Jewish life, and there is no Jewish life worthy of the name without Judaism.

The pactice of shaking the four species helps us practise the same truth. We bring together species that grow in different terrains and hold different textures. None is complete on its own. Together they become a blessing. Bring heart and spine, courage and tenderness, skill and prayer. Bring Rabbi Akiva’s practicality and Rabbi Eliezer’s faith. Shake them in all directions, because holiness is not confined to a single point on the compass.

When we welcome ushpizin, guests of spirit and flesh, we repeat the lesson again. Avraham enters with hospitality. Miriam enters with song. Ruth enters with loyalty. Invite them all. Then invite the neighbour you barely know, the person you have not called, the person whose story is unlike yours. Real huts become clouds of glory when their doors are open.

This week, as we sit under this woven sky, let us choose a path that holds both truths. We will work for physical safety, for all who dwell with us. We will also hold fast to a Judaism that heals, elevates, and critiques, a Judaism that remembers the stranger and refuses to trade conscience for comfort. We will build huts, and we will weave clouds.

May our sukkah steady our hands and widen our hearts. May God spread over us the sukkat shalom, the shelter of peace. And may the joy of this festival give us strength to protect life, and the wisdom to fill that life with meaning.

Chag sameach.