Dvar Torah: Human-Like, Human-Light | Rosh haShanah 5787

There is a chassidic teaching attributed to Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa according to which every person should have two pockets, with a slip of paper in each, so that they may draw upon one or the other as circumstances require. When sad or discouraged, one should reach into the right-hand pocket and find the words, “For my sake the world was created.” But when feeling joyful and powerful, one should reach into the left-hand pocket and find the words, “I am but dust and ashes.” Many, however, make the mistake of taking from the opposite pocket to the one they truly need.[1]

I love that last line because it rings personally true. When I am down, I tend to seek readings and songs that echo my sadness and end up bringing me further down. When I am happy, I seek activities that express that expansive state of mind and, in turn, make me happier. We do not always reach for what is good for us.

Members of Bet David know that I am a heavy user of artificial intelligence. Although most of my experience with AI has been benign and very useful, reports about increasingly autonomous systems behaving in ways their designers did not intend have been personally unsettling.[2] What happens when systems we build begin to act in ways we did not anticipate?

If I followed Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s advice, perhaps I should have responded by switching off the computer and going for a hike. Instead, I did the opposite. I started watching stories about technology taking over from humanity: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Person of Interest, and finally Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film describing a dystopian reality in the year 2026.[3]

Metropolis is much older than the other films in that list, but it ended up being the one that affected me most. It imagines a city in which the wealthy live above ground while workers descend below ground to keep its machinery running. The workers move in synchronised patterns, their bodies bending to the rhythm of machines. Then a machine is given the appearance of Maria, a human woman. What disturbed me was the movement in both directions. The machine is made more human while, at the same time, some human beings are made machine-like and perceived as less than human.

That feels quite contemporary. We are becoming good at making machines resemble human beings. They speak our languages, imitate our styles, reason with us, produce images and respond in ways that can feel astonishingly personal. Last month, Beijing hosted the second World Humanoid Robot Games, in which a humanoid robot ran the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, almost a second faster than Usain Bolt’s human world record.[4] In the AI world, I keep reading reports of adults using AI as companions, sometimes romantically, and of teenagers turning to these systems for serious conversations they might once have had with human friends.[5]

To some people these are welcome technological advances; to others, they are signs that technology needs to be reined in. In July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies signed a statement asking the United States government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.[6] Yesterday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published an essay calling for the development of frontier AI to slow down. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind publicly backed the direction of his proposals.[7] That debate has caught a great deal of attention.

At the same time, and this does not seem to be spoken about with the same urgency, some human beings are increasingly treated as though their humanity carried less weight than ours. Undocumented migrants, demographic threats, burdens, enemies, collateral damage: the vocabulary changes, but the moral move is similar. We know too well where the idea that some human beings deserve less dignity can lead, and we swore that we would never allow it to happen again.

In today’s Torah reading, God says: “Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness.” The Torah goes on to insist: “God created Adam in the divine image; in the image of God, God created him; male and female, God created them.”[8]

Before Adam has done anything, before Adam has demonstrated intelligence, morality or usefulness, Torah gives humanity its status: tzelem Elohim, the image of God. Precisely what that means has always been open to debate, but the idea of being created in the Divine image stands at the core of Judaism’s understanding of human dignity.[9]

Prof. Nahum Sarna z”l, a Bible scholar at Brandeis University, pointed out how radical that language is. In the ancient world, kings could be described as the image or likeness of a god. B’reshit takes that royal language and democratises it.[9] Not one king, one class or one nation, but humanity is created in the divine image. Human dignity is therefore not something we earn. It is not a prize given to those who meet the correct standard of intelligence, civilisation, morality, citizenship or usefulness. B’reshit makes a different claim: human worth does not depend on anything else we can say about a person.

The Torah does not promise that human beings will show exemplary behaviour. One midrash imagines the angels debating whether humanity should be created at all. Kindness says yes. Truth says no, because human beings are full of lies. Justice says yes. Peace says no, because human beings are full of conflict. While the angels are still arguing, God creates Adam.[11] The Torah knows what human beings are capable of and still insists on tzelem Elohim. Human dignity is not revoked when a person disappoints us, frightens us, angers us or belongs to a people we have learnt not to care about.

Rabbi Akiva famously taught that “וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ”, “Love your neighbour as yourself” is the great principle of the Torah. Ben Azzai disagreed, saying that an even greater principle is the verse: “This is the record of Adam’s line. When God created Adam, in the likeness of God he was made; male and female [God] created them. And when they were created, [God] blessed them and called them Adam.”[10]

Why greater? One possibility is that “neighbour” can always be narrowed. The Hebrew term, רֵעַ/re’a, has often been interpreted as referring particularly to those within one’s own group. But Adam comes before every narrower identity. Before Jew and non-Jew, before citizen and foreigner, before black and white, there is Adam. Ben Azzai’s principle leaves us no category of human being whose dignity begins at a lower level.

There are no degrees of tzelem Elohim. B'reshit does not say that some people bear more of the divine image than others. Human beings may differ enormously in power, ability, character, behaviour and circumstance, but none of those differences creates a scale of humanity on which some lives count for more and others for less.

We are asking increasingly sophisticated questions about machines: whether they can think, create, deceive or feel, and at what point something sufficiently human-like might deserve moral consideration. Those are serious questions. But perhaps the more urgent question is whether we can still recognise the full humanity of people who are already human.

Perhaps that is where Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two pockets return. When we think about the technological power we are acquiring, perhaps we need the pocket that says, “I am but dust and ashes.” We need humility about what we understand, what we control and what we ought to create.

But what if the other pocket was never meant only for ourselves? When I look at another human being, especially someone whom fear, anger or politics have taught me to value less, I may need to reach into that pocket on their behalf and remind myself: “For your sake, too, the world was created.”

If another person is created b’tzelem Elohim, then their suffering cannot simply become less important because it is inconvenient to me. Their life cannot become cheaper because they are distant from me. Their fear does not become less real because I fear them. Their children do not become less precious because I do not know their names. Dehumanisation works by getting us accustomed to suffering that would horrify us if it happened to people we recognised as fully our own. Eventually, the unequal distribution of sympathy begins to feel natural.

The claim of B’reshit is that it is not natural. Every human life begins with the same declaration. B’tzelem Elohim bara oto: in the image of God, God created the human being. There is no footnote saying “to different degrees”. So the discipline I want to take from this Torah reading has to do with attention. I want to notice the moments when I begin to care less because of who the person is. When another person’s humiliation seems acceptable, when their suffering feels remote, when their death becomes a statistic, that is when tzelem Elohim is supposed to interrupt me.

When the shofar sounds this morning, it will interrupt us. It stops the service, it stops whatever argument we are having in our own heads, and it asks nothing of us except that we listen to it. And after it sounds we say hayom harat olam, “today the world is conceived”, and then hayom ya’amid bamishpat kol yetzurei olamim, “today all the creatures of every world stand in judgement.” Every creature of every world, standing together this morning, and not one of them standing lower than another.

On a day in which we read the story about the creation of the world, that is the world we are invited to create.

Shanah Tovah

[1] Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, via Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim. 

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/podcasts/the-daily/ai-openai-hugging-face-rogue-model.html; https://www.instagram.com/reels/DdGVDQ0gD3p/; https://www.instagram.com/p/DdDOqn0jJDC

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFdvbf9bomM

[4] https://www.reuters.com/sports/robot-olympics-ends-with-humanoids-864-second-100m-nearly-second-faster-than-2026-08-26/

[5] https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/talk-trust-and-trade-offs-how-and-why-teens-use-ai-companions.

[6] https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/technology/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-slowdown.html.

[8] Genesis 1:26–27.

[9] Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, commentary to Genesis 1:26–27.

[10] Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9:4, commenting on Leviticus 19:18 and Genesis 5:1–2.

[11] Bereshit Rabbah 8:5.

Dvar Torah: When Certainty Blinds Us | Rosh haShanah 5787

Somewhere on the way up the mountain, the boy notices that something is missing. He is carrying the wood his father tied to his back, and his father walks beside him with the fire and the knife, and since they left the others at the foot of the hill neither of them has said a word. “Father,” the boy says at last, and the father answers, “Hineni, here I am, my son.” The boy looks at what they are carrying and asks, “We have the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” The father does not slow his pace. He tells his son that God will see to the lamb, and the two of them walk on together, as they have been walking all morning. The boy does not ask again and the father offers nothing more, so the question climbs the mountain with them unanswered, and they keep walking side by side, the son who has seen that something is wrong and the father who cannot see past his own certainty. This is the same father who once argued with God over the fate of a city of strangers, and who now climbs towards the sacrifice of his own son without a single question. They go on doing what they have been doing, step after step, until the knife is already in the father’s hand.

At the very last moment a voice calls out to him, and it calls him by name, twice: “Avraham, Avraham.” He answers with the word he has already spoken twice in this story, hineni, here I am. He said it first when God called him and gave him the command, and again on the path, when his son said “Father” and waited to be heard. Now he says it a third time, and something in him wakes, as though from a trance. He stops and looks at the place where he is standing. On the way there he had lifted his eyes and seen only where he was going. Now he lifts them again and sees what has been there all along: caught by its horns in a thicket, a ram.

The root for seeing runs through the story five times, from the place Avraham sees from afar to the name he gives the mountain afterwards, a name meaning that God sees. A midrash in B’reshit Rabbah, the classical rabbinic collection of interpretations of Genesis, relates that the angels who watched the father bind his son wept, and their tears fell into the eyes of the boy lying on the altar beneath them, causing him to become blind later in life. Another midrash in the same collection claims that Yitzchak, bound and looking upwards, saw the Divine Presence, and God, unwilling to take the life of Avraham’s son, decreed instead that his eyes would dim when he grew old. Both versions place the beginning of the son’s blindness on the altar to which the father’s certainty had brought him. The boy, who was the only one on that mountain able to notice that something was missing, carried a darkness from that morning into the rest of his life, and the midrash leaves us to wonder whether this is how blindness passes from one generation to the next, from those who could not see to those who had to lie still beneath their certainty.

Psychologists who study how people pursue their goals have found that a strong commitment to one aim can push competing aims out of awareness, so that the more firmly we hold on to the first, the harder it becomes even to bring the others to mind. They call this “goal shielding.” Once the father had fixed himself on obedience, protecting his child or questioning his own understanding of the command may simply have stopped occurring to him. A related finding has been called “inattentional blindness.” In a well-known experiment, people who were asked to count the passes of a basketball in a short video were shown a person in a gorilla costume walking through the middle of the scene, and about half of them never noticed it. Their eyes worked perfectly well, but with their attention given over to counting, what walked across the screen never reached them, much as the ram stood in the thicket for as long as the father’s attention stayed fixed on the summit. None of this is a failing of bad people or of one side. It is what devotion does to attention. The more a cause matters to us, and the more of ourselves we have invested in it, the harder it becomes even to see, let alone register, whatever does not fit the story we are carrying up the mountain.

What finally broke Avraham’s trance came from outside him. A voice he had not expected called his name, and he was able to answer it. Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, a dear former teacher, has described genuine pluralism as a willingness to leave open the possibility of being transformed by the encounter with someone different, to the point of being persuaded by an argument we did not accept before. By that measure most of our disagreements are not pluralistic encounters at all. We listen to the people we disagree with the way a chess player watches an opponent, attentive only to the next move we will need to counter, and we leave every conversation holding exactly the positions we brought into it. We know this habit well enough from arguments about politics and sports, and it becomes most entrenched when the subject is the one closest to our identity. For many of us in this room, that subject became Israel in the past few years.

The debate about Israel, both inside and outside the Jewish world, has become a case study in goal shielding and inattentional blindness. Many who march against Israel in the name of justice do not register the moment a chant about Israel becomes an attack on Jews, or when the target of a demonstration moves from an embassy to a synagogue or a Jewish school. Earlier this year Roedean cancelled a tennis match against King David, and in a recorded call its head described the problem as a “Jewish day school issue.” The school later acknowledged that the decision had been discriminatory and apologised, yet some commentators still hurried to defend the cancellation as legitimate political protest, unable to see that children had been turned away from a tennis court because they were Jewish. The commitment to a single cause has made it possible for people who would never excuse violence against civilians anywhere else to describe the murder of babies and elderly people in their homes on 7 October, documented in detail and in many cases filmed by the killers themselves, as resistance to occupation, and to walk past the hostages, the living and the dead, as if they were not part of the picture at all. None of this is hidden. It is right there on the screen, but for those whose attention is fully given over to counting the passes of one side, it is simply not there.

It would be comfortable to stop here, and many of us would leave this morning feeling that the blindness belongs to other people. Many of us have lived these years in mourning and in fear, waiting more than two years for the last of the hostages to come home and watching hatred of Jews grow all over the world, including here in South Africa. Some of us have spent them defending ourselves at work and online more often than we ever imagined we would. Our commitment to Israel’s safety is a deep one, and it has a place in the Jewish tradition that I would never want to diminish. But the same mechanism that prevents those who march against Israel from seeing the evidence in front of their eyes works inside our own community, and it works precisely because we love Israel. 

Some of the criticism aimed at Israel in these years has been antisemitic and some has not, and too often we have not stopped to tell the difference, meeting criticism of decisions taken by the Israeli government with the charge of antisemitism before we had heard it out. In doing so we have worn down the one word we most need right now. At a time when hatred of Jews is rising dangerously around the world, our warnings are heard by many as one more cry of wolf, and when the wolf is real, fewer and fewer people believe us. During the war, when reports of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza reached us, many of us dismissed them as a whole. Some of the images that circulated were indeed mislabelled or misleading, and it was right to say so, but the hunger beneath them was real, and when the questions about it reached us, many of us answered the way the father answered his son, that it would all be seen to, and kept walking. We speak readily, as we should, about Palestinian violence against Israelis in the West Bank, while violence carried out by settlers against Palestinian civilians there is something many in our community prefer not to speak about at all, even though it is reported regularly in the Israeli press and condemned by Israelis themselves. The danger lies in how our commitment can push aside other commitments that are just as Jewish, among them the obligation to see the suffering of the stranger and to recognise when those acting in our name have done wrong.

Each camp sees the world through its own blinders, attending closely to every fact that confirms its commitment and letting the rest pass by unseen, and each gathers in spaces where only its own perspective is spoken aloud and those who hold another are regarded with contempt. This is not a description of somewhere else. Over the past months I have received messages from members of this congregation, some of them among our most active, who told me that they do not feel safe expressing here what they really think about Israel, because their views differ from what they perceive to be the consensus in this room. They are still coming to services, still sitting beside us, and they have stopped saying what they see. If people who love Israel feel they must hide that love, something has gone wrong, and if people who are deeply troubled by the actions of the Israeli government feel they must hide those concerns, something has gone wrong as well. It is easier to draw strength from confirming our positions to one another again and again, and perhaps from not having to sit with the people who would challenge them. But the hard truth is that our community could grow stronger through honest disagreement, and from allowing each of us to be fully seen in all we are and all we believe.

A survey of American Jews carried out last year for the Jewish Federations of North America found that more than eight in ten of those aged seventy-five and over agree that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, while among those under forty-five fewer than half say the same. A smaller study by For the Sake of Argument, an organisation that runs dialogue programmes about Israel, listened to some thirty young American Jews who have come to reject Zionism. Most had grown up in a Jewish education with Israel at its centre, many of them in day schools, Zionist summer camps and Israel programmes, and several had tried to bring their questions to a rabbi and been shown the door. Whether they are right is a question worth arguing about, and the story on the mountain asks something else: what becomes of the one who looked at what was being carried, asked where the lamb was, and was told, in one form or another, that God would see to it. Some of these young people have walked away from the mountain altogether. Others are still among us, young people in our own families and our own community who carry the certainties they were handed the way the boy carried the wood on his back and keep their questions to themselves; one of the voices in that study describes going to synagogue and learning “how to swallow, how to stay silent.” Another said that their parents do not realise “how sad I am that I am no longer a Zionist.” Some families in this room may know that sadness from one side of the table or the other, and some of the silence in our homes is an attempt to protect the people we love from it.

The opposite blindness exists as well. I know of Jewish communities where criticism of Israel’s conduct has hardened into hostility towards anything connected with Israel or Zionism, where the trauma of the massacre and of the hostages has gone unacknowledged, where Yom haZikaron and Yom haAtzmaut are no longer marked, and where the Israeli flag is a forbidden item. These spaces have achieved their own uniformity by exclusion, and the young Jews who love Israel and want to argue with it from within find no place in them either. Whichever direction a community narrows in, those who feel they cannot be seen as they fully are become the ones who stop speaking, and eventually the ones who leave.

Only after the voice had called his name and he had answered hineni did Avraham lift his eyes, vayisa Avraham et einav, and see the ram that had been caught in the thicket for as long as he had been climbing. In a few minutes we will hear the horn of that ram. The Talmud imagines God asking Israel to sound a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah in memory of the binding of Yitzchak, and Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher and legal authority, heard in the shofar a call to sleepers to wake from their sleep. The same God who commands the sacrifice at the beginning of the chapter is the God whose messenger stops it at the end, and the story leaves us asking whether on that mountain God also came to see something differently. Which voices have I already decided are not worth hearing, and which questions, asked by someone sitting beside me, have I answered before I really listened? If even the certainty of that command could be revisited, the question for each of us this morning is which of the voices we have silenced we might now decide to hear and answer with hineni. When Avraham answered hineni, he did not yet know what the voice would ask of him. To answer it to one another is to be present first, before we know where the conversation will take us.

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah!

[1] Genesis 22:4, 22:8, 22:13, 22:14.

[2] B’reshit Rabbah 65:10, on Genesis 27:1. 

[3] https://rabino.link/ubefzo

[4] https://rabino.link/u8x41a

[5] https://rabino.link/2mtkrs

[6] https://rabino.link/i2lf3c

[7] https://rabino.link/3j9uj0

[8] Genesis 22:13.

[9] Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 16a.

[10] Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot T’shuvah 3:4.

Dvar Torah: The Bridge is Narrow | Rosh haShannah 5787

I am completely obsessed with podcasts. I listen to at least four episodes a day, mostly published in Brazil, the United States and Israel. I have still not found an excellent South African one about local news and politics, and if you have a suggestion I would like to hear it over brocha. A few years ago one of those podcasts gave me a story that has stayed with me ever since.

It was an episode of The Daily, from the New York Times.[1] It told the story of Ella Maners, a girl in Nashville who had just turned nine. Ella has OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and when the interviewer asks what frightens her, the list comes out fast and without embarrassment: being sick, tornadoes, fires, Windex, monsters, going upstairs on her own. The two at the top are vomiting and tornadoes, and the tornado siren for her whole neighbourhood stands next to her house. Her mother, Katie, explains something about the illness that most of us get wrong. We picture the compulsions, the hand-washing and the checking of locks. Ella's compulsion was avoidance. She would do almost anything to stay away from a situation in which the thing she feared might happen.

The day Katie understood the size of it, she pulled up in the carpool queue at school and it was the teacher, rather than Ella, who walked towards the car. Ella was on the floor of her classroom, knees against her chest, arms around herself, saying that if she stood up she was going to be sick. Katie says there was nothing she could say. "You are going to be all right." "You are not going to be sick." None of it reached her, and she ended up lifting her daughter off the floor and carrying her to the car. What she learnt later is that the reassurance had not simply failed to work. It had been feeding the thing it was meant to settle. Then the school ran a routine tornado drill on a cold afternoon, and Ella was wearing two thick coats, and the siren went, and the children were made to duck their heads in the bathroom, and she was sick. Her two worst fears arrived together that day. Everything the adults had promised her turned out to be untrue, and she found that out in front of her class.

A week at Fear Facers, a day camp run by the University of Florida in Gainesville, started to change that. There Ella gave her OCD a name, Ocie, and a shape, a small blue bubble in her head, blue because blue is her favourite colour. And she was taught to invert the sentence she had been using all her life. When Ocie started up, "you are going to get sick, you are going to get sick," she had always answered, "I'm not going to get sick," and that answer was the fuel. What she was taught to answer instead was: "yes, I am. Yes, I am. Yes, I am." Ocie, in her telling, gives up and complains that it isn't fair. Then they exposed her to the things themselves, working upwards from the mild towards the worst. On the hardest morning they had the counsellors chew vomit-flavoured sweets and pretend to be sick into a toilet, and asked Ella to look. She would not look. She cried, Katie cried and then left the cubicle because her own crying was making it worse, and outside the door she asked the staff whether they had made a terrible mistake. They said no. They said there would be a moment in there when Ella found out she could do it. Eventually somebody photographed the toilet and asked her to look at the photograph, and she covered her eyes, and then made herself look, and then took two steps and looked into the toilet itself. Her counsellors cheered so loudly that Katie could hear it through the door, and they formed a tunnel outside the bathroom for her to walk out through. Asked afterwards whether the camp took the fears away, Ella says no. Asked what is different, she says they are not as scary now.

Ella has an illness, and most of what frightens the rest of us is not an illness. Some fears are exactly the right size for what they are about, and a tornado siren next to your house is not nothing. What carries over from her story is not the diagnosis. It is the discovery her mother made on the classroom floor, that the sentence we reach for first, that everything will be fine, does not shrink a fear that is fed by hiding, and that the difference between the nine-year-old and the rest of us is not that we are braver. It is that she has told people. Adults usually take the fear into the closet and shut the door on it, and what we find out afterwards is that we could not put the fear in there by itself. Locked in with it are the parts of our identity that might set it off, the things about us that make us visible and therefore exposed, and those parts stay in the dark for exactly as long as the fear does.

Hebrew has more than one word for fear. When we speak about our relationship with God, we ordinarily reach for yirah, which belongs to reverence, to the sort of fear that comes from being awed by something true. The word pachad is the one Hebrew speakers use every day for what Ella was living with. Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon, an American rabbi who was a research scientist before she was ordained, draws the distinction carefully: the two overlap in ancient literature, but the awe that opens a soul tends to be called yirah, while pachad tends to name "the oppressive fear that shuts a person down."[2]

There is one place in the Torah where pachad is attached to God, and it appears in chapter 31 of Bereshit, when Yaakov takes his leave of his father-in-law Lavan. They quarrel, each accusing the other of having cheated him, and at a certain point Yaakov says: 

לוּלֵי אֱלֹהֵי אָבִי אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם וּפַחַד יִצְחָק הָיָה לִי כִּי עַתָּה רֵיקָם שִׁלַּחְתָּנִי

had the God of my father, the God of Avraham and the Fear of Yitzchak, not been with me, you would have sent me away empty-handed. [3]

The word is pachad, the fear that locks a person in. Ibn Ezra takes it at face value, as the fear that Yitzchak himself felt, and points back to the mountain, to the passage we will read from this bimah tomorrow morning.[4] If Ibn Ezra is right, then something remarkable has happened in this family. Yitzchak was bound to an altar by his own father and came within a moment of being killed there, and that terror never left him. It did not get resolved, and nobody talked him out of it. What happened instead is that it became one of the names by which his son addressed God. The fear was not cured. It was carried, out loud, in the family's own vocabulary for the holy.

When my children were younger they used to bring me their fears, and I used to make them smaller. My daughter, who was eleven, having heard about global warming, told me one weekend that she was afraid Rio de Janeiro would be under water before she had the chance to have children of her own. My son had a period when he could think about very little except shootings and armed robberies, which in that city were not imaginary. Neither of them was paralysed, but the anxiety was there, and it showed up in ways they did not always name directly. My instinct in every case was the same instinct Ella’s mother had, which was to tell them the problem was not as big as they thought. I was doing that for them, because it was what I believed a father was supposed to do. I was also doing it for myself. Watching my children afraid sets off my own fear, which has to do with the condition of the world I am handing over to them, and shrinking their fear was the fastest way to get relief from mine.

If Ella is right that the healthy thing is to own our fears rather than hide them, then I should go first. Ella's fears were private and embarrassing. The ones I am about to name are public, and public fears are easier to say from a bimah, which is itself a kind of hiding. You will have your own list, and it may not look like mine.

I am afraid of the global rise in antisemitism, which has stopped being something we monitor from a distance. Every one of you produced a ticket with your name on it to get into this building tonight, and we checked those tickets more strictly than this congregation ever has. That is a security procedure, and it is the right one, and I am not asking anybody to relax it. I am asking us to notice that we absorbed it almost without discussion, and that it is now part of what coming to shul means here.

I am afraid of a chauvinism that has become respectable again, which treats any argument for including people who were historically pushed out as an insult to those already inside, and which has learnt to present contempt as common sense. Five days ago a party that the German state itself monitors as a threat to its constitution for its neo-nazi tendencies and connections took forty-four per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt and came within three seats of governing alone a German state.[5]

I am afraid of what we are doing to the planet. The heat of this European summer killed at least thirty-five thousand people on provisional figures that cover barely half the continent,[6] while the ice goes at both poles and the rain over the Amazon shifts away from where it has always fallen.

And I am afraid of a world in which a handful of countries do as they please because nobody can stop them, and the rest of us are told this is simply how things have always worked.

One old response to fear of this kind is to make ourselves smaller. When I was fifteen I went to Israel for the first time on a Jewish Agency programme, and before we flew a man came to brief us on security. “If your plane is hijacked, do not think twice about getting rid of anything that identifies you as a Jew. Take off the chai, take off the magen David, throw them as far from you as you can. Right now it is better to stay alive than to die a hero.” He was not wrong about the aeroplane. What worries me is how easily that advice becomes a way of living, so that a whole community walks around having thrown its identity into the aisle and calling that safety. The other version of the same instinct builds upwards instead: higher walls and more locked doors, not because the threat requires them but because the fear does, until the building is safe and there is nobody new inside it.

You might know this song: 

כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאוֹד וְהָעִקָּר, וְהָעִקָּר לֹא לְפַחֵד, לֹא לְפַחֵד כְּלָל.[7]

the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid at all.

The song is a twentieth-century adaptation based on something Rav Nachman of Breslav write. The original text is slightly different, though, and the difference matters:

וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד, וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר – שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל [8]

Know that a person has to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not yitpached at all.

Yitpached is a reflexive verb built on the root of pachad. Do not frighten yourself. That is not an instruction to stop being afraid. Rav Nachman does not tell us the bridge is wide, and he does not promise we will reach the other side. He tells us not to do to ourselves what pachad is trying to do to us.

Yehuda Kurtzer, who runs the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and hosts another podcast I follow, made a distinction after the shootings in American synagogues. Being frightened is one thing, and it is honest. Turning being frightened into an ideology is something else, because it converts a feeling we cannot fully control into a belief that then decides how we read the world and what we are permitted to do about it. His conclusion is: "I refuse to be scared. There is too much to do."[9] That can sound like the sentence Ella was taught to give up, "I'm not going to get sick," but it is the opposite. Ella's old sentence denied the fear. Kurtzer admits it in the same breath, and refuses only to let it govern.

Here is what that refusal means for me. I do not want my fear of antisemitism to make me suspicious of everyone who is not Jewish. I do not want my fear for Israel to make me indifferent to the humanity of Palestinians. I do not want my fear of political extremism to convince me that everyone who disagrees with me is my enemy. I do not want my fear of a less tolerant world to make me a less tolerant person. I do not want my fear for the planet to persuade me that the outcome is already decided and there is nothing left to do. And I do not want my fear that the norms and the institutions are collapsing to persuade me that values are a luxury we can afford only when circumstances are easy. What frightens me most is the possibility of arriving at the far end of all this having quietly become somebody I would not have wanted to sit next to.

None of that requires pretending the dangers are imaginary, or that every threat can be talked down with goodwill and dialogue. Ella did not get better by discovering that she would never be ill again; she was ill, in front of everyone, and she is still afraid of it. Yitzchak did not come to terms with that mountain by pretending he had never been tied there. The question is not whether the fear is real. The question is what we do with it once we have admitted that it is, and whether a pachad that is carried out loud, the way Yitzchak's was, can stop shutting us down and begin instead to do the work of yirah, and open us.

The next ten days are ten days of supervised exposure, during which we are asked to lower our defences and stand in front of God and in front of ourselves as we actually are, with no masks available. For many of us that is the terrifying part, because we have spent so long performing the person we believe we are supposed to be that we have lost track of the person underneath. Will we face those questions without murmuring that everything will be fine, everything will be fine, everything will be fine, which was never true for Ella and is not going to be true for us? Will each one of us have the courage to name what frightens us without letting those fears decide who we become?

The Mishnah says there were no better days for Israel than the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur.[9] I do not think that means everything was fine on those days. I think it means people had stopped needing to pretend that everything was fine. In a few moments we will continue with the service, and a week on Sunday we will be back here for Kol Nidrei. 

בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתְבוּן וּבְיוֹם צוֹם כִּפּוּר יַחְתְּמוּן

on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.

Who will take the risk of being seen as we really are, and who will hide for one more year? I don’t have a recipe of what we need to do; all I have is a nine-year-old's account of the morning she made herself look, which was that she was so scared, and that it was worth it.

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/podcasts/the-daily/children-fears-ocd-anxiety.html

[2] https://forward.com/shma-now/pachad-yitzchak/381263/fear-becomes-strength/

[3] Bereshit 31:42.

[4] Ibn Ezra on Bereshit 31:53.

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/sep/08/afd-election-victory-germany-saxony-anhalt-far-right

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/25/at-least-35000-excess-deaths-europe-back-to-back-heatwaves

[7] Likutei Moharan II:48.

[8] https://medium.com/@yehudakurtzer/must-we-be-scared-30ca11cfdb0d

[9] Mishnah Ta'anit 4:8.

Dvar Torá: Beyond the Four Mitzvot / Além das Quatro Mitsvot

PORTUGUÊS: O texto em português segue abaixo do texto em inglês.

For two years, I taught rabbinical students at the Ibero-American Institute for Reform Rabbinical Training — Chumash (the Five Books of Torah) one year, Nevi'im (the Books of the Prophets) the next, with largely the same cohort of students across both. When the Nevi'im course came around, I asked them to write a drashah on any haftarah from the liturgical cycle. One student thought he had found a clever shortcut. He opened his paper by noting, correctly, that a parashah and its haftarah typically share a name or a theme — and from that observation he pivoted entirely to the Torah portion, never once returning to the Prophets, which was the subject of the class. It was smart. It was creative. It was completely off topic. I failed him.

I tell you this as a confession. Pay close attention as I speak, and you may notice the precise moment I pull the same trick. You have been warned.

This week's parashah is Tetzaveh — “to command,” "to give an order." The opening verse reads:

וְאַתָּה תְּצַוֶּה אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

V'atah tetzaveh et bnay-Yisrael

“You shall further command the Israelites.”[1]

The word tetzaveh shares its root with a word you all probably know: mitzvah. In its most technical sense, a mitzvah is a “commandment” — an “obligation”, an “order.” In Aramaic, however, the everyday language of the Talmud, the word carries a different resonance: “connection,” “attachment,” “link.”[2] And in the English of a contemporary Jewish household, when a parent says to their child, “that was a real mitzvah, standing up for that classmate who was being bullied,” the word has shifted again — now meaning something closer to “a good deed” than to a legal obligation. Three languages, three meanings: commandment, connection, kindness.

Hold that range of meanings in mind, because something happened this week that genuinely irritated me.

An Instagram post on Purim, published by an organisation connected to the international Progressive Jewish movement, listed what it called the mitzvot of the holiday. There was a technical error. Purim has four mitzvot: hearing the Megillah, sharing a festive meal, sending portions of food to friends — mishloach manot — and giving gifts to those in need — matanot la'evyonim. The post listed all four, but muddled the distinction between the last two in a way that missed the point of both.

That inaccuracy is not really what bothered me.

Progressive Judaism has staked its identity on the conviction that meaning-making matters more than mechanical compliance with laws that may no longer speak to the lives of contemporary Jews. That emphasis is not a compromise — it is a principled position, and it is ours.

Two brief examples. The central mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah is to hear the shofar. In years when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, the shofar is not blown until after Shabbat ends, at the very close of the services. Imagine someone who spent weeks doing genuine t'shuvah: honest self-examination, sincere apologies, real repair. They came to shul, prayed with full attention, weeping from a recognition of their own failures. Then, for whatever reason, they had to leave before the shofar was blown. Would you truly say that person had failed their religious obligation?

Second example. Rabbinic Judaism constructed an elaborate architecture of Shabbat law — thirty-nine categories of forbidden work, the melachot, with commentary branching endlessly from each one. The Mishnah itself concedes the fragility of this structure: “the laws of Shabbat are like mountains suspended by a hair, for they have little basis in Scripture and yet the laws derived from them are numerous.”[3] One rule is clearly grounded in Torah, though: the prohibition against lighting fire.[4] And yet every person who drove a petrol-powered car to shul this evening technically violated that law. Does anyone here believe that coming to shul on Shabbat goes against the spirit of Shabbat?

These examples illustrate a genuine fault line. Orthodoxy places its emphasis on faithful transmission and performance of the law. Progressive Judaism places its emphasis on the meaning behind the law and its relevance to living human beings. Neither approach is without complications — but they are genuinely different, and we should not pretend otherwise. So when a Progressive organisation frames Purim primarily through the language of “the four mitzvot,” something has gone wrong. It feels, to borrow a word from the season, like wearing someone else's costume.

Which brings me to Purim — and to why this holiday matters so much, right now, in this city, in this country.

Purim is a Diaspora story. It unfolds in a Jewish community living as a minority under foreign rule, subject to the goodwill — or the malice — of those in authority. It is a story about antisemitism, about the compromises Jews make in pursuit of proximity to power, and about what happens when Jews who were once powerless find themselves holding power.

Beyond the reflective possibilities that Purim offers, traditions of the festival that extend far beyond the “four mitsvot” have much to teach us. For example, the tradition of wearing costumes on Purim (which is not a mitsvah in that narrow sense of the term) contains powerful possibilities. When I lived in the United States, I met some female Jewish students at the University of Illinois who chose to wear a hijab during Muslim awareness week — not as a casual gesture, not as costume or cultural appropriation, but as a deliberate act of solidarity, a way of experiencing firsthand the hostility that Muslim women faced simply by being visibly themselves. When we dress as someone else — with imagination and some humility — we open ourselves to the question of what it feels like to live inside a different skin, even if only for a few hours during a Purim celebration.

For years, I considered mishloach manot a silly tradition. Every Purim, people fill baskets with the most ultra-processed food they can find: sweets, biscuits, things wrapped in plastic that no one particularly needs. I did the same. And then one year, following the example of a dear teacher and friend, Rabbi Ebn Leader, I decided to do something different. I spent time in the kitchen and cooked fifty individual meals — fish, roasted vegetables, couscous, a dessert — and gave them away as mishloach manot. What I had not anticipated was the impact. Not on the recipients alone, but on me. Seeing the way people responded to receiving something made with genuine care, a real token of appreciation, changed the way I understood the tradition entirely. Mishloach manot is not about the basket. It is about the act of saying: I thought about you. I made something for you. You matter to me. The mitzvah — in the fullest, Aramaic sense of the word — is the connection itself.

And yet the violence at the end of the Book of Esther is not something we can dress up or celebrate our way past. The Orthodox Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz reportedly refused to leave Israel permanently for one reason above all others: it was the only country in the world where he could guarantee he would never have to celebrate Purim[5]. His method was precise. On Purim itself, he would remain in Jerusalem, which as a walled city observes the holiday a day later, on Shushan Purim. Then, the following day, he would travel to Tel Aviv, where Purim had already been celebrated. He thus arranged never to hear the Megillah, never to drink in celebration of what he saw, at its core, as a mass killing — the slaughter of Haman, his ten sons, and, according to the text of Esther chapter 9, over 75,000 enemies of the Jewish people throughout the ancient Persian empire. Leibowitz, as was his way, was simply being direct: he saw Purim, at its foundation, as a celebration of violence.

I am proud to belong to a religious movement in which I do not need to replicate that itinerary and leave the place I live in order to avoid the challenges I find in our own tradition. I can face Purim directly: celebrate the thwarting of an antisemitic massacre, and at the same time grieve, with full moral seriousness, that the very Jews who were once powerless chose, the moment power was within their reach, to answer the threat of violence with violence on a devastating scale. That grief does not cancel the celebration. The celebration does not cancel the grief. Holding both without resolving the tension too quickly is, I would argue, what Progressive Jewish maturity looks like.

Most contemporary scholars understand the Book of Esther as a literary work — a diaspora novella rather than a historical chronicle[6]. Its function in the Jewish canon, and Purim's role in the Jewish calendar, must therefore be to allow us to have these deeply important and often difficult conversations — conversations that are avoided, intentionally or unintentionally, when we restrict our focus to “the four mitzvot.”

I did not expect fifty meals to teach me something I did not already know; perhaps in the same way that my students did not expect to learn so much by walking across a university campus dressed in the clothing of another community. But that is usually how it works — the tradition you dismissed turns out to be the one that was waiting for you. Purim is full of those surprises. A holiday that looks, from the outside, like costumes and noise and too much sugar turns out to be one of the most morally serious days in the Jewish calendar: a story about power and powerlessness, about survival and its costs, about the difference between a gift and a transaction. This year, I hope you find at least one moment in the celebration when the costume slips and something true shows through. That, in the end, is what the tradition has always been asking of us.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.

[1] Exodus 27:20.

[2] Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson and Rabbi Patricia Fenton (eds). Walking with Mitzvot.

[3] Mishnah Chagigah 1:8.

[4] Exodus 35:3

[5] Shaul Maggid, “The Dark Side of Purim,” The Forward, 10 March 2014: https://forward.com/opinion/194161/the-dark-side-of-purim

[6] See, for example, Adele Berlin, “The Book of Esther and Ancient Storytelling,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 1 (2001): 3-14

Dvar Torá: Pharaoh’s Heart, Our Hearts: On Selective Empathy / O Coração do Faraó, Nossos Corações: Sobre a Empatia Seletiva

PORTUGUÊS: O texto em português segue abaixo do texto em inglês.  

These have been weeks of overwhelming noise. If you have been following the news, you have felt it, the sensation that the world is moving faster than our capacity to make meaning of it. In different places, we are watching the collision of force and resistance, state power and human bodies, ideology and lived experience. The facts vary from country to country, but the atmosphere is shared: everything is urgent, everyone is speaking, and yet something essential is being lost in the volume.

There is so much noise. Pundits are shouting. Politicians are posturing. Social media is on fire. And yet, beneath this noise, there is a terrifying silence. It is the silence of selective empathy.

In the crises unfolding around us, many of the reactions I observed this week were not based on the human reality on the ground. They were based on strategic alliances. Instead of asking “Who is hurting?”, people were asking “Does this victim help my argument?” If a victim’s suffering validates our worldview, we amplify it. If a victim’s suffering complicates our worldview, we scroll past. We have turned human pain into political capital.

This phenomenon, this inability to process reality because of our prior commitments, is not new. In fact, it is the central psychological diagnosis of this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Va’era. It is the story of the hardening of the heart.

We all know the refrain. Moshe goes to Pharaoh, demands freedom, and Pharaoh says “no!” because his heart is “hardened.” But if we look closely at the Hebrew text, the Torah uses two completely different words to describe the state of Pharaoh’s heart.

The first word is kaved. Throughout the early plagues, such as Blood and Frogs, the text says “vayikhbad lev pharoh.”1 Kaved means heavy. It implies gravity, weight, and lethargy. But deeply, it shares a root with the word kavod, which means honour, glory, or pride.

A “heavy heart” is a heart that has become weighed down by its own self-importance. It is a heart filled with kavod, with the need to maintain a reputation or a status. When our heart is kaved, we become sluggish. We cannot move or change our minds because we are burdened by the weight of our prior declarations. We cannot admit we were wrong because the ego is too heavy to lift. A heavy heart dulls. It begins to say, “Yes, it’s tragic, but…,” and then builds a whole scaffolding of justification.

But as the plagues continue, the text shifts.

By the time we get to the later plagues, the Torah uses a different word: chazak. “Vayechezak lev pharoh.”2 Chazak means strong. It means stiff. It implies active resistance, tightening a muscle, building a wall. This is not the passive weight of the kaved heart. This is active fortification. This happens when we feel our worldview is under attack, so we double down. We stiffen our spine. We view empathy as a weakness that must be repelled. We tell ourselves that we must be “strong” enough to ignore the suffering that contradicts our politics. A hardened heart refuses to budge. It says, “Even if it’s tragic, I’m not moving,” because moving would feel like betraying my side, my tribe, my identity.

These are not two different groups of people. These are two movements that happen within each of us, sometimes even simultaneously. Our hearts become heavy with the weight of our theories and our pride, unable to move. And at the very same time, our hearts become stiff with defensiveness, refusing to feel. Meanwhile, thousands of Venezuelans, Iranians, and Americans are screaming, and we are not truly listening.

The tragedy of Va’era is that oppression is sustained not only by cruelty, but by a kind of moral deafness. Pharaoh does not merely resist freedom; he resists being changed by what he has seen.3

To understand this, we have to remember something crucial about ancient Jewish understanding of the body. In the modern world, we think of the heart as the seat of emotion and the brain as the seat of the intellect. But in ancient Jewish thought, lev, “heart”, is where thought, will, and moral intention meet, what we might call the inner decision-centre. Whenever I talk about “heart” from now on, that is what I have in mind: the centre of your feelings and of your thoughts. When the Torah says Pharaoh’s heart hardened, it means not just his emotions but his entire capacity for understanding became rigid. His grasp of reality became so fixed that he could no longer process new information.

We do the same thing. We filter the world through our “hearts,” meaning our minds, our theories, and our politics. We have a theory or an ideology and we let that theory dictate what we see.

But look at how God operates in this parasha: at the beginning of the portion, God explains to Moshe why redemption is beginning. God does not offer a political theory. God does not offer a strategic analysis of the Egyptian economy. God says: “Gam ani shamati et naakat Bnei Yisrael,” “I have also heard the groaning of the Children of Israel.”4 And in the previous chapter: “raiti et oni ami,” “I have seen the affliction of My people.”5

According to Va’era, God responds to what is seen and heard. God begins with the observation of suffering. God does not shield Godself from the reality on the ground. Rashi captures this beautifully in his comment on the moment God finally engages with the Israelites’ suffering. He writes that God “directed God’s heart to them and did not hide God’s eyes.”6 Godliness is the refusal to hide one’s eyes from the raw data of pain. God does not ask, “Does this scream fit My previous opinion?” God hears the scream and responds accordingly.

Notice the difference. We humans start with the theory and use it to filter what we see. My theory says Leader X is a hero, therefore I cannot see the victims of Leader X. God starts with the eyes and ears and allows them to direct the heart. It is as if God were saying: “I see a victim; therefore, I must act.”

This is the challenge I want to place before us this Shabbat. It might be an uncomfortable challenge because it requires us to disrupt our strategic alliances.

I read a social media post this week that shook me. It was written by María Elena Morán Atencio, a Venezuelan writer living here in Brazil. She watched the news of the invasion and the capture of Maduro, and then she watched the reaction of her Brazilian friends. She saw people who were outraged by the American intervention but who had been silent for years about the Venezuelan dictatorship because it was politically inconvenient to criticise it.

She wrote this:

“Many of the people who are today screaming with indignation never spoke out against the horrors of the dictatorship... The 8 million Venezuelans fleeing the country, the thousands of political prisoners, the tortures... never deserved the solidarity that today floods my feed... The name of this is selective indignation.”

And then she makes the distinction that is at the very centre of our parasha. She writes to her Brazilian friends:

“Your concern is about a theoretical fear... [but] our suffering is not theoretical... If you cannot name three cities in Venezuela... maybe you should go teach a class on something you actually know.”7

This is the voice of Va’era. This is the naaka, the groan.

She is telling us that while we are busy tending to our kaved hearts, weighed down by our heavy theories and our intellectual pride, we have missed the reality. We have missed the humans. These situations are far more complicated than I can address in a sermon, and people of goodwill disagree about proper responses.

Whether you lean Left or Right, whether you prioritise global justice or national security, the risk is the same. The risk is that your “heart,” your intellect and your ideology, becomes more real to you than the suffering of the person standing right in front of you.

The 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas warned us about exactly this danger. He taught that Western thought always tries to fit people into a “totality”, a system or a theory. But the “face” of the other person, the defenceless human face, shatters that system. It demands a response before we can categorise it.8 Morán Atencio is showing us the face, and we are trying to force it back into our totality.

Can we put down the weight of our ideology long enough to hear the reality of people who are suffering? Can we lower the shields of our stiff hearts long enough to see the pain of families torn apart?

To be Bnei Yisrael, to be the Children of Israel, is to refuse the luxury of a “theoretical” heart. We are called to be the people who hear the cry first, regardless of who is crying, and regardless of who caused the pain.

The Torah repeats this ethic as law. In the same book that tells Israel’s founding story, it insists that society must train itself to hear the vulnerable: “You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan,” it says, “if they cry out to Me, I will surely hear their cry.”9 Notice what the verse makes central. Not the sophistication of our arguments. Not the correctness of our alliances. The cry.

The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim. It comes from the root tzar, which means narrow, tight, constricted. We usually think of the Exodus as a physical journey, leaving a specific country on a map. But the tradition teaches us that the Exile in Egypt was also a state of constricted consciousness. Mitzrayim is not just a place on a map; it is the narrowness of the ideological heart. It is the narrow place where I only care about suffering when it scores points for my team. It is the place where the heart is so heavy with pride that it cannot move, or so stiff with defences that it cannot feel.

God says: “Vehotzeti etchem,” “I will bring you out.”10 I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you out from under the weight of these heavy hearts. This week, as we look at the world shaking around us, let us pray for the courage to leave Mitzrayim.

May we have the courage to dismantle the walls we have built around our empathy.

May we have the strength to lift the weight of our own pride.

May we be brave enough to see what God sees, and hear what God hears: the undeniable, unvarnished truth of human suffering.

And in that seeing, and in that hearing, may we find the beginning of our own redemption.

Shabbat Shalom.

1

Exodus 7:14; 9:7; 9:34.

2

Exodus 7:13; 9:12.

3

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Weighing of the Heart,” Covenant & Conversation: Va’era (London: Maggid Books). Available at https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/vaera/the-weighing-of-the-heart/

4

Exodus 6:5.

5

Exodus 3:7.

6

Rashi on Exodus 2:25.

7

María Elena Morán Atencio, Instagram post, January 2026. Available at https://www.instagram.com/p/DTEUPqaD6Up/

8

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

9

Exodus 22:21-22.

10

Exodus 6:6.