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.

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.

Dvar Torah: Their Story in Our Book of Life | Yom Kippur Yizkor 5786

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Lendo nosso Livro da Vida a tempo de poder mudá-lo")

This morning, we explored a powerful and challenging idea: what if we could read the Book of our Own Life from beginning to end, seeing all its joys and sorrows at once? We asked ourselves if, knowing the inevitable pain that accompanies a full life, we would still choose to love, to connect, to embrace it all.

Now, as we gather for Yizkor, we shift our perspective. We are no longer looking at the book we are still writing, but at the completed, cherished stories of those we have lost. We hold in our hearts the books of their lives.

This morning, I spoke about a short story I read a while ago: Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. The story’s central idea is that a life's meaning is found not in its sequence of events, but in its totality. It contrasts the human perception of time as a chain of cause and effect with a simultaneous awareness, where past and future are known at once. From this perspective, a life is understood by its ultimate purpose. The story’s power comes from posing a profound question: if you knew the entire story of a loved one's life—knowing both the immense joy it would bring and the inevitable, heartbreaking pain of its end—would you still choose to live it? The narrator’s decision to embrace that beautiful, tragic story affirms that the joy and the sorrow are inseparable parts of a meaningful whole.

As I mentioned this morning, in the story, the protagonist learns that she will marry a man she hasn’t even kissed yet, and that they will later get divorced. Their daughter will suffer from a rare, incurable disease and die young. And even with this foreknowledge… she chooses to love him. She chooses to have that child. And she loves them as though she didn’t know how the story would end.

This, in its essence, is the bargain of love.

I once asked a dear friend, who grieved her grandfather deeply, whether she would still have been that close to him, knowing the pain she would eventually feel. “Absolutely,” she answered, and added, “Only those who live, grieve.” In her next message, she wrote: “Only those who experience happiness, suffer.”

Her words are the heart of Yizkor. Our grief is the measure of our love. We are here today because the people we remember chose to love, and because we chose to love them back. And we would make that choice again.

Yizkor is our chance to read their stories again. If we could read our own Book of Life, what role would they play in it? If we had known, while they were still alive, what we know now, how might we have changed our relationship with them?

This moment of memory invites us to focus not just on the loss and the ache of their absence, but on the light they brought into our lives, the good moments we shared, and the values they inspired in us.

And perhaps the most important—and most difficult—question to ask now is this: knowing how these people touched our lives, and acknowledging on Yom Kippur that our own lives will one day end, how can we live differently from this day forward in their honour—and for the sake of those who will still be here after we’re gone?

May the light of their souls continue to illuminate our paths, offering us inspiration and comfort. May their presence be felt in our happiest moments and in those when we need their support the most. And let us say, Amen.

Dvar Torah: Reading our book of life in time to change it | Yom Kippur Shacharit, 5786

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Lendo nosso Livro da Vida a tempo de poder mudá-lo")

My late father spent virtually his entire professional life working for the same construction company. In an era without smartphones or high-resolution computers, he had a tool that helped clients imagine what a tile they liked would look like when repeated across a wall. It was a set of four foldable mirrors that enveloped the tile, creating the illusion of an infinite background in that same pattern.

Today, with virtual reality headsets, major architectural projects can allow us to “walk through” buildings that haven’t yet left the drawing board, giving us the feeling of physically being there.

Jewish tradition, with far less technology at its disposal, has for centuries developed strategies to help us experience scenarios far removed from our everyday lives. Shabbat, for example, is referred to as me’ein shel olam haba — a “taste of the world to come.” For 25 hours, we live as if the world were perfect. Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is described as a rehearsal for our own death: some people wear a kittel, reminiscent of the tachrichim, the shrouds in which we are buried; we abstain from many acts that belong to the realm of the living — we do not eat or drink, we do not have sex, and we avoid other pleasures; we recite vidui, the confession of our transgressions, just as we are commanded to do before we die.

Living for 25 hours as though the world were whole on Shabbat inspires us to bring some of that ideal into the week that follows. Experiencing Yom Kippur as a dress rehearsal for our death invites us, paradoxically, to reflect on what we value most in life. Rabbi Alan Lew expresses this concept in the following way:

This is what Yom Kippur asks us today. What is the core of our life? Are we living by it? Are we moving toward it?

We shouldn’t wait until the moment of our death to seek the answers. At the moment of death, there may be nothing we can do about it but feel regret. But if we seek the answers now, we can act in the coming year to bring ourselves closer to our core. This is the only life we have, and we all will lose it. No one gets out alive, but to lose nobly is a beautiful thing. To know the core of our being is to move beyond winning and losing. [1]

Being able to walk through a house before it has even been built may give us the courage to greenlight the project. Experiencing the world as if its brokenness had already been repaired can empower us to fix what we can. Imagining ourselves at the end of our lives enables us to focus on what truly matters, to see past the fog of the everyday that often clouds our vision. Paying the cell phone monthly bill, taking the clothes to the dry cleaner's, finishing the project you've worked on for two months, studying for the exam that will determine your final grade — all important tasks, but none of them define who we are or what our role in the world might be. Yet, all too often, we allow them to claim the best of our time and energy.

But what if we could see our lives from an even broader perspective? What if we could, for example, access the Book of Life we speak so much about on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? What if God were to step out of the room for a moment and allow us to read everything written about us — how we were born, how we’ll die, our greatest loves and deepest disappointments? How might that change the way we live?

Some time ago, I encountered a story that resonated deeply with the metaphors of these High Holy Days — especially the metaphor of the Book of Life. It was a short story called Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. [2]

The story is about alien spaceships arriving at various locations across Earth. A linguist is recruited to communicate with them and gradually discovers that these beings experience time in a non-linear way — something we humans find difficult even to imagine.

Time, for us, has a set rhythm. Every second, the second hand of the clock ticks forward, and there’s nothing we can do to rewind it or speed it up. It’s as if our lives are a film in a cinema, where we can’t pause to go to the loo or skip through a violent scene. But what if life were like a short story collection — one we could open to any page and read freely? First the wedding, then adolescence, then the details of our birth… What if we could even see how we will die?

That is what the linguist learns from the aliens — she begins to read her own life as a book of interconnected, but also self-contained, stories. If you had that power, how would it change your choices?

In the story, she sees that she will marry a man she hasn’t even kissed yet, and that they will later separate. Their daughter will suffer from a rare, incurable disease and die young. And even with this foreknowledge… she chooses to love him. She chooses to have that child. And she loves them as though she didn’t know how the story would end.

This is the heart of the Yom Kippur challenge. If we could see the entire arc of our own story, what would we learn? We would see chapters of profound joy and connection, and others of pain and loss. We would see the people whose lives intertwine with ours — our partners, our children, our friends — and the complete story of our relationship with them, from its beautiful beginning to its inevitable end.

The question the linguist faces is the question we face today: knowing that love can lead to heartbreak, that commitment can lead to disappointment, and that life itself leads to loss, do we still choose to live fully? Do we still open our hearts? If you could read your Book of Life, and see a relationship that will bring you a decade of true happiness but end in sorrow, would you still begin it? If you could see a choice that will lead to great professional fulfilment but also your greatest failure, would you still take that risk?

We live in a time when our decisions are increasingly shaped by fear, particularly fear of pain. I know people who got up to all sorts of mischief as teenagers but who now won’t let their own children go out alone, or play contact sports — for fear of what might happen. If we could foresee that a relationship would be full of intense emotion and meaningful joy but would end tragically, I suspect many of us would opt out, thereby forfeiting all the good that could have been. In our fear of suffering, we end up choosing emotional mediocrity.

The story’s great revelation is not that the future is knowable, but that even with full knowledge of the pain that awaits, the protagonist chooses love. She chooses to live. She rejects emotional mediocrity born from fear.

This is the ultimate lesson of the Book of Life. It is not a divine ledger designed to frighten us into compliance. It is a mirror, like the one my father used, showing us the pattern of our lives. Yom Kippur gives us the chance to pause, to look into that mirror, and to decide if we like the pattern we see.

We cannot know the future. We cannot read the story of our life from beginning to end. But we can decide, here and now, what kind of story we want to write. Acknowledging that our time is finite, and that joy and sorrow are inextricably linked, how can we choose to live more bravely, more lovingly, more meaningfully from this day forward?

This Yom Kippur, may we have the courage not to fear the difficult chapters, but to write a story filled with connection, purpose, and love. May we be inspired to live so fully that when our book is finally closed, it will be one worth reading.

Gmar Tov!

[1] Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, p. 230.

[2] Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others. The film is available on Netflix here: https://www.netflix.com/br-en/title/80117799

Dvar Torah: Seven Annulments, Seven Affirmations | Kol Nidrei 5786

When we move to a new country, there are many elements to adjust to: from the most basic things, like finding out how to do the recycling, what the good brands are in the supermarket, and the unwritten rules of driving; to more subjective concepts, like how to show affection without crossing personal boundaries, or what issues can be openly talked about and what needs to be whispered only with people you really trust.

Among the most prosaic aspects of being a newcomer to South Africa is learning its calendar. Some might say it is the basic Gregorian calendar used in most of the world, and indeed, it is. But every country adds its own flavour to the way it relates to the calendar. In South Africa, I am learning about its holidays and their history, which are a reflection of South Africa’s past, as you know much better than I do. Brazil, with a very different history, doesn’t have a Day of Reconciliation, a Heritage Day or a Freedom Day. Other national holidays come from religious contexts, such as Good Friday and Christmas in South Africa, or Rosh haShanah, Yom Kippur, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot in Israel. There are also dates that were created, or at least encouraged, by entrepreneurs interested in profiting from them. I don’t know the history behind South Africa’s Children’s Day, but in Brazil it is observed on the 12th of October and, while existing on the books since the 1920s, it only became a real phenomenon in the early 1960s, when toy manufacturers decided to invest heavily in marketing campaigns advocating for families to give presents to children on that day. When I was born, in 1971, it was already a huge success.

As a child, I always wanted a remote-control car, but I never got one. When I was, perhaps, six years old, I was walking with my mother and I saw a remote-controlled car in a shop window. I started screaming and crying that I wanted it… so my mother did what many parents would do in that situation: she deflected the issue. “I will give it to you on Children’s Day”, she told me, without any intention of keeping that promise once the day arrived and hoping that I would have forgotten the issue by then. Immediately, I stopped crying, happy that my tantrum had achieved something. Many months later, but still in the same year, I remember my mother getting home and I ran to greet her at the door. “Where is it?” I asked. “Where is what?” she asked, confused. “Where is my gift? The remote-control car you promised me for Children’s Day. TODAY is Children’s Day!” My mother had clearly forgotten her promise, but I hadn’t. In that instance, she dealt with the issue head-on: “If I promised, I ‘unpromise’ now!”

I think I have blamed this incident for never having got a remote-control car and, more importantly for our purpose tonight, it might have led me to radically oppose the possibility of “unpromising” something, which is, to some extent, the purpose of the ritual we just experienced.

For nearly twelve centuries, this ritual cancelation of vows has been a source of profound conflict. [1] At its core, Kol Nidrei—“all vows”—is an Aramaic legal formula designed to annul oaths and promises made rashly or under duress. In the pre-modern world, a vow carried a cosmic weight. [2] Words had the power to alter reality. The impulse behind this ritual, likely born not in the great academies but among the common folk, was a deeply human one: to seek release from the promises we couldn’t keep. [3]

Yet this practice immediately drew the ire of the great rabbinic authorities of Babylonia, the Geonim. They saw it as a dangerous legal shortcut that undermined the sanctity of one’s word. Rav Amram Gaon dismissed it as a minhag shtut, a “foolish custom”, and demanded it be stopped. [4]

But the people refused to let it go.

This prayer, this formula, became a rebel. It survived because it spoke to a deep, popular need that outweighed the objections of the legal scholars. To save it from being completely outlawed, the rabbis had to find a way to make it work. It was Rabbenu Tam, the grandson of Rashi, who performed a brilliant act of legal jujitsu. If annulling past vows was impossible, he argued, let’s change the tense. Let’s have Kol Nidrei annul the vows we might make in the coming year. This clever shift from the past to the future allowed the ritual to survive and flourish in the Ashkenazi world. [5]

But it was the melody that truly cemented its place in our hearts. That melody, rising and falling like a human sigh, became the soul of the service. It gave voice to a history of pain and longing that Yom Kippur otherwise lacked. It became so powerful that we no longer came for the Day of Atonement service; we came for the Kol Nidrei service. [6]

The conflict, however, was far from over. As our Progressive movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, Kol Nidrei became a source of intense embarrassment. For centuries, this text had been used as antisemitic ammunition. This led to the humiliating practice of the more judaico oath, forcing Jews in court to take an additional, often degrading, oath swearing that their testimony was not subject to the Kol Nidrei annulment. [7] For the early reformers, who were desperate to prove their loyalty and ethical standing, the prayer was a moral and public relations disaster. In 1844, an assembly of progressive rabbis in Braunschweig, Germany, voted to remove it from the prayerbook. [8]

Across the Atlantic, the American Reform movement followed suit. Its Union Prayer Book omitted the text entirely. And then, in the 1940s, as a result of the great waves of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States, a strange thing happened. Many congregations longed for the emotional resonance of the tradition they had left behind. They wanted Kol Nidrei back. The committee revising the prayerbook was deeply divided. And then, in what seems like a story straight out of a novel, the traditional Aramaic text was accidentally included in the first printing of the new edition in 1945, a mistake attributed to the chaos of wartime printing.

Rabbi Samuel Cohon, a passionate opponent of the traditional text, was horrified. He demanded they stop the presses. But the response came back, dictated not by theology, but by cold hard economics. Scrapping the 30,000 copies already printed would cost tens of thousands of dollars. And so, in a moment of sublime irony, the binding machine defeated the theologians. Kol Nidrei had once again stubbornly refused to die. [9]

For the next printing, Cohon did something revolutionary. Instead of simply removing the text, he wrote an English substitute that was a complete inversion of the original. Where the ancient formula sought to annul our vows, Cohon’s prayer asked God for the strength to fulfil them. [10] It transformed a ritual of release into a moment of profound commitment.

Tonight, we are the heirs to this entire, messy, beautiful history. We are not here to find a spiritual loophole or to press a cosmic reset button that wipes our slate clean. We are here to do the opposite. We are here, in the spirit of Samuel Cohon’s radical inversion, to declare what truly matters to us. We are here to make commitments, not annul them.

The traditional Kol Nidrei annulled seven kinds of vows made between a person and God. [11] Tonight, we replace those annulments with seven sacred Jewish commitments. Seven affirmations that define who we are, what we value, and what we resolve to build in the year ahead. [12]

First Commitment: To Aspire

We commit to aim high. Kol Nidrei invites us to take promises seriously, not to avoid them. We name the ideals that shape a life of holiness, patience, compassion, justice, and honesty, and we reach for them with courage. Torah commands, “קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ, be holy,” [13] and the prophets distil this into walking humbly and doing what is right. [14] We affirm that holiness is within human reach. We will set a high bar for ourselves, believe that growth is possible, and keep choosing the better path even when it is hard.

Second Commitment: To Forgive

We commit to forgive. Aspiration guarantees that we will sometimes fall short. Forgiveness is the practice that keeps a community whole and a soul supple. Our tradition teaches the attributes of divine mercy, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and rich in kindness. [15] We will hold bold expectations and meet failure with gentleness, towards others and towards ourselves. This is not the refusal to name harm. It is the choice to repair trust, to make space for return, and to carry one another forward.

Third Commitment: Pride in Progressive Judaism

We commit to walk our Progressive path with confidence. We belong fully to Am Yisrael. Our Judaism is rooted in Torah and the wisdom of generations, informed by history and science, and accountable to human dignity. “אֵלּוּ וָאֵלּוּ דִּבְרֵי אֱלֹהִים חַיִּים, these and those are God’s living words,” [16] reminds us that principled disagreement can be sacred. We affirm gender equality and LGBTQ+ dignity. We honour tradition by engaging it honestly and letting it speak to the moral questions of our time. This is authentic Judaism, thoughtful, joyous, and alive.

Fourth Commitment: Communal Co-Creation

Drawing from one of my recent Shabbat drashot, we commit to co-create this community. The theological basis for this is the radical idea that the Torah is not in heaven, but “in your mouth and in your heart”, [17] empowering each of us with the agency to shape our Jewish lives. We are not religious consumers; we are builders. At this stage we have few committees and programmes, which is an invitation rather than a deficit. This year we will give better form to our care for one another, shaping teams that welcome, visit, sing, teach, organise, and serve, so that our shared home reflects the gifts and responsibilities of all who gather here.

Fifth Commitment: Lifelong Learning

We commit to taking Jewish learning seriously, for ourselves and for future generations. As we discussed in another recent Shabbat drashah, we reject the phenomenon known as “paediatric Judaism”, where Jewish knowledge ends at bar or bat-mitzvah. [18] The goal of adult Jewish learning is to become as sophisticated in our Jewish lives as we are in all other realms. [19] It is to realise that Judaism has relevant insights for the most crucial moments of our lives, not only for what happens inside the sanctuary. In 5786 we will work on an adult learning programme that fits our community, with spaces to question, to encounter classic texts, and to explore contemporary issues through a Jewish lens. What we learn ourselves can kindle others, and what we teach one another can steady us for the work ahead.

Sixth Commitment: Tikkun Olam, Repairing the World

We commit to act on our values. Tikkun Olam is not a slogan, it is the natural outcome of internalised Jewish ethics. Living in South Africa, a reality of extreme inequalities, our responsibility is undeniable. I am inspired by the words of our sister congregation, Beit Emanuel, which affirms that, “in this land we have experienced the best and worst of the human spirit. We have plumbed the depths of racism, violence, and injustice, and we have soared the heights of grace, reconciliation, and renewal.” [20] We will turn compassion into concrete practice, joining neighbours, learning from those already doing the work, and showing up reliably. Service and justice belong together. Meeting immediate need and addressing root causes are both part of our Jewish responsibility, here in Johannesburg and beyond.

Our Seventh Commitment: Sustaining Our Community

Finally, we commit to sustaining our community, grounded in the ancient wisdom of Pirkei Avot: “אִם אֵין קֶמַח, אֵין תּוֹרָה, If there is no flour, there is no Torah.” Prayer, learning, care, and service require time, skill, and financial support to endure. Bet David is blessed with rental income, but it is not enough. In some communities abroad, members contribute between 1% and 2.5% of their income as dues. [21] We are not there yet, but this is a conversation we want to start among ourselves. Tonight, we ask each of you to consider: What can you give? Not as a fee for services, but as an investment in the Jewish future. Our ancestors built the infrastructure of this community in much harder times. We commit to honouring their legacy by keeping this sanctuary alive and thriving—for ourselves, and for those yet to come.

This is our Kol Nidrei. Not an escape clause, but a covenant. Not an annulment of vows, but an affirmation of commitments. We stand here tonight, witnesses to our own shortcomings, but also to our deep and powerful desire to be better. The haunting melody that filled this room was not a song of release, but a call to commitment. [22]

The tools we need to flourish—the wisdom to choose, the capacity to act justly, and the power to co-create our sacred future—are not distant. The capacity for an ethical and vital Jewish life is right here. It is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, for you to do. [23]

May we have the courage to make these commitments, and the strength to live them.

Ken Yehi Ratzon. May this be God’s will.

Shanah Tovah! Gmar Chatimah Tovah!

[*] Unless otherwise noted, all the articles mentioned in the footnotes are from All These Vows: Kol Nidre, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011). 

[1] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre: Anatomy of a Conflict".

[2] Jonathan Magonet, "What If Cleverness Is Foolishness and Righteousness an Illusion?". See also Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Morality, Meaning, and the Ritual Search for the Sacred".
[3] Tony Bayfield, "At Least Credit Me with Being Compassionate".

[4] Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, "The Kol Nidre Mirror to Our Soul". See also Eliezer Diamond, "Kol Nidre: A Halakhic History and Analysis".

[5] Eliezer Diamond, "Kol Nidre: A Halakhic History and Analysis". See also Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance".

[6] Ellen M. Umansky, "Ritualizing Kol Nidre: The Power of Three". See also Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Introduction".

[7] Andrew Goldstein, "Memories of the Past, Guidelines for the Future". See also Annette M. Boeckler, "The Magic of the Moment: Kol Nidre in Progressive Judaism”.

[8] Annette M. Boeckler, "The Magic of the Moment: Kol Nidre in Progressive Judaism”.

[9] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance”.

[10] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance". 

[11] Rachel Nussbaum, "Over-Promise, Under-Deliver … and Then Forgive".

[12] Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Kol Nidre from Union Prayer Book to Gates of Repentance."

[13] Lev. 19:2.

[14] Micah 6:8.

[15] Ex. 34:6.

[16] Talmud Bavli, Eruvin 13b.

[17] Deut 30:14

[18] Jonathan Magonet, "What If Cleverness Is Foolishness and Righteousness an Illusion?".

[19] Ruth Durchslag, "Words Mean Everything, Words Mean Nothing—Both Are True”.

[20] Beit Emanuel’s Prayer for South Africa.

[21] https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/can-synagogues-live-by-dues-alone

[22] Jonathan P. Slater, "Release beyond Words: Kol Nidre Even on a Violin".

[23] Aaron Panken, "Courting Inversion: Kol Nidre as Legal Drama”.

Dvar Torah: From Paediatric Judaism to a Lifetime of Learning

Many of us here are parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We want the best for the children in our lives. We want them to be well-read, so we encourage them: we give them books and we ask often, “Have you done your reading yet?” But a fascinating 2018 study on this very topic revealed a profound truth. Children have an uncanny ability to detect hypocrisy. One child in the study said of his parents, “They don’t do any reading, they just ask me and then I have to go do it.” Another put it simply: “He doesn’t read himself really.” The researchers concluded that when encouragement is not backed by example, it rings hollow.

This simple truth from the world of literacy is a powerful mirror for our own Jewish lives. How often do we treat Jewish learning as something exclusively for the young? This results in what we might call a “paediatric Judaism.” Imagine if our entire experience of literature never progressed beyond Curious George and the like. We would be missing the richness of the novels, the poetry, the drama that give life meaning. And yet, so often, this is what happens with our Jewish knowledge. We mature into sophisticated learners in every other area of our lives, our careers, our hobbies, our understanding of the world, but when it comes to Judaism, many of us remain stuck at a 13-year-old’s level. Our faith becomes a set of stories and rituals that one graduates from, like primary school. This is the danger we face.

Our own tradition understood this profound psychological truth centuries ago. A person once asked Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk how they could encourage their children to dedicate themselves to the study of Torah. Menachem Mendel replied: “If you truly wish to do this, then you yourself must devote time to Torah, and they will follow your example. Otherwise, you will not dedicate time to Torah, but merely tell your children to do so. And that is how it will remain.”

And that is how it will remain. A faith for children. A faith that cannot sustain us through the complexities of adult life.

It is into this very challenge that our parashah speaks with such astonishing wisdom and foresight. The text provides the perfect antidote to this problem of a hollowed-out, paediatric Judaism. Listen to this verse from D’varim: “Gather the people, men, women, children, and the strangers in your communities, that they may hear and so learn to revere the Eternal your God and to observe faithfully every word of this Torah.”

Let us pause and absorb the radical inclusivity of this statement. The instruction is not “Gather the children.” It is not “Ensure your children have a Bar/Bat-Mitzvah education.” It is “Gather the people.” All of them. Men and women, young and old. The children, who are not just our future, but our partners in the present. And, perhaps most strikingly, “the strangers in your communities.” Every single person is to be included in this great assembly of learning.

This is a profound statement about the nature of Jewish education. It is not something to be confined to the classroom. It is not a task to be completed in childhood and then set aside. It is a lifelong, communal endeavour. The Torah is not meant to be a dusty scroll, revered from a distance by adults while being force-fed to children. It is meant to be heard, learned, and internalised by everyone, together, until it shapes the very way we see the world. The goal is twofold: to learn to revere God, and to observe the Torah faithfully. The reverence and the observance are intertwined, one flowing from the other. And it starts with the adults showing up.

But this grand instruction begs a fundamental question. If this learning is for everyone, what is this Torah that we are all meant to know? Is it the 613 mitzvot in all their intricate detail? Is it the complex tapestry of Talmudic debate? Many adults shy away from Jewish learning precisely because they imagine it to be an insurmountable mountain of arcane rules, something best left to the rabbis or the especially learned.

Our tradition, however, provides us with some beautifully concise and powerful answers. Perhaps the most famous is the story of a person considering becoming a Jew by choice who came before Shammai and Hillel. He approached Shammai with an impossible request: “Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai chased the man away with a builder’s ruler. It was an absurd request.

But then the man went to Hillel. Hillel, renowned for his gentle nature, did not dismiss him. He stood the man on one foot and said, “Do not do to your neighbour what is hateful to you. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

“The rest is commentary. Now go and study.” In this one, brilliant statement, Hillel encapsulates the very essence of adult Jewish learning. He does not say the commentary is unimportant. But he says it is all an elaboration of a single, foundational principle: empathy. The core of the matter is to see the other, recognise their humanity, and treat them with dignity. The intricate laws of Shabbat and kashrut are the “commentary”, the frameworks through which we practise and refine our ability to live out that core principle. Hillel’s message is clear: start with the heart, with the basic principle of human decency, and from there, the study of the rest will have context and meaning. This is an entry point for any adult, at any level.

This focus on the ethical core is a recurring theme. Consider the debate between Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai over the klal gadol baTorah, the most important verse in the entire Torah. Rabbi Akiva proposed the famous verse from Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It is a powerful choice, a call for active love and compassion.

But Ben Azzai disagreed. He chose an even more foundational verse from Genesis: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. On the day that God created man, in the likeness of God He made him.” Ben Azzai argued that this was greater because our ability to love our neighbour as ourselves can be subjective. It presumes that what we want for ourselves is what our neighbour wants, but people are very different from each other. Sometimes the best way to treat someone with dignity is not to think of them as being just like us, but to recognise and honour our differences. And what if, on a given day, you do not love yourself very much? Ben Azzai’s verse, however, establishes an objective, unshakeable truth: every single human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. Their value is not dependent on your feelings towards them. It is inherent. This principle compels us to honour the humanity in everyone, even our enemies.

What is striking is that in identifying the core of Torah, none of these sages pointed to a ritual precept. They all pointed directly to the realm of interpersonal ethics. They all understood that the ultimate purpose of the Torah’s intricate system is to shape us into a certain kind of person. It is to mould us into a mensch.

Mensch is a Yiddish word that, although often translated as “person”, means a lot more than that. A mensch is someone of integrity, honour, decency, and compassion. A mensch is a real human being. This is the goal of a Jewish education, and it is most certainly not a paediatric goal. Becoming a mensch is the work of a lifetime. It is an adult curriculum.

This brings us to a stark teaching from Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers: “וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ” — “In a situation devoid of humanity, strive to be a human being.”

This is a profound ethical demand. It is easy to be a good person when surrounded by good people. But what do you do in a moral vacuum? What happens in a workplace where gossip is the norm? Or in a political climate where decency is mocked? The Mishnah tells us: in that place, you must strive to be a mensch. When no one else will stand up, you must. This requires an adult morality, an internalised ethical framework that does not depend on external validation. This is what Jewish learning is for.

And so, we return to where we began. We cannot ask our children to build this deep ethical character if we are not actively engaged in building it ourselves. We cannot expect them to love a tradition that they see us neglect. The command of our parashah is our guide. It is a call to intergenerational, communal learning. It is a call for adults to model what a life of learning and striving looks like.

Let us, therefore, answer that ancient call. Let us gather, all of us, and commit ourselves to this learning. Let us show our children, and each other, that Judaism is not a subject to be passed, but a life to be lived. Let us learn together what it means to be a mensch, so that our children do not learn from our hypocrisy, but are inspired by our example. In doing so, we not only honour our past, but we build a more humane and compassionate future for all.

Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be God’s will.

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah!

Dvar Torah: Giving Life to Our Metaphors for God | Rosh haShannah 5786

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Dando vida às metafóras sobre Deus. Rosh haShaná 5783")

I want to begin with a Chasidic story that I love to teach, and which I came across in a book by S. Y. Agnon [1], the Israeli author awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

One day a chasid visited his Rebbe, the Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk, during the days between Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur, and asked whether he could watch how the Rabbi performed the kapparah.

For those unfamiliar with the term, kapparah is an old tradition in which a person’s sins are transferred to a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur by waving the animal over the person’s head. The animal is then slaughtered, along with the sins of the person, and donated. Over time, and with concern for animal welfare, some people have done a version of this ritual in which the sins are instead transferred to money, which is then donated. Let it be clear that these practices are no longer observed by the great majority of the liberal Jewish world.

The Rabbi’s answer surprised the chasid somewhat:

“I am honoured that you wish to see me carry out the mitzvah of kapparah, but I must tell you that in this particular mitzvah, my performance is nothing extraordinary. If you want to see someone who does it in a special way, go and see Moishe, who runs the hostel.”

On the morning before Yom Kippur, the young chasid went to Moishe’s home to observe how he did kapparah, peering through a window.

Moishe began by sitting in a wooden chair in front of a small fireplace in his living room, with “his two books of teshuvah” by his side. Moishe took the first book and said:

“Ribono shel Olam [Master of the World], the time has come for us to settle accounts for all our transgressions of the past year, for kapparah applies to all Israel.”

He opened the first book, read what was written very carefully, and began to weep. The young chasid listened closely while Moishe read a list of sins (all apparently rather minor) that he had committed in the previous year. When he finished reading, Moishe took his notebook, soaked with tears, held it above his head, then threw it into the fire. He then took the other book, much heavier than the first, and said:

“Ribono shel Olam, before I listed my transgressions; now I will recount all the transgressions that You have committed.”

Moishe immediately began to list all the episodes of death, suffering, disease and destruction which had occurred over the previous year to members of his family. When he finished listing them, he said:

“Ribono shel Olam, if we were to calculate precisely, You owe me more than I owe You. But I do not wish to be so exact in our accounting, for today is the eve of Yom Kippur and we are all obligated to make peace with one another. Therefore, I forgive all Your transgressions against me and my family, and You also forgive all my transgressions against You.”

With that, Moishe took the second book, also soaked with tears, held it above his head, and threw it into the fire.

He then poured vodka into his cup, made the blessing, said “L’chaim!” loudly. He sat down with his wife and had a good meal in preparation for the fast.

The young chasid, shocked, returned to his Rebbe and recounted the heresies Moishe had spoken to God. The Rabbi said to him:

“Know this: in the heavens, every year God and all the Divine court gather to hear with keen attention the things Moishe says. And as a result, there is joy and satisfaction in all the worlds.”

As I said, I love teaching this story because there is in it a fundamentally Jewish element of protest which we have allowed to fade over the past century and a half. When I offer the first class in an Introduction to Judaism course, I tell the students that whereas, in most other religious traditions, being a devout person means saying “Yes, Sir” to the Divine message, in Judaism a committed Jew responds to God’s call with “how dare You ask me such a thing?!”. That was how Avraham, the first patriarch, responded when God instructed him to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah [2]; that was how Moshe responded when God said He would destroy the people after the episode of the Golden Calf [3]; that was how the rabbis responded when God attempted to intervene in one of their rabbinic debates [4]. The name most often given to the Jewish people in the rabbinic tradition, Yisrael, reflects this perspective: “one who wrestles with God”. The most amazing thing is that God does not seem disturbed by our questioning of God’s actions; on the contrary: in one story in which God's opinion is rejected by the rabbis, God comes away smiling and saying “My children have defeated me” — proud, like a parent whose daughter defeats him at chess.

When I teach the story of Moishe performing his extraordinary kapparah, people seem to appreciate it, and I think the reason is that they admire his conduct. But the truth is I believe they also identify with the chasid, who thinks it (what Moishe is doing) is heresy.

We want a new model of relationship with the Divine, yet we have immense difficulty giving up the current model, even when it deeply troubles us.

In preparation for this sermon, I was reading a book called God the What? What Our Metaphors for God Reveal about Our Beliefs in God, by Carolyn Jane Bohler. Early in the book, the author offers a questionnaire about our beliefs and suggests that readers fill it out before reading the book, and again after finishing it.

Personally, after all my years in rabbinical seminary, I consider myself someone with a sophisticated Jewish education; someone whose understanding of God is in no way based on what I call “Santa Claus God” — the long white-bearded image, sitting on a throne in the sky, watching every detail of our lives. My understanding of the Divine is fluid, but much closer to Mordecai Kaplan’s, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement (who defined God as “the power that makes for salvation”), or to those who see God as a process; or to Maimonides’, the rationalist philosopher for whom humanity could never assert with certainty what God is, only what God is not — for example, that God does not have a body. And yet, by the end of Bohler’s questionnaire (which includes statements like “God continues working in us, shaping us”, and “God and humanity share power and responsibility”, and “God takes what is and, again and again, seeks to create the best with what He has”), I was surprised to find that most of my responses still assumed “Santa Claus God”, the God I don’t believe in. I asked myself: why is that, if that is not how I believe the Divine to be?

Because the context that surrounds us matters, and repeated context matters even more. Perhaps some of you followed a few years ago the controversy around the live-action Little Mermaid film, in which the title role is played by Halle Bailey, a Black actress. On one side, fans upset that the Little Mermaid in the film would not have the almost-white skin of the original cartoon version. On the other, Black children moved to see that their hero would be portrayed looking like someone similar to them. I have never met a mermaid, nor do I know anyone who has. I do not know what colour her skin or hair would be, her height, or her tone of voice — and even without knowing a mermaid, no one complained when Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century character was portrayed as a red-haired white woman in a Disney cartoon. Without denying that many of the complaints had racist inspiration, there is also the truth that, after being portrayed white and red-haired in many children’s movies, that image becomes engraved in our consciousness. Dolls, Disney animations and other studios’ productions, clothes, many items hammering that idea into our heads since 1989, when the animated feature was released. That repetition of an image turns what might once have been only one possible way to read the character’s appearance into the only way people feel it must be.

The same phenomenon occurs with our theological perceptions. Within the Jewish world, whenever we recite a brachah we use the formula “Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-Olam” — “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe.” Many aspects of the Divine are implicit in this short formula: God is “other”, whom we address as Ata (You) — and so is not part of us. God is male. God is hierarchical, our King and of the whole universe. In the wider culture, when God is a character in a film, it is in the vast majority of cases portrayed as an old white person with a deep voice. Even the comedians who deconstruct religious tradition, who question religious perspectives, portray God this way — other, male, hierarchical. When God is presented outside that mould — and there have been several attempts in recent years — the reception is like Moishe’s kapparah: it’s heresy!

Some time ago, I led workshops with groups of educators and students: I asked them what attributes they would ascribe to God based on the way God is depicted in the Torah and in Jewish liturgy. Most of the responses were far from welcoming: “punitive”, “egocentric”, “dogmatic”, “fearsome”, “violent”, “misogynistic” were some of the words used. However, when I asked what they personally believed about God, I received entirely different answers: words about being welcoming, partnership, horizontality. From the texts we read, the prayers we say, the cultural reality in which we live, we have come to accept that the “correct” perspective of God is one in which many of us no longer believe.

“No longer believing” also needs qualification, because it is implied in that phrase that once Jews believed in this God literally. Rabbi Larry Hoffman is one of the principal — if not the foremost — experts in Jewish liturgy in the liberal Jewish world. He challenges the idea with which we have been convinced: that our ancestors believed these texts literally. In his words:

“Complicating matters is our still very poor understanding of our ancestors, whom we envision as humorless saints who did not have to suffer the problems with prayer that plague us. But what if they were more like us than we think? Did the same prayers that bother us bother them – an all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing God who lets innocent children die, for example? When they encountered these liturgical claims, did they take them literally? Or had they already come to terms with the inexpressibility of the profound? Did they have to await modern literary criticism to develop what we now call “readership strategies”—or did they already know enough to read the way we do, recognizing the poetics of simile, hyperbole, personification, and the rest? That they lived in medieval times makes them neither childishly naïve nor mentally incompetent, after all. Some of them were geniuses like Maimonides, who denied God’s corporeality and anticipated our unease with prayers that treat God as if God were an all-too-human judge requiring pacification by prayer and petition. But was Maimonides the only one who thought such “heresies,” or was he just a particularly prominent person who dared say them out loud? Great writers do not always provide ideas that no one has ever entertained so much as they couch them in words that evoke knowing nods from readers who more or less suspected these truths anyway but had no way of expressing them.”

“What shall we say, similarly, about the authors of these prayers? How would we know if they wrote ironically, rather than literally, for example? Their Hebrew was unvocalized, leaving us, the readers, to guess at punctuation like commas and periods, but also exclamation points for intensity, question marks to denote rhetorical uncertainties, and quotation marks to warn against a literal understanding of what they bracket. What if we have been getting all this wrong? We can see, for example, how frequently they cited the Bible; but if their primary concern was quoting, how would we know if they intended the quotes as literal truths? We quote Shakespeare‘s “seven ages of man” to get across the idea of human development, but not to say that there are specifically seven such ages that “men,” say, bur not women, go through. If someone writes “divinely,” we do not mean they really write like God. What if our most gifted writers of prayer almost never took their writing literally? What if they were gifted the way writers are today—able to stretch language imaginatively enough to convey what ordinary conceptual thought will never quite arrive at?” [5]

Some time ago I read an article reporting that a skeleton was found in Borneo, Indonesia, with a leg amputated between knee and foot 31,000 years ago. The marks on the bones show that this was not an accident, but a surgical amputation. The surgery took place when the individual was 14 or 15 years old, and he lived until about 20. According to the article’s author:

“What seems obvious to me is that this discovery will force scientists to reconsider the technological and cultural development of those peoples. Since these populations did not know writing and did almost not build architectural works, all we know about them comes from excavating the places in which they lived and studying bones, paintings, remains of food, and the few artefacts found. With so little information, it is natural that we underestimate the progress of those societies. A discovery like this will force us to re-evaluate the knowledge and the technologies these people already mastered.” [6]

For more than 30,000 years, human beings were already capable of surgical amputation, but we continue to imagine that our ancestors believed the Torah literally and that our rabbis composed the Jewish liturgy without any poetic licence, without use of metaphor, without irony. All of those would be modern techniques to escape a theological reality with which we cannot quite reconcile ourselves.

In her book Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Sallie McFague argues that reading religious texts as if they had a single literal meaning is to engage in what she calls the “idolatry of religious language”:

“The ancients were less literalistic than we are, aware that truth has many levels and that when one writes the story of an influential person's life, one's perspective will color that story. Our is a literalistic mentality; theirs was a symbolical mentality.” [7]

What if a symbolic reading were within our reach? What if we allowed ourselves a generous and radically metaphorical reading of the liturgical poems we will read in these Days of Awe, the Yamim Noraim?

In the book about religious metaphors that I mentioned earlier, the author suggests techniques for us to use these metaphors intentionally, without feeling that we are submitting to a theology that is not ours — and also to recognise that some of these metaphors do not work for us, that we should seek others. In one example where the reinterpretation was possible, she discusses the image of God as a potter, which is part of the liturgy of Yom Kippur—and which used to be dear to me, yet also troubling. I was troubled by the idea of God as a potter because it placed me in a passive, clay-like role, without agency, subject to the will of my Creator. Carolyn Bohler relates in her book that her son works with clay, and what she learned from him is that many attempts are required before the final product is ready. She continues, saying that the Divine Potter enjoys being creative, editing us, shaping us, giving us form.

With such a generous reading — not violating the sense of the text but nor presuming that its authors intended we adopt a literal reading — I have been able to see a way in which the Divine, dwelling within me, in a non-hierarchical way and without assuming any gender, helps me to transform all the time, in dialogue with me, as together we strive for me to become the best version of myself. The author herself recognises that not all metaphors leave room for this kind of symbolic seeking. In the book of the prophet Hoshea, for example, God compares Godself to an abusive husband — an image perhaps impossible to reclaim, especially for survivors of domestic abuse. Many others, however, have been thrown out like the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

In the best sermon I have ever read, Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig depicts God as an old woman waiting for her children to visit on Yom Kippur. At one point, God complains about the postcards her children send, with printed words written by others, in which they merely sign their name — toward the end of the text, it becomes clear that these postcards are the pages of the machzor, the High Holiday prayer book of Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur — words we repeat as if they were ours, as if we meant what they express, without even stopping to reflect upon their meaning.

Moishe, the hostel-owner, showed the radical courage to perform cheshbon hanefesh, accounting of the soul, both for himself and for God — thereby giving meaning to the ritual of kapparah. Could we too find that kind of radical courage, and transform the experience of these awe-filled Days into something truly meaningful and transformative?

Shanah Tovah! May the year 5786 be transformative and very sweet for all of us.

[1] S. Y. Agnon, “The Account,” Yamim Noraim, Part II, ch. 22.
[2] Genesis 18:25.
[3] Exodus 32:11-13.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b.
[5] Larry A. Hoffman, “Prayers of Awe, Intuitions of Wonder,” in Who by Fire, Who by Water: Un’taneh Tokef, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010, pp. 4-12.
[6] Fernando Reinach, “A mais antiga perna amputada”, Estado de São Paulo, 17 de setembro de 2022.
[7] Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, p. 23 (e-book).