Dvar Torah: The Physics of Spirit: Light in the Valley of Shadows

The Jewish world has just experienced two terribly difficult years. At almost every celebration, at almost every communal moment, even when the occasion was genuinely joyful, we carried an awareness of what was happening elsewhere in the Jewish world. Something brittle. A grief that did not always have words. A vigilance that never fully switched off. Regardless of where each of us stands on the political spectrum, most, maybe all of us have had reasons to feel bruised, wounded, and exhausted by this era.

And so, as this Chanukah approached, I think many of us permitted ourselves a quiet hope. Not that we would forget October 7th. We did not want to forget it, and we should not forget it. But perhaps we might begin, slowly, to move beyond it in the only way one ever moves beyond trauma—not by erasing it, but by letting it heal, little by little. By living with its consequences with more steadiness. By learning and maturing from harsh lessons we actually never asked to learn.

This Chanukah, we told ourselves, might be the first celebration in over two years in which the shadow of that day and what followed it was not at the very top of our communal agenda. We allowed ourselves to imagine something close to a "normal" Festival of Lights.

And then, on the first night of Chanukah, there was the terror attack in Australia.

I do not need to describe it. You know. You have already felt what news like that does to a Jewish soul, and to a Jewish community. The sudden return of a familiar dread. The sense that the story offered us a resolution, only to pull it away. Like the cinematic trope where a plot seems complete, and the audience exhales, and then, in the final moments, the danger rises again. The false ending. The villain presumed gone, returning at the last moment.

Many in our South African Jewish community, myself included, have friends and relatives living in Australia. The bond between our communities is thick, woven of shared history and shared migration. And even when we do not have direct ties, the Jewish world is small enough that pain does not remain local. It travels. It arrives. It rearranges the atmosphere and the rhythm of our lives.

A festival dedicated to bringing light into the world leaves us with the spiritual question of this week: How do we respond when we offer light, and the world answers with darkness? When we extend a hand in celebration, and it is met by terror? When the very moment we are striking the match, trying to bring holiness into the world, devastation breaks in?

One response is ancient and human. Fight aggression with aggression. Meet darkness with a deeper, more aggressive darkness. Let fear harden into suspicion. Let grief harden into hatred. There is a part of the human heart that finds that response natural, even logical.

But Chanukah, at its best, asks us to consider a different kind of logic.

Chanukah may be the Jewish festival with the greatest range of interpretations and narratives. It can be told as a holiday of fighting for national pride, of spiritual resistance, of grit, of miracles, of religious freedom, of the complicated uses of power. We argue about it, but across all the arguments, one symbol has remained oddly steady: the light.

In the Northern Hemisphere, where the story began, Chanukah arrives in deep winter, when the nights are longest. There, the metaphor almost explains itself.

But here in the South, in South Africa, in Brazil, and indeed in Australia, we celebrate Chanukah in the summer. The days are long. The sun is strong. The world, in purely physical terms, is flooded with light.

And yet this week has taught us something painful and clarifying. Physical sunlight is not enough to banish darkness. You can have the longest day of the year, and still, in a single moment of terror, the world can feel pitch black. Just when our brothers and sisters in Australia were basking in the summer warmth, a cloud of darkness descended upon all of us. The sun can illuminate streets. It cannot always illuminate the human condition.

Which is why the light of the Chanukah candles are just a physical representation of something much deeper and meaningful, something moral and spiritual. A candle is not a floodlight. It does not conquer. It does not dominate. It does not humiliate. It simply insists on being light, and in doing so, it changes the terms of the darkness around it.

Parashat Miketz, in its own way, is also a meditation on what darkness can and cannot do.

The parashah opens with two words that sound, at first, like a simple timestamp: Vayehi miketz shnatayim yamim, "And it came to pass at the end of two full years." Two years.

In the narrative, Yosef has been stuck in an Egyptian dungeon. He has already endured the pit his brothers threw him into. He has already survived slavery. He has already been falsely accused and plunged into another pit. Now he has been in the dark, forgotten, waiting, for two full years.

We know that feeling. We know what it feels like to count the time since a trauma began. We know the feeling of miketz shnatayim yamim, of waiting for the end of two difficult years, hoping for a release, hoping for the light to break through the dungeon bars.

And then Pharaoh dreams.

Miketz places terror not only in external events, but in the mind itself. Pharaoh wakes up shaken, destabilised, not because something has happened outside, but because his interior world has staged a nightmare he cannot control. Dreams are like that. They do not ask permission. They do not obey the rules of daylight.

Trauma is like that too. It is not only what happened then. It is what continues to happen inside us afterwards. It can quiet down for a season, and then something breaks in, and suddenly the past feels present again. The nervous system does not always distinguish between memory and immediate danger.

So Miketz does not treat fear as something trivial. But it also does not treat fear as fate.

Pharaoh's advisors cannot interpret the dream in a way that steadies the world. Yosef is summoned. And Yosef refuses two temptations at once. He refuses denial, and he refuses panic.

He does not say, "It is nothing." And he also does not say, "Since it is frightening, your response must be frightening too."

Instead, Yosef does something counterintuitive. He takes fear and translates it into responsibility. He takes anxiety and turns it into preparation. He takes a nightmare and turns it into a plan to preserve life. He brings clarity. He brings sustenance. He turns the darkness of the dungeon into the light of salvation.

It would have been understandable if Yosef emerged bitter, vengeful, eager to add his own darkness to the darkness he inherited. But he does not. He listens. He clarifies. He brings order where there was confusion. He brings a kind of light, not only for himself, but for the society that imprisoned him.

And then, in one of the parashah's quieter transformations, Yosef is given a new name by Pharaoh, Tzafenat Paneach. The original Egyptian meaning is uncertain, but Targum Onkelos translates it as "the man unto whom hidden things are revealed“, a revealer of mysteries.

That is not a small description of Yosef's role in Miketz. He becomes the one who can stand in a room filled with fear and say: there is meaning here, and there is a path forward. He becomes, in the most literal sense, someone who reveals what is hidden.

Chanukah offers a parallel language for this.

The Talmud says that the ideal place for the Chanukah lights is outside, at the entrance to the home, or in the window, pirsumei nisa, publicising the miracle (Shabbat 21b). Chanukah is not meant to be only private comfort. It is meant to be visible.

And then the Talmud adds a sentence that feels like it was written with Jewish history in mind: u'v'sha'at ha-sakanah, "and in a time of danger", one places the chanukiah on the table inside, and that is sufficient (Shabbat 21b).

It is a remarkably honest concession. The tradition does not romanticise vulnerability. It does not demand recklessness. It recognises that there are moments in history when the street is not a neutral space. The terror attack in Australia has forced a sha'at hasakanah upon us. It has forced us to think about safety, perhaps to move our lights from the window to the table.

But here is the crucial point: We still light.

The location may change because of the danger, but the flame does not. The terrorists want us to stop lighting altogether. They want the fear to extinguish the mitzvah. They want to make the act of bringing light feel naïve, or dangerous, or pointless.

But we have a different "physics" in our tradition. It is a spiritual physics articulated by our sages, who taught: "Me'at min ha-or docheh harbeh min ha-choshech"—"A little light dispels a lot of darkness" (Chovot HaLevavot, Fifth Treatise on Devotion 5:13).

This is not just poetry; it is reality. Walk into a dark auditorium. Strike a single match. The darkness does not fight back. It simply vanishes, within the radius that the light creates. Darkness is not a force in the same way light is a force. Darkness is what happens when light is absent. It has no substance of its own.

Which means that the question Chanukah asks after a week like this is not whether darkness exists. It does. We know it does. We have felt it. The question is what we allow darkness to do to us.

Rav Kook taught: "The pure righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light; they do not complain of evil, but increase justice; they do not complain of heresy, but increase faith; they do not complain of ignorance, but increase wisdom."

I do not read that teaching as a demand for cheerfulness. I do not read it as a rebuke to grief. Rav Kook is not saying, "Do not feel what you feel." He is warning against a different danger: the danger of becoming fluent in darkness. The danger of letting darkness set our emotional vocabulary, our moral instincts, our imagination of what is possible. The danger of being so shaped by what we oppose that we begin to resemble it.

This is a truth echoed by Nelson Mandela, who knew intimately what it meant to sit in a prison cell and wait for justice. He taught us: "People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

That is not a sentimental claim. It is a hard one. It suggests that our most corrosive emotions are not inevitable. It suggests that communities can decide what they will practise, what they will normalize, and what they will pass on to their children.

Tonight, have already lit six Chanukah candles. Six nights of refusing to let the season's darkness have the last word. Six nights of adding light, not once, but again and again.

And there are only two nights left.

That matters. Because by the sixth night, the chanukiah is no longer tentative. It is bright. It is harder to ignore. It takes up space. It becomes, whether we intended it or not, a statement. Not the statement that everything is fine, because it is not. Not the statement that we are untouched, because we are not. But the statement that something in us refuses to be extinguished.

Miketz offers one final key, and it comes through the names Yosef gives his children, born in the darkness of Egypt. He names the first Menashe, meaning: “God has made me forget my hardship.” And the second Ephraim, meaning: “God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.”

I think many of us longed for Menashe this year. A little forgetting. A little relief. A holiday that did not feel like a memorial service with candles. We wanted to reach “the end of two full years” and feel, at last, that the dungeon door had opened.

But after what happened on the first night in Australia, it may be that Menashe is not available to us yet. Not because we failed. Simply because the world reminded us, again, that Jewish history does not always grant us neat endings.

So perhaps the spiritual task, this year, is Ephraim, the one whose name means “God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.” Not to bless the space of suffering. Not to romanticise it. But to refuse to let it be the only space we inhabit. To discover, within the very place that has wounded us, a capacity to remain human, to remain tender, to remain more than our fear.

Two nights remain. The light will reach its fullness not because darkness has disappeared, but because it has not succeeded in converting us into its echo. And if we can hold onto that, even quietly, even imperfectly, then we will have honoured what both Miketz and Chanukah are asking of us: to remain, even in a valley of shadows, a people who still knows how to kindle light.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach.

Dvar Torah: Shared Graves, Shared Grief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waskow then asks the question that we must ask today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Gen 23:2

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

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

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

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

Dvar Torah: Voices from the Akedah – A Bibliodrama

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

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

Avraham:

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

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

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

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

Itzchak:

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

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

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

Sarah:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ram:

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

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

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

God:

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Akedah: Can We Rebuild?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabat Shalom.

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

More Questions and Fewer Certainties

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Por mais perguntas e menos certezas")

Between immediate obedience to Divine commands and vigorous protest against them, Avraham embodies strikingly different forms of religious leadership in this week's parashah, Vayera. When God reveals the plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because their sin is overwhelming, Avraham challenges God's ethics in the strongest possible terms: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?!".[1] On the other hand, when, a few chapters later, God demands that Avraham sacrifice "his son, his only son, the one he loves, Yitzchak",[2] our patriarch consents without question, takes his son and walks with him to the place God had indicated for the sacrifice. If not for Divine intervention at the last moment, when the sacrificial knife had already been raised, Avraham would, in fact, have followed God's instruction and ended the life of his own child.

Across the centuries, both stories have been held up as models of virtue and religious conduct. Many commentators, pointing to the near-sacrifice of Yitzchak, have stressed that not only was Avraham willing to carry out the Divine instruction, but Yitzchak was also willing to be sacrificed, if that was God's plan. From this perspective, and from the lessons drawn from this biblical passage, devotion that rises above one's personal wishes and needs is the religious ideal to be sought. If Avraham was tested in this episode, these commentators argue, then he passed with distinction.

However, at least since Talmudic times, and despite attempts by rabbinic leadership to sideline this approach, a critique of Avraham's ready acceptance of the Divine order to sacrifice his own son has also featured in how commentators read the near-sacrifice of Yitzchak.[3] For them, Avraham's challenge to the revelation of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction reflects a healthier posture in relation to authority, even Divine authority. In particular, for Avraham, seen as an iconoclast, one who would overturn idols and who was unafraid to stand against general consensus, such a stance would be more in keeping with his life story.

I think about these stories and how they relate to different theological models, not only the external Divine Voice that Avraham heard, which instructed him to leave the place he lived and build a new home in a land that God would show him, but also the inner voice, the one that comes from the Divine spark in each person. When do we listen to our inner voice almost without asking questions, and when do we challenge it intensely? When are our certainties so strong that we accept their premises at face value, without any questioning, like dogmas whose validity is beyond dispute and whose very acceptance becomes a form of unexamined devotion? When, on the other hand, do we ask the uncomfortable questions, unsure where they will take us, with a trembling fear that we might, in fact, be betraying our inner voice and who knows what else in the process?

These ancient tensions between obedience and questioning echo powerfully in our own time, particularly in how we engage with strongly held beliefs. In the age of social media, we define ourselves by the causes we champion, often speaking out with unwavering certainty. Like rival supporters whose clashes sometimes turn violent, a pattern we know too well across our sporting landscape, we share our side's arguments without questioning their validity, scrolling past opposing views without considering the wisdom they might contain. We become both perpetrators and targets of abuse, hardening positions and deepening divisions.

I take inspiration from Avraham's courage in challenging God over Sodom and Gomorrah, and from the lessons we can draw from that example. The dialogical relationship with the Divine that is established there is one of the Torah's most moving passages for me. In our beautifully diverse society, where we encounter different convictions and traditions constantly, this lesson feels particularly urgent. May we all learn from him to have the courage to ask more questions and hold fewer certainties, to break the cycles of abuse and violence into which our stances sometimes harden. May we pursue dialogue and ubuntu, the recognition of our shared humanity, and welcome each person's pains, traumas, joys and convictions, so that we can foster debates marked by greater respect, deeper understanding, and genuine fruitfulness.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Gen. 18:25
[2] Gen. 22:1–2
[3] See, for example, chapter 5 of J. Richard Middleton, Abraham's Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job and How to Talk Back to God.

Dvar Torah: The Audacity to Build a Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Genesis 12:1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Gen. 14:13.

[2] B’reshit Rabbah 42:8.

[3] Gen. 12:13.

[4] Gen. 12:16.

[5] Gen. 20:1–16.

[6] Gen. 26:1–33.

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

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