Dvar Torah: The God of Becoming: Finding Faith in Uncertainty

How do you imagine the first moment God breaks centuries of silence and speaks to Moshe?

We have certain expectations of the Divine. We expect majesty. We expect power. If we were choosing the location, we might pick a cedar of Lebanon, towering and ancient. We might choose a jagged mountain peak, or a storm like the one that will eventually descend on Sinai. We expect the setting to match the status of the occupant.

Yet when the time comes to break the silence of centuries and speak to Moshe, God defies every expectation. The setting is a sneh—a lowly, prickly thorn-bush. A shrub that offers no shade, produces no fruit, possesses no beauty. The humblest plant in the desert.[1]

A Midrash notices exactly what we notice. Shemot Rabbah asks: why a thorn-bush? And it answers: to teach that there is no place devoid of the Divine presence, the Shechinah, not even a thorn-bush, not even the lowest, most painful places.[2]

That is already profound comfort. God is not found only in the beautiful, the successful, the photogenic. God is found in the thorns. God is found where we would rather not look.

But the thorn-bush does more than teach us where God can be found. It hints at how God behaves.

A God who chooses the thorn-bush is not a distant monarch. Not the Greek ideal of the "Unmoved Mover"—perfection understood as being untouched, unchangeable, unbothered.[3] The God of the thorn-bush goes to where the pain is. God is present not above the world, but within it. A God who is moved. Abraham Joshua Heschel called this divine pathos: the claim that God is not indifferent, that God cares, that the world matters to God.[4]

Which is why Moshe's question, in the very next breath, feels so human.

Moshe asks: "When they ask me, 'What is God’s name?', what shall I say?"[5] On the surface, it sounds practical. But Moshe is not really asking for information. If he were, saying “the God of Avraham, of Yitzchak and of Yaakov” would’ve been enough. He is asking for trust. How can I trust a God I cannot define?

We human beings love nouns. We love names. If we can name something, we can grasp it. If we can grasp it, we can control it. That impulse lives very close to the heart of idolatry—not only bowing to statues, but turning the infinite into something finite. Trading the God who calls for a god we can manage.

And we live, perhaps more than most generations, in a time of radical uncertainty. Some of it is personal: health, family, relationships, ageing. Some of it is communal: identity, cohesion, conflict. Some of it is global: violence, climate, technology, the constant sense that the ground can shift under our feet.

In such a world, the temptation is to ask religion to become a theological security blanket. We want God to be the answer that makes uncertainty go away. We want God to be a noun: solid, dependable, unchanging. A cosmic controller who has everything decided.

Then the Torah does something extraordinary. God refuses to give Moshe a noun. Instead, God gives him a verb:

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.[6]

Some of us might’ve grown up hearing it translated as "I Am That I Am." It sounds majestic, philosophical, static. Pure Being. A God who is complete, finished, beyond all motion.

But the Hebrew refuses to sit still. Ehyeh is in the imperfect tense. It leans forward. It opens out. "I Will Be What I Will Be." Not a frozen definition, but an unfolding presence. Not only "being," but "becoming."

Here we need to name an influence that many of us carry without noticing. Greek philosophy gave Western religious imagination a powerful picture of God as perfection-through-unchangeability. That picture influenced Christian theology, and it also influenced medieval Jewish philosophy. Maimonides develops a model of God as absolute, necessary existence, beyond change and beyond any human attribute.[7] There is grandeur in that vision. But it can become spiritually dangerous when it quietly turns God into a cosmic controller, a being of absolute certainty, too perfect to be affected.

That is not the God speaking from a thorn-bush.

Because in the Torah itself, God does not merely announce existence. God speaks relationship.

"I have surely seen the affliction of My people."

"I have heard their cry."

"I know their suffering."

"And I have come down to deliver them."[8]

This is not a God untouched by the world. This is a God who is affected by what human beings do to one another. Rashi sensed this dynamism immediately. He interprets Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh not as a metaphysical definition, but as a promise of presence: "I will be with them in this sorrow, just as I will be with them in future troubles."[9]

Do you hear the difference? The Greek God says, "I exist." The Jewish God says, "I will be with you." The first offers certainty; the second offers relationship.

And this is where Jewish Process Theology becomes not just an intellectual exercise, but a lifeline. Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson challenges the picture of God as a coercive monarch who has already decided everything. He offers instead a God of relationship, a God who does not override human freedom but works through it, inviting, luring, calling creation towards healing and wholeness. Not the "Unmoved Mover," but the "Most Moved Mover."[10]

If God says "I will be," then the future is not predetermined. It is open. Who God becomes in history depends, in part, on what we do. We are not passive recipients of a fixed plan. We are partners in redemption.

That is thrilling, and it is frightening.

It is thrilling because it means the world's brokenness is not the last chapter. It means change is genuinely possible. It means our actions matter, not as footnotes to a script, but as real contributions to what the future becomes.

But it is frightening because it means we cannot cling to the idol of certainty. We cannot know how the story ends. We cannot outsource responsibility to the heavens.

The Talmud offers a remarkable scene that captures this theology in narrative form. In Tractate Brachot, God initially wants Moshe to tell Israel, "I will be with you in this suffering, and I will be with you in future sufferings." Moshe protests: do not mention future sufferings now, it is enough that they bear the suffering of the present. And God agrees, and tells him to say simply: "Ehyeh has sent me to you."[11]

Read as theology, it is startling. God not only speaks, God listens. God not only commands, God responds. God enters a dialogue about what people can bear. It is a portrait of divine relationship, not divine distance.

Now, if this is the God in parashat Sh'mot, what changes for us?

First, it changes how we pray. If we pray to a God who has already decided everything, prayer becomes either performance or persuasion. But if we pray to Ehyeh, the God of becoming, prayer becomes relationship. Prayer becomes alignment, but not passive alignment. It becomes turning ourselves towards the divine call, answering it, arguing with it, consenting to it, and then returning to it again.[12]

Second, it changes what "faith" means. Faith is not certainty. Faith is not knowing the ending. Faith is the willingness to live without the idol of control, whilst staying in relationship with a God who cannot be pinned down.

And third, it changes how we live with suffering. A static, all-controlling God can make suffering unbearable, because if God is the cosmic controller, then every tragedy becomes either willed or permitted with full power to prevent it. That is the theology that breaks people's hearts.

The thorn-bush suggests something else. God is present in suffering, not as its author, but as its companion, and as the power that calls us towards response. God is the fire that burns, yet does not consume. Not the destroyer, but the resilience. Not the one who guarantees we will never be in the thorns, but the one who meets us there and calls us towards a different future.

And perhaps this is why the bush burns but is not consumed. Not because redemption is a single moment that fixes everything. But because becoming is ongoing. The fire keeps burning, and still we are not consumed.

So here is the invitation for this Shabbat.

Let us be honest about our uncertainty. Let us stop demanding from theology what theology was never meant to provide: total control.

Instead, let us listen for the voice that calls from the thorn-bush, not from the places where we feel powerful and composed, but from the places where life scratches, where the world hurts, where we are tempted to look away.

And when that voice says, "I will be," let us hear it as promise and responsibility.

Promise: the present is not the final word.

Responsibility: the future is being written, and our choices are part of the ink.

We do not worship a thing. We worship in relationship. We do not follow a map with every turn marked out. We are in dialogue with a voice that says: I will be with you, as I will be with you.

And in a world that is uncertain, and sometimes frightening, and often unfinished, that is enough.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Exodus 3:1–2.

[2] Shemot Rabbah 2:5.

[3] Aristotle, Metaphysics

[4] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets.

[5] Exodus 3:13.

[6] Exodus 3:14.

[7] Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I:63.

[8] Exodus 3:7–8.

[9] Rashi on Exodus 3:14.

[10] Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Jewish Lights, 2013).

[11] Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 9b.

[12] Toba Spitzer, "Why We Need Process Theology," CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (Winter 2012).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom.

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

Dvar Torah: Seeing with Care in an Age of Certainty

This week we read Parashat Re’eh. As it begins, Moshe, speaking to the people on the plains of Moab, about to enter the Promised Land, lays out a choice of cosmic significance. He says:

רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה

“See, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.” (Deuteronomy 11:26)

He continues, making the terms perfectly clear: the blessing comes if you listen to the commandments of God, and the curse comes if you do not.

It all seems so straightforward, so binary. On one side, there is light, blessing, and obedience. On the other, darkness, curse, and rebellion. It’s a structure that feels intuitive; it appeals to our desire for moral clarity, for a world where the rules are clear and the consequences are direct. Do good, and you will be rewarded. Stray from the path, and you will suffer.

It is a worldview of sharp lines and distinct categories, and for a generation poised to conquer a new land, filled with new challenges and temptations, perhaps this clarity was essential. You are either with God, or you are not. You are either on the path of blessing, or on the path of curse.

But as we sit here today, in our complex, messy, and often confusing world, we must ask ourselves: is life truly that simple? Do our experiences really fit into such neat and tidy boxes?

We have all lived long enough to know that sometimes, the most difficult and painful moments of our lives, what we might have called a ‘curse’ at the time, can lead to unexpected growth, wisdom, and transformation. We have a name for this phenomenon: a ‘blessing in disguise’. It’s the recognition that the neat division between blessing and curse can be porous, that light can emerge from darkness, that a painful ending can be the necessary prelude to a beautiful new beginning.

Our own tradition, in its deepest wisdom, understands this. While Deuteronomy presents this stark choice, the prophet Isaiah offers a far more complex and challenging theology. In a powerful declaration of God’s ultimate unity and power, the prophet says in God’s name:

יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ, עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא רָע. Yotzer or u’voreh choshech, oseh shalom u’voreh ra. “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil.” (Isaiah 45:7)

This is a staggering verse. It collapses the simple binary. It tells us that the source of all existence is one, and that this one source encompasses everything we perceive as good and everything we perceive as evil, the light and the darkness. Reality, Isaiah teaches, is not a simple battle between two opposing forces. It is a complex, unified whole. This verse challenges us to move beyond simplistic labels and to grapple with a more profound and unsettling truth: that life cannot be easily sorted into ‘blessing’ and ‘curse’. Everything, it seems, can be seen from multiple perspectives.

This ancient tension between the simple binary of Deuteronomy and the complex unity of Isaiah has taken on a powerful new urgency in our time. We live in the age of the algorithm, an age of social media, where the currency is not wisdom, but attention. The platforms that shape our discourse are designed for speed, not depth. They demand that every complex issue be distilled into a video of two minutes or less, every nuanced thought summarised in 280 characters.

In this digital ecosystem, complexity is a bug, not a feature. Nuance is boring. Thoughtful, analytical rigour is dismissed as elitist or out of touch. What gets rewarded? What goes viral? It is the simple, the radical, the absolute. It is the digital equivalent of “berachah u’klalah”, blessing and curse. You are either with us or against us. Right or wrong. Good or evil. The middle ground has vanished, and the loudest, most extreme voices dominate the conversation, attracting the views and the clicks upon which the whole system is built.

To make matters worse, we are caught in a relentless war of narratives. With the rise of sophisticated technologies like deepfakes, we can no longer be certain that what we are seeing is real. A video can be manipulated, a voice can be cloned, and a photograph can be manufactured to show something that never happened. The very foundations of our perception, seeing and hearing, are becoming unstable. How can we know who to trust? How can we discern what is true when our own senses can be so easily deceived?

It is precisely here, in this moment of profound epistemic crisis, that our parashah, Re’eh, returns to offer us its most subtle and urgent guidance.

The parashah's name and its very first word is Re’eh, meaning "See!" It is a command to open our eyes, to perceive, to witness what is being set before us. Yet in a world of deepfakes, this command becomes a challenge. It is no longer a simple instruction to look, but a demand to look critically, to see with discernment.

Then there is the word Sh’ma (שׁמע), to listen or to hear. Its variations appear six times in our parashah. We are told to listen to the commandments, to listen to the voice of God. But in an age of infinite information, of podcasts and pundits and screaming headlines, what does it mean to truly listen? It means filtering the noise, discerning the motive, and listening not just to the words being said, but for the truth, or the falsehood, that lies beneath them.

The acts of seeing and listening, the two primary ways we receive information about our world, are at the core of our parashah, and they are the very faculties under assault today.

But the parashah does not leave us there. It offers us a third, crucial verb, a tool for navigating this treacherous landscape. The word is Shamor (שמור), meaning to keep, to guard, or to be careful. This root word appears an astonishing seven times in Parashat Re’eh. We are commanded to be careful to perform the statutes, to guard the commandments.

Here, I believe, lies the parashah’s hidden wisdom for our time. The text opens with the stark, simple binary of blessing and curse, a framing perfectly suited for the social media age. But it then repeatedly, insistently, whispers a different instruction: Shamor. Be careful. Guard yourself.

Be careful with what you see. Do not accept images at face value. Interrogate their source. Question their intent. See with a critical, guarded eye.

Be careful with what you hear. Do not be seduced by the easy certainties of the zealot or the comforting rage of the demagogue. Listen for the nuance, for the voices that have been silenced, for the complexity that the algorithm seeks to erase.

Be careful with the simple narratives of blessing and curse. The world is rarely so clear cut. The person you have labelled as your enemy is a complex human being with their own story. The political solution that promises a simple utopia is almost certainly hiding a dark compromise. Shamor. Be careful of the seductive pull of absolute certainty.

Parashat Re’eh, then, is not a simple instruction manual with a clear choice. It is a sophisticated lesson in perception. It presents us with the binary worldview that is so appealing, and then gives us the intellectual and spiritual tools to dismantle it. The true blessing, it suggests, is not found in blindly choosing one path. The true blessing is the wisdom to be careful, the strength to embrace complexity, and the courage to inhabit the difficult, uncertain, and profoundly human space between the extremes.

In a world that demands we react in an instant, our tradition calls on us to pause and reflect. In a world that rewards radical simplicity, our Torah urges us to be careful and to appreciate nuance. And in a world where we are told to trust our eyes and ears, our parashah says: Re’eh, see, Sh’ma, listen, but above all, Shamor, be careful. For it is in that careful guarding of our minds and our hearts that we will truly find the path to blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

The Fire That Consumes and the Fire That Iluminates: A Jewish Reflection on Religious Fundamentalism

In Parashat Sh’mini, two young priests, Aharon’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, bring אֵשׁ זָרָה, aish zarah, a “strange fire” before ה׳ and are instantly consumed by Divine flame. The Torah does not tell us exactly what their sin was, only that they acted in a way not commanded by God [1]. Their death is jarring, a moment of tragedy interrupting what was meant to be a day of joy, the inauguration of the Mishkan.

Across generations, our sages struggled to understand this story. Rashi quotes Rabi Ishmael suggesting they entered intoxicated [2]. Kohelet warns: “Do not be overly righteous… why destroy yourself?”[3]. Their sin, it seems, lay not in rebellion but in excess, in zeal untempered by discipline or humility.

In our time, Rabbi Donniel Hartman has written powerfully about what he calls “God-intoxication” – the idea that when religious people become so consumed with serving God that they forget their responsibilities to other human beings, faith turns from a source of goodness into a source of harm. He warns:

“For the God-Intoxicated person, the awareness of living in the presence of the one transcendent God demands an all-consuming attention that can exhaust one's ability to see the needs of other human beings. This religious personality is defined by strict non-indifference to God. The more we walk with God, the less room we have to be aware of the human condition in general, and consequently, our moral sensibilities become attenuated.” [4]

This Shabbat, as we read of Nadav and Avihu, the world also mourns the loss of Pope Francis, a man who spent his papacy challenging the assumption that religious leadership must come wrapped in certainty. Wikipedia+1 His courage lay not only in what he affirmed, but in what he dared to question. He opened space for dialogue where others closed doors. He sought holiness not in doctrinal purism, but in compassion, justice, and service.

In many ways, Francis embodied what Jewish tradition upholds as its ideal religious leader: one who walks humbly with God [5], who fears arrogance more than doubt, who sees every human being as b’tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God.

The death of Nadav and Avihu reminds us that religious zeal and certainty, when not grounded in humility and restraint, can lead to disaster. The life of Pope Francis reminds us that religious leadership, when imbued with empathy and doubt, can lead to healing. Together, they offer a stark moral contrast between the fire that consumes and the fire that illuminates.

As Jews, we do not turn away from passion in our service of God. But we are taught to balance zeal with discernment, certainty with inquiry. We light sacred fire, the fire of Shabbat candles, of Torah study, of protest against injustice, not to burn ourselves or others, but to bring light unto the world.

May the memory of Pope Francis be for a blessing. And may we, in our own traditions, continue to resist the dangers of fundamentalism, not by rejecting God, but by putting love, humility, and human dignity at the centre of our service.

Shabbat Shalom,

[1] Lev. 10:1
[2] Rashi on Lev. 10:2
[3] Ecclesiastes 7:16
[4] Donniel Hartman, Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself, p. 46.
[5] Micah 6:8

Dvar Torah: A Faith Beyond Proof – From First to Second Naïveté

Tonight’s sermon is in dialogue with my column in this week’s AdKan, where I asked what some may find to be a provocative question: What if the Exodus never happened?

In that piece, I summarised what most contemporary archaeologists tell us: that there is no direct evidence of a mass Israelite presence in ancient Egypt, no archaeological trace of hundreds of thousands of people travelling through the wilderness, no record of Pharaoh’s armies drowning in the sea. This is not news in academic circles, but it still challenges many of us who grew up believing that the Exodus was not only sacred, but historically verifiable.

I mentioned how, in 2001, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles gave a Pesach sermon in which he openly raised that question. He told his congregation that the Exodus, in the way it is described in the Torah, probably did not happen. And the reaction was intense—some were deeply appreciative of his intellectual honesty, while others were shaken. The discussion went so far as to land on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

And I also mentioned the work of Richard Elliott Friedman, whose book The Exodus offers a nuanced and respectful suggestion: that while the large-scale Exodus may not have occurred, a smaller group—perhaps the Levites—did leave Egypt, and brought with them a memory of slavery and divine liberation. Over time, that memory was adopted by the wider Israelite community, becoming the foundational story we now tell each year.

But as I wrote in the column, and as I want to explore more deeply tonight, the question that really matters is not about historical certainty. It’s about how we understand truth.

Elie Wiesel once wrote, “Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.” It’s a striking sentence—and one that I believe every religious person should sit with for a while.

Wiesel’s words remind us that there are different kinds of truth. Some truths can be weighed, measured, confirmed by excavation or DNA. But others live in stories, in rituals, in values that shape our lives. The Exodus, whether it happened as written or not, is one of those stories. It has shaped Jewish identity, Jewish ethics, and Jewish theology for more than three thousand years.

But how do we hold onto a story like that—lovingly, meaningfully—once we know that it may not have happened in the way we were first taught?

Here I want to turn to the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and his idea of the second naïveté.

Ricoeur describes three stages in our relationship with sacred stories. The first is what he calls first naïveté—a stage of uncritical belief. As children, or even as adults entering a religious tradition, we accept the stories at face value. The sea split. The manna fell. The bush burned. No questions asked.

Then comes the critical stage. We grow older. We study. We ask hard questions. We read biblical scholarship. We encounter contradictions. We learn that many cultures have flood stories. We discover that the Torah may have been written by multiple hands across generations. For many, this critical stage is painful. Some try to retreat to the certainty of literalism. Others walk away from religion altogether, believing that if the stories aren’t factually true, they must be meaningless.

But Ricoeur offers a third possibility: the second naïveté. This is not a return to innocence, but a movement forward. After the struggle, after the questions, we learn to read the stories again—not as newspaper reports, but as carriers of profound symbolic and ethical truth. We are no longer asking, Did this happen? We are asking, What does this mean? What does it teach me?

This is a religious maturity that does not ask us to lie to ourselves about history, but neither does it allow cynicism to rule. It invites us to re-enter the story with open eyes and full hearts.

This is what allowed us to sit at the Seder table with integrity. We could say, as the Haggadah does, “In every generation, each person must see themselves as if they came out of Egypt”—not because we were pretending, but because we were participating. The “as if” is not a disclaimer; it is the point. Pesach is, essentially, about re-commitment.

The Exodus story becomes a lens through which we see the world. It teaches us to stand with the vulnerable. It teaches us to remember where we came from. It teaches us that redemption is possible, but never easy. These are truths that do not need to be excavated. They need to be lived.

And that brings us to our current religious moment. I believe that Judaism today must be built not on first naïveté—not on insisting that every word of the Torah is literal truth—but on the kind of faith that has walked through the desert of doubt and come out the other side. A Judaism that is not afraid of scholarship, but also not paralysed by it. A Judaism that reads critically, but prays with heart. A Judaism that tells its stories not to make us feel superior, but to make us more compassionate.

We are not commanded to prove the Exodus. We are commanded to remember it. Not to win arguments, but to build character. Not to be archaeologists, but to be just.

So tonight, I invite each of us to take that step toward second naïveté. Let the story live in you—not as a fact to be verified, but as a calling to be answered. Even if we were not there, the story is still ours. Even if it did not happen, it can still be true.

Because, as Wiesel taught us, some events do take place but are not true—and others are, although they never occurred.

Shabbat shalom and chag sameach.

Dvar Torah: Rethinking How We Speak of the Divine

If you've visited my office over these past two months for a private conversation, particularly if our discussion was about learning more about Judaism, there's a good chance you left with a small, square post-it note with the names of a book and a podcast. The book, “Here All Along” by Sarah Hurwitz, is in my opinion the finest introduction to Judaism ever written. Even if you grew up Jewish, attended Jewish day schools, or think you have no need for an introductory-level book, you should still read it. In the introduction, Ms. Hurwitz shares how it was only as an adult, during an Introduction to Judaism class, that she discovered the depth and sophistication of Judaism, a richness she felt the diluted teachings of her youth had obscured. She studied extensively and wrote the book she wished had been available when she was younger.

Initially, the podcast I recommended alongside the book was an episode of “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt,” featuring Sarah Hurwitz. However, I soon realised that, while she discussed her book, much of the conversation addressed other issues less relevant to those I was advising. Thus, I began seeking other podcasts featuring Ms. Hurwitz, hoping to provide more focused recommendations.

In a podcast I listened to this week, she spoke with Mijal Bitton, a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. At one point in their conversation, Ms. Hurwitz passionately challenged simplistic portrayals of God:

I find it utterly enraging when people define God as a being in the sky who controls everything, that's God. Then they smugly proclaim that they could never believe in such a thing, but isn't it wonderful when people believe in it because they need that to feel safe in the world. Oh, I'm so happy for them, I find that so condescending, I find it so arrogant, I don't believe in that kind of God. 

(…) From the Jewish tradition I have, it seems that actually our tradition also does not put forth a childish, simplistic kind of God. In fact, most religious traditions actually have a lot of sophisticated, complex, contradictory ideas, and for people to just be so condescending about these deep, vast, old religious traditions makes me really frustrated. So I really want to push back against ‘that’ as God, and I love this idea of making it a little broader and more complex.[1]

In another episode, Ms. Hurwitz spoke with my friend Dr. Joshua Holo, Vice President of Academic Resources at Hebrew Union College, emphasising Judaism's unique theological humility:

“We don't have a doctrine (…) [of] God, and I find that so wise because it reflects a fundamental humility. I think when people start telling you that they know what God is and what God does, what they're doing is they're actually shrinking God down to this human size thing that they can control for their own purposes and it's extraordinarily dangerous. I love that Judaism says, this is so beyond any one of us to define, to cabin, so we just, we intimate, we gesture to it.”[2]

All of us who grew up in predominantly Christian or Muslim societies inevitably acquired ideas about the Divine that aren't originally Jewish, influencing our understanding significantly. Even within the Orthodox Jewish world, comparing contemporary views about God to classical Jewish texts from two or three centuries ago reveals this external influence clearly. Famously, Maimonides developed the concept of "Negative Theology," arguing, like Sarah Hurwitz, that human minds cannot fully comprehend Divine reality, and thus, we should refrain from trying to define God directly, instead affirming only what God is not.

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Vice President of the American Jewish University, wrote extensively about Process Theology, aiming to remove these external philosophical influences. He recounts purchasing a house with a wall painted an unpleasant green. Initially, he asked a painter to cover it with white paint. But the painter noticed something underneath, and after scratching the surface, decided instead to remove the paint entirely, uncovering the beautiful wood hidden beneath. Rabbi Artson reflects:

Modern Westerners often approach religion as I did the paneling: they assume that the only way to be religious is to accept the sickly green overlay of Greek philosophy. They take neo-platonized Aristotelian scholastic presuppositions and filter religion through those ideas. Then, because they have insurmountable problems with those assertions, they assume that the quandary involves religion itself, or the Bible, or the Talmud, or observance, or God. What Process Theology offers is the opportunity to sandblast the philosophical overlay of Hellenistic Greece and medieval Europe off the rich, burnished grain of Bible, Rabbinics, and Kabbalah so that we can savor the actual patterns in the living wood of religion, the etz hayyim, and appreciate Judaism for what it was intended to be and truly is.”[3]

Rather than an omnipotent, unchanging deity entirely separate from creation, Rabbi Artson’s Process Theology presents God as deeply involved with the unfolding world, affected by human choices, continually offering possibilities for growth, healing, and transformation. God, in this view, does not coerce but gently guides the world towards goodness, beauty, and justice, respecting human freedom while actively nurturing the flourishing of creation.

This continuously evolving concept of God may challenge many of us. We like the security of fixed definitions, but this security is superficial. When our neatly defined beliefs confront reality, they often fall short. Embracing a relational God may not only align more closely with authentic Jewish teachings but also resonate more deeply with the realities of our lived experiences.

In this week’s parashah, P’kudei, the Israelites complete the construction of the Mishkan. The Torah tells us:

וַיְכַס הֶעָנָן אֶת־אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד וּכְבוֹד יְהֹוָה מָלֵא אֶת־הַמִּשְׁכָּן׃

The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting,

and the Presence of ה׳ filled the Tabernacle.[4]

The sanctuary wasn't built just once, long ago; it is continually built wherever we sincerely pursue holiness. Whenever and wherever such sacred space is created, God’s Presence fills it anew. When we try to confine God into limited boxes derived from external religious concepts, we do a disservice both to our ancient tradition of rich, diverse theological perspectives and to our own personal relationships with a dynamic, living God.

This Shabbat, let’s try to be open to experiencing God as constantly in process and transformation, just as we are. Perhaps this dynamic growth is the truest meaning of being created in the Divine image.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/5dy8utGVkMpFlUddlBISKO?si=7185feeac72b4f05
[2] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Og6Xy3eP50d92oP5TfcwW?si=57b32a0633184876
[3] Artson, R. B. S. (2013) God of Becoming and Relationship. 1st edn. Jewish Lights.
[4] Ex. 30:34

Dvar Torah: Faith Without Idols: Why Absolute Certainty Can Be Dangerous

At some point during my teenage years in the 1980s, a fancy hotel in São Paulo began organising gastronomic festivals, inviting chefs from renowned international restaurants. In one of these events, in 1986, they hosted a dinner inspired by the restaurant in Rome where the famous Fettuccine Alfredo was born. My brother, a fan of the dish and eager to taste it in its original form, convinced my parents to take him. My mother, then, made me an offer: since the dinner was expensive and I was not particularly interested in the famous fettuccine, she would give me another gift of the same value. At fifteen years old, already certain of the career path I wanted to pursue, I accepted the deal and chose a book on computer graphics.

Computer graphics, which are now an integral part of our daily lives, were not as widespread back then. Beauty and the Beast, featuring a ballroom scene partially developed with computer graphics, was only released in 1991. Toy Story, the first full-length film created entirely using computer graphics, came out in 1996. At the time, I was fascinated by the short, creative TV videos created by Hans Donner, a Swiss designer who had established home in Brazil and become a reference in the field.

What captivated me about the book I received instead of the dinner were its beautiful images, but behind those incredibly realistic computer-generated models lay complex mathematical formulas. Computer Graphics is the field of Computer Science that transforms numbers, formulas, and algorithms into images that, over time, have become almost indistinguishable from reality.

How is it possible that numbers can describe physical reality? Max Tegmark, a Swedish physicist and author of Our Mathematical Universe, argues that the physical world is a “gigantic mathematical object.” [1] Similarly, Galileo stated that “Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.”[2]

Mark Schaefer, author of The Certainty of Uncertainty, points out that one of the advantages of mathematics as a language is that it is far less ambiguous than other fields of knowledge. “There are not competing traditions of mathematicians who argue whether 2+2=4, nor are there dissenting mathematicians who maintain that 2+2=5 and consider the rest to be hopelessly misguided heretics.”[3] Thus, mathematics could be seen as a system in which certainty exists. However, Rabbi David Curiel argues that the certainty that every mathematical problem has a solution disappears when we delve into Advanced Mathematics.[4] In the same vein, illustrating how advanced mathematical studies differ from our everyday experience of certainty, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger stated that a completely satisfactory model of quantum reality was “not just practically inaccessible but even unthinkable.” He added: “To be precise, of course, we can think of it, but it is wrong.”[5]

In preparing this week’s sermon, I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on our certainties and doubts, on the space we allow for ambiguity, and on the times when we demand definitive answers.

This week’s parashah recounts that, after the liberation from Mitsrayim, the parting of the sea, and the encounter with the Divine at Mount Sinai, Moshe delayed his return with the Tablets for forty days. In his absence, the people constructed a golden calf and began worshipping it. Despite having experienced direct interactions with the Divine — encounters that our generation can only dream of — they still needed something more tangible, a more absolute certainty, which they found in the form of a golden statue.

In many passages of our tradition, the construction of the golden calf is associated with the pursuit of unquestionable, absolute certainties. This person is good, and that one is bad; one culture values life, while another worships death; this ideology is unquestionably superior to that one. In exchange for these absolute truths, we often forgo our critical thinking and our ability to question with sincerity. The Chassidic master Mordechai Yosef Leiner, better known as the Ishbitzer and author of Mei HaShiloach, wrote: “People’s anxiety stems from their immense fear of stepping into the realm of doubt, and for this reason, some have claimed that it would have been more comfortable had humankind never been created.”[6] According to Rabbi Leiner, God planted אילנא דספיקא, ilna desfeica, “the tree of doubt,” in this world, and this is the source of our anxiety.

In a way, Moshe descended from Mount Sinai carrying a different kind of certainty—the Tablets of the Covenant, a tangible representation of the abstract relationship between God and the people of Israel. Confronted with the worship of the Golden Calf, he threw the Tablets to the ground, shattering them. Those Tablets represented absolute certainty, sculpted and inscribed by God. With that act, Moshe extinguished any expectation that our tradition would be built on absolute answers.

Anyone who knows me knows that I relish playing the devil’s advocate, questioning almost everything, turning our certainties upside down until we are left with no golden calves to cling to. That is why the idea of worshipping our own certainties unsettles me deeply.

And yet, we live in strange times… Some people argue that vaccines contain microchips to control us; others claim the Earth is flat; some deny the science of climate change. Sowing doubt to reap conflict has become a profitable business, making some of the world’s biggest corporations immense fortunes. Instead of being used to embrace and understand, doubt is being weaponised to exclude; instead of saving lives, it is serving those who seek to put them at risk.

I wish I could offer a mathematical formula to distinguish between constructive doubts — those that help us refine our answers — and destructive doubts, which only generate discord without improving anything. Unfortunately, I let go long ago of the certainty I once had that my future lay in computer graphics, along with the belief in automated solutions to complex problems. There is no magic answer; each of us must rely on our discernment and critical thinking.

Towards the end of the parashah, God instructs Moshe to carve a new set of Tablets. This time, they would not be exclusively Divine but the product of a partnership between God and humanity. By design, doubt was embedded in this second set of Tablets.[7] The tablets were to be shaped by human effort, while the inscriptions would be Divine.

Moreover, Rashi tells us that the fragments of the broken Tablets were placed in the Ark alongside the new set. This way, we would be constantly reminded of the dangers of absolute certainty—represented both by the fragments and by the Golden Calf.

As if we needed more reminders, this week’s parashah offers yet another moment that challenges absolute rules. Moshe asks to see God’s face, and God replies: "I will make all My goodness pass before you and proclaim before you the name ה׳ and the grace that I bestow and the compassion I show, but you cannot see My face, for no human being can see My face and live." Yet, just nine verses earlier, the Torah states: "וְדִבֶּר ה׳ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה פָּנִים אֶל־פָּנִים כַּאֲשֶׁר יְדַבֵּר אִישׁ אֶל־רֵעֵהוּ", "And God spoke to Moshe face to face, as one speaks to a friend."[8]

There are moments when we are almost certain we have encountered the ultimate truth, that we have seen truth itself face to face. Yet, even as the Torah recounts moments when this seemed to happen between Moshe and God, it simultaneously acknowledges that such an experience is impossible. The closest we can come is to see the Divine, truth, and certainty from behind, with a hint of doubt—just as God offered Moshe.

May all doubt always serve to advance, to embrace, to improve, to refine. In a time when we are increasingly prone to retreat into our own truths, may we remain open—to listen, to see, to consider, to question, to engage in dialogue. And in doing so, as a community, supporting one another, may we navigate the anxiety of living in a world of uncertainties.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, p. 246, as quoted in The Certainty of Uncertainty, p. 108.
[2] Mark Schaefer, The Certainty of Uncertainty, p. 107.
[3] Ibid., p. 107.
[4] "Ki Tisa: Releasing the Golden Calf of Certainty", Asiyah: Jewish Community of Greater Boston, 5 March 2021. Available at: https://www.asiyah.org/news-1/2021/3/5/ki-tisa-releasing-the-golden-calf-of-certainty
[5] Martland, Religion as Art, p. 166, as cited in The Certainty of Uncertainty, p. 112.
[6] Mei HaShiloach Anthology, commentary on Talmud, Eruvin 13b:1.
[7] Rashi, commentary on Deuteronomy 10:2.
[8] Exodus 33:11.