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

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

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

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

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

וְאַתָּה תְּצַוֶּה אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

V'atah tetzaveh et bnay-Yisrael

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

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

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

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

That inaccuracy is not really what bothered me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach.

[1] Exodus 27:20.

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

[3] Mishnah Chagigah 1:8.

[4] Exodus 35:3

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

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

The Sentence That Reopened a Family

Most of us know what it is to fight with someone we love. Sometimes the reasons are serious—real values, real wounds, real breaches of trust. Other times the spark is almost ridiculous: a misunderstanding, a careless tone, a small disappointment that lands on top of an older, deeper hurt. But once the fight begins, it can take on a life of its own. Words stop being about expressing truth and start being about winning—or worse, about injuring. We discover exactly where the other person is vulnerable, and we aim for it.

Then comes the strangest part. Even when both sides are exhausted, reconciliation can still feel impossible. Not because love is gone, but because pride is loud. Because everyone is waiting for the other to move first. Because returning to warmth feels like surrender, or like pretending nothing happened. The wall stands there, stubborn and heavy.

And then, sometimes, something unexpected interrupts the story. A sudden smile that is not sarcastic. A soft phrase, spoken without defence. A hug in the middle of the night—not as a solution, but as a signal: "I am still here. I still remember us." It does not erase what was said or undo what was done. Some fights leave scars, and some scars never fully disappear. But the barrier cracks, and through that crack people rediscover what brought them together in the first place.

Parashat Vayigash gives us one of the Torah's most dramatic versions of that moment.

The rift between Yosef and his brothers is not a petty argument—it is a catastrophe. They betrayed him, plotted to kill him, sold him into slavery, and constructed a lie that shattered their father's life. For twenty-two years, a chasm has torn the family of Yaakov apart. Now Yosef holds extraordinary power in Egypt, and the brothers stand before him, unaware of who he is. Yosef has been testing them, pushing them, drawing them near and frightening them—perhaps trying to discover whether anything has changed, perhaps trying to protect himself from being hurt again.

Then Yehudah steps forward and speaks from the heart. He does not offer clever negotiation; he offers responsibility. He describes what their father will suffer if Binyamin does not return. He offers himself instead.

And Yosef reaches his limit.

The Torah tells us Yosef could no longer restrain himself. He orders the room cleared of strangers, creating privacy for what comes next, because some truths should not be performed in public. He weeps so loudly that the Egyptians outside can hear him. Then he says the words that change everything: "Ani Yosef. I am Yosef. Is my father still alive?" (Genesis 45:3)

In that instant, the whole relationship is rewritten.

Until now, Yosef has been an Egyptian official—powerful, unreadable, dangerous. The brothers have been cautious, defensive, strategic. Now Yosef becomes a brother again. Not a victim, not a ruler, but a person. By revealing his identity, Yosef exposes himself to the very men who once tried to kill him. He hands them the power to hurt him again. But he understands a profound truth: you cannot reconcile with a mask. As long as he played the role of the Egyptian ruler, he could control them, test them—but he could never be their brother again.

The brothers are terrified. They cannot speak. And Yosef, understanding their fear, immediately rushes to reassure them. He does not diminish what they did—"whom you sold into Egypt"—but he helps them see God's greater purpose in it all.

This is the beginning of reconciliation, and it begins not with a neat speech about forgiveness, but with vulnerability. That is the Torah's emotional wisdom. Repair does not start when everyone agrees on the facts. It starts when someone risks telling the truth without armor. When someone drops the mask, even for a moment, and says: "This is who I am. This is what you are dealing with. This is real."

Vayigash does not pretend that decades of trauma evaporate in a single embrace. The text hints that the brothers remained suspicious for years. But the wall breaks, and a new future becomes possible.

This week, the Torah invites a quiet, difficult question: where in our lives have we allowed a fight to become a fortress? And what might be the one small, honest move that could crack it open—not to erase the past, but to make room for a future?

Shabbat Shalom.

The Courage to Be Yaakov

Twenty years earlier, in a tent dim with the haze of old age, a father asked his son a simple question: "Who are you, my son?"

The son, desperate for a destiny he felt he deserved but was not given, lied. “I am Esav, your firstborn,” Yaakov told his blind father, Yitzchak. In that moment, Yaakov stole a blessing that was not intended for him. He walked away with the prize, but the cost was exorbitant: the loss of his home, the hatred of his brother, and two decades of life spent looking over his shoulder, living in exile.

Now, in this week's parashah, Vayishlach, the bill has come due. Yaakov is about to meet Esav again. He is terrified. He sends gifts ahead, he divides his camp, but ultimately, he is left alone in the dark on the banks of the Jabbok River.

It is there that a mysterious figure—identified in the text only as ha'ish, "the man"—ambushes him. Our Sages debated who this figure might be. Some say it was an angel, others the guardian angel of Esav, yet Yaakov names the place Peniel, ‘I have seen God face to face.’

They wrestle until the break of dawn. The struggle is undeniably physical, Yaakov's hip is wrenched from its socket, but it is also something more. Before the stranger can depart, he asks Yaakov a question eerily similar to the one his father asked twenty years prior:

"What is your name?"

This is the pivotal moment of Yaakov's life. He could have lied again. He could have claimed to be someone stronger, braver, or more noble. But this time, he does not flinch. "Yaakov," he answers. He admits to being Yaakov: the heel-grabber, the supplanter, the trickster. He recognizes himself for who he has been.

As Rabbi Cheryl Peretz notes, this was a necessary prerequisite for his survival. "Did Jacob know who he was? After all, he had lied to his father... To have any chance of reconciliation with his brother, Jacob had to acknowledge that he had, in fact, done wrong; he had to wrestle with the guilt and disappointment in his own actions. He had to take an honest look in the mirror." [1]

Perhaps this is why the text identifies his opponent simply as "a man", because on the banks of Jabbok, Yaakov wrestled with more than an external adversary. He grappled with his own conscience, his fear, his shame, and yes, with God. The wrestling is both outer and inner, physical and spiritual at once. And it is only in the honest light of that confession of being "Yaakov" that he receives a blessing that is fully his. He is given a new name, Yisrael, one who wrestles with the Divine and prevails.

We often face similar moments that demand self-reflection. Like Yaakov, we wrestle with difficult questions: Who are we? What have we done? As Rabbi Peretz suggests, "Only through honest self-evaluation will we ultimately walk away renewed and transformed." [1]

The transformation, however, leaves a mark. The text tells us that when the sun finally rose, Yaakov limped because of his hip.

In our modern world, we are conditioned to view injury as failure and wholeness as perfection. But the Torah offers different, radical wisdom. Rabbi Yael Shy teaches that "although limping and in pain from the fight, Jacob emerges as who he is meant to be—Israel." [2] The limp is not a defect; it is a record of the experience. It is proof that he stayed in the fight. As Hannah Weizman (Plotkin) beautifully puts it, "That limp is not a sign of defeat but of blessing; it represents the profound change born from struggle." [3]

I suspect many of us carry our own limps, visible or invisible. Old mistakes we cannot undo. Harsh words that cannot be unsaid. Ideals we failed to live up to. Trauma that still echoes in the body. Some of those wounds came from things done to us; others, if we are honest, from things we did. Vayishlach does not promise that faith will erase any of that. What it offers is a different hope: that if we dare to wrestle, to answer truthfully when asked who we are, then even our limps can become signs of blessing.

This week, as we read of Yaakov walking into the sunrise, limping but renamed, perhaps we can ask ourselves a quiet question: Where in my life am I still trying to live on someone else's blessing? And where might God be waiting, in the dark corners of my story, to ask me one more time, "What is your name?"—inviting me to embrace my true self, walk forward, limp and all, into the light of a new day.

It is there, in our authentic, wounded, and wrestling selves, that we finally find the capacity to say: "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."

Shabbat Shalom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] Gen. 6:11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gmar Tov!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the people refused to let it go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Commitment: To Aspire

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

Second Commitment: To Forgive

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

Third Commitment: Pride in Progressive Judaism

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

Fourth Commitment: Communal Co-Creation

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

Fifth Commitment: Lifelong Learning

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

Sixth Commitment: Tikkun Olam, Repairing the World

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

Our Seventh Commitment: Sustaining Our Community

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

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

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

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

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

Shanah Tovah! Gmar Chatimah Tovah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[13] Lev. 19:2.

[14] Micah 6:8.

[15] Ex. 34:6.

[16] Talmud Bavli, Eruvin 13b.

[17] Deut 30:14

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write This Song: On Music, Memory, and Meaning

Music has always played a significant role in my life. I’ve never played a musical instrument, and I don’t pretend to be a gifted singer, but from a very young age I found great joy in singing. I still remember performing at a talent show in a hotel I visited with my parents when I was six. Apparently, I had no trace of stage fright! Later, as a teenager, I parodied a well-known Brazilian protest song to suit my then-rebellious worldview. Where the original called out, “Come, let’s go, for waiting is not knowing; those who know make the moment, they don’t wait for it to happen,” my version sang: “Come, let’s go, for studying is not knowing; those who study waste their time and don’t know what it is to live...”

Yes, I was once that teenager. Please don’t share this with your children, and especially not with mine!

Despite the questionable lyrics, I loved music. I still do. Music was, and remains, far more than entertainment. It has often served as a kind of emotional time machine. There are songs that instantly transport me to the back seat of my mother’s car in the early 1980s, to the burning passions and heartbreaks of adolescence, and to the tense political atmosphere of Brazil’s final years under military rule. Music has that power: to help us feel before we are ready to think; to reveal truths our minds may resist; to connect us with moments and people long gone.

I sometimes bristle when the Torah is described merely as a “book of law”. Of course, it contains laws, but for me, especially as a Progressive Jew, it is first and foremost our people’s sacred narrative. It tells the stories from which I’ve drawn so many of the values that shape my life. Chief among them is the image of humanity created in the Divine image, read on the second day of Rosh HaShanah and again on Simchat Torah. There’s no explicit law in that passage, but from it flows the profound Jewish commitment to the dignity of every single human being.

This week’s parashah, Vayelech, sets the stage for the powerful poem that will follow in next week’s parashah, Haazinu. Moshe is instructed to prepare a song that will be delivered on the last day of his life, summarising Israel’s relationship with God, past, present, and future. The text commands: “Now, therefore, write this song for yourselves, and teach it to the children of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be My witness against the children of Israel” (Devarim 31:19). Moshe's legacy is not just law; it is also music and memory, a testimony designed to be internalised emotionally and carried forever in our hearts.

On this Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return, may we allow the songs of our own lives to accompany us on our journey. May they bring us not only nostalgia but healing, connection, and the strength to keep walking towards the future we still long to compose.

Shabbat Shalom and Shannah Tovah!

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

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

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

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

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

The Rabbi’s answer surprised the chasid somewhat:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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