Jewish And...

A free form version of the ongoing conversations from my website: www.jewishand.org

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No freedom of religion?

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A Jewish Country Song

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What Our Faith Demands, Episode 2

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From the place where I am right

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The Power to Read

“Reading into or reading out of: reading scripture should make us uncomfortable and ask us to learn.”

[First given as a sermon on August 24, 2025]

Find this interesting? Please register for the upcoming class inspired by it: Original and Amendable: Reading the US Constitution in Light of Rabbinic Legal Methodology

Once, when meeting an African American minister for the first time, I was asked, more interrogated: “Do you do exegesis or eisegesis?”

I must admit, no one had used both those words to me since classes in rabbinical school!

After giving the apparently correct answer, namely “exegesis”, the minister told me that he observed serious caution in new relationships with faith leaders and wanted to know if I read scripture in ways that would justify enslaving African Americans. We can use the texts that we hold sacred and important to rationalize abhorrent behavior. This minister, understandably, would refuse partnership with someone who would use texts to justify their own unethical opinions.

In Deuteronomy, Chapter 13, Verse 1, the Divine says: “don’t add or take away from anything I tell you.”

This seems to say we must take the entire teaching literally, word for word.

And yet, none of us do.

Truly – no one adheres to all that is written in Scripture – it is not possible.

Some people try, that’s for sure, but everyone must interpret, and our texts often demand contradictory things from us.

Furthermore, Jews have never taken the entire text literally. Reading farther on in the Deuteronomy, Chapter 13:6, it says: “Now that prophet or that dreamer of dreams is to be put-to-death.”[1] This contrasts with the caution against the death penalty in Jewish traditions. We have a much later text, from the Mishnah, which dates to around 200 CE, over 1,800 years ago, that shows the reluctance with which the death penalty was used for a capital crime. This long discourse shows that ancient Jewish courts made the death penalty so difficult to impose that it almost never happened. The early rabbis supported this with this teaching:

Adam the first person was created alone, to teach you that regarding anyone who destroys one soul, the verse assigns them blame as if they destroyed an entire world, as Adam was one person, from whom the population of an entire world came forth. And anyone who sustains one soul, the verse ascribes them credit as if they sustained an entire world.[2] 

Recognizing that it is all well and good for the ancient rabbis to have interpreted away literal readings, while also admitting that Jewish culture reveres the writers of our ancient texts as bearing more authority than we ever can, how can contemporary Jews claim authentic interpretations when the text says: “add and subtract nothing”?

For methods of interpretation, we often divide into two general camps, those of us who try to do exegesis, and those who use eisegesis. Exegesis asks us to learn from the text –reading out of the text. We use the entire canon to help us create context to understand what it says. Eisegesis uses what we think already as a lens on what the text says – reading into the text.

Let’s dismiss most eisegesis from the outset – those who use it often flagrantly bring a text to prove what they already think. They are not endeavoring to learn something from the text. They attempt to teach their own perspectives using the text for their own devices. This seems to be clearly “adding and subtracting” from the text and makes it difficult to adhere to our text today. We will return to all the people who nonetheless do this.

For those of us trying to engage scripture in “good faith” – we need to learn from it, to use it as a source of wisdom not a proof of how we are already wise. In our death penalty example, we see ancient rabbis clearly dismissing an entire form of justice from the Five Books of Moses, the central canonical text for the Jewish people. There are a lot of death penalties enumerated in scripture – for violating the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14), for idolatry (Deuteronomy 17:5), even for being a disobedient child (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), plus the text we read today about the false prophet being put to death. How do the rabbis, who claim absolute devotion to doing what the text says, not only as a religious observance of faith, but also most importantly as a civic law for the basic functioning of their society, allow themselves to so clearly “subtract” from the text while also adhering to it?

The rabbis start with principles that the entirety of the teachings of Judaism lay out clearly. We cannot say that life is important, as shown by the story that tells us that we are all descended from one person and therefore every person contains the potential for an entire world, and be so cavalier about life’s importance that people are put to death all the time. The rabbinic tradition of reading text this way in Jewish society dates back formally at least to the Babylonian Exile, when the earliest academies were founded and Jews needed to figure out how to apply Biblical teachings away from the centers in Jerusalem – that’s more than 2,500 years ago. That means that from the very earliest days of attempting to use Biblical texts as a guide for all of the Jewish people, Jewish scholars developed a system of reading and interpretation that was not based on a slavish literal interpretation – “do this because it says so” – but in fact started with fundamental questions about what the text was trying to teach us as a whole. What are the principles of the society that we hope to build together?

The real principles are often found in the stories, and they help us to understand how to read texts that are often inconsistent. The story shows us the teaching and serves as a more powerful example than any listing of “thou shalt’s” and “thou shalt not’s”.

Jewish exegesis is informed by principles of the text that require us to NOT do literal commands that are contrary to the principles found in the stories that show us what society could be like when we work together. These readings receive support from Jews throughout history in large part on account of the inherently communitarian and democratic approaches of Jewish culture – Jewish authorities really do “serve at the pleasure” of the Jewish people historically.

We see this all the time today because people in power regularly say they “only do what the law says” while reading it entirely differently from its plain language or ignoring plain meanings altogether. Public textual interpretations go directly at the flawed usage of eisegesis that we dismissed and that the African American minister cautioned me about. So many tell us that they can or can’t do things based on their readings of texts. We have leaders claiming that the plain text of the US Constitution doesn’t say what it clearly says, like that every person has certain rights regardless of citizenship. We have religious people saying that their interpretations of scripture must apply to all of us, regarding our own relationships, women’s health, and personal identity.

The Supreme Court used a tortured reading of the Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution to requalify Donald Trump to run for president. Here’s what the text says:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.[3]

The Supreme Court decided that this part of the Constitution was not “self-activating” and used what was clearly tortured reasoning to deny the State of Colorado the power to remove a candidate from the ballot because the State has no jurisdiction over Federal candidates (despite States’ Constitutional responsibilities to run Federal Elections), reading the Congressional power to “remove such a disability” as an additional requirement that Congress must first impose the disability.[4]

Apologies for getting into the weeds of Supreme Court decisions.

Yet, this is the point, and this is the problem with these two terribly “my eyes are glazing over terms” – exegesis and eisegesis – they are stand-ins for the real thing that’s happening, which is about power, the use and abuse of authority, and the denial of rights and power to the people.

When someone uses a text to explain why they get to tell us what to do:

- especially claiming a tortured reading as a plain reading that we must obey, like the Supreme Court’s machinations above, or their use of “originalism” or the phony history that they attempt to do with “history and tradition” arguments, or not even telling us their reasoning at all, as they have repeatedly done on the so-called “Emergency Docket”;

- or a faith leader attempting to end discussion by saying “Scripture says so”;

- or a political leader claiming that they have the power to do something because they looked for and found an obscure legal decree;

what they are really saying is that they have power over us, they have the authority to tell us what language and text mean, that they can make any argument they like to perpetuate their power at the expense of our powerlessness.

In contrast, when we offer a set of principles to read a text with one another, to explain why this way makes sense and that other way makes less sense, we engage in the conversation because we are in community together, because we respect that each of us is a reflection of something sacred, something infinite in the universe, and a fundamental principle behind that is that I don’t get to tell you what to do because I said so. We honor the teaching of the rabbis that we think of ourselves as all descended from one source and that therefore we are all equally endowed with reason, and merit, and value, and wisdom to interpret. We accept that our difference of opinions, often uncomfortable, is the source for productive discussion, out of which will emerge something greater than your opinion or my opinion, namely our shared opinion.

The most important aspect of life together is building community and power collaboratively, through community, so that we can work with one another. This isn’t easy. It takes work, and listening, and admitting that we don’t know everything ourselves, and that solutions are found in compromise and collaboration. When instead we follow a less arduous path and submit to the sovereignty of a one-opinion, one source of wisdom for all of us model, then we give up our rights to self-determination and freedom for all of us together.

Let us learn with one another, develop principles that we can all work on together, and build something better, more inclusive, with liberty and justice for all.

 [1] Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken, p. 912

[2] Steinsaltz, A. (2007). Mishnah sanhedrin 4:5. Sefaria: a Living Library of Jewish Texts Online. https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Sanhedrin.4.5?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en

[3] The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (1866, June 13). National Constitution Center – The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xiv

[4] DONALD J. TRUMP, PETITIONER v. NORMA ANDERSON, ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF COLORADO. (2024, March 4). Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf)

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The Power to Read

“Reading into or reading out of: reading scripture should make us uncomfortable and ask us to learn.”

[First given as a sermon on August 24, 2025]

Find this interesting? Please register for the upcoming class inspired by it: Original and Amendable: Reading the US Constitution in Light of Rabbinic Legal Methodology

Once, when meeting an African American minister for the first time, I was asked, more interrogated: “Do you do exegesis or eisegesis?”

I must admit, no one had used both those words to me since classes in rabbinical school!

 After giving the apparently correct answer, namely “exegesis”, the minister told me that he observed serious caution in new relationships with faith leaders and wanted to know if I read scripture in ways that would justify enslaving African Americans. We can use the texts that we hold sacred and important to rationalize abhorrent behavior. This minister, understandably, would refuse partnership with someone who would use texts to justify their own unethical opinions.

 In Deuteronomy, Chapter 13, Verse 1, the Divine says: “don’t add or take away from anything I tell you.”

This seems to say we must take the entire teaching literally, word for word.

And yet, none of us do.

Truly –no one adheres to all that is written in Scripture – it is not possible.

Some people try, that’s for sure, but everyone must interpret, and our texts often demand contradictory things from us.

Furthermore, Jews have never taken the entire text literally. Reading farther on in the Deuteronomy, Chapter 13:6, it says: “Now that prophet or that dreamer of dreams is to be put-to-death.”[1] This contrasts with the caution against the death penalty in Jewish traditions. We have a much later text, from the Mishnah, which dates to around 200 CE, over 1,800 years ago, that shows the reluctance with which the death penalty was used for a capital crime. This long discourse shows that ancient Jewish courts made the death penalty so difficult to impose that it almost never happened. The early rabbis supported this with this teaching:

Adam the first person was created alone, to teach you that regarding anyone who destroys one soul, the verse assigns them blame as if they destroyed an entire world, as Adam was one person, from whom the population of an entire world came forth. And anyone who sustains one soul, the verse ascribes them credit as if they sustained an entire world.[2]

 Recognizing that it is all well and good for the ancient rabbis to have interpreted away literal readings, while also admitting that Jewish culture reveres the writers of our ancient texts as bearing more authority than we ever can, how can contemporary Jews claim authentic interpretations when the text says: “add and subtract nothing”?

For methods of interpretation, we often divide into two general camps, those of us who try to do exegesis, and those who use eisegesis. Exegesis asks us to learn from the text –reading out of the text. We use the entire canon to help us create context to understand what it says. Eisegesis uses what we think already as a lens on what the text says – reading into the text.

Let’s dismiss most eisegesis from the outset – those who use it often flagrantly bring a text to prove what they already think. They are not endeavoring to learn something from the text. They attempt to teach their own perspectives using the text for their own devices. This seems to be clearly “adding and subtracting” from the text and makes it difficult to adhere to our text today. We will return to all the people who nonetheless do this.

For those of us trying to engage scripture in “good faith” – we need to learn from it, to use it as a source of wisdom not a proof of how we are already wise. In our death penalty example, we see ancient rabbis clearly dismissing an entire form of justice from the Five Books of Moses, the central canonical text for the Jewish people. There are a lot of death penalties enumerated in scripture – for violating the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14), for idolatry (Deuteronomy 17:5), even for being a disobedient child (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), plus the text we read today about the false prophet being put to death. How do the rabbis, who claim absolute devotion to doing what the text says, not only as a religious observance of faith, but also most importantly as a civic law for the basic functioning of their society, allow themselves to so clearly “subtract” from the text while also adhering to it?

The rabbis start with principles that the entirety of the teachings of Judaism lay out clearly. We cannot say that life is important, as shown by the story that tells us that we are all descended from one person and therefore every person contains the potential for an entire world, and be so cavalier about life’s importance that people are put to death all the time. The rabbinic tradition of reading text this way in Jewish society dates back formally at least to the Babylonian Exile, when the earliest academies were founded and Jews needed to figure out how to apply Biblical teachings away from the centers in Jerusalem – that’s more than 2,500 years ago. That means that from the very earliest days of attempting to use Biblical texts as a guide for all of the Jewish people, Jewish scholars developed a system of reading and interpretation that was not based on a slavish literal interpretation – “do this because it says so” – but in fact started with fundamental questions about what the text was trying to teach us as a whole. What are the principles of the society that we hope to build together?

The real principles are often found in the stories, and they help us to understand how to read texts that are often inconsistent. The story shows us the teaching and serves as a more powerful example than any listing of “thou shalt’s” and “thou shalt not’s”.

Jewish exegesis is informed by principles of the text that require us to NOT do literal commands that are contrary to the principles found in the stories that show us what society could be like when we work together. These readings receive support from Jews throughout history in large part on account of the inherently communitarian and democratic approaches of Jewish culture – Jewish authorities really do “serve at the pleasure” of the Jewish people historically.

We see this all the time today because people in power regularly say they “only do what the law says” while reading it entirely differently from its plain language or ignoring plain meanings altogether. Public textual interpretations go directly at the flawed usage of eisegesis that we dismissed and that the African American minister cautioned me about. So many tell us that they can or can’t do things based on their readings of texts. We have leaders claiming that the plain text of the US Constitution doesn’t say what it clearly says, like that every person has certain rights regardless of citizenship. We have religious people saying that their interpretations of scripture must apply to all of us, regarding our own relationships, women’s health, and personal identity.

The Supreme Court used a tortured reading of the Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution to requalify Donald Trump to run for president. Here’s what the text says:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.[3]

The Supreme Court decided that this part of the Constitution was not “self-activating” and used what was clearly tortured reasoning to deny the State of Colorado the power to remove a candidate from the ballot because the State has no jurisdiction over Federal candidates (despite States’ Constitutional responsibilities to run Federal Elections), reading the Congressional power to “remove such a disability” as an additional requirement that Congress must first impose the disability.[4]

Apologies for getting into the weeds of Supreme Court decisions.

Yet, this is the point, and this is the problem with these two terribly “my eyes are glazing over terms” – exegesis and eisegesis – they are stand-ins for the real thing that’s happening, which is about power, the use and abuse of authority, and the denial of rights and power to the people.

When someone uses a text to explain why they get to tell us what to do:

- especially claiming a tortured reading as a plain reading that we must obey, like the Supreme Court’s machinations above, or their use of “originalism” or the phony history that they attempt to do with “history and tradition” arguments, or not even telling us their reasoning at all, as they have repeatedly done on the so-called “Emergency Docket”;

- or a faith leader attempting to end discussion by saying “Scripture says so”;

- or a political leader claiming that they have the power to do something because they looked for and found an obscure legal decree;

what they are really saying is that they have power over us, they have the authority to tell us what language and text mean, that they can make any argument they like to perpetuate their power at the expense of our powerlessness.

In contrast, when we offer a set of principles to read a text with one another, to explain why this way makes sense and that other way makes less sense, we engage in the conversation because we are in community together, because we respect that each of us is a reflection of something sacred, something infinite in the universe, and a fundamental principle behind that is that I don’t get to tell you what to do because I said so. We honor the teaching of the rabbis that we think of ourselves as all descended from one source and that therefore we are all equally endowed with reason, and merit, and value, and wisdom to interpret. We accept that our difference of opinions, often uncomfortable, is the source for productive discussion, out of which will emerge something greater than your opinion or my opinion, namely our shared opinion.

The most important aspect of life together is building community and power collaboratively, through community, so that we can work with one another. This isn’t easy. It takes work, and listening, and admitting that we don’t know everything ourselves, and that solutions are found in compromise and collaboration. When instead we follow a less arduous path and submit to the sovereignty of a one-opinion, one source of wisdom for all of us model, then we give up our rights to self-determination and freedom for all of us together.

Let us learn with one another, develop principles that we can all work on together, and build something better, more inclusive, with liberty and justice for all.

  [1] Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken, p. 912

[2] Steinsaltz, A. (2007). Mishnah sanhedrin 4:5. Sefaria: a Living Library of Jewish Texts Online. https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Sanhedrin.4.5?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en

[3] The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (1866, June 13). National Constitution Center – The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xiv

[4] DONALD J. TRUMP, PETITIONER v. NORMA ANDERSON, ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF COLORADO. (2024, March 4). Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf)

[jewishandmore]

Grumpy Jews (Who Read), Episode 4

Click here to listen to our podcast.

And click here for all the links to books that we mention.

Here’s the transcript:

Jonathan: Welcome to Episode Four of Grumpy Jews (Who Read). This episode was recorded before Hanukkah, before the weekend, on which there was a terrible shooting at Brown, on which there was a terrible massacre in Australia, on which, Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered. We say Happy Hanukkah, and we say, may all of us find light in this time of darkness and mourning.

We wish you all the best. And here it is, Episode Four of Grumpy Jews who read from before Hanukkah.

Good morning, good afternoon, good day. Whatever time it is that you’re listening to this. This is Grumpy Jews who Read, and there are two of us here today. We don’t have any special guests. We’ll save that for next time. ‘Cause I think next time we’ll be from New York City.

We’ll do it in person. So, I am Jonathan, the youngest grumpy Jew on the line here today, with my mother, who my daughter says is younger than I am anyway, so, so we have Marti Reich who is here and. We are going to remind everyone that what we mean by grumpy Jews is we’re not really all that grumpy.

Marti: Some people have looked at our photo on the podcast and said, but you don’t look grumpy at all. And part of it is that we understand that sometimes sort of the critical eye that we bring to the world is interpreted as grumpy. So, it is sardonically grumpy. We’re actually pretty optimistic people in general.

Jonathan: We are optimistic, but you know, we’re Jewish. So, to a certain degree our optimism is tempered by the history of things not working out as well as we hoped.

Marti: Are they working out so well right now? Except we are trying to make the day better. And one of the ways we do it is we read,

Jonathan: We were, talking about, and, we’re prepping for a bigger show on historical fiction. And I was recalling that way back when, when I was an undergrad, I took a class on writing historical biographies and, how difficult it is to write something that is actual history, because of course you

Everything needs to be footnoted. Everything needs to be sourced. You can create connecting language, but it all has to be real. And what did you call that? The, I

Marti: said that is giving up being God.

Jonathan: That’s right.

Marti: That’s what a novelist is. It’s why I love novelists because they are God and they can make anything happen or not happen.

And when you’re writing nonfiction, that is, has to be true. You can’t be God. So that was the point.

Jonathan: And I think interestingly enough, this is a way into another discussion that we’ve been having because if the novelist is God and we are in conversation with God, right? When we read a novel, when we.

Listen to the novel as opposed to read the novel. Our conversation is not just with God anymore. Our conversation is with the author and the interpreter of the book who is reading it to us. So suddenly having someone presented in a voice is an intermediary. The conversation is more complicated. It’s also as Sadie would had said, it’s much, it’s more constrained because we no longer have the freedom to imagine what the characters sound like.

Marti: That’s true. But the other thing that Sadie said is if you space out while you’re listening. It’s one thing if you space out while you’re reading, you can go back and believe me, I go back and read paragraphs over and over again. ‘cause I realize, did I just read this and what did it mean?

I think that reading, whether you are listening. Or reading, whether you are an ebook or book-book, is really the object here. Let’s all read people who don’t read end up with administrations like we have now.

There’s a difference. But you start out with the bottom line is, I’m really happy if people are involved with books in any way they can get them.

Jonathan: So I think the issue here really is, are we engaged in a conversation that takes us out of our every day? And the key element about reading, the romance about reading for a kid, right?

Is that the kid gets to be somewhere else with other people and their world is expanded. I think most of the kids, our own and myself included, got involved in reading as a way of being transported.

Marti: No question.

Jonathan: Whether or not we’re listening to the book or reading the book, whatever medium it is, whether or not we are like, you know, our, most of the people in our family are “gotta have the physical book in hand” type readers.

I am an audio book listener, an avid listener, because otherwise I couldn’t possibly read as much as I do. Engaging in that conversation that takes us out of where we are, that expands our ability. The world opens up when we read, but more importantly, our exposure to other people and conversation opens up.

Marti: And I wanna also bring up something that the way you first experience books is your parents or caretakers or grandparents reading to you. So the first experience kids have is they hear it.

Something very sweet about people listening to audio books that reminds them of their childhoods or just the sweetness, the warmth.

The confidence of sitting and listening. So I’m not gonna discount it. I don’t do it. I’m not gonna say I, I haven’t listened to a book since I was two, but I’m not too controlling about holding the book, but it’s a good, so one of the

Jonathan: things I asked Sadie about today. I asked Sadie if Sadie had ever encountered the book, the Latke, That Couldn’t Stop Screaming, which is one of my favorite books outside, of me reading it.

That in fact, it’s one of those books because I have read it to Sadie’s classroom, almost every year. So. I said, so it’s, I would imagine for Sadie, it is impossible to hear the voices in that book without me doing them. Right? So I have a voice for, the pine tree at the end.

That is me imitating the Ents from Lord of the Rings. So I have a voice that I do, and I don’t believe Sadie could probably read that book now without hearing that voice in the same way.

Marti: That’s fine.

Jonathan: Right.

We got our kids into reading through Harry Potter, through the movies, but as soon as they watched the first movie, we required them to read the first and the second book before they could watch the second movie. I am old enough to have read all the Harry Potter books before the movies came out, so I have in my mind the transition between the Harry Potter characters that I imagined when I read the book and then how they transformed when they became, associated with the actors.

Marti: My bottom line is, look, I’ve watched a lot of movies that were derived from books, and often I’ve said the movie was better than the book because it did something that spoke to me. The visual quality, whatever. All I’m saying is if people are listening to books. That’s something I think that after you listen to a book, you might venture into a book-book, but it doesn’t matter right now.

It is a different experience. And I will tell you the thing that we also discuss is that reading.

Jonathan: What did you say about reading Safta?

Marti: It’s you. It’s your connect. It is not. If reading is not a spectator sport, right? So the point about reading for people like me is you gotta get involved. And I know that I close a book or stop reading when all of a sudden I’ve drifted away and I’m not a hundred percent on the page, then it’s time to go watch a Korean drama on Netflix. But once I’m in a, in a book, I am involved. Now listening is a little bit more of a spectator sport.

Jonathan: So, we are quoting Connie Freirich my grandmother. Yes. Who said reading is not a spectator sport. So I have a book and movie combination.

I think I would like to recommend for us to talk about another time.

Marti: Okay. Which is

Jonathan: Everything is Illuminated.

Marti: Oh, that was like such a weird film,

Jonathan: right? So a weird film and a weird book. Okay. I love them both. All right. And despite them being different, I gather. Mom does not.

Jonathan Saffron Foer, but we’ll talk about it another time. But I highly recommend both the movie and the book, and they are vastly different experiences.

Marti: All right, let’s talk about some book titles that we wanna recommend.

Jonathan: I wanted to ask you about one other thing as we go into book titles, because you turned my attention to this, article about the broken reader, in the New York Times book review from November 29th.

It was a guest essay. The essay, if you are looking for it online, is How I Began to Love Reading Again by Jeff Giles so he talked about losing the joy of reading, and you had, a response to him, Mom, what?

Marti: I did? Oh, well, I read it and, you know, my response is that yes, you can lose the joy of reading.

You can become a broken reader. And I just was at a party the other night where one of my neighbors told me that it happened to her. My, answer is go back and find something so easy. So good narrative driven, good character driven, that you don’t have to do a lot of involvement. Which I would say is not the Loneliness of Sonya and Sonny, but, anything that gets you. And so, you know what? I have a story. Can I tell you this story

Jonathan: Please?

Marti: So I was a kid who read a lot. I mean, read a lot,

Jonathan: we know.

Marti: Then, and then all of a sudden I got into comic books. Maybe I was 11 or 10, and I became in love with Archie and Veronica and all of the comic books that were out in the fifties.

Your grandmother, my mother, went into. A panic and this was just a no no. But she was smart enough to know that taking comic books away was not gonna be the answer. And what did she do wisely? And I tell everybody, everyone should have a library card. Everyone should use the libraries. We just got some money refunded to libraries.

She went to the library and said, I have this 10-year-old daughter who’s. Pretty good reader and you know, intelligent and I need books that will engage her. And that’s the word. Wow. Wow. And she came home with three books and that was that. I started reading those books and the comic books went away. And one of the books I read every single year into adulthood, and I have it on my bookshelf and I’ve read it to a couple of the grandchildren.

The whole idea with getting back to reading is find something, should I use the word easy, but engaging?

Jonathan: Well, I am less of a doctrinal, anti comic book, zealot. And

Marti: grandma would not be happy about that.

Jonathan: Well, it’s another medium.

Marti: Yes.

Jonathan: And, and we, we can treat it as another medium and that reading still is engaging in that conversation.

So speaking of that conversation, you have a book you wanna recommend or a book you wanna talk about in particular?

Marti: Other than Mona’s Eyes?

Jonathan: Other than Mona’s Eyes? Well, I have to read.

Marti: because we’re gonna go back in time and we’re gonna go to. Okay. Okay. Maggie O’Farrell. All right.

That’ll be one book. ‘cause the movie is out. A lot of people think it’s the best movie of the year. I loved it. But it’s a beautiful book and the movie is translated, very well. So I think we should go back in time. And that’s a five-year-old book. It was during the.

Pandemic it, it sang to me, it brought me to tears and perfect example. Perfect example is a book about Shakespeare, historical fiction. Not really, because everything about Shakespeare is fiction. We almost know nothing about him. So Maggie O’Farrell just said, I’m gonna take a little of this and a little of that and I’m gonna do a story.

That’s really what we want. And she was playing God, of course. And I give her my permission. So that is a book everyone had. If you missed it in 2020, go back and read that book. It’s gorgeous. Another book, another idea I have is I’d like to once in a while, pick an author that we’ve never talked about and say, just read that author.

So I’m gonna make a list of some like that. I think somebody just did a whole list. I think it was the New York Times, about Kate Atkinson. Everything Kate Atkinson has written almost. I’ve read everything. It’s not all perfect. But it’s great. A lot of it. So I think we should look for authors. You have authors that you love.

I particularly have authors I love and then they disappoint me.

Jonathan: Well, this is, this is the thing, right? So the kids and I spoke about, Robert Jackson Bennett He’s, he’s great, right? He’s written some great things.

He’s also written some duds, so we wouldn’t recommend all of him . I am a particular fan of, an English sci-fi author named Adrian Tchaikovsky, who seemingly writes so much that I can’t keep up. And much of it is beyond stellar, right? He has two sci-fi trilogies that are groundbreaking in their innovation. Similar to N. K. Jemsin, who is also an amazing fantasy sci-fi author, almost all of the stuff I’ve ever read of hers is stunning. Like, pick up N. K. Jemsin if you want,

Marti: I hope our listeners understand that when you talk about sci-fi and fantasy.

It doesn’t work with me, but that we’ve accepted that.

Jonathan: We have accepted that.

Marti: Okay.

Jonathan: On the, my favorite author in the world at the moment is Jill Lepore, who is, you know, a fantastic professor of history who has written two works of history. One retelling American History and her more recent one on the History of the Constitution.

She has a podcast that just came out with, Yascha Mounk talking about, why we should amend the Constitution. I love Jill Lepore. She’s amazing. Haven’t actually read or heard anything of hers that I don’t love. Speaking of sci-fi. Jill Lepore has done, a podcast series on Elon Musk and his background and history and how he misunderstands science fiction.

Marti: Were he only a science fiction character? It would be fine with me. So, no, I just realized that we have a division here. I am primarily a fiction reader, although I read a lot of nonfiction and history and biography, but it’s far outweighed by my fiction reading. And you have other talents. I think that should make, our podcast more interesting because we’re offering a little bit of something to everybody.

We do,

Jonathan: We offer quite a variety. So speaking of variety, we

Marti: love, we both love, the Warmth of Other Suns. And Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.

Jonathan: Well, those books are astounding.

Marti: Important, important

Jonathan: and vital.

Marti: Vital.

Jonathan: So we can talk about a book that you recommended to me, which is the Sweetness of Water.

Marti: Oh, and that was, that was Nathan,

Jonathan: Nathan Harris

Marti: Harris’ first book.

Jonathan: Yes.

Marti: Okay. We have to find that book.

Jonathan: Why did you recommend The Sweetness of Water to me? Why did you love it so much?

Marti: Oh, well, it’s about, Jonathan, I think I read it a while ago, but I think it has a lot to do.

It’s about slavery, right?

Jonathan: So in the wake of, the Civil War, his new book is called Amity.

Marti: Amity, which was really good also. But, I think they’re both terrific, but I thought the Sweetness of Water just left me with such a good feeling.

Jonathan: So it’s about a family.

They think their son has died in the Civil War. And so this white couple who seemed to be relatively well off and don’t own slaves and the protagonist, George is kind of a lost person and then starts a project of clearing the land. He wants to start peanut farming and employs two recently freed African American slaves.

Marti: Okay.

Jonathan: So it’s an interesting setup, you know, and they’re in good,

Marti: good book, right?

Jonathan: It is good. I’m about a third of the way through it,

Marti: Just, there’s a movie on Netflix called Train Dreams.

Jonathan: Okay. What did you think of Train Dreams?

Marti: Well, here’s what I love about some movies. Some movies are like reading a book. And Hamnet was like that, which is why a lot of people have problem with it. And Train Dreams is like that. It’s a beautiful story, but it’s. It’s a story that is like an evolving page by page of a person, and it’s a narrative of about a person.

And I think you could all watch it.

Jonathan: Okay. So. What did you think of the last season of the Diplomat?

Marti: Great.

Jonathan: So why is the Diplomat?

Marti: it’s so crazy. It’s so impossible, and the acting is terrific.

It’s great. I can’t wait for the next whole.

Jonathan: So we also love the Diplomat. We, Ginny and I, so Ginny loves the Diplomat so much that she couldn’t stop herself watching the first season, even though she knew she was gonna watch it again with me.

Marti: I don’t do that, but that’s, that’s extreme. But that’s okay.

Jonathan: And then we both,

Marti: might do that with the Koreans.

Jonathan: We both loved it so much that we were happy to rewatch prior seasons in anticipation of the new season. We even watched it with Sadie.

Marti: Well, it’s terrific series, and they’re both wonderful. They’re all good. The whole plan is great.

Jonathan: So well acted. And I think also this falls into a category that we’ve talked about before of, competence porn.

What the diplomat reminds us of, it’s kind of, the West Wing updated, is that we want to believe that there are people who know what they are doing in positions of power. And what the diplomat highlights is. Wow. There are people who really know what they’re, who are deeply knowledgeable and know what they’re doing and are trying to get the right thing done.

And I think that’s a particular balm for us today.

Marti: Yes. I and certainly that was the West Wing. I will tell you that you said that I had turned to Jeffrey a couple of times. During it when I’d say, I can’t believe how much they know about the way government is working. And it’s such a new experience for us right now.

And, it is a wonderful show. It’s a wonderful show. I wanted to throw in a thing that you and I talked about before, please. And that is the Mary Renault,

Jonathan: Uhhuh.

Marti: Okay. So, there’s a great chain of bookstores in Hudson Valley called Oblong, and I’ve going to the Oblong Bookstore in Rhinebeck for 25 years, and I get their email,

Updates all the time. And they, and we are

Jonathan: not yet sponsored by, by Oblong. So let, let’s let them know that we’re talking about them. We love them even though they are not yet our sponsor.

Marti: They just did something about a new paperback.

Edition of Mary Renault, the Persian boy. She wrote a trilogy. They claim, and I agree that she’s probably one of the best writers of historical fiction. And the Persian Boy is a story, and this is the best one. Although I read the other ones, but it’s way back. I’m talking 25, 30 years, way back, maybe even longer than that.

But the Persian Boy’s about Alexander the Great even though I haven’t read it in 30 years, I would. Tell everybody now that Oblong has just validated my decision that you guys who are listening should read it if you like historical fiction. ‘cause that’s a topic we’re gonna get to later in our podcast.

Jonathan: Well, I think it’s a topic we’re gonna return to on a regular basis. So here. So I am reading the Sweetness of Water now at your recommendation. You know, kind of my deal on this podcast is how many books between podcasts? Can I read that, that Safta recommends so,

Marti: well, I’m not sure I’m gonna recommend the Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny ‘cause it’s long but it’s, Ann Patchett had a quote where she said she wanted a pack a suitcase and get inside this book and just live there. And I can understand that, because the rest of your life closes out while you’re reading this book and you say, what, what? I have to go make dinner. Wait, hold it. You know? So, um. Which I don’t do a lot anyway, so, but anyway, um, so,

Jonathan: so, so do you want, so should I, I should read Mona’s Eyes for next time and we can have an in-depth discussion of Mona’s Eyes.

I should read the Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny.

Marti: No, you should not read Sonia until I finish it. I’m only not quite halfway through

Jonathan: or I should read The Persian Boy for next time.

Marti: Yes. But here’s another thing I wanted to say. About whether we finish books or we don’t finish books.

And we’ve had this discussion over the, we have because in some ways, um,

Jonathan: we’ve had it on the podcast

Marti: we’ve had. Yes. And I went through a very long period of guilt where you had to finish it. Anyway, the Booker came out, the Booker Prize came out, and it’s, it is my, it’s what I hold books up to.

The Booker and Sarah Jessica Parker. Was one of the judges this year.

Jonathan: Right.

Marti: She’s very smart. She has her own publishing company. They read 153 books. I think that’s the number in a very short period of time.

Jonathan: She, we talked about her giving up family life for reading.

Marti: That’s right. That’s right. But then there was a whole article, which I read online, and then I read in the Times both and. She as a newbie, as one of the judges, she was reading a book that was really giving her a hard time. She was well into it, a hundred plus pages, and she called the chairman of the committee, I believe, and said to him, I’m really having a problem with this book.

And he said, oh, put it aside. I already did that. So I thought, oh wow, this is great. If the booker can put books. Marti Reich can put books aside.

Jonathan: Well, and this, this I think is a good place to end as we end enter into this holiday season. We’re gonna list all of these books at the urging of my friend Dawn.

I am going to make sure that all of our links are to independent bookstore links. We wanna support independent bookstores

Marti: and libraries.

Jonathan: And libraries. So all of the links on our website when I update it should be to independent bookstores for all the books that we recommend.

We have. All of these books that we’ve mentioned make great holiday gifts, so feel free to use the links to purchase them or pick them up at libraries. I cannot recommend enough, the apps that come out from libraries. Libby is an amazing app. And you can borrow audio books and kindle books on Libby from the comfort of your own home without actually going to the library and support libraries by that, which is great and also less expensive than buying books.

Marti: I’ll show you. I buy a lot of books. I right now currently have eight books on my St. Agnes library queue, which is a great library on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West side. So you can do both. You can do both. And your grandmother was a library person, remember? Well,

Jonathan: and look at that.

We managed to mention both of my grandmothers today, grandma Ida, who was the library matron of honor, who really, inspired us all. And Connie Freirich, who said. Truly reading is not a spectator sport and we encourage everybody to engage in reading. May everyone have a wonderful holiday season.

Hopefully the next time you hear from us, we will do a holiday winter break, special edition from the Upper West Side,

all right. Well thank you everybody for joining us. We look forward to next time and we are grumpy Jews who read and we wish you all a happy holiday season. Happy Hanukkah, which starts this week and, we look forward to our next time. Take care.

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Grumpy Jews (Who Read), Episode 1

Here is our first episode - Marti Reich and Jonathan Freirich - talking about what it is to be a real New Yorker, or not, how we aren’t really all that “grumpy”, what a real cocktail should be, and most importantly, reading and books. Click and enjoy!

Grumpy Jews (Who Read), Episode 1

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Make the call

I should have made the call. Now he’s gone. 

A great person, a mensch (a person of integrity), one of my most important teachers, Rabbi Michell Chefitz (z’l – may his memory always be for blessings), died earlier this week.

The last exchange we ever had was from February 2020, more than five years ago, and I was apologizing for not having called sooner. I needed advice, and I wanted to talk. He wrote:

When we left off our call you mentioned you might call back with the passage of some time. I don't know how much some time is, but it’s been some time. Call whenever you like. I'm often available. If not, please leave a message. Wishing you well --- Mitch

I really missed out.

Mitch made a big difference in my life. His book, The Seventh Telling, inspired me to learn more about Jewish mysticism and develop new and easier ways to access and share that wisdom with others. Mitch’s book, The Thirty-Third Hour, offered creative and innovative models for Jewish education that excited me about learning with communities. These were some of the first books that reawakened the Jewish learner in me after the marathon of study that was rabbinical school.

When I had the opportunity to help bring Mitch as a speaker to a community, I jumped at it. Before I got to meet him though, he had been delayed in arriving for his first speaking engagement by a funeral. So, with Walli, Mitch’s amazing spouse as moral support, I brushed up on Mitch’s writing and offered a talk in his place. I had never received such a show of faith in me as a young rabbi and teacher.

I re-read The Seventh Telling so many times, using its material in sermons and classes. I purchased copies to share with friends and congregants. When Mitch published a beautiful compendium of some of his most amazing stories, The Curse of Blessings, I enthusiastically read and shared it too. The story that inspired its title is one that I have retold so often that I have developed my own dramatic voices and theatrical gestures in portraying it. 

Every now and then I would remember to connect with Mitch and listen to his calming voice as he sagely reflected on whatever I brought to him. I can only imagine what struggles he faced in recent months as his health seemed to wane and he shared that he was taking a break from writing on his Substack, something that I only discovered after his passing. Now I have more of his writings to explore. 

Mitch’s last post before signing off was a re-sharing of his story, Gabriel’s Horn. It’s a beautiful story, a timely one, and I recommend it to everyone.

Like the character in the story, Mitch showed us all how he was strong and pleasing and wise, and so much more. I am saddened that I didn’t take advantage of connecting with him and learning from him more. I am grateful that I learned so much from Mitch, and that there is so much more of him that I have yet to encounter and learn.

Mitch has left us. And he left me with the reminder that I should have made the call.

Don’t wait. Make the call.

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Father - Daughter Sound the Shofar

Sadie and I sound the Shofar for Rosh Hashanah 5786 - the Jewish New Year we celebrated this week.

Thanks to Ginny for all the camera work and production!

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Rabbi Jonathan & daughter Sadie Sound the Shofar

L’Shanah Tovah!

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Are we there yet?

Rosh ha-Shanah Evening 1 Tishrei 5779 Sunday, September 9, 2018 Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

Torah opens with God speaking the world into being:

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִי־א֑וֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר

And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)

God’s words bring the universe into being, and God’s words banished Adam and Eve from the garden, but then God’s words could not prevent Cain from murdering his brother.

God sets things in motion with words and then the effect cannot be undone by words. We know that we cannot control what happens after we have spoken, and we also know that we cannot avoid the responsibility for the impact of what we have spoken. We are powerful creators when we speak, and limited when trying to control what we have done with our words. We know we are responsible and that we cannot undo what we have spoken.

The truth of communication is that as soon as we speak, gesture, or release anything into the world - written word, video, audio, image - then we no longer control what it means. People read into words and images things that the artist or author or director or actor never intended.

Today, instead of having a public conversation about the power of speech and its impact and the frequent difference between intended meaning and the meaning heard, we face a dire problem.

We currently suffer from a persistent, pervasive, and nearly absolute refusal to understand that what we say makes a difference. Public figures regularly deny that saying something to get attention in the moment makes irreparable ripples that we cannot undo. Our leaders must now address so much more than politics. We have reached the point when we need bold and honest and public conversations about what is right and what is wrong - what is moral and immoral - what contributes to the downfall of our country or lifts it up. 

Let us be thoroughly clear: this is not about red or blue or green affiliations. This is not about right or left. This is about what we as Jews and Americans must bring to our public discourse so that we will have a future.

Heinrich Graetz, Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historian, observed that, “Judaism is not a religion of the present but of the future,” which looks “forward to the ideal future age…when the knowledge of God and the reign of justice and contentment shall have united all men in the bonds of brotherhood.”

As Jews we need no reminder of the power of words to incite violence. Admittedly, we can be oversensitive. There is no denying that our experiences give us good reasons for our sensitivities.

More than our history makes us sensitive. Our central teachings demand that we pay attention.

We are commanded to listen to God’s words, to strive to understand them, to grapple with them, to turn them into a good way of living and being together.

שְׁמַע | יִשְׂרָאֵל, יְיָ | אֱלֹהֵינוּ, יְיָ | אֶחָד:

“Listen Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One.”

When the rabbis who fashioned our Judaism began to craft the customs and traditions we follow, they started here, with these words.

“Listen Israel, pay close attention…”

In the Torah scroll, two letters in Sh’ma visually stand out. The last letter of the word “Sh’ma - Listen”, the “ayin”, and the last later of the word “Echad - One”, the “daled”, are written much larger than the rest of the letters of the Torah. These two letters form the word: “eid - witness”. One message of Sh’ma is “bear witness”, pay close attention, listen and then decide what should be done in response to what we hear, see, and notice.

I cannot tell you what we need to bear witness to - there is no easy list of signs of wonders and offenses that we must notice. Rather I appeal to our consciences to trust our communal norms and refer back to them and each other. We witness together, and must turn to each other with our questions about what we notice.

And, we must do more than notice.

When is the right time to raise the alarm? I worry about this because I wonder if I am just being an oversensitive and paranoid Jew.

We know that our survival relies on paying attention. We all have heard the stories of Jews who listened and figured out how to leave in time. We hear the Holocaust survivors noting that the current rhetoric reminds them of what they heard in Germany in the 1930’s.

No matter how much we want to ignore the signs, we are unable to do so. We ask ourselves, over and over again: “Are we there yet?”

At the time of the Civil War anti-immigrant hostility raged, Jews were suspected of treason, of profiteering with the South, and expelled from the Union Army in the West. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the main promoter of American Reform Judaism, and the man whose visit inspired Temple Beth Zion to become Reform in 1863, publicly hedged on supporting abolition because of concerns that if America stopped persecuting African-Americans, then Jews would be next. Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise was clear about the wrongness of slavery, still Rabbi Wise was realistically afraid that the oppression and persecution of the Jews in this country would come as it had in Europe.

As North and South argued the questions - especially whether or not to expand slavery beyond the original slave-holding States, civility was abandoned entirely. In 1856, a Southerner responded to insults and anti-slavery rhetoric by physically beating Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of Senate. Sumner’s injuries were so severe that he could not serve in the Senate for three years. The North proclaimed Sumner a hero and the South proclaimed the violence against him both warranted and insufficient. [1]

The United States that Abraham Lincoln faced four years later was even more divided. Lincoln was the moderate candidate, the reconciler, and his mere election was enough of an excuse for the Southern States to secede and begin the Civil War.

And still, with all of that, in the face of anti-immigrant fervor towards others, the overt anti-Semitism by the North, and the violence everywhere, we careful and oversensitive Jews stayed here.

Is there something so much more alarming today?

Should my sense of alert lead me to abandon our home and drive across the bridge seeking refuge in Canada?

Are we at a new point of alarm that must spur us to action, or have we passed the point of effective action so that we must instead be silent, like Rabbi Wise, for our own safety?

Our public discourse is in a state of failure not unlike the one that allowed violence to erupt on the floor of the Senate more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Irresponsible leaders choose to embrace positions solely to grab headlines. We the public must remind them that they were elected to pursue principles and policies, not “likes” and Twitter followers.

Leaders shout the most outrageous things in public now and then later claim that what we heard was not what they meant. That what they said meant something else. This is worse than an argument. This is absolutely demeaning to every person who listens and every convention about shared meanings that makes society possible.

Judaism demands that we learn and teach. The verses that follow Sh’ma Yisrael, “Listen Israel”, command us to “place the words on our hearts, teach them to our children, speak them in all places and at all times, bind them and write them.” We understand this as a commandment, an imperative, to internalize meanings so as to better understand and develop and clarify words and transform them into meaningful actions.

The claim that I can say something and then, tomorrow, with all of you as witnesses, claim that I said something that meant the opposite of those plain words - this claim destroys the very foundation of the language and speech upon which civilization is based.

We knew this long before we could turn to a video record of every word uttered in public. We knew this because we listened, learned, wrote, and then rewrote - such is the Jewish project. Turn words into teaching, teaching into practice, and practice into a better society.

We stand today as Jewish sentinels on the threshold of a New Year looking out and seeing and remembering and knowing that violence lays just beneath the surface of human society - held at bay by the thinnest of community agreements on civility and law.

In this time of seemingly shifting and emerging facts, of perspectives and opinions constantly claiming firm ground on insubstantial foundations, I struggled to bring words before you today. How could I possibly think that something I wrote yesterday, or last week, or last month, would still be relevant, meaningful, or even truthful in the next minute?

I imagine that being a border guard during a time of relative peace can be stressful - soldiers often speak of guard duty as a battle with boredom and the difficulties of maintaining vigilance. We are in a different place altogether. Each day, gazing out at the potential maelstrom, wondering if warning is needed, half-deafened by a tumult that only seems partially real - would any warning I could offer be heard? And if so am I justified in crying out or merely crying wolf?

We know that there is substance to be found beneath the noise. Principled and foundational teachings still help us sift through the overwhelming volume of questionable data thrown at us every day. We use these foundations to aid us in deciding: have we reached the precipice yet?

So we listen and bear witness.

Our witnessing demands knowledge and memory - we bear witness to a history filled with tragic terror a good deal of which has been directed at us. Our witnessing demands that we fulfill the commandment from Leviticus [19:16]:

לֹ֥א תַעֲמֹ֖ד עַל־דַּ֣ם רֵעֶ֑ךָ

“Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.”

We must interfere. We must prevent bloodshed. We must stop the violence. And there is bloodshed, and violence is here.

To witness is to take responsibility for what happens in our presence.

We are responsible, one for another, as Jews, as Buffalonians, as Americans, as Humans, as inhabitants of this planet. We are all interconnected and we must remember to act with conviction to threats to the entirety of our existence together.

Attention-seeking leaders stand in front of us every day, saying that they uphold principles, and turn around acting in total disregard of everything they claim.

We must call this out. We must demand reason when nonsense is put forward as justifications for injustice. We must call out bigotry when it is expressed.

We can stand aside no longer. If for no other reason that if we stand aside, then history has shown us that we are next.

The Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri offers us this advice:

“A nation is shaped by the stories its children are told. A nation is sustained by the stories it tells itself. The good stories can liberate its potential, it helps it face the dragons of its evils.”

The story we tell as American Jews can start with the words of George Washington to the Touro Synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island: 

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [2]

We remember what it is like to be welcomed as good citizens and so we welcome others, newcomers like us.

Unlike everywhere else we have been, when our history followed the brutal pattern of persecution, pogrom, and expulsion, here we are not outsiders. Yes, we face challenges and anti-Semitism, and yes, we are concerned, but we are truly both American Jews and Jewish Americans - we are part and parcel of the struggle to make the United States both complicated and beautiful, truly “e pluribus unum” - “out of many one”.

After centuries of horror in Europe, after our unsure stance during the Civil War, we here in this country stood up for our fellow citizens. As co-founders of the NAACP, as freedom riders, and as advocates for equal rights, civil rights, and voting rights, we have known when actions were needed, and taken them.

Our story as Jews is an American story, perhaps best expressed by the words of hope spoken by Lincoln in his First Inaugural address, words that still cry out to us today as we attempt to bridge the gaps between us:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

This is a story we can tell to each other, to our children, and to their children.

Ben Okri also wrote that “the true storyteller works with the future.”

We retell and repeat, reinterpret and reimagine, the stories of our Torah, and the stories that become our Torah, to remind us what to do in every age, and in the face of every crisis so that we can build the future.

How will we tell the story of these days?

Were we silent when we should have spoken up?

Were we seated when we should have stood up?

Did we stand idly by as blood was shed?

I may yet be wrong. This may not be the moment of action. I am not advocating we all cross the Peace Bridge never to return. We stayed through the Civil War, and we should stay now. We are needed more than ever.

We must not allow our country to get there.

I believe in us, and I believe in America. America needs us to do more than believe. We must participate. We must vote and get out the vote. We must hold our leaders accountable. We must unite around the principles that make this place a miracle for Jews and so many others.

We must not wait.

We must make this year a good year so that there can be more good years.

L’Shanah Tovah.

[1] Goodwin, D. K. (2006). Team of rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln. Simon & Schuster. p. 184

[2] Washington, G. (1790, August 18). George Washington to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135

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Creation starts with brokenness

I actually began to think about this talk in the Spring, when I heard a podcast by one of my favorite teachers, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, called “Kabbalah and the Big Bang”(1). When I looked at talk I had written, inspired by Rabbi Artson, I was crushed. I had put together a science lecture, not a sermon. In order to get to this talk, I had to break what I had written to begin with. And it turned out that in doing this, I also found the central message for tonight - that brokenness is the start of creation.

Brokenness is not a problem, it is the beginning. 

Which makes sense, since on Rosh HaShanah we celebrate the beginning of everything. Here’s the scientific part, so bear with me a bit. We start with a question: 

“How big was the Big Bang?” 

In 1964, two physicists, Alpher and Herman, who had already come up with an answer to this question, also figured out that the Big Bang was so big, that it would have left a faint residue, an after-glow, that could still be detected today, fourteen billion years after the original explosion. Being scientists they called this after-effect something official sounding: “Cosmic Background Radiation”, and calculated exactly how intense it is right now. 

Around the same time Bell Labs in New Jersey built the Horn Antenna, which was the largest of its type - it would listen farther into the universe with greater accuracy and sensitivity than ever before. As the lab started using this antenna, no matter what they did, they couldn’t get rid of some background noise, a hum that made the researchers think their new antenna wasn’t quite right. They cleaned it, chased off any birds or animals that might be soiling the surface, rewired it, and they still couldn’t get rid of that hum. 

Eventually, these technicians at Bell Labs complained about this persistent noise that they couldn’t get rid of, and Alpher and Herman heard about it. They drove up to the lab from Princeton, tested the frequency of this hum, and found that the persistent noise exactly matched their calculations of the current intensity of the Cosmic Background Radiation, that echo of the Big Bang. In other words, entirely by coincidence, the Bell Labs people developed the means by which they could actually hear what the Big Bang still sounded like, fourteen billion years later. 

Now, here’s the really interesting part - this sound, this original echo of the Big Bang, was the same everywhere. No matter where they pointed the antenna the same, steady, constant sound could be heard. What’s weird about this is that we don’t live in a universe that makes a steady, constant, sound. Our universe is incredibly varied, with different types of matter and energy and lots of space in between it all. It looks different, and sounds different, everywhere. 

This is a problem. The original thing that exploded out - the reality that came out of the Big Bang - exploded outward with perfect consistency. One big uniform ball of energy, matter, and space, without any variations. That’s what they heard and proved from the evenness of the sound of the explosion detected at Bell Labs. So, when did that big ball of consistent and unvaried everything turn into the beginnings of the very uneven universe that we recognize today? 

We don’t find out until 1989, when a research satellite detected faint ripples of intensity in this Cosmic Background Radiation - variations in the constant noise that is that echo of the Big Bang. These faint ripples showed the first appearances of areas where matter came together unevenly, leaving other places where things were spread thin, creating the variations in everything that would become galaxies, stars, solar systems, and planets. These faint echoes picked up within the background noise didn’t occur until 300,000 years after the Big Bang. 

Sir Roger Penrose, a physicist who works with Stephen Hawking, said: “From the view of modern physics the entire world can be seen as the manifestation of a broken symmetry. If the symmetries of nature were actually perfect we would not exist.” Symmetry, that evenness, orderliness, and sameness in all places, prevented the creation of anything at all. When the universe became irregular, matter and energy came together and became galaxies and stars, eventually creating us. All of this depended on a break in the evenness in which everything began. 

George Smoot, a researcher who helped discover this irregularity, said: “If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.” 

All of this research happened decades after the Big Bang Theory was proven. 

In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, and then figured out exactly how long it has been expanding, leading to the proof for the Big Bang as a description of creation. In all the science about the Big Bang there is a point in time, near the moment of explosion, before which physicists cannot understand anything because nothing works in that space and time according to any rules anybody can figure out. When we look backward into time around the Big Bang we run up against a wall of mystery, a thing called a singularity, before which, nothing can be known. 

This barrier of knowledge is so serious that Penrose, that brilliant physicist, wrote: “Space-time singularities are regions where our understanding of physics has reached its limits. If one is trying to be scientific, it is understanding that appeals, and here, at the singularity, you just have to give up.” 

From a scientific point of view then, the story of creation sounds like this: a point of infinite density, a singularity, which we can’t even begin to understand, exploded, also for no reason that anyone can ever understand. Exploding outward evenly, that ball of everything got big enough and cool enough over a long time, three hundred thousand years after the original explosion, so that irregularities emerged in the unvaried state of everything, allowing clumps to form, and gather together, into the beginnings of what things look like today. 

 Here is how we normally begin the Jewish story of Creation, and we’re going to look at it almost word-for-word: 

Gen. 1:1 At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,  

2 when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters-  

3 God said: Let there be light! And there was light. 

4 God saw the light: that it was good…(2) 

Later, after two days of creation, the Torah continues: 

Gen. 1:14 God said: Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night… 

And then we hear all the details of the creation of the sun and the moon and the stars.

What happened to the light from Day One? 

The Book of Genesis describes three days of creation, including the creation of Light, and “and there was evening, and there was morning, Day One”, then Day Two then Day Three. After that, on the Fourth Day we get the sun and the moon as if there were not already light. We could focus on this as an inconsistency, an error in an old story, or even a reason to dismiss Torah entirely. 

A Jewish way of reading says that this apparent inconsistency hints at a deeper truth, that we have to read between the lines and the letters. We use this as an opportunity to tell a story behind the story. This is when we create midrash, and imagine answers to questions in the text. The text is not broken, it is demanding interpretation. 

We can answer the question, “What happened to the Light of the First Day of Creation?” by retelling the story of creation from God’s perspective. 

Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, a Jewish scholar of the Bible and teacher at Pardes in Jerusalem, observed that all motivation comes from needing something - we notice something is missing and we work to fill the absence (3). From this perspective, Jewish mysticism suggested that God began to create because God did not want to be alone. God was lonely and wanted to fix it. Later in Genesis, God expressed this sentiment by sympathizing with Adam’s loneliness. God says: “It is not good for the human to be alone, I will make him a helper corresponding to him” (Genesis 2:18). 

God was everything and everywhere, infinite, and alone. In Jewish tradition, God the infinite is entirely unknowable. According to the Zohar, the unknowable infinite God decided to become smaller in order to create and share reality with some company. God shrunk into an infinitely tiny point, and from that point, poured divine energy back into the empty space that God had left so that there would be room for creation. When God starts sending divine power into the world, that is the first creation of light, and it is the light of God’s unfiltered raw creative essence. God forced all that power into spaces, newly created vessels that were no longer made of God. These vessels couldn’t contain God’s energy, and they shattered, spreading shards containing the bits of the essence of God throughout the universe. 

Instead of a tragedy at the beginning of time, this enabled God to be present in all Creation as slivers, remnants that we uncover when we create, when we work together for a higher purpose, when we participate in repair of the universe. 

The shattering of the vessels explains where the original light went and why God needed to create smaller sources of light, the sun, moon, and stars, later in the creation story. 

A Late Medieval mystic, Menachem Azaria of Fano explained this need for things to break in order to create, in this way: “Just as the seed cannot grow to perfection as long as it maintains its original form, growth coming only through [the breaking of its shell]. So [creation] could not become whole as long as [it] maintained [its] original form, but only by shattering.” 

What makes a seed grow is that it breaks open. The breaking of the seed’s shell is the beginning of the growth of the plant. This allows a root to emerge from the seed into the soil and stretch towards the sun. An intact seed, one that never breaks open, will never grow. 

Our universe, like a successful seed, broke, and thus grew. It had to be broken, it had to have irregularities, in order for creation to happen and our familiar world to emerge. 

The mystical version says we are created in the divine image because everything is from God. Everything is filled with the shards of God. 

 Two parallel stories. Unknowable infinite points burst into reality spontaneously, meaning we have no idea why it happened, creating all that exists in the process, and only became recognizable as something like our world when wrinkles of brokenness, errors, entered into what was originally a flawless expression of power and energy. The brokenness in the stories is not a problem, rather it is the reason that everything can exist. 

We are the stuff thrown out from flaws that entered into the original explosions that created time and space. We developed the mindfulness, the awareness, to understand that we are made of that stuff from the stars. The mistakes in God’s perfection are us, and we evolved into souls who can look out and up at each other and the world and offer praise for the mystery at the core of everything. The story that we use to explain our Jewish texts helps bring meaning to the science that we use to describe the world. 

We need both versions. I know that the medieval Jewish Kabbalists did not come up with the Big Bang Theory. These are two separate stories. We need them both because the poetry and power of the mystical narrative that places us in relationship with the source of all things helps us find the ethics and the meaning in the poetry and power of the scientific narrative that shows that we are made of the same stuff as all things. No matter how amazing the work of Newton and Einstein and Hawking and their students and colleagues, taking the implications of their teachings and communicating them to the world in a way that emphasizes the behavior that responsible people might aim for, still remains the work of those of us outside the labs and observatories. We must take these insights about the way things work and transform them into inspirations that help all of us work together, better. 

At the heart of all of this lies the connection between creation and being broken. At this time of year, and on this day celebrating creation, when we turn towards the image of God as sovereign of all the universe, who brings order and crafted beautiful stable substances out of the tohu va’vohu, the “wild and waste” of early Genesis, we might get disheartened, thinking, “It took God to bring order. So much of my life feels broken. I can’t do what God did, I can’t do anything to fix it”. 

When we look at these two stories we realize that brokenness is not a problem, it is the beginning. Nothing begins from a sense of completion. All our motivations come from our recognition that we must do something to fix things. 

We are not the only people to think this way either. 

Japanese culture has the concept of Kintsugi, which is the art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer dusted in precious metals. The method, which results in beautiful pieces like this one depicted in the photo for this blog post is supported by a philosophy that treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. 

Everyone of us is broken. We all bear scars, some internal and some external. We are all broken vessels containing shards of the divine. We all bear the history of our difficulties, our conflicts, our struggles. We do this as individuals and we do this as the people Israel. Israel is the name we bear from Jacob who earned it by struggling with an angel and walking with a limp from that experience for the rest of his life. 

From each moment and encounter of breaking we can create. We are the seeds that grow from broken shells. We bear the elements of broken stars that exploded and spread through the galaxy billions of years ago. We see with reason, feel with poetry, and bring them together to build a better whole. We are the remnants of shattered vessels from which we gain the strength and inspiration to participate in the completion of all creation. We can become the partners that God sought by helping alleviate loneliness around us. 

On this birthday of the world, as we celebrate the creation of all things, let us remember that everything starts by being broken. Our brokenness is part of the universe, part of God, and it is our strength for entering the year to come as a partner in Creation. 

(1) Matt, D. C. (2016). God and the Big Bang, : Discovering harmony between science and spirituality (2nd ed.). Turner Publishing Company.

(2) Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken.

(3) Zornberg, A. G. (2011). The beginning of desire: Reflections on Genesis. Schocken.

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You are a good Jew

Welcome to the season of apologies, the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when many of us try to make amends for any wrongs we committed in the last Jewish Year.

Regardless of the season, when people find out I am a rabbi, many of our conversations begin, “I am so sorry rabbi that…” 

“…I don’t go to services more often.”

“…I don’t belong to a synagogue.”

“…I am not more Jewishly involved.”

And then we talk about how that person cares about living and doing with integrity, cares about being a good member of their family, an attentive friend, and an active part of their work and neighborhood communities.

I ask: “Don’t those things, what you do as a good person for the people around you, also make you a good, committed Jew?”

The measure of our Jewish qualities should really overlap with the measure of our human qualities.

Most of all, Judaism serves to help us become good people.

People living in peace with each other, figuring out how to have productive civic society – these form the fundamental goals of Judaism.

All Jewish ritual practices, celebrating Jewish peoplehood and finding belonging in Jewish communities, what we eat or don’t eat, imagining that we manage to do what the Universe demands of us, and everything else, all intend to help us find our way to ethical, compassionate, and righteous lives and societies. Maimonides describes the commandments, the terms of the Jewish covenant or binding contract with the Universe, as a program of personal improvement.[1] We improve ourselves to improve the world, and the society that we build is how we take individual improvement into the area of world improvement. 

This is not some modern, radical, new age, idea – the center of Judaism is: “make the world a better place”. 

We do this first and foremost by being better people – better to ourselves and each other.

Haven’t been to services in a while and still work hard to be a good neighbor? You are a good Jew.

Had a bacon cheeseburger the other day and still volunteer for good causes? You are a good Jew.

Didn’t have a bat or bar mitzvah and still feel Jewish, and work hard at being a good person? You are a good Jew.

This is not an exhaustive list.

We are something of a list-crazy people.

We have 613 commandments from the Torah, from just the Five Books of Moses, and for centuries we disagreed about which they were.

We have enough summaries, “these are the top three things we should do to be Jewish”, that different Jewish institutions choose different top three lists for their letterheads and mottos.

As we enter the New Year of 5786, I apologize.

I am sorry that as a rabbi, I participate in a culture that makes Jews feel bad for not being “Jewish enough”.

We don’t need a scarcity approach in any of our worlds.

Instead of scarcity, I offer you:

“You are enough. You are enough of a Jew.” 

Yes, many of us, not even half of Jews who self-identify, will go to synagogue next week.

And yes, those in synagogue between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will spend time confessing all the wrongs we have done.

Let’s avoid one of those now and in the future.

Let’s celebrate the Jewish people that we are.

Identifying as Jewish is hard enough. 

You are Jewish enough.

You are good enough.

We are good enough.

May we all find enough to make the New Year a better year for everyone.

L’Shanah Tovah u-metukah – a good and sweet year to us all.

[1] For more on Maimonides and the “Reasons for the Commandments”, see Goodman, M. (2015). Maimonides and the book that changed Judaism: Secrets of the guide for the perplexed. University of Nebraska Press., Chater 7, pp. 113-137

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Peanut Butter, Chocolate, and Getting Along

Why can’t we all get along? 

The anniversary of September 11, 2001, and yesterday’s horrific shooting and murder of Charlie Kirk, may his memory serve as a blessing, amplify the seriousness of our crisis of getting along.

The original opening of this piece was: “the idea of hegemony is a fallacy”.

And then Ginny, my spouse, told me that despite their accuracy, for the sake of clear communication, I must not use words like “hegemony” and “fallacy”.

Ginny is pretty much always correct, so, instead, I will use the idea raised in the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial: “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter…you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!”[1]

The Reese’s people were onto something. Everyone prefers their own thing. While some prefer chocolate, and others peanut butter, others still choose peanut butter and chocolate combined, and even others are allergic to one or both of those, or find the entire project too sweet.

Personally, I can’t believe that people like chunky peanut butter cups and yet some people must love them because Reese’s still sells them.

None of these is better than the other - it is all just a matter of taste. 

Twenty-four years after 9/11 and people still claim that entire countries should be “one way”. President George W. Bush’s words in the week following that awful day twenty-four years ago, “you are either with us or you are with the terrorists”[2] seem tame in comparison to a sitting US Senator claiming just last week that the United States was founded as a White Christian Homeland[3] in blatant contradiction to so much of what our Founders wrote and said and our founding documents proclaimed. 

E Pluribus Unum – “out of many one” – the earliest motto of the United States[4], feels like more than the unification of 13 colonies into a new country. This motto serves as a call to the heart of the American project: that many peoples can form one multi-cultural nation. Today, this vision and hope seem greater challenges and perhaps more distant than ever. 

At the root of this lies the toxic idea that one people, one idea about who we are, can dominate all the rest, and that such a unifying principle should dominate everything else. This is wrong.

As soon as any group narrows the definition of rightness and correctness to exclude other people as less than, as soon as a group defines their own goodness as exclusive and superior to all others’, they have shut the door on growth, on improvement, and on the all the strengths that have proven to succeed for us as people.

All good ideas improve through encountering differences.

All people, individuals and groups, grow and thrive through conversations and exchanges with those unlike them.

All nations do better when we share in a broad community that includes others who make us uncomfortable and force us to change for the better when our habits and norms confront different ways of thinking and doing.

The lessons of the American project, the importance of “out of many one”, the challenges of terror and assassination, and the war that inspired our Founders to create the Constitution that seeks to hold us together in peace by being amendable[5]:

All these must move us towards greater engagement with others near and far, more civil discourse, and more serious self-reflection on who we are and how we can contribute to more listening, learning, compassion, and eventually, understanding between all of us who may disagree, but who are strengthened most by our humble engagement with differences. 

In the realms of chocolate and peanut butter, may we all find the sweet treat that suits us best and celebrate that others can do the same, even if our chosen desserts are different. 

In the realm of our nation during troubling times, wishing everyone wholeness and well-being on this difficult day, both in the past and in the present.

[1] For those of you who haven’t seen it and can tolerate the cheesiness of 1982 advertising, here it is: https://youtu.be/rTTixlelryY?si=ltxHsUQsV_p7jqXV

[2] President declares “Freedom at war with fear”. (2001, November 21). Welcome to the White House. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

[3] Shanes, J. (2025, September 5). A Senator just unapologetically declared the U.S. a white homeland. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/09/eric-schmitt-white-nationalism-national-conservatism-conference.html

[4] Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books.

[5] Jill Lepore talks about this and her forthcoming book, We the people: a history of the U.S. Constitution, on this podcast: Lithwick, D. (2025, September 6). How to fix our broken constitution. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2025/09/the-constitutional-tool-america-needs-right-now

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Discover a New Approach to Spiritual and Rabbinic Counseling

This year, a Christian colleague surprised and delighted me, saying I had helped them “get right with God”.

Surprised, most Jews don’t talk that way about our spiritual paths.

Delighted, because as a rabbi, helping people with their spiritual challenges and journeys is an honor and a blessing.

My Jewish journey challenges me to open up everything that I learn from ancient texts and contemporary traditions. I aim to offer accessible and useful reflections for everyone.

Listening, witnessing with awe and care, guiding toward growth, all rooted in Jewish wisdom.

These are the heart of my work as a spiritual and rabbinic counselor.

Every conversation has infinite potential. The ancient rabbis in the Mishnah teach that all of us contain the potential for an entire universe – our possibilities are endless.

When we meet one another with curiosity and openness we help explore new possibilities for connection and healing.

Why choose me and Jewish & counseling and support? 

• 100% Personalized: Every session is tailored to your questions, experiences, and spiritual needs, whether you seek clarity, comfort, or renewal in difficult times.

• Authentically Jewish and open - informed by Jewish sources while honoring the richness of diverse backgrounds, we uncover strength in our differences and learn from each other. 

• Real Client Impact: As Dennis, a recent client, shared:

“You not only provided guidance, teaching and ever-important questioning during my conversion; you also gave me the tools to find a place of peace and ways to connect with God, the universe, and my own self in very difficult times.”

 What to Expect

Sessions are judgment-free, confidential, and designed to meet you wherever you are on your journey. Together, we’ll explore your questions through wonder and reflection. I aim to listen deeply, honor your story, and help you find your own best way forward.

 Ready to begin?

Whether you're facing a transition, planning a ceremony, or just need a safe place to reflect

I'm here.

Schedule a discounted 30-minute consultation to experience firsthand how spiritual and rabbinic counseling can support your growth. For more information or to book your session, visit Jewish &’s Support and Spiritual Guidance Page.

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Welcome to the Hive Mind "Jewish &" starts with Ginny and me

A new stage in Ginny's and my collaboration begins - check it out here:

Welcome to the Hive Mind — Jewish And

After nearly three decades of shared work behind the scenes, I’m stepping forward to claim my place as Rebbitzen—this time on my own terms.

Shabbat Shalom everyone!

And a Happy Labor Day Weekend - remember that organizing is at the heart of workers' rights, and workers' rights are at the heart of a healthy society.