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Dear friends,
I’ve been sitting for a while with the events of the last week — the confirmation of the deaths of hostages: the Bibas children, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, ages four years and nine months when kidnapped; and their mother, Shiri; alongside peace activist Oded Lifshitz — may their memories be for a blessing.
(It took place in the context of what The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg refers to as “Hamas’s Theater of the Macabre” — the harrowing ways in which the return of the hostages to Israel have been stage-managed in ways that elicit even further torment for the families of the hostages.)
I’m trying to sit with the humanity of all of this. I found myself listening to the The Daily Briefing podcast from The Times of Israel today and, at about the 15:30 mark, emotional for the first time in a long time, upon hearing the description of Yoav Avital, Ariel Bibas’ five-year old friend, experiencing the journey of grief at the loss of his friend — going through a series of stages: shock, denial, anger… and whimsy, the latter not part of all of our typical stages of grief. He imagined the ways he could save his friend, bringing him back to life. He imagined what he would do upon their reunion, which was never to be. He even imagined that Ariel’s captors loved him too much to return him, a thought that shot right to my heart.
I won’t pretend the Jewish people are the only people to experience collective grief over the last year; we know families on all sides of this conflict, and all around the world, have experienced heart-wrenching loss in an all-too heartbreaking year.
I just know, following as I do, the story of the Jewish people, sharing ties of kinship, of the sense that we have a shared legacy that we have inherited together, looking to cherish that legacy and pass it off to the next generation, who will do with it what they will, the way in which I feel the heartbreak for the Bibas family, and the way in which that reminder of our humanity, of our capacity to feel love for fellow human beings whom we’ve never met and whom we don’t know, instills in us the capacity to love both our neighbor, our kin (Leviticus 19:18) and the stranger, the ger (Leviticus 19:34), cherishing humanity, cherishing our people, cherishing the next generation.
Society Hill Synagogue has ties to Oded Lifshitz, in the sense that he was a volunteer for Road to Recovery, one of the organizations featured in our High Holiday Israel Appeal this year.
Two years ago for our High Holiday Israel appeal, in addition to offering an appeal to invest in Israel Bonds, we made an appeal to support the Ukraine response of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (better known as the JDC), helping provide food, medicine, housing, home care, winter survival aid, trauma support, education initiatives for children, and employment assistance to enable Ukrainian Jews to move forward with hope.
This was because it was that year, as I wrote about multiple times then, that Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, launched an unprovoked war of aggression aimed at toppling Ukraine’s government and increasing Russia’s territory.
In a stunning turn of events last week, the United States objected to a Group of 7 resolution calling Russia the aggressor and voted no, alongside Israel, on a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory; both flowing from the President of the United States’ statement to the leaders of Ukraine that “you should never have started it” (the war), when, in reality, it was the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who is Jewish), who united his country to stop the Russian invasion and prevented a continuation of Russia’s imperial aims beyond Ukraine, which had evoked eerily reminiscent memories of World War II.
That unprovoked Russian aggression had led to something like 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed and 370,000 who have been wounded, and approximately 198,000 Russian soldiers killed and 550,000 wounded, a level of loss that can recede to the background with the intensity of the war between Israel and Hamas at top of mind.
In times like these, it is important not to let history be rewritten. Russia was the aggressor, and we pray for a world that keeps its imperial ambitions in check.
Finally, I wanted to share the D’var Torah this past Friday night. I was honored that Susanna Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s daughter, was in attendance when I (yet again, not knowing she’d be there) cited her father multiple times in the D’var:
This D’var Torah is about a discussion I recently encountered online.
It begins with a lament, a self-aware concern expressed by one online commenter. “Ugh,” she says. “The crushing weight of having two manageable tasks.”
She’s poking fun at herself a little bit, confessing that, I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but having two significant things to accomplish in a day can feel overwhelming.
Another commenter weighs in and says, “tbh” — internet speech for “to be honest” — “the crushing weight of having one manageable task.”
Some days, anything can feel daunting.
Momentum begins to build. Another user chimes in: the crushing weight of no tasks but feeling like there should be a task.
One more: the crushing weight of not knowing if there is a task.
Finally, a concluding commenter settles the matter: “I’m starting to think this crushing weight is not about the tasks.”
I’m starting to think the crushing weight is not about the tasks.
This thread came to mind for me when I had a conversation with a recent B’nei Mitzvah parent, who confessed to me that all of her stress was focused on preparing to welcome her family and friends for the Bar Mitzvah, after which she had a different stress she would need to pivot to.
Which seems to be how life is for a lot of us. We say, once I get through this week, with the following special case items, things will settle down. If I can just manage to get through this one manageable task, things will clear up. But then of course, no they don’t.
I’m starting to think it’s not about the tasks.
I am perennially guilty of this. I have regularly said the words to my wife, “after this week,” with this wedding and this Bat Mitzvah and this Board meeting, things will settle down. But my wife is no Charlie Brown, and I am no Lucy. Caroline Kamesar knows the next week will bring its own life cycle event, its own committee meeting, its own adult education class, and that, with a few rare exceptions, it will be comparably busy to this week.
And even if it isn’t, as one commenter says, the crushing weight of no tasks but feeling like there should be a task seeps into our thinking
I’m starting to think it’s not about the tasks.
So what do we do about this?
I’ll give you the good news: you’re doing it.
Shabbat is Judaism’s eternal answer to this “crushing weight.” Shabbat is your spiritual permission slip to put whatever weight you are carrying on the shelf; to set it aside; to say, the nature of the world as we know it, ever since the Garden of Eden, is that our list of tasks is never complete, never finished, the stresses never completely go away.
And so once a week, like God, we say, enough. I deserve, just like God, a day of rest, a day of repose, a day of planting myself in that primordial garden, of tasting what it will be like in the world to come, in the age of redemption.
Now, in some respects, I would argue that it is more challenging for liberal Jews than Orthodox Jews to experience this edenic Shabbat.
If you are Orthodox, the guardrails are clear: you are not turning on electricity, you are not driving, you are engaging in no commerce on Shabbat. While it’s by no means easy to follow these strictures, there is absolute clarity on how one builds what Abraham Joshua Heschel calls “a palace in time.” A fortress, in which the only thing you permit yourself is deep engagement with Shabbat.
How do we do this if we are liberal Jews, where, on the one hand, we may feel a deep love for, and deference to, Jewish tradition, where we sense that its wisdom, passed down to us through the generations, is a wellspring from which we are called to draw nourishment and sustenance, while at the same time not necessarily feeling bound by exactly the way those laws have been interpreted throughout the ages? For example, not necessarily feeling like the traditional rabbinic interpretations for Shabbat envisioned a world where opening a refrigerator turns on a lightbulb, where there is a refrigerator, where there is a lightbulb.
How do we approach Shabbat if we’re both called to experience this sacred day of rest, while recognizing that we are still immersed in the modern world, without a huge community cordoned off from the rest of society?
There are no easy answers, but I believe it starts with the sensibility that the weight we carry is not about the tasks. We will never outrun the treadmill. We will never finish our to-do list, or, to the extent we do, we will wonder if there isn’t something else we haven’t thought of that should be on there.
Instead of trying to get through the list as fast as we can, or worrying about what else should be on the list, once a week, we put the list aside. We take whatever weight we are carrying and put it on the shelf. It will still be there when we return, perhaps unchanged, but though it may be the same, when we return, we might not. On the other side of Shabbat, having planted ourselves in the soil of eternity, we might be different.
There’s a tradition that on Shabbat we receive a neshamah yetarah, an additional soul, and at the end of Shabbat, those neshamot yetrot, those additional souls, return to heaven, and they relate, to the Holy One, all of the ways that their host on earth, the person in whom they had been implanted, transformed over the course of Shabbat, even in ways unbeknownst to the host.
When we return to the list, the list might not have changed, but we probably have. Shabbat is our opportunity to move out of the mundane, into the holy one day a week.
While we might not approach technology on Shabbat in exactly the ways Orthodox Jews do, we can still approach the world with the sense that it has existed before us and will exist without us. That our contributions, while perfectly urgent six days a week, can wait one day out of seven.
To illustrate, Heschel refers to the pious man who “once took a stroll in his vineyard on the Sabbath. He saw a breach in the fence, and then determined to mend it when the Sabbath would be over. At the expiration of the Sabbath, he decided: since the thought of repairing the fence occurred to me on the Sabbath, I shall never repair it.”
While this is no doubt a bit of hyperbole — we can’t quite control what unwelcome thoughts flitter through our mind over the course of a day and don’t need to punish ourselves for them — it does illustrate the sensibility we’re trying to cultivate. Not adding to our list but taking a pause from it. Not feeling daunted by our list because we have a sacred permission slip, one day a week, to set it aside. Not being overwhelmed by the presence or absence of any task on the list, because it’s not about the tasks. Life has its own weight regardless of tasks, and yet once a week, we suspend that weight on the beams of the eternal, in the form of the rhythm known as Shabbat.
I wish you a Shabbat of peace. Shabbat Shalom.
