Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

This week we read a double Torah portion, Nitzavim-Vayeilech, in which Moses and the Israelites are preparing for the conquest of Canaan. Rabbi Larry Milder writes about the disturbing instructions to destroy the inhabitants of that land, including Moses saying that God will  “wipe out those nations from your path and you shall dispossess them” (Deut. 31:3). 

Rabbi Milder then points out an important piece of context of this part of our text. “The date of the Israelite ‘conquest’ of the land is generally thought to be 1250 B.C.E. The Book of Deuteronomy is written as though it is a recording of events that occurred on the eve of this conquest. Most scholars, however, believe that Deuteronomy was composed during the reign of Josiah, around 621 B.C.E. In other words, the ‘Deuteronomist’ is telling a story that is already ancient history. The version of the settlement told by the Deuteronomist reflects the issues and concerns of the time of Josiah far more than it does the time of Moses some six centuries earlier. By the time of Josiah, there were no longer any Canaanite nations. The seven nations that the Deuteronomist urges the Israelites to dispossess had long since ceased to exist, and the commandment to destroy them was by then purely hypothetical. The Deuteronomist’s real concern is idolatry, not Canaanites.”

Reading parts of the Torah that portray and advocate violence and injustice can challenge our relationship to the text overall. It can be helpful to learn historical context, not to justify the text but to understand how it may have come into being. Reading this text today, we can ask numerous questions relevant to us – Which sources do we read to learn history, such as the history of our country?  How do we relate to the peoples who first lived here? What does “idolatry” mean to us now? What are today’s “idolatrous” practices that we find tempting or appealing?

Wishing you Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

The great Israeli feminist professor and leader of numerous organizations, Alice Shalvi, wrote about this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, and its relevance to the Jewish calendar and this season of reflection and renewal. She notes that life transitions are often “accompanied by self-scrutiny, a vow, and a determination to improve, to ‘turn over a new leaf.’…Remembrance of things past is an essential part of developing a new identity, beginning a new existence.”

Transition often includes ritual that helps us look back and arrive in our new, present moment. Shalvi points to the “ceremony that marks the entry into the Land of Israel (Deuteronomy 26:1-10): as an expression of gratitude, the people are to bring a basket filled with the first fruits of the land’s bounty and to recount the events that led to the long-awaited settlement of the land.” She applies this process to her own reflection on the founding of Israel, and the ideals of equality, particularly for girls and women, to which she dedicated her life’s work. You can find her full piece here. 

As the moon reaches its fullest this Friday and then wanes in the two weeks until Rosh Hashanah, we can begin to recount the events of our lives, to express gratitude and reflect on what we have learned from our decisions, challenges, experiences, ideas and as we enter the new year. May the rituals of this season help us to make the transition with awareness.

Wishing you Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

This Torah reading is packed with distinctive mitzvot, from the requirement to send away a mother bird before removing the eggs from her nest to the responsibility to keep our property safe from preventable accidents. 

Here is one more: When you make a loan of any sort to your compatriot, you must not enter the house to seize the pledge. You must remain outside, while the party to whom you made the loan brings the pledge out to you. And if they are needy, you shall not go to sleep in their pledge; you must return the pledge at sundown, that they may sleep in their cloth and bless you; and it will be to your merit before the Eternal your God (Deut. 24:10-14).

Of course, this was not “one more” but rather several more instructions – yet we can see that they add up to one thing that is deeply vital to the society the Torah envisions: complete respect for the humanity of a person who has found themself in need of borrowing. The teaching that a lender must not presume to enter someone’s home without permission just because that person is in their debt is ever-current. It is made all the more powerful by the statement that showing this kind of respect earns us merit in the eyes of the One who knows that we are all borrowers, if in different ways. 

Wishing you Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

We have now entered Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashanah, and a period of both reflection and anticipation. While the nature of time and our lives seems to cause many of us to feel surprised when Rosh Hashanah arrives, connecting with our calendar and the practices associated with the months and seasons can help us to become more ready. 

Many know that the Yamim Noraim/High Holy Days focus on teshuvah or turning toward our best selves and aligning our paths with our deepest truths. While teshuvah is something we can and should practice all year long, the season of this special focus on it is meant to begin with Elul, giving us a full month plus the 10 Days of Awe to look back on the year and to pay attention to ourselves and to our relationships.

In many communities, hearing the shofar for spiritual focus begins today on Rosh Chodesh Elul and continues daily (except Shabbat) throughout the month. Rabbi Kelly Whitehead writes, “To listen to the shofar is to practice a kind of holy attention. We listen for the soul’s trembling, for the heart’s longing, and for the voices calling out around us.”

Connecting the shofar blasts with the voices of other people, Rabbi Whitehead teaches “…the shofar… is a spiritual amplifier. It reminds us that truth is found in relationships, in the stories, sorrows, and wisdom of others.”

To begin this kind of listening, we may first have to listen deeply to ourselves, whether we do this in prayer or meditation, or with others in conversation. I look forward to gathering with you during the coming month for services including this kind of listening, as well as anticipating celebrating the holidays with you.  

Wishing you Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

This week we read a Torah portion called Re’eh, which means “See,” and begins with this word: “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you listen to/heed the commandments of the Eternal your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not listen to/heed the commandments of the Eternal your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced (Deut 11:26-28).

See, we are told, that a significant choice is before you. Before choosing the spiritual, ritual and ethical path that we are being called to follow, we are called to take note that we have a choice. While the mitzvot are, literally, commandments, the very text that records them also explicitly recognizes and calls us to recognize that we can choose whether or not to heed them. 

Interestingly, the words to see and to hear are both used metaphorically in these verses. We can understand that we have a choice whether or not our eyesight is sharp, and we can heed wise counsel whether or not we hear it with our ears or learn it in some other way. But the use of “see” to convey recognition and “listen” to convey obedience express the importance of our achieving understanding and action through our lived senses. We are not to heed the mitzvot as automatons but as living, sensing beings. 

This is expressed again in the citation above, when the text describes “other gods” as those gods “whom you have not experienced.” Here God reminds the Israelites that they are not being asked to act on a theoretical faith alone, that they have lived experiences of the Holy One’s impacts in their lives. 

This reminder is of course for us too. This “One” or “Oneness” who calls us to heed the voice of conscience is the same Source of the experiences of our lives – the smell of freshly picked flowers and fruit, slow healing from injury, the lift in our spirits from a call or hug from a trusted friend.

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

Starting with the first verse, the Torah reading this week can be hard to stomach: “And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, your God, יהוה, will maintain faithfully for you the covenant made on oath with your ancestors ” (Deut. 7:12). Many of us find promises and threats alienating, not representative of the Divine Source of life we experience or aim to connect with. This biblical God is quite different from later characterizations in Rabbinic sources, where God’s empathy and care stand out. 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks brings a reading based in history: “Moses, for the first time in history, was hinting at a law of history… If you assume – [Moses] tells the next generation – that you yourselves won the land and the freedom you enjoy, you will grow complacent and self-satisfied. That is the beginning of the end of any civilization. In an earlier chapter Moses uses the graphic word venoshantem, “you will grow old” (Deut. 4:25), meaning that you will no longer have the moral and mental energy to make the sacrifices necessary for the defence of freedom.

Inequalities will grow. The rich will become self-indulgent. The poor will feel excluded. There will be social divisions, resentments and injustices. Society will no longer cohere. People will not feel bound to one another by a bond of collective responsibility. Individualism will prevail. Trust will decline. Social capital will wane.

…Only against this background can we understand the momentous project the book of Devarim is proposing: the creation of a society capable of defeating the normal laws of the growth-and-decline of civilisations. This is an astonishing idea.

What Moses was saying to the new generation was this: You thought that the forty years of wandering in the wilderness were the real challenge, and that once you conquer and settle the land, your problems will be over. The truth is that it is then that the real challenge will begin. It will be precisely when all your physical needs are met – when you have land and sovereignty and rich harvests and safe homes ­– that your spiritual trial will commence.”

Perhaps in these verses which appear to present a dominating God, our Torah is conveying a deep lesson about the content and purpose of its laws, and about our role in achieving and maintaining freedom. 

As Rabbi Sacks concludes, “The real challenge is not poverty but affluence, not insecurity but security, not slavery but freedom.”

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

Many years ago, I worked at a summer camp as the Jewish Program Director. My job included creating all-camp Shabbat programs and bringing creative Jewish activity and learning alive for campers and staff. Since it was summer, there was just one holiday observed at camp, in addition to Shabbat: Tisha B’Av, the date on which we remember the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem – actually, the date came to mark the destruction of both the first and second Temples, and other calamities in our history as well, including the ill-fated Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 133 CE, the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492.

I felt so sad that this was the holiday we had to honor at summer camp. Why couldn’t it have been Sukkot – we could have built incredible forts for sleeping under the stars! Or Tu B’Shvat – think of all the tree planting, nature exploration and art projects about trees we could have done. 

But honoring historic losses and fulfilling the mitzvah of introspection about communal mistakes was what our calendar gave us. So my staff colleagues and I created a program with beautiful music that encouraged calm reflection and a ritual in which we formed a human spiral. In that spiral, on the floor of the dining hall, we sat together while campers and staff read aloud from a list of historical tragedies that have befallen our people and others as well. We acknowledged that our people and others have been through crises and losses that have impacted us and our families even centuries later. 

And then we invited whoever felt moved to share a short sentence about other hard things they wanted to acknowledge from history or our current world. We did not know how many young people would feel they had something to say, or who would be brave and willing to speak. Then, so many young people spoke that we had to gently bring this part to an end. Next, we invited them to share what gives them hope. The sharing went on, and on. Adults, teenagers and eight-year-olds shared what gave them hope in very hard moments. 

Camp ended some days later, and new campers arrived for the next session. Staff members approached me and asked when we would be doing this important ceremony. Tisha B’Av was over, but in the middle of summer camp, they insisted we do something that enabled a kind of acknowledgement and sharing that is rare and necessary. 

Today is Tisha B’Av. The Jewish people continue to live through immense grief and stress all over the world and particularly in Israel. And we also experience joy, connection and hope, especially when we are not pressured or expected to pretend that things are easy. In fact, it may be the chance to be real that provides the very opening for change and for change.

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

Last week’s parasha included the episode of five sisters who petition to inherit their family’s land after their father’s death, since they have no brothers. Moses consults with God and the women win the right to inherit the land. This week, the case is followed up, as a new problem has arisen out of the solution – if the women inherit the land and then marry into other tribes, the land will be lost to their tribe for the coming generations. 

The solution to this new problem is to require that women who inherit the land of their families “may marry anyone they wish, provided they marry into a clan of their father’s tribe…Thus no inheritance shall pass from one tribe to another, but the Israelite tribes shall remain bound each to its portion” (Num. 36:6, 9). 

Limiting who some women can marry doesn’t sound good from a current perspective. But without larger context, we may assume that such limits were even more complete than they were. While only men were counted in the original apportionment of the land to the tribes, women did inherit property in the bible. As noted in The Torah, A Women’s Commentary, “the appearance of some of the [daughters of Zelophedad]’s names as place names on early clay fragments suggests that they were primary owners” of property, and that it did not become their husbands’ after they were married. 

Further, documents from the Jewish community Elephantine, Egypt, include several contracts from the 5th century B.C.E. in which a father bequeaths property to both sons and a daughter, and another document that shows a man transferring half of a new property to his wife and naming their daughter and son as equal heirs. (The Torah, A Women’s Commentary, p1028).  

Why think about these ancient details? At least for me, learning this kind of history makes it easier to imagine not only our vast differences but also our continuity with the families of those years so long ago. Something about that connection feels hopeful. 

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

On one hand, living in a country that has had its independence now for two and a half centuries, it can be hard to even understand the meaning of that independence when it was first gained. But on the other hand, breaking free from governing systems that have lacked basic participation and representation of the people being governed has been an ongoing journey for the entirety of our country’s history. Huge swaths of the population of the US have had to fight from the beginning for basic rights to participate in shaping our policies and legal systems. This ongoing fight for inclusion, equality and full implementation of democratic principles is not an anomaly of our history but a defining part of it.

Judaism too is an ongoing, ever-developing practice and system based on principles that are not always fully implemented. In parashat Pinchas, which we read this week, a man has died, leaving five daughters and no sons. (Numbers 27:1-11) Since the inheritance laws in operation at the time in the story deny women the right to inherit their family’s land, the women and their descendants face the possibility of losing their family’s land altogether. So the daughters confront Moses and the other men in leadership of the community to demand a change in policy to address their situation. Moses brings the case to God, who agrees with the daughters – this despite that God and Moses are the source of the original framework. This ability to change is central to our ability to survive and thrive as a people and a system of communal practice and policy.

As we enter July 4th weekend, parashat Pinchas reminds us that the unfolding of communal change is not something to view only as spectators. Jewish life and life in our great and troubled country both demand fresh thought and the fulfillment of responsibility, even as they offer us the fulfillment that goes with them.

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

In Numbers 8:2, as part of the instructions for completing the temple and its contents, we read, “When you kindle light in the lamps…” The description led some to ask why we are to light lamps for God, who is already full of light? Here is a creative response from the midrash, our storehouse of ongoing answers to such questions:

To what is the matter comparable? It is to a Royal One who had a beloved one. The Royal One said to them: ‘Know that I will be dining with you; go and prepare for me.’ The beloved went and prepared a common bed, a common lamp, and a common table. When the Royal One came, their attendants came too, encircling them from this side and that side, with a golden lamp before the Royal One. When the beloved saw all the grandeur, they were ashamed, and hid everything they had prepared, as it was all for common people. The Royal One asked: ‘Did I not say to you that I am dining with you? Why did you not prepare anything for me?’ The beloved replied: ‘I saw all this grandeur that came with you, and I was ashamed and hid everything that I had prepared, as they were common vessels.’ The Royal One said: ‘As you live, I reject everything that I brought, and due to my love for you, I will use only yours.’ Likewise, the Holy One is all light, as it is stated: “And the light rests with God” (Daniel 2:22), (story from Midrash Rabbah 15:8).

At some time, each of us may ask, who we are to offer what we have to another person, a community, a situation, or even to the Source of Life. What could we possibly offer that is needed? The story from the midrash has these moments in mind and answers us. It is not that we alone have the power to create mountains and oceans, nor to snap our fingers and solve a difficult situation, but that we each have light to bring, and that our light is wanted – so wanted that at times another more powerful light might cover itself to make ours visible. 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller