Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

In English, the fourth book of the Torah is Numbers, named for the census taken at the opening of the book. But in Hebrew, the book is Bamidbar, “In the Wilderness.” The word “wilderness” can connote desolation, loneliness, and danger. It can also connote freedom, connection and inspiration. Perhaps every one of us has encountered each of these during wilderness experiences. 

It is not a coincidence that Moses meets God at a bush in the wilderness, nor that he receives the Torah on a mountaintop. Nor that the Israelites – and all of us, since we are considered to have been there in spirit as well – received the Torah at the base of that mountain. Forests, mountains, and other undeveloped places offer a spaciousness where we can find new learning, guidance, and insight. 

Nighttime also offers some of these qualities, and maybe that is why Shavuot, our celebration of receiving the Torah, is celebrated with a nighttime study session. I am excited to celebrate and learn together next Thursday night as Jews all over the world receive Torah anew. See below and see you then!

This week includes both Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s memorial day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror, and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. It is a good time to appreciate the Israelis in our lives – members of our families, our congregational community, and our other circles of friends and community, as well as the role that Israel has played in many of our lives. Personally, the three years I spent living in Israel were formative times for me in many ways, including the chance to learn Jewish text and tradition, connect with the places and the land that are central to Jewish origins and to Judaism, to live in a culture where the Jewish calendar and rhythms of communal life were shared and celebrated by so many, and to begin lifelong friendships with Israelis and also with a Palestinian family. It is remarkable how central to many of our lives a place so far away can be. 

This connection, which brings so much joy and richness to many of our lives, can also make the distress of that place especially painful for us (no matter what our political perspectives). And on top of feeling the pain, we – the Jewish people as a whole – are often held responsible for it. This is similar for Palestinians, and similarly irrational. It can be helpful to connect with Israelis and Palestinians who are doing the courageous work of bridging divides and envisioning a shared future of equality, peace, mutual recognition and cooperation. So this time of both celebration and pain is an especially fitting time for our community to host the leaders of Roots/Shorashim/Judur who will share their personal stories of transformation and their work bringing Israeli Jews and Palestinians together on the West Bank, where this is particularly rare and challenging.

Our event is co-sponsored and hosted at Easter Hill Methodist this Sunday from 5-7pm and also sponsored by The Good Table UCC, so we will have the chance to renew and make new connections. Please come and bring your friends!

Shabbat shalom to everyone in the meantime,

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

Spring is springing in the beautiful Bay Area, and we were blessed with some rain, so grass and plants are especially green and flowers are bright with color. And on Monday evening, we commemorated Yom HaShoah with a beautiful ceremony of memory, lament and reflection on the terrible events of the Holocaust. We shared memories and stories from family and other loved ones who were murdered and others who survived – not only about their deaths but also about their lives.  

This coexistence can be both beautiful and confusing. As a child, I used to wonder if there was sunshine and green grass in the concentration camps. When I eventually visited some of them, I of course confirmed that there was. The camps existed on the same planet where we live, and so yes, the sun came up there too. 

The Torah reading this week, Tazria-Metzora, focuses at length on the skin disease usually translated as leprosy. Rachel Scheinerman writes, “tzaraat is not really a disease in the medical sense, though it produces physical symptoms. Instead, it’s a kind of spiritual ailment with physical manifestations. Tzaraat is hard to understand in part because there is no precise modern parallel. But arguably the best one we have is the experience of loss and grief.”

As in the Torah’s description of how to address tzaraat [usually translated as leprosy], in which people are isolated from their community during the course of the disease, when a loved one dies, we may feel we are out of step with the rest of the world, or that beauty and other parts of life which feel positive seem out of step with our grief. All of that is okay, but it would also be helpful if our “regular” lives left more room for the understanding that grief of all kinds is regular too. 

I look forward to seeing many of you this Friday for Shabbat Together. As we celebrate beauty and all that we are grateful for, let’s allow ourselves and others to acknowledge the fullness of the range of our experiences, sometimes talking about the hard parts, or just knowing that we do not have to carry them alone. 

Shabbat shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

Huge thanks to everyone who helped to make our seder beautiful, delicious, and welcoming! It was wonderful to be with our mix of members and guests, including Jews and non-Jews who are part of our families and friend groups, as well as some of our elected representatives who joined us to celebrate and strengthen our relationships. 

As Jewish communities celebrated Pesach throughout the week, and spring flowers wowed us with their colors, the juxtaposition between these and the threat of catastrophically escalated violence against Iran by the US was stark. Even before that, the ongoing attacks on immigrants by federal authorities and numerous other breaches of law, human rights and basic decency by parts of our government have become simultaneously shocking and expected. It is hard to celebrate freedom in this context – I’m sure many of us felt it was almost wrong to do so, as if we were ignoring the context all around us.

But it is also vital that we do celebrate what freedom we have… by using it. The Haggadah instructs us to see ourselves personally as having been enslaved and then liberated, and our tradition teaches that every one of us was present at Sinai when we received the Torah, entering into a covenant with the Source of Life. What does that covenant call on us personally to do right now? Each of us has something to give that can lift us and others out of shock and into connection and action. 

One thing many of us can do together, in concert with hundreds of other members of the Union for Reform Judaism and our friends and allies is to actively work for a fair mid-term election. This will require many people to participate in helping people who are impacted by the current efforts to minimize voting among many constituencies. What might this look like? Let’s start thinking about it together. Please join me next Wednesday from 4-5pm for a zoom call with leaders of our movement as well as the Mayor of Minneapolis, inspiring musician Elana Arian and information about opportunities to participate in our movement’s Every Voice, Every Vote campaign. Click here to Register 

Shabbat shalom, 

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

As a child, I memorized the Four Questions by listening to a recording of another child singing them. I loved the rhythmic, repetitive melody, the sound of the Hebrew, and recognizing some of the words—matzah, chametz, lilah. But the closer I looked, the less it seemed to be a series of four questions, and the more it looked like one question with several parts, or maybe no question at all, but rather a description of the strange things that make the Seder different from a regular dinner party. Maybe you too have noticed this.

The purpose of the Four Questions, rather than a formula to be memorized, was – and is – to provoke real questions and thoughts that arise from the seder. They are part of the mitzvah of explaining the meaning of Passover to our children (found in Exodus 13:14). To fulfill this goal of provoking questions and fostering discussion of the vital themes of Passover, we can follow singing the traditional questions with asking new questions about freedom, oppression, courage, faith, justice, leadership, or any of the other timeless human themes that make the Exodus story so compelling. 

Framing our questions carefully can help avoid eliciting yes/no answers and instead spark real conversations. Here are a few examples:

• Moses had a speech impediment and was afraid to speak to Pharaoh. Why is this important to the story?
• The Torah teaches, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22: 20). How can we cause our own experiences of injustice to lead us toward compassion and courage rather than bitterness or fear?
• What symbolic food or object would you add to the Seder plate to provoke questions about an liberation issue that’s important to you?

Wishing everyone Chag Sameach and Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

Freedom implies expansiveness – the chance to spread our wings, both physically and metaphorically, or spiritually. So it can seem frustrating and confusing that preparing for Pesach, our Festival of Freedom, entails a cleaning practice that can feel more like a lengthy, even oppressive, chore. Over Jewish history, in many communities, the cleaning out of our homes to remove hametz [bread and other leavened specific grains] has turned into a full spring cleaning.

Sometimes, we have music playing, and I’m schlepping things in and out of the kitchen while feeling part of something hopeful, a combination of anticipating the renewed, clean space and looking forward to seders and the week of special foods we’ll have during the week. Other times, I find myself feeling resentful to be spending a sunny spring day carefully cleaning out cabinets and drawers, spending hours switching out dishware and kashering utensils. 

Rabbi Toba Spitzer teaches, “Passover is ultimately about freedom and new beginnings.  The exodus from Egypt is a birth story – the birth of the Israelite people, and of a new kind of society, covenanted in love and justice.  Passover is also a spring holiday, celebrating the first harvest and the new birth of the flocks.  So part of the practice of clearing out hametz is linked to this sense of beginning, of new possibilities – clearing out the old, to make room for the new.”

At the end of the process of cleaning and clearing, there is a playful, symbolic version of the removal of the hametz. Someone hides a few pieces of bread around the house, and others, often children, search for it in the dark, using just a candle and feather to search and remove the last of the hametz. So this year, I am wondering if I can keep this playful, symbolic version in mind as we do the actual cleaning. Can I imagine while wiping the crumbs out of drawers that I am doing something akin to searching in the dark by candlelight, the sense of playing hide and seek, of aiming to find something and capturing it, and of clearing out what is not needed to make space for celebration and creativity?  

Liberation includes both serious business and lighthearted play. May our preparations and our seders include this full range of thought, ritual, conversation and commitment to this core of our people’s story and culture. 

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller

The first word of the Book of Leviticus is one of a number of words whose letters stand out in a Torah scroll for being written differently than they usually appear. They are bigger or smaller than the letters next to them, or otherwise different. In the case of the word, vayikra, the aleph at the end of the word is very small compared to the rest of the word. 

Vayikra means “[GOD] called,” and the verse begins “God called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting…”  Many interpretations of the small aleph have been offered, but the prevailing teachings connect it with Moses’ humility. Moses’ combination of deep, honest humility with courageous leadership enables him to be in a relationship with God that even includes challenging and making demands of God. 

Humility can be a tricky quality to strive for – just the need to strive for it is based on the understanding that we may have learned a habit of seeing ourselves as better than others. In societies where people are ranked in so many ways, it is near impossible not to experience feeling both superior at times and also inferior to others at times. But these powerful feelings are still only feelings. They don’t make it true. Jewish tradition holds that we all have a spark of the holy, and we are all descended from the same first human, to teach that we share a basic equality of value. 

This basic equality can make us feel both small and great – similar to standing under the night sky.  With Rosh Chodesh Nissan being this Wednesday night and Thursday, the new moon will become fuller each night until Passover begins with the full moon on Wednesday night April 1st. I invite you to join me in going outside each night for these weeks, to see the moon (or at least the sky if the moon is not visible). May it bring us both light and the chance to reflect on our basic connection, beyond comparisons, with other people and all of life.