From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Last month I got an email that reassured me that all will be well with the world. That joy and blessing are very much alive.The email attached a photo of two women who are long-time members of our congregation. The younger one is only 103. The older one is 104. They have been friends since they were 12. Do the math, and that is one long, rich friendship. They were having lunch with their daughters. The picture is of the four of them all smiling at their lunch. Both women read the paper every day. Both women exercise every day. Both women talk to their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and friends every day. Both women are totally up on what is happening in the world. Their beautiful lives, 103 and 104 years old, and still living, feels biblical. And it is. Their lives evoke Moses who, at the end of his life at the age of 120, is described as loh khahatah eino v’loh nas lechoh, Moses’s vision was undimmed and his vigor unabated. He lives, richly, until his last breath.I had always thought that only Moses, and rare people like our 103- and 104-year old friends, get this treatment. Until I read Peter Attia’s book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, which makes the case that all of us can be Moses in the sense that all of us have more control than we might think about living richly all the years of our lives.We all know the word lifespan. Lifespan is the number of years we get to live. But Attia taught me a new word: healthspan. Healthspan is the quality of our health—physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, relational—throughout the years of our life. Attia’s main point is that what we do now can impact how we live later. What we do in our earlier years can shape not just our lifespan but our healthspan, not just the quantity of our years, but the quality of our years. The habits we live by in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s can dramatically affect the vitality of our 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. Our current practices shape our future years. And this is a decidedly Jewish issue.

An older gentlemen needed surgery for a rare medical challenge. Turns out that the best surgeon in town was his own son. As the father was about to go under, he asked to speak to his son. Yes, Dad, what is it? Son, do not be nervous. Do your best. I trust you. Just remember one thing. If it does not go well, if something happens to me on the operating table, your mother will live with you and your wife for the rest of her life.How do we navigate hard times? We all know that we are living in hard times. Is there some way to turn hard times into beautiful outcomes—in fact beautiful outcomes that only happen as a result of how we navigated those hard times?

Recently, as part of a routine medical procedure, I needed to get hooked up to an IV. Unfortunately, the nurse who did it, while very nice, had a hard time. She poked a needle into my arm and said, oh, so sorry, that didn’t work. She poked a needle into my arm a second time and said, oh, so sorry, that didn’t work either. Let me ask one of the other nurses. Another nurse came and the third time was a charm. The IV took.When the procedure was over, and I got home, I was fine, but I noticed that my arm had all these cuts and bruises. I wanted sympathy. So I went to my wife in search of that sympathy. I pointed to my right arm. I pointed to the wounds, which I called, for greater effect, lacerations, contusions, and hematomas. Shira look at these lacerations from the bungled IV attempt! Look at these contusions! I think this is a hematoma!! From the bungled IV!!I’m not sure what I was expecting. But I wasn’t expecting what I got. What I got was, Shira took one look at my arm and said: Buck up buttercup. Excuse me, I said. What did you just say? She said: Buck up buttercup.In our 42 years together, Shira had never put those three words together, ever. I had never heard them before. I wasn’t exactly sure what Buck up buttercup meant, but it did not sound like the kind of sympathy I was looking for. It sounded like she was saying: toughen up. Stop complaining. The bad news was that I did not get the sympathy I was looking for. The good news is I got something even better: a sermon topic. Is it a Jewish virtue not to complain, or is it a Jewish virtue to complain? There is a lot of Torah on complaints and complaining, and it is nuanced.

The main religious value concept for our High Holiday season is teshuvah, repentance.Given the centrality of teshuvah in Judaism, and in the Jewish calendar now, the Torah’s treatment of teshuvah is curious indeed. It appears very late in the game. There is zero mention of teshuvah in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, or Numbers. Teshuvah does not appear until Deuteronomy chapter 30. Why so late?And when teshuvah finally appears, it is only after total disaster has already struck. The Israelites will have angered God so much that God will destroy the land and exile the Israelites.            The Lord uprooted them from their soil in anger, fury, and great wrath, and cast them            into another land, as is still the case.  (Deut. 29:27)Is teshuvah meant to be our code red response to our code red disaster?Finally, the last verse right before teshuvah is mentioned is one of the classic stumpers of the Torah.            Concealed acts concern the Lord our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and            our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching. (Deut. 29:28)What does this verse mean, and why is it inserted here, in between the expulsion of the Israelites caused by the wrath of God, and the gift of teshuvah which will allow the Israelites to return to God and to their land?What does the Torah’s treatment of teshuvah mean to how we practice it now?One possibility is that the Israelites failed deeply and have teshuvah to redeem them. So too, we fail deeply, and we have teshuvah to redeem us. The Talmud teaches that somebody who sins, who fails, who grapples, who goes through a transformation and comes back to God is at a higher level than somebody who never sinned.Over the next several weeks, we will double click on this teaching. Does our tradition really privilege transformation (I strayed, I sinned, I have come back) over a pure heart (I am disciplined, I am committed to being ethical, I did not stray)?Over the next several weeks we will examine the case for the primacy of transformation versus the case for the primacy of a pure heart.

The two lands we love, America and Israel, both have a problem. The problem is real, recurrent, and deadly. The problem showed up in both lands this week. The problem is violence and lack of regard for the sanctity of human life, lack of regard for the Bible’s most important teaching: that all human beings are created in God’s image and therefore deserve to live and to be treated with respect and dignity.On Monday morning, at a busy bus stop in Jerusalem, two shooters fired upon ordinary people living an ordinary day, killing six innocent people, the victims of terrorism. The shots were fired in Jerusalem. But the effects were felt in Newton. The effects were felt in our preschool, right here.One of the victims was Rabbi Mordechai Steintzag. His daughter Tanya teaches at our preschool. On Monday Tanya flew to Israel to attend her father’s funeral. Like Rabbi Steintzag, every one of the victims was innocent; was loved; did good in the world; did not deserve to be murdered; loved their life and their families; and leaves behind families and communities that will never be the same. Each life taken is an infinite tragedy.And then, on Wednesday, at Utah Valley University, political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He leaves behind a wife, two young children, and family and friends who are bereft that a31-year-old is no more, the victim of political violence. Charlie Kirk’s murder is an infinite tragedy. Tonight is Selikhot, the beginning of our High Holiday season. How do we understand this violence, and what are we to do about it? Of course we decry it. We denounce it. We mourn it. We lament it. But is there anything we can do about it?

In last week’s class we encountered the Greek myth of Icarus who, ignoring his father’s advice, flew too high and too close to the sun so that his wings made of wax and feathers melted, he fell to the sea, and died. In class one of our learners offered a poignant coda. While the rest of the world did not see and did not care about Icarus dying, his father Daedalus cared very much. His father gathers his fallen son and buries him. Daedalus loves his son so much. Cares about him so much. And controls so little. If the son makes decisions that undermine his own life--indeed that end his own life--there is nothing that Daedalus can do but mourn. The Hebrew Bible also contains a powerful story of a father whose heart is broken by the self-destructive decisions of his son: David and Absalom. Absalom rebels and leads an army against his father, King David. When David hears that Absalom has died—his long hair caught up in the branches of a tree, which allowed his enemies to slay him—David famously laments: “My son Absalom! O my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you! O Absalom, my son, my son!” Infinite love. Infinite care. No control. Infinite pain. So many of us experience our own version of the pain of Daedalus and David. Our loved ones make decisions that we cannot control that undermine their lives and cause us pain. As we enter the High Holiday season tomorrow night with Selikhot, part of the pain we carry into the High Holidays are the times that our loved ones are their own worst enemies, which we can do absolutely nothing about. Is there a prayer that helps? Tomorrow we will look at the most responsive prayer that I know of on this question, The Serenity Prayer:  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. Would that prayer have helped Daedalus as he buried Icarus? Would that prayer have helped King David as he mourned his son Absalom? Does that prayer help us? When our loved ones undermine their own lives, is serenity even possible?

For many of us, this week has been the week of the big pivot. We pivoted from August to September; from summer to fall; from vacation to obligation; from light and breezy summer rhythm to an alarm clock that wakes us up to face the reality of a schedule. Back to school. Back to shul. Back to the High Holidays coming up with their invitation to take stock of our lives. All of which is very different from going to the beach or going to Tanglewood or climbing a mountain in New Hampshire or enjoying the gorgeous green of Vermont or the waters of Cape Cod, Nantucket, Nantasket, or Martha’s Vineyard.In short, how do we think about a return to the daily grind?

Icarus has so much to say to us now, a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah.According to Greek mythology, Icarus flew too close to the sun with wings made of feather and wax. The sun’s heat melted the wax, and Icarus fell into the sea and drowned.In 1560, the Netherlandish master Peter Bruegel the Elder painted a masterpiece entitled Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. This painting is now displayed in a museum in Brussels. The title is so evocative. To Icarus, no story was more important than Icarus. To Icarus, his flying so high, falling so low, and meeting an untimely end in a cold sea in a cold world was all-important. It was THE story. But there is a broader landscape where the fall of Icarus was not only not the story. It was not noticed at all. There are three peasants each doing their thing, plowing, herding and fishing. They are totally absorbed in their own world. They neither see nor care about Icarus.The pathos of the painting—the desperate pain of one, utterly unseen by others—has inspired poetry by William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden. The last stanza of Williams’s poem expresses this dissonance so clearly:a splash quite unnoticedthis was Icarus drowningThe painting, and the poetry of Williams and Auden, convey the world as it is: a splash quite unnoticed. Judaism has a lot to say here. Hillel’s famous teaching in Pirkei Avot is a response. Hillel would not be comfortable with the three peasants not seeing and not caring. Yes, they have their own lives to attend to. That is legitimate. But Icarus drowned. How could they not notice? In attempting to move the dial on human indifference, Hillel teaches: If I am not for me, who will be?If I am for myself alone, what am I?And if not now, when?(Pirkei Avot 1:14) This dialectic of Hillel animates our High Holiday liturgy. Take a look at Bruegel’s masterpiece. Who are the three peasants today? Who is Icarus today? Where are we in the paining? Who and what are we not seeing? What are we focused on? What is our version of plowing, herding and fishing? What does Hillel say to us?

August 30, 2025

Inheritance – A Personal Journey of Discovery and Choice. We have no control over what we are bequeathed. Or do we?Rabbi Jamie Kotler teaches Torah and Jewish texts at synagogue communities in the Boston area and beyond. She has served as chaplain at Fireman House (Hebrew Senior Life), and has served on the Boards of The Rashi School, and Mayyim Hayyim, and on the building committee for Newbridge on the Charles at Hebrew Senior Life.Rabbi Kotler grew up in Brazil and Mexico, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, with little religious practice or knowledge. She began studying Torah as a young mother of three. Her desire to steep herself in the texts and traditions she had missed as a child led her to enter rabbinical school at the age of 54 and was ordained by the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in June 2016. Before entering the rabbinate, she was a computer programmer (EDS, TX and Hewlett-Packard, CA), a financial analyst (Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, CA), and a consultant to small businesses.Rabbi Kotler holds a BA in Biology from Brown University and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She is married to Harold Kotler, and together they have five grown children and four grandchildren.

Rabbi Rachel Silverman (she/her) first joined the Camp Ramah New England staff as a Rosh Edah (unit head) at the overnight camp from 2005-2010. Many years later, she’s thrilled to be back as the Director of Ramah Boston, our newest day camp. Rabbi Silverman previously served as a congregational rabbi in both Brookline and Sharon, MA, after receiving her ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2010. When she is not at camp, she is a ceramic artist and enjoys biking, cooking, and gardening. She lives in Sharon, MA, with her husband Josh, their three kids (Anna, Danny, and Benjamin), dog (Abby).

August 8, 2025Just about every night, before bed, we read one of Eder’s favorite books, usually a few times in a row. Eder loves many books, but for the past few weeks, his absolute favorite has been Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. He loves it so much that he often doesn’t have the patience to wait for us to read it to him—he will take it out and read it to himself. He recites the story with joy while out walking or riding in the car, and often, after he announces the doctor’s pronouncement will emphasize the story with “that’s what happened.”Recently, Eder has started improvising within the story. It started on a visit with his grandparents. We’ve been spending a lot of time with him working on please and not just screaming when he wants something. In the middle of his dramatic recitation of No More Monkeys, he paused and said, "the doctor should have said please." For that week, every time he told the story, it was about how the doctor could have gotten what he wanted if he just said please. There was a week when every rendition of the story involved monkeys injuring different body parts and getting booboos that needed a kiss. And then, my favorite question, “where's the Dada monkey?"Listening to Eder’s questions and comments on the story has made me realize that despite growing up with this cute rhyming story, I had never really thought about it. I had always written it off as a story to teach kids to avoid jumping on the bed. But now, thanks to Eder, I’m thinking about so many different pieces of the story in a new way. Why do we, in a story for toddlers, model the kind of speech that we wouldn’t appreciate in real life? Why do we tell stories that feature absent fathers and mothers who are out of control? Why tell a story where every single monkey falls off the bed? Why not tell a story where the monkeys learn and find ways to play that don’t involve getting hurt?Now, you may think I'm losing it. Oh no, pregnancy brain and sleep deprivation and suddenly the rabbi is hallucinating Torah in toddler literature. But I think this is adynamic that we all fall prey to at one time or another. All of us have stories we’ve inherited that we’ve never interrogated or stories that we’ve written for ourselves that no longer serve us. It’s very easy for these stories to become ingrained in our psyches to the extent that they dictate how we engage with the world around us. It’s very easy for us to just repeat without ever wondering why.

On January 15, 1997, Princess Diana walked through a minefield in Angola.The background for her walk was the civil war in Angola that raged for 27 years, from 1975 through 2002, which meant that she was walking through a minefield while the war was still going on. When Angola secured its independence from Portugal, a civil war broke out between a Communist faction supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and an anti-Communist faction supported by the United States. The war was not only long but deadly, resulting in 500,000 to 800,000 deaths of civilians and soldiers; and the displacement of 4 million refugees.The war also left Angola infected with landmines which meant that on any given day, with a blue sky overhead, a person in the wrong place at the wrong time could step on a mine and be maimed or killed. In fact, although the war ended in 2002, since 2008, 60,000 innocent people have been killed or maimed by land mines.So in 1997, Princess Diana walked through a minefield in Angola for two purposes: one, to raise awareness and urgency to clear the mines in Angola; and two, to create an international treaty that land mines no longer be used in war. Her goal was to have a “mine-free world.”Princess Diana’s walk was highly successful. In Angola over 120,000 landmines have been cleared since her walk. Land that used to be uninhabitable because of mines is now used for homes, schools and businesses. And, within a year of her walk, 164 nations signed the Ottawa Treaty banning land mines, leading to a halt in their production and to the destruction of stockpiles. Real progress.You might think that with such dramatic success, the only reason for her children to ever go back to Angola would be to celebrate the mine-free world their mother had dreamed of. Sadly that is not the case. Just two weeks ago, on July 16 to be exact, twenty-eight years after his mother first walked through a minefield, Princess Diana’s son Prince Harry was back in Angola walking through minefields. Why now?

I’m sure you’re familiar with the saying: “curiosity killed the cat.” We say it when curiosity leads us down an unproductive or even dangerous path. However, in a fascinating interview with Professor Tal ben Shahar, an expert in the field of positive psychology, he offers this wonderful line: “curiosity might have killed the cat, but it keeps us alive.” Curiosity, says this prominent researcher, is one of the great secrets of happiness. It ensures that even when we’re alone, we’re not bored. But also, says ben Shahar, being curious about others brings new relationships, can help mend broken ones and deepens connections.About Rabbi Sonia SaltzmanRabbi Sonia Saltzman is currently serving as Rabbinic Advisor for Graduate Students at Boston University Hillel. She has taught at various synagogue communities, including Temple Emanuel (Newton), Kerem Shalom (Concord) and Newbridge on the Charles (Dedham). Rabbi Saltzman was Senior Rabbi at Temple Ohabei Shalom, Brookline from 2011-2018 and from 2008-2011 she served as the rabbi of Sha’arei Shalom, Ashland.Rabbi Saltzman was ordained in 2008 as part of the first graduating class of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College. During Rabbinical School, she held student pulpits at Temple Emanuel in Newton and at Temple Aliyah in Needham, completed chaplaincy training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and served as faculty for the Bronfman Youth Fellowship Program in Israel. Prior to entering the rabbinate, Rabbi Saltzman worked in the field of micro-finance at ACCION International as head of the Financial Services Department, extending credit to small businesses in the developing world. She also worked in Bank of Boston’s Project Finance Department and taught in its Loan Officer Development Program. Rabbi Saltzman is a graduate of Tufts University (BA in Political Science) and holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs (Columbia University) and a Masters Degree in Bible and Jewish Thought (Brandeis University).She is married to Dr. Ned Saltzman, a urologist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital and has two grown sons, Benjamin and Gabriel.

July 19, 2025The most amazing article appeared in the New York Times this week titled “The Tooth Fairy is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle.” No seriously, I am not making this up. Apparently twenty years ago, when Purva Merchant was applying for dental school, her boyfriend set up an email account for her using her nickname “the tooth fairy.” Ever since, she has received somewhere between three to five emails per day from desperate parents and adorable, sometimes disbelieving children. And she has personally responded to each and every message.The article is full of amazing email exchanges. There is the letter from the mother who forgot to exchange a tooth two nights in a row, who writes to the tooth fairy to let her know that there has been a misunderstanding and to ask if she could stop by while her son was at school. There is the letter from the child who received $100 for her first tooth, but then a much lower sum for each subsequent tooth and is very upset at the injustice of it—shouldn’t teeth all be worth the same amount of money?! And then, just some adorable little notes:“My tooth got pullen out at the dentist today and I am excited for you to cone to my house and give me a surprise for being a brave girl.I am sleeping in my mums bed tonight and my tooth is silver so you can zee it and it’s under the black pillow and it’s in a dog box wrapped in a tissue”and“I’m so sorry I swallowed my tooth. And I love you. XXX OOO”Reading these letters stole my heart. I love the whimsy of every exchange. The parents who, long before the advent of AI, were emailing random tooth fairy addresses in the hopes that somewhere, somehow, someone would save them and preserve the magic of the tooth fairy for their child. I love the image of parents sitting down to help their children write to “the tooth fairy” only to receive a real response in exchange. Can you imagine the squeals of joy?! The fact that these letters are all written by a pediatric dentist makes it even better.

When she was six years old, Erin Paisan fell in love not only with Camp Mystic in the Hill Country of Texas. She specifically fell in love with the Guadalupe River, which was the life force, the energy, the joy, of Camp Mystic. Decades later she still remembers with perfect clarity the very moment when she fell in love with the river. As she told the story to the New York Times Daily host Michael Barbaro, she and her mother were picking up her brother from a nearby camp. Six-year-old Erin saw the girls of Camp Mystic playing, splashing, smiling, in the Guadalupe River. She turned to her mother and said: “I want to go to that camp.”It was far from inevitable that she would be able to go. Camp Mystic is a century-old camp. Generations of the same family would go, m’dor l’dor, from mother to daughter to granddaughter. Erin’s family was not a generational family. And they were not, in her own words, an elite family. Her parents were divorced. Her father was not in the picture. And yet somehow, she was accepted at Camp Mystic, which she joyfully attended from ages 10 to 16. She loved Camp Mystic so deeply as a child that every year she packed her trunk in December. She loves Camp Mystic so deeply as an adult that she has instructed her family, when she passes, to have her remains spread at the camp.She loved that all the girls got a fresh start. Nobody knew or cared how rich they were, how big their house was, what kind of reputation they had at school. In the regular year, Erin Paisan was the child of divorce without a dad who was seen as a geek, in her words. But not at Camp Mystic.She shared that when her husband can’t sleep, what centers him is thinking about golfing 18 holes at his favorite golf course. When Erin can’t sleep, what centers her is thinking about the river at Camp Mystic.But wait a minute. Didn’t that river at Camp Mystic flood last weekend, claiming a heartbreaking number of innocent lives and leaving a heartbreaking number of devastated families? How could Erin Paisan find calm by thinking about the river at Camp Mystic?But the problem is deeper than that. While the flooding of the river last weekend was by far the worst and most catastrophic, it has not been the only flooding. There was also flooding in 1978, when Erin herself was a camper. She remembers being moved to higher ground and going two days without food because the waters were so turbulent that counselors could not safely bring the hungry campers the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then there was a flooding of the Guadalupe River again in 1987 which had deadly consequences.With all that loss, with all that tragedy, how could Erin Paisan still love the river? This question gets at a deeper question. What does it mean to love deeply? What does it mean to love deeply a person? A place? Our nation? Our homeland?

July 5, 2025

Some weeks, when we open the Torah, it’s not clear how that particular parsha speaks to our lives. But this week, the Torah feels so real. It feels like the Torah could easily be written for exactly this moment. So today, I want to do something radical: I want to take a deep dive with you into our parsha. I want to learn with you the story of Korach and what our rabbis teach. And I want to be very granular about the lessons we can learn from that story.

AJ Helman (they/them/theirs) is an educator and artist with a focus on Jewish and LGBTQ+ theater and education. After graduating from Emerson College with a BFA in Theater Education and Performance, AJ remained in Boston, working in the local theater and film industries as both an artist and a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion liaison. As part of their activism and educator work, they facilitated workshops on gender diversity in theater and spearheaded better inclusion practices for transgender employees in the film industry thanks to the support of Ryan Reynolds’ and Blake Lively’s Group Effort Initiative. AJ proudly marched with Keshet at San Francisco Pride directly following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, effectively making LGBTQ+ marriage in the United States legal. In addition to their activism and artistry, AJ is thrilled to be a part of the Temple Emanuel staff as the Ritual Coordinator.

How did you sleep on Thursday night? When I first learned that Israel’s war with Iran had begun in earnest, I, like so many of you, did not sleep much at all. Because of the 7-hour time difference between Boston and Israel, in the early hours of Friday morning I was able to reach Micah Goodman, our beloved teacher and friend who lives in Kfar Adumim, twenty minutes outside of Jerusalem. What Micah had to say was both inspiring and concerning at the same time.First the inspiring part. Micah shared that Israel’s attack on June 13 exceeded its wildest dreams. As Micah put it, the start of the war was all of Israel’s best military victories—the Six Day War, Entebbe, the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Osirak in 1981, the exploding pagers that crippled Hezbollah—all at once. Using intelligence, covert operations, Mossad agents on the ground in Iran and drone technology, Israel was able to eliminate Iran’s leading generals and nuclear scientists in their homes, in their beds, in targeted attacks, in which Israel did not also kill their families. Why were Iran’s leading generals and nuclear scientists at home, in the first place? Why weren’t they in a bunker? Micah answers his own question by observing that we cannot prepare for something that has never before happened in history. What Israel accomplished on June 13 had never before been accomplished in the history of war, the kind of chutzpah, planning, skill and savvy that allowed these targeted assassinations. Add to that Israeli fighter jets that evaded Iranian air defenses, allowing Israel to attack more than 100 sites. Micah observed that Israel’s morale is very high.But there is a but. Micah and his wife and their teen-age daughters, like so many Israeli families, spent their night in a bunker. Shul throughout Israel has been cancelled. Micah’s public lectures for next week have been cancelled. All public events have been cancelled. Since the airport is closed, Israelis are worrying about food. Where will their food come from? Israel imports much of its food supply. He went to the grocery store on Friday morning, worried about whether his family will have enough food, and the store was jam-packed with nervous grocery shoppers, and the shelves were largely empty.So there is edge in Israel. Iran remains formidable. The Houthis remain formidable. There still is Hamas. There still is Hezbollah. While the beginning of the war could not have gone any better, where it will go next, nobody knows. There is what Micah calls “radical uncertainty” about what this war will mean for Israel’s future and for the region.What do we do with this complex picture? How do we understand and respond to it? What does it mean to us? What does it ask from us?