This is the d’var Torah I delivered at Congregation Neveh Shalom on Friday, May 1.
There’s something disorienting about coming home and realizing you’re not quite the same person who left. The streets are familiar, the rhythms unchanged, and yet, something in you has shifted. Last week, I welcomed Shabbat in the Douro Valley, the oldest demarcated wine region in the world, after having visited the Crypto Jews of Belmonte. I returned from Portugal carrying images I can’t shake: magnificent cathedrals preserved in full glory in contrast to a quiet doorway in Évora with nothing but the faint imprint of a mezuzah. No plaque. No grand recognition. Just a trace. A whisper: Jews were here.
Parshat Emor moves between sacred rhythms and sacred responsibility. We read about the laws governing the kohanim, the priestly class tasked with maintaining holiness in the public sphere. We are given the calendar of our festivals, Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, marking sacred time in a world that often forgets it. And threaded throughout is a powerful charge: v’lo techalelu et shem kodshi, v’nikdashti b’toch Bnei Yisrael. “Do not profane My holy name, and I will be sanctified among the people of Israel.”
We often understand this as a call to act in ways that reflect well on Judaism, to live ethically, visibly, proudly. But after what I’ve seen, I hear something deeper. Because sanctifying God’s name is not only about what we do when it’s easy or celebrated. It’s about what we carry when it’s hidden, when it’s threatened, or when it could disappear.
In Belmonte, Jews lived as crypto-Jews for over 500 years. They held onto fragments of ritual and identity, often at great risk. The only Hebrew word that endured in their prayers was “Adonai.” Everything else adapted, softened into Portuguese, reshaped for survival. And still, they held on. Before entering the church for their “baptism” they’d recite: “My body enters, but my soul remains sacred for Adonai.” A vow they could recognize and annul if needed on Yom Kippur in their own way. Rabbi Joshua Stampfer described that community as proof that Am Yisrael chai, not as a slogan, but as a fragile, defiant truth.
And now I stand back here in Portland, where we are blessed with freedom, visibility, and community—and I feel both gratitude and responsibility pressing in. Because the truth is, Jewish history does not always leave behind monuments. Sometimes all that remains is an imprint on a doorway. A memory carried quietly across generations.
V’nikdashti b’toch Bnei Yisrael. Holiness doesn’t depend on grandeur. It depends on continuity. So what does that ask of us, here, now?
It asks us not to take for granted what others risked everything to preserve. It’s coming together to pray on Shabbat, or to learn at Aliyah or with our scholar in residence next weekend, or to sit and eat in the Neveh sukkah this fall. Recognize that every time we gather, every time we teach our children, every time we mark time as Jews, we are doing something profoundly consequential.
It asks us to be visible—not recklessly, but intentionally. To place mezuzot on our doorposts not just as symbols, but as statements: we are here, and we’re not going anywhere.
And it asks us to live in a way that honors both the fragility and the strength of our story. To carry forward not just survival, but meaning. Not just identity, but purpose.
As we enter Shabbat together again, the charge is both simple and weighty: don’t let it fade. Be the imprint that endures. Live so that generations from now, whether through grand institutions or the faintest trace, someone will be able to say not only that Jews were here, but that we lived, we gathered, we believed—and we carried it forward.
Rabbi Eve Posen 