Author: Eve Posen

Hold My Hand – Parshat Vayera 5783

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Over the past two-plus years, as Covid turned our world upside down, we’ve all felt the loss of what was our normal. Not being about to be physically present for holidays was hard, masks were uncomfortable, but so important. We went through the peaks and valleys of fear to relative calm and back to fear again as variants and surges came and went.

One of the lasting effects of Covid is how we handle physical touch. We’re now hyper-aware of every physical interaction. Whether it’s avoiding a handshake when meeting someone new or the awkward hug while holding your breath, for someone like me who’s used to giving a big hug or a gentle arm squeeze when I’m comforting someone, the early phases of the pandemic were especially hard. It’s only now as we’re understanding more and living with our adjusted reality that I realize how much meaning holding hands can have in our lives.

From skin-to-skin contact for newborns, to adult health benefits like slowing the heartbeat, lowering blood pressure, and triggering the release of oxytocin, the positive effects of touch have been proven time and again. Studies using PET scans have even shown that just holding a person’s hand helps the brain’s response to stress.

Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant and Ishamel’s mother, teaches us this lesson as well in the Torah this week. In this week’s parshah, Vayera, Abraham and Sarah contemplate the son that will be born to them in their old age; Sodom and Gomorrah fall as Abraham bargains with God to save Lot’s life; and Isaac is born, causing a rift in Abraham’s house with Ishmael. Abraham moves forward in making a deal with King Avimelech, and we end with the Akeidah, the test of Abraham as God asks that he offer up his son, Isaac.

When Sarah can no longer handle having Hagar and Ishmael in their home, she sends them into the wilderness. Hagar is alone with her child, feeling vulnerable and a bit scared. In chapter 21, verse 18, God instructs Hagar, “Come, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand.” Though they’re isolated from their community, God reminds Hagar that they have each other in this powerful moment of human touch. 

The exact translation of the Hebrew is closer to “make your hand strong in his.” When we hold each other, when we lift each other, we are stronger. As we’ve all learned over these last years, a simple high five or a gentle arm touch brings strength and connection. The name of our Torah portion this week, Vayera, means “and he saw.” Perhaps this is a reminder that really seeing each other is more than a visual cue. The real value of human connection is to see when someone is in need. 

When Enough is Enough – Parshat Lech Lecha 5783

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At least once a week, I look around our house and wonder, “How do we have so much stuff?” It feels like as the kids get older and our lives get busier, we accumulate more and more stuff. Some of the stuff is reasonable: new toys, games, clothes. The problem with this is that we tend to fall behind on getting rid of the outdated, outgrown, unused items, causing clutter and stress for me. As I write this, I look out at a sea of old or half-finished art projects and toys that haven’t been played with for years.

It’s not that we’re hoarders (at least Duncan and I aren’t) but we do have packrat tendencies that make us yearn for more space. However, we can’t add on to our house every time we feel like we’re cramped. Instead, we have to make choices about what stays and what goes, and we have to figure out how to make the space livable for all four of us. 

This feeling certainly isn’t unique to our family. In fact, Avraham and Lot teach us about some of this in our Torah portion this week. This week we read Parshat Lech Lecha. In Parshat Lech Lecha, we are finally introduced to Avram and Sarai – later Avraham and Sarah – who become the great patriarch and matriarch of the rest of our narrative. We learn that Avraham follows God with full intent, without questioning, and that Sarah goes with him. God tells him to leave his home, leave the only house he’s ever known, and go to a place he knows nothing about. 

Following God’s voice and taking a leap of faith, Avraham goes on the journey with his kinsman, Lot. When they left for Egypt they had relatively few possessions, but as they made alliances and moved through Egypt they both amassed more “stuff” than they had originally intended. Their encampment together became crowded and unlivable. The clutter made the vast landscape feel small and cramped for the families, so they decided to part ways. 

As tensions rise between the two families, Avraham says, “Let there be no strife between us, you choose where you want to move.” Clearly, for Avraham and Lot, more space was the answer. They couldn’t have parted with all their assets, so they instead moved to different places and expanded the amount of room. Since that’s not a possibility for our family, I’ll have to accept the alternative for now and “expand” our house by getting rid of some of our “assets.” It may cause a little bit of strife, but in the end, shalom bayit (peace in the home) isn’t necessarily about making everyone happy. It’s about compromise and understanding everyone’s needs, which is precisely the lesson of Lech Lecha.

Promises We Make – Parshat Noach 5783

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As the parent of children who seem to have steel-trap memories, I have learned to be very careful about the kind of promises I make. They’ll remember that one time, six months ago when summer was a distant wish, that I promised we’d go tubing, and suddenly they’re asking me when that will happen or how come it didn’t happen and why I don’t keep my promises. Oy. 

On the one hand, I probably made that promise in a spur-of-the-moment attempt to try and move us forward from whatever tantrum or heartbreak we were in the midst of. On the other hand, I probably should’ve thought it through just a tiny bit more to make sure that promise was something we could actually fulfill.

This balancing act of expectations and being held accountable is as old as humankind, and it’s particularly noticeable in the Torah this week. This week we read Parshat Noach, the story of Noah. This second section of text in the Torah takes us through the story of the flood, building the ark, Noah saving his family and the animals, sending out a dove, and God’s promise to never do this again. We learn of the generations of Noah and how humanity moved on to create the next piece of the narrative, the Tower of Bavel. After the Tower of Bavel, we see that the nations are scattered, and then the Torah quickly moves us through the 10 generations between Noah and Abraham, where the rest of our history takes off.

As God walks Noah and his family out of the destructive flood, a rainbow serves as God’s promise that “water will never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”  Beyond this, the rainbow is meant to signify an ongoing commitment to the covenant for all time that we go through this world with God, not apart from. And yet, just a few verses later the whole of “flesh” builds a tower to the heavens that enrages God, but God has to hold true to this promise if they are to maintain any sense of trust going forward.  

The promise of “never again” is much more serious than mine of a water park adventure, and yet both put the weight of follow-through on our words and actions in the future.  Promises are made more challenging than necessary if we’re not cognizant of all the possible ramifications.

What Parshat Noach teaches us is that as difficult as they may be to keep sometimes, promises do more than guarantee an outcome for one party. The promises we make hold us accountable and remind us that words matter. 

God Blessed Them – Parshat Bereshit 5783

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For the past two years, I’ve taught a weekly Torah exploration class. While similar Parshat HaShavuah (weekly Torah study) classes will often focus on one or two central moments in the text, I chose for this series to be an overview, where we read the whole section and react and reflect on its entirety. One thing I have loved about this approach is it meant that I never knew what would come up from week to week, and every discussion encouraged me to question and view the text through multiple lenses. Truth be told, this has been my favorite hour each week. 

In particular, what has struck me is that each time we read the Torah anew, there are new questions, frustrations, and appreciations that present themselves. For example, in both years of the class the participants zeroed in on the beginning of the Torah as a model that was repeated throughout the rest of the text, yet also one that was no doubt told from a specific and biased perspective. What led us here? The beginning is a good place to start. 

This week we read Parshat Bereshit, the first portion of the Torah. We are wowed by the story of creation, including the time and care God put into creating each day and making it exactly as God wanted. We learn about the first people and their experience in the Garden of Eden, especially how they learned to build, grow, and be together. The Torah continues with the story of Cain and Abel and the first sibling rivalry gone terribly awry, and we get a taste of some very real consequences caused by human actions. Thus begins the idea of God as the parent, creating life and making sure everything has its own place.

In chapter 1, verses 27-28, the narrative provides details that feel both informative and at the same time part of a very specific agenda. “So God created Mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

Hebrew, like many languages, is a gendered language that has long struggled with the non-binary, which makes it all the more interesting and alarming that creation was clearly binary and non-binary. Male and female are mentioned, but so is a version of they/them. We typically interpret “them” in the Torah as a plural binary pronoun, but what if God was addressing each human individual as they/them? What if Hebrew was non-gendered? What if the Torah had purposefully adopted this notion of non-binary and run with it? What if our tradition was not subsequently based on women being subservient or “help-meet” to men, but instead built on this duplicity of human nature to be both hunter and caregiver, explorer and rule follower? 

“What if” questions are a fascinating, but mostly fruitless endeavor to reimagine the past in a way that changes the shape of our present. But I can’t help being intrigued by a “what if” that asks us to imagine a world without binary, in any sense of the term. After all, we are created in God’s (nonbinary) image, and we should all be celebrated as the human beings we were intended and blessed by God and the angels to be. 

The Good Old Days – Yom Kippur 5783

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This is the sermon I delivered on Yom Kippur, October 5, 2022. You can listen using the player below or read the text.

January 27, 1973. The signing of the Paris Peace Accords officially ends U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The fighting that had lasted almost 20 years by that point didn’t end, it carried on for a few more years as United States troops withdrew.

Skip ahead to that fall. October, 1973. Forty-nine years ago right now, in fact. Egyptian and Syrian forces attack Israeli forces on Yom Kippur. The Yom Kippur War.

On October 10, Spiro Agnew resigns as Vice President of the United States and pleads no contest to tax evasion.

November 17, 1973. That’s when President Nixon tells 400 Associated Press managing editors “I am not a crook.” Less than a year later, he will also resign.

The world was a mess in 1973, or so it seemed. It makes sense that by January of 1974, people yearned for a simpler time. Because in January, 1974, we got a little reminder of how great things used to be. They were the Cunninghams, and they lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1950s. Howard owned a hardware store, Marion was a stay-at-home mom – a phrase that hadn’t been invented yet – and their kids went to school and hung out with their friends. One of those friends became the most famous Jew to ever wear a leather jacket. And suddenly America could relive those happy days, and they were so happy that they lasted 11 seasons.

It’s funny to think that only 20 years separated the filming of Happy Days and the time it took place. It would be like having a TV show now that played on the nostalgia of the 2000s. Does anybody yearn for the 2000s?

But truly, the idea of going back to supposedly better times comes up all the time, in every era. Movies and TV shows romanticize it. Political parties politicize it. So why do we insist that things were better before?

This was heightened even more during peak Covid. How many times did you hear “when things are back to normal” or the phrase “pre-Covid”? You’ve probably heard it at least once just today. But I want to caution us that it can be dangerous to think in terms of going back. In real life, ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance, and to go back in time implies going back and losing all of the knowledge we’ve gained since then.

Famously, there was a music teacher who suggested to her students that every time they ran through a particular piece, it should automatically sound slightly better than the time before, because the musicians were three minutes older and wiser than they were during the last run-through. We are now two and a half years older and wiser. When we play together, how will our music sound?

This is the season of teshuvah, of return, but instead of thinking about going back in search of what we’ve lost, I’d like us to imagine going forward with what we’ve gained. I invite you to take a breath, perhaps even close your eyes. Find yourself a center. It has been two long years since we’ve been able to be together, in this space for the High Holidays. Over the last two plus years, so much of our world has changed; some for the worse, but perhaps some for the better. Over these two years, we’ve longed for moments like “before.” Those pre-pandemic times when decisions to go to the grocery store or visit family members were not ones for which most of us had to weigh our health risks.

We missed seeing full, smiling faces, but we learned to better read each other’s eyes. If you closed your eyes, feel free to open them.

Our kehillah, like so many of you, has had to make some big decisions about how we were to return to the building and to in-person programs and services. We joke that we’ve pivoted so much we don’t remember which spot we started in. As a tap dancer in my younger days, they would teach us to pick a spot on the wall when we were doing a turn so that we could focus on it and not get dizzy. Ever since 2020, it has felt like there’s no spot to focus on, which means we’ve had a dizzying two years.

As we enter a new year, personally I find myself trying to balance the act of introspection that’s involved in looking back so that we can make teshuvah and improve ourselves in the coming year, along with trying not to get stuck in the past. I can’t change the past me, but I can change this me and make plans for the future.

This is what our Jewish calendar asks us to do too. Each year we read the Torah again from the beginning, the same story, a look back at our past, and our role as the carriers of this story, is to find meaning in it for our today and tomorrow. It’s misleading though, isn’t it? Because every time we put the Torah back in the ark, we sing “Etz chayim hi” (it is a tree of life) which ends with “chadesh yameinu kekedem.” Return us to the ways that were before, the days prior.

See? We can’t escape the “good old days.” It’s right there in our liturgy. Why? Where does it come from? This verse is a lamentation, literally, from Eicha, the Book of Lamentations. And the “good old days” are the time of the Temple. But when we sing this on Shabbat while we put the Torah away, are we really asking for animal sacrifice again? Just to be clear, I’m not. And I’m fairly certain the rabbis of old weren’t yearning to return to those days either. Well, some might have been, but there’s a reason it’s said and not acted on. It’s reflexive. Renew us. Return us to you, God. Return us to each other and to ourselves.

As much as Happy Days or The Wonder Years or Mad Men or any other period piece would have us believe, there’s no one time we all yearn for. What we yearn for is clarity of purpose, and sometimes in the foggy present, clarity of purpose is only possible when you look back and realize how you’ve been shaped by the time you’ve been given.

My teshuvah is not about returning to some other time or some other me. It’s about returning to that spot on the wall. My focus. The things that fulfill me, that make me . . . me. And I hope the same for you. Chadesh yameinu kekedem. Renew our days, not of old, but of now, for another year, so that we may continue to find the truest versions of ourselves. G’mar chatimah tovah.