Rabbi Zeitlin

Entering the “Three Weeks” between the fasts of the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, a time of pain and sadness culminating in the yearly re-living of the Destruction of our Holy Temple, it might be an appropriate time to consider pain.

As I’ve reached a certain age, chronic pains seem more eager to join me than do new students, fans of my music or unexpected checks in the mail combined!  Seriously, though, these pains which many of us find increasing as we age are, like every thing else in our lives, sent by The Creator as just the material we need at any given moment to learn and to grow.  It might still seem a rotten deal, but we can at least try to cut our losses by paying attention to the lessons they provide.

Without getting into medical details at all, I’ve recently developed an intermittent, sudden shooting pain in one of my feet.  It seems to arrive on its own–I’ve not been able to discern a pattern of movements that either cause or delay it.  It just hits.  If this happens while I’m walking, my very first reflexive intuition, of course, is to stop and wait for it to pass.  However, I quickly learned that this is the very worst thing I can do.  If I stand there, the pain lingers longer.  However, if I just go back to walking, it almost always quiets down much more quickly.  It’s pretty clear to me, someone who is easily distracted by much less immediate and less intense things all the time, that I’m offered the lesson in my own body to not let obstacles, even painful ones, stop me.

Thinking on that, I thought I’d experiment with the pain when it strikes me while I’m just sitting still.  If I continue doing whatever I was doing, even something productive, the pain seems to float on for quite a while before it subsides.  However, if I get up and take a few steps, become even just a little more physically active, it disappears.  Perhaps this is reminding me of the danger of complacence.  Even when I am working, I surely can be doing more.

I certainly don’t have sayings of Chazal, our holy sages, let alone pasukim, verses, from the Torah to support these insights.  And I might be completely off-base–one of the truisms of our tradition is that there will always be infinitely more we don’t know than we ever can, and that that’s alright.  But when I start off assuming Hashgacha Pratit, the individual Divine oversight of each of our lives, then these pains, just like everything else that comes into my life, are intentional and, hard as it might be to accept with experiences like pain, beneficent.  It’s my challenge to make positive use of them.

There’s a story about Rabbi Akiva walking with some colleagues on the relatively recent ruins of the Holy Temple.  As they were lamenting the damage and the loss, a fox ran across and Rabbi Akiva laughed.  Of course, this seemed an outrageous, inexplicable response until he explained that we have a tradition that just as low as the Temple and the People of Israel have fallen from their previous glory, that high will they rise beyond that previous glory.

As best expressed, perhaps, by the Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzatto, 18th Century Talmudic prodigy, Master Kabbalist and more), humanity is created to be the beneficiary of God’s Divine Love and Goodness.  The greatest reward we can experience is to be directly attached, as closely as we’re able, to God Himself.  We achieve that through our approach to Him, as Jews utilizing the system of Torah and Mitzvot that are bestowed to us, by imitating Him as much as we’re able (closeness in the spiritual worlds is defined in similarity rather than, in this material world, geometry).  Foremost, we try to, like Him, be creators for the benefit of others.  But very high on the middot, character qualities, we also want to emulate is independence.  As God requires no other being to provide for His welfare, we also strive to the partial independence of earning our own benefits rather than receiving them as hand-outs.

As we really are strongly hard-wired and conditioned (as the contemporary advertising industry makes great use of), we find that ultimately all we can really control are our own choices.  So, ultimately, our challenge is to, from moment to moment, choose options that lead toward completeness and reject those which lead us to loss.

While we might now, intellectually, realize that all the “game” is comprised of is always making the right conscious choice (you’re disqualified from just choosing randomly and lucking out, because integral to the choice itself is the desire to make that choice, not necessarily for its own sake, but because it leads to the ultimate wholeness of which we’re capable of bringing to the world.

If things were left here, though, the system wouldn’t work.  We would always, “naturally”, choose to “do the right thing” because we knew ahead of time that it would yield the maximum reward.  Thus, we’d be choosing so selfishly that we’d really no longer have any choice.  We’d be like lab rats with a no-brainer task which always yields the treat.  And, of course, we’d no longer be earning what we get through our own efforts and real choice.

Free will is a very important concept in humanity and its place in the universe.  This isn’t a philosophical, political or psychological truth, but one that leads right back to our goal of being as independent, thus resembling The Creator, as much as possible.

And so the Ramchal explains that each person is suspended exactly between good and evil with the choice to move in either direction.  And we face that challenge moment to moment, always with the potential of amazing progress, always with the danger of disastrous self-destruction.

In order to maintain our dynamic equilibrium, the bad choice, even if we can clearly see a disastrous outcome, must be exactly as attractive as the positive choice.  This is what necessitates what we call the יצר טוב and the יצר רע, the Yetzer Tov (compulsion to create good) and the Yetzer Ra (compulsion to create evil).  The Yetzer Ra exists solely for the absolutely necessary function of making the wrong choice equally attractive as the right one.

I confess to, perhaps an age-appropriate, curmudgeonly, low view of much of contemporary American culture and its exports.  Selfishness and immediate gratification, always present, have been transformed from embarrassing shortcomings we each have to the highest socio-cultural value.  “Soft-core” pornography is no longer even considered questionable for children as witness popular music, fashion and reality television.  I’m not the first to draw parallels to the rapid fall of Roman civilization.  The trivial is crowned supreme and critical thinking and seriousness are condemned as elitist.  Not only has much of the Jewish world internalized so much antisemitism that it brands efforts for Jewish survival as “triumphalist”, xenophobic and imperialist, so has much of western civilization become infected with shame of its own success and values.

But I promised, with the title at least, to present a contrarian view to all these negative contemporary phenomenon, so I’m obligated to deliver.

Remember, in order for each of us to achieve our personal best, to reach our goals in growth and wisdom and refinement and kindness, we need to over and over again make right choices.  Not only that, but we have to be motivated solely by wanting to do the right thing each time we make a good choice.  That requires that as our “rewards” and benefits for each right choice becomes ever more apparent, the appeal of each bad choice has to equally increase.  Being drawn, socially or emotionally or through manipulation to make ever worse, ever more destructive, ever more self-enslaving choices actually reveals just how great the potential power is in our right decisions and actions.  The harder it is to be unhip, unpopular, to be judged judgmental, the more attractive it is to give up our unique Jewish practices and values, reflects, perhaps, how close we are finally approaching a world where we’ve completed our work in bringing Creation to its glorious target.

Living between the cracks, as it were, having orthodox smicha and living an halachic lifestyle but working and teaching mainly outside the orthodox world, people often ask me to whom I feel allegiance.  Is my loyalty supposed to be to the orthodox world or, perhaps, only to that segment of it which formed and continues to nourish me?  Perhaps to the movement who defines the shul I occasionally go to?  Should it be, instead, to the denominations who invite me in to teach and share my knowledge, even if they decline much of what I offer?  It’s harder than you think, since there is so little unity among the denominations and movements and flavors these days.  Rather, they not only compete with each other, but all too often actively battle among themselves.  Denominationalism and fracture is the greatest contemporary tragedy of the Jewish people.

I could try to get out of this dilemma by saying that my loyalty is to God, but that’s a cop out.  Of course, I feel love, awe, loyalty and so much more towards our Creator, but I also have to acknowledge that God is no more dependent or needful for my loyalty than He is for anything else–He’s already complete in every manner of perfection.  Likewise my dedication to and work in, both learning and teaching, Torah, that finite projection of the Infinite in our finite world, doesn’t add to the Torah itself–it’s already complete.  Loyalty to my ancestors and to our saintly scholars, while true, alone is only sloppy sentimentalism.

No, my loyalty and the object of my devotion is, simply, to the Jewish people, in all our polarized fragmentation.  Seriously, I realize that I’m inadequate as a bridge to everyone, but I’m not willing to write off anyone or any subgroup.  That’s why I do what I do, which is to try to bring the “technology” of halacha, our traditional methodology for merging our lonely, individual selves with The Infinite, to all.

Too many in the orthodox world have, as Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo recently wrote, expelled God from halacha (see http://cardozoacademy.org/current-thought-to-ponder-by-rabbi-lopes-cardozo/the-expulsion-of-god-in-halacha-1-ttp-298/) and it’s not a new phenomenon.  Nonetheless, the only purpose of halacha is to establish and deepen our relationship with The Creator.  Too many in the non-orthodox world have completely abandoned halacha and tradition and even Israel, largely as a reaction against the emptiness they, unfortunately, do too often see.  And as much as any other observant Jew, I also often lose sight of this purpose.  But this loyalty to the Jewish people that I claim to have mandates me to remind all of us, myself included, what it’s really all about.

The Meor Eynayim by Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, in his teachings for Parshat Behaalotcha, reminds us that מצוה, Mitzvah, commandment, is based on the word צוותא, Tzvata, a team or group.  In other words, the purpose of a Mitzvah is to join us with God–it’s the path, הלכה, Halacha, to דבקות, Devekut, merging with God.  Beyond that, he teaches that the word, מצוה, itself contains encoded within it (by means of את-בש, a deep-level decoding of Torah using certain letter substitutions) the Divine Name, partially revealed in the two final letters, ו and ה, as well as concealed in the first two letters, מצ, which decodes into a י and a ה.  This indicates to us that every Mitzvah requires both the revealed element, the action itself, and the concealed element, our inner intentionality, כוונה, Kavanah.  Empty actions, no matter how strict or pious-seeming, are dead like a body without a soul.

So, to whatever degree I’m able to, my loyalty to the traditional world is to constantly remind my fellow Mitzvah-observers of why we’re involved in this enterprise, just as my loyalty to the currently non-observant world is to publicize this, to constantly point out that Halacha is much more than mechanical, often neurotic, arbitrary actions which only isolate us from the rest of the world.

One of my teachers, the late Rabbi Avrohom Lapin zt”l, used to say about Shabbat, that if we Jews only knew what it really can achieve in the world, we’d enthusiastically and protectively treasure it and join in.  We’d need no coaxing at all.  I can still hear his voice saying, “if only we would know”.

All of us, across the entire Jewish spectrum, have in our power the ability unite and elevate the merely physical/empirical/finite with the Infinite.  We can simultaneously refine and optimize ourselves as well as fix and optimize our world (the real meaning of תיקון עולם, Tikkun Olam, repairing (i.e. completing the Creation of) the world).  My responsibility, again, is to continuously remind all of our people of our potential, excluding none.

The Malchut Shlomo has a deep insight into the pasuk in last week’s parsha, BeChukotei, והלכתם עמי בקרי והלכתי עמכם בחמות קרי, V’Halachtem Imi B’Keri V’Halachti Imchem B’Chamat Keri, If you treat me with contempt (keri), then I will treat you with the heat of contempt.  He relates the word קרי (keri) to מקרא, mikrah, accident, random, arbitrary.  The Rabbi re-phrases this pasuk (verse) to say that if you insist on thinking that everything is random, that there is no meaning or order in existence, then I will deal with you in a way that will appear to you random and meaningless.

In other words, the consequence for acting as if God doesn’t exist is that we will not be able to perceive Him.  Whatever “punishment” might fall one, the real loss is the loss of an intimate relationship with The All.  We’re left with our small, limited little selves, along and afraid in a meaningless life.  I can’t imagine a worse life.

Writing about the song in the middle of the Pesach Seder, Dayenu דינו, he explains that the miracles we’re thanking God for are not the rescues that occurred on our way from the depths of Egyptian slavery to our ultimate redemption through the Holy Temple, but rather than He facilitated these rescues in a way which, each time, revealed His active presence.  The greatest experience available to us as the limited human beings that we are is the direct experience of and union with the Infinite Creator.

We’re taught that usually we need to earn, to merit these experiences through the modality of mitzvot, even though there are times, such as the Redemption from Egypt, where we experience this through חן, chen, grace.  The key, at each opportunity, is to  choose, through our בחירה, bechira, free will, the path that most leads to harmony with the Divine Will.  Of course, in order to do that, we need, first, an awareness of God in the world.  Seeing meaning in the world is both the “reward” itself as well as the means to earn that reward, paralleling the concept שכר מצוה מצוה, schar mitzvah mitzvah, the reward for a mitzvah is itself a mitzvah.

Ultimately, we’re given the choice of what kind of life we want for ourselves.  Do we choose the pain of infinite emptiness and loneliness or do we choose to see that our lives do, indeed, have meaning and potential?

I can’t prove it with pasukim, but I have a different way of looking at our seemingly endless exile.  The common explanation  is that we didn’t live up to the standards required for the persistence of the Holy Temple.  Eventually we’d used up our chances and, failing, saw the destruction of the Bet HaMikdash and the loss of our land.  If only we can regain the spiritual level we occasionally reached in those long lost days, we’d earn the return to our land and, shortly after, witness the rebuilding of a Third Temple.  But, obviously, we have been too flawed, generation after generation, so we remain in this limbo.

My thought is that we did, with each of the two previous Temples, create a suitable environment for them.  However, the plan has always been, סוף מעשה במחשבה תחילה, Sof Ma’a’se B’MachShava T’chila, the final reality is the original goal.

In other words, the third Temple, may it come speedily in our days, will be overwhelmingly more beautiful, more powerful, more love-filled than either of the two previous ones.  Therefore, our world needs significantly more work to prepare for something this grand.  Therefore, it’s not so much our shortcomings we should focus on, but at the enormity of the task which will bring even greater reward.

Perhaps no other mitzvah is quoted as frequently as ואהבת לרעך כמוך, V’Ahavata L’Reyecha K’Mocha, Love your fellow as yourself.  We proudly point at this commandment as the basis of our entire value system and a variant of it, to not inflict on someone else something you yourself detest, is said by Hillel to encapsulate the entire Torah!

In a world of rampant egotism, vanity and selfishness, you’d think that we’d easily understand what it means to love ourselves.  While it might require the sacrifice of sharing that feeling for others, intellectually, at least, it seems pretty simple.

Rabbi Twerski zt”l (Malchut Shlomo, Parshat Kedoshim) gives us a little more context.  He reminds us that this commandment isn’t presented in a vacuum, but rather is preceded with the commandment to not only not hate our brother, but also to gently correct him (VaYikra 19:17).  The following verse (Vayikra 19:18), furthermore tells us to neither take revenge not to bear hatred in our hearts.  This is immediately followed in the same verse with the commandment to love our fellows.  Further, he tells us that these linked commandments aren’t “merely” mitzvot, but contain a promise.  He explains that if we carefully practice these prohibitions, that when we perceive an injury from someone we take a breath and not jump immediately to hate, but rather that we calmly let that person know just how we feel about their action, we can discharge our own anger.  Thus, we won’t feel an overwhelming need to get back at them with revenge, and we’ll find that our heart isn’t filled with anger and grudges.  If we’re able to succeed in controlling our own behavior as described, we’ll see that rather than hating this person, we’ll actually find a love for them.

On the surface, this sounds naive.  First, the Torah is talking about a real injury, either to property or honor. We’ve all learned speaking our mind doesn’t make everything “all better”.  It also can seem unreasonable that we, the victim, is the one required to expend so much energy.  We need to engage the other party rather than confront them.  We need to separate within ourselves the actual injury and our feelings about it.  We need to speak gently with them, even when we’re bursting inside with raw emotion.  And then we need to actively lower our emotional temperature.  Having done all this emotional work, we should, perhaps, love ourselves for just how balanced and mature and “spiritual” we’ve been.  Perhaps we can feel a sense of neutrality toward him, but doesn’t it sound unreasonable to them be required to love them?  After all, who is the victim and who is the villain in this situation?

But Rabbi Twerski zt”l took this another way entirely.  He says that as a result of this process we’re assured that in the end we will come to love him.  This is very puzzling.  How can this be?

I think we need to look at the entire situation from a different point of view.  Our tradition teaches us that we benefit and progress from performing both the positive and negative commandments, the mandates and the prohibitions.  Ideally, we can best achieve our goals for ourselves and for the world in general if we at least visit each mitzvah.  But without someone harming us, how will we ever be able to experience these particular mitzvot?  How will we be able to grow if we don’t leave our comfort zone, but why would we ever, on our own, enter a situation which is painful?  It’s only through the agency of this injury or insult that we have the opportunity to develop these important qualities in ourselves.  When we finally see that the attack, even if it was based on malice the other person had for us, viewed from this higher point of view, we then realize that this was, indeed, an experience we needed.

We’re taught that שכר מצוה מצוה, Schar Mitzvah Mitzvah, that the reward for performing a mitzvah is that mitzvah itself.  With great effort and with eyes open to beneath the surface, we realize that we would never have had to opportunity to fulfill these mitzvot otherwise.  It’s possible, perhaps not easy or trivial, but possible to develop a deep love and gratitude for the person who, by whatever means, created these opportunities for us.

It’s simplistic to see everything in terms of reward and punishment–God’s love is certainly not limited to a Pavlovian template.  Admittedly, some of our experience will be generated by that mechanism.  But other experiences will be designed to challenge us, to present our next opportunity to grow and to climb higher.  In situations like that, the other party is, in a sense, only part of that mechanism directed towards our growth, just like we’re often involved in situations only because of our contribution to someone else’s challenge!  It would be easier, of course, if everything came to us with a label, but it rarely does.

There is a very strange halacha that we’re mandated to make a bracha, a blessing, on bad things that happen to us exactly as we bless good things!  On the surface, this is an entirely absurd commandment.  Only when we look beyond the feeling tone of the experience and see it, rather, as a gateway to our next stage, can we see the blessing in it.  Likewise, it’s no challenge at all to love a fellow who only does good things to us.  We don’t grow until we are forced to transcend our own anger and sense of hurt.  At that point, we do find love and gratitude blossoming within our hearts.

Shabbat Shalom

I often say that Judaism is the “art of unreasonable optimism”.  By that I mean that Tshuva,  radical transformation and growth, rather than merely minimal course corrections, is always within our grasp.

As a rabbi, I often find that the best way I can help someone in their spiritual explorations is to try very hard to not place any obstacles in their way.  The most common mistake, I find, is pushing someone to be more observant.  More often than not, I’ve merely created resistance.

*   *   *   *   *

Teaching by example can be very powerful.  It’s important to make sure, however, that the right message gets across.  Much of what I do, especially in the realm of religious observance, I do because it’s the right thing for me to do.  However, all too often, it results in isolation and becomes an uphill struggle.  I fear that while the lesson I’m trying to teach is that some things are so important, you do them even if they don’t bring immediate and apparent happiness, too often only the message some people see is that these efforts bring unhappiness.  Times like these, only direct words can indicate the emphasis.

*   *   *   *   *

In the desert, we too often merely heard the words of God, but we too rarely took the time to see Him beneath the mundane, daily reality of our lives.  With infinitely more distraction these days, it’s harder, but at least as vital for us to make those efforts.

*   *   *   *   *

 The goal of Mitzva fulfillment and Halachic observance should be the intense, almost overwhelming experience of God each and every moment.  Of course, we might not reach or long maintain this spiritual/emotional/intellectual/physical peak, but that, rather than conformity or obsessiveness or arrogance, should be our beacon.

*   *   *   *   *

 Embracing our own imperfections is unavoidable if we hope to engage the Infinite God.

We often speak of Tshuvah, returning, as if it’s no big deal, easy to do.  Exclude another “weekday” activity on Shabbat, restrict our diets a little more.  Donate more money to your synagogue or Jewish school.  We’re happy, God’s happy and it didn’t even require that much extra work!  If only it were that effortless….

In the fall, we’ll start looking over the rules, halachot, of tshuvah in preparation for the Yomim Noraim.  We’ll remind ourselves that true tshuvah requires analysis and honest evaluation of our behavior, serious decisions, changed behavior and commitment to a long term effort.  But now, in the beginning of spring, recently exulting in a sense of Pesach freedom, we tend to emulate Alfred E Neuman’s “What, me worry?”.

If it’s difficult for an individual to change, imagine how much harder it is for an entire nation to change directions.  Our model, of course, is the pagan city-state of Nineveh in the time of Jonah.  Told that they faced total annihilation unless they gave up their savage ways, rather, by going against the “human nature response” of denial and debate, they undertake an immediate revolution and totally redeem their culture.

I’m struck that in the United States, slightly less than four years away from the worst economic meltdown in recent memory, mindless consumerism continues to dominate.  With a national election coming up, the conversation centers on celebrities and popular entertainment.  Faced with economic default, faced with a terrorist nation intent on acquiring nuclear arms, we respond with the President performing on late night comedy television and the opposition Republicans bickering among themselves as to who is a “true conservative”.  Rather than a contest of ideas and ideals, it’s a fund-raising contest.  I don’t have much hope here.

On the other hand, Israel has undergone a quiet transformation, forced after a number of years’ experiences to make a reality check.  It wasn’t long ago that the left was a significant voice in Israeli politics.  There was sufficient public support for what turned into a disastrous military withdrawal from southern Lebanon and and entire Jewish evacuation, self-inflicted ethnic cleansing, from Gaza.  We were ready, obviously over-eager, to engage our enemies in civilized discussion and negotiation.  A sizable portion of Israelis were willing to give up our historic heartland, the land of Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya’akov, Sara, Rivka, Leah and Rachel, in order to live in peace.

What happened, of course, had nothing to do with our idealism and dreams.  Rather, we’ve had rockets rain on Israel.  And rather than “the world seeing what we’re up against”, we’ve only faced international demands for even more unilateral retreat.

But something else has happened.  Idealistic and peace-longing as ever, Israelis have come to realize that we must rely on ourselves.  In fact, the Israeli public seems significantly in front of its government.

Another label for Tshuvah is, perhaps, learning from mistakes.  It’s heartening to see Israel awakening from illusory dreaming.  I only pray that the United States, as well as Europe, also begins this process.

The Torah portion in the diaspora, Tazriah/Metzora, begins by discussing the spiritual ramifications of birth.  We need to focus on rebirth.

Within the first several weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, during Sefira, the counting of the Omer, we encounter four, recently-established special days, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fallen Soldiers Remembrance Day and Israel’s Independence Day and Jerusalem Liberation Day.  These come in the period of time that while we eagerly experience and anticipate our spiritual elevation from the miracle of leaving slavery to transcendental revelation at Sinai, we also restrain and restrict our happiness out of memory of the slaughter of our people during the Great Revolt which closely followed the even greater disaster of the destruction of the Holy Temple, the sacking of Jerusalem and our not-yet-finished exile.  This time frame represents massive transition and, with the introduction of these four days, illustrates the dynamic nature of our eternal Torah.

Our holy sages have taught that the Torah is, indeed, eternal, in that it teaches each and every generation the best way to worship and engage with The Creator.  The evolution of Halacha, including the creation of these four holy days, however, teaches us that the lessons and approaches for yesterday aren’t necessarily the lessons and approaches for today.  What is eternal is our holy service through the modality of Torah and Mitzvot.

For example, at the time of the siege of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai arranged to be smuggled out of Jerusalem in order to meet Vespasian, then the leader of the conquering Roman army.  He negotiated a settlement with Rome in which the Jewish people would establish an academy of Torah in Yavne in order that the teaching of Torah not perish along with our Temple.  At that point in our history, it was absolutely right and necessary that Torah study survive, even at the expense of the Temple, Jerusalem and countless Jewish lives.  However, we don’t and can’t really know how the outcome might have changed had those Torah scholars instead dedicated themselves to the physical defense of Jerusalem.

That was then, but now, almost two thousand years later, we once again have Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  Jerusalem, in the process of rebuilding, is, finally, restored to the Jewish people.  And, once again, this time in the face of radical Islam aggression, combined with western, European and American indifference, the Jewish People in Israel are once again faced with the very real threat of annihilation.

I celebrate the renaissance in Jewish learning, the miraculous rebirth in just a little more than sixty years since the Holocaust.  I devote much of my life and time to studying and teaching our tradition.  I absolutely support this vital activity and work to see ever more Jews engage in Torah study.  I also recognize that we are no longer at the crisis we were in several short decades ago, with the finest of our scholars recently slaughtered.  As a people, we have nurtured a tremendous array of Torah institutions that now cover the globe like no time in the past.

I think we need to acknowledge our success to date.  Part of that acknowledgement is the realization that even if zero army-aged young men and women in Israel were to receive draft deferments, there are myriads of others, both in other age ranges as well as those currently outside of Israel, who will continue Torah study.  And, with the help of God, all those who would serve in the IDF will be able to return to their own studies after fulfilling their other obligations to God and Israel.

Perhaps the Torah’s lessons and mitzvot for today’s battles and challenges require a different response than in Rabbi Yochanan‘s time.  Perhaps if the young people of today’s Torah world were to join their less-observant brothers and sisters in the IDF, this time the Jewish People will prevail.  And, perhaps if we join now in the defense of Israel, with a secure and peaceful future, our secular brothers and sisters will then join us in the study, practice and celebration of our shared Torah.

I pray that with this resolve we receive the Torah this year at Shavuot in a profound and revolutionary way, finally living up to the potential of the experience.