Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Alex Braver | August 21, 2026

Bachelor home.

Right around this time last week,

as congregations across the Eastern Time Zone were bringing in Shabbat,

an attacker stormed the bema at Central Synagogue,

a violation that reverberated around the world

because it was live streamed, just like our services are tonight.

Everyone in the sanctuary at central,

not knowing how the event would unfold when the disruption began.

Lived through a moment of fear that is both unimaginable

and also, in 2026, a very vividly

imaginable nightmare.

As a community, we joined with millions of Jews and our neighbors

around the world and praying that this Shabbat is restorative,

peaceful in body and in spirit.

For our friends on East 55th Street and all the members

of the central community,

we're so grateful here for our own security team, for our own community's

dedicated professional and lay leadership, which understands and takes

with seriousness the investments in security

and in safety that are a sad necessity for Jewish institutions

at this time and in this world.

And so it's very

meaningful to gather together and welcome Shabbat.

Whether you're here in the sanctuary, whether you're at home and watching

online.

And I want to affirm that whatever you're carrying with you, from anxiety

to hope to everything in between, that can all be part of our TV

law, a part of our prayer together that we're offering.

And there's nothing that we can't hold

because that's what community is for.

That's what this community is for.

That's what Shabbat is for.

And sadly and ironically

and somewhat perversely, this past Shabbat in Jerusalem, our partner community,

Colin Sharma, was vandalized by a group of teens.

Windows were broken.

Artwork was damaged.

A pride flag was torn down.

And this was an assault on a community in Israel that shares our values,

BJS values, and that is fighting for the type of future we believe in.

And the attack there, which was committed by our own

fellow Jews who don't necessarily share all those values.

Hits very close to home as well.

There's a sense, I think, that

we're under attack from all directions and threatened by a shadowy

mass of dangerous actors with all sorts of motives and agendas.

And that feeling, I think, maybe feels

especially acute right now.

And in moments like this,

our tradition understands and honors

the experience of seeing enemies everywhere.

It is a fear expressed especially in Psalms,

even in Psalm 27, which we'll recite later on.

It's part of the practice,

the spiritual practice during the month of Elul leading up to the High Holy Days.

To recite this twice a day.

And the psalmist describes his enemies as being a lie.

The whole adversary.

They're evil doers coming near to devour my flesh.

And he says, there are besiegers setting up a camp against me.

And though the psalmist has confidence

that God will protect us and will strengthen our hearts against

whatever comes,

those images of being devoured,

of being besieged, are part of our sacred texts.

And they emerge from an ancestor who likely experienced real terror,

and does not want us to forget the lessons

that they learned.

These days, I understand, even as I lament

the instinct to see each new face that walks into a synagogue

as a potential threat, rather than as a human being in God's image,

looking to learn and grow and explore what our tradition has to offer

this broken world.

Having navigated that brokenness in that world for a few millennia ourselves,

and I know that so many of us here and so many Jews around

the world, are carrying the weight of all that fear.

And I

understand the impulse to identify a clear enemy

who needs to be stopped to keep us safe.

And to be honest, we know that

there are real enemies out there who actually do need to be stopped.

Like Joseph Heller writes in catch 22.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

We know there are real threats out there.

We know they need to be met with appropriate seriousness.

And there is indeed a long standing Jewish legal tradition from the Torah

through the Talmud and onward that sees acts

of self-defense as an obligation, including preventive action,

to stop someone who intends violence.

But the Torah this week in our parsha

offers a subtle reminder of another truth that we need to hold.

At the same time, which is the possibility of encountering

someone, a friend, an enemy, or someone in between,

and seeing in them an opportunity to perform a mitzvah.

To dream.

The Book of Dream.

And our parsha provides two cases.

If you find your fellow's ox sure aka

gone astray, you must return it to them.

And if you see your fellow's animal fallen under its burden,

you have to help them lift it back up again.

But the same rules are actually given

a few books earlier in modes, in Exodus and in Exodus,

the rules are describing not your fellow's ox, sure,

but your enemies ox short or short, or even your enemies ox.

And then it describes the donkey of Sona,

someone who hates you.

So why the change from Exodus to Deuteronomy from your enemy,

who has these animals that need help to your fellow in devouring.

And our Torah portion.

This question opens up

centuries of rich debate in our sources about the range

and the scope of our obligations to friends and to foes.

Do we owe our

enemies the bare minimum level of human decency,

and to begrudgingly return a lost item to them, or a lost animal?

Are there exemptions to these obligations?

Or is the goal of these laws more high minded?

Which is an invitation to use these moments

of shared humanity to elevate us in some way?

And if that's the case, are we really meant to imagine

that every enemy could become our fellow

if we just returned their donkey?

I'm not sure.

But reflecting on this verse in 1878, in Poland,

this Father Matthew, who to the altar of Geir writes the following.

When a person trains themself this way, talking about seeing someone's

lost objects, seeing someone struggling with an animal

when they train themselves so that it's impossible for them to ignore

their fellow's physical or spiritual losses,

then they'll

also be able to help recover what they've lost and lifted up,

and how much the more so for the individual themself

when they encounter some lacking themself

that they can't bear.

Meaning, if we want to learn how to do our own spiritual work

and our own husband nefesh our spiritual soul accounting.

That is the theme of this month of all leading up to Rosh Hashanah.

We need to look toward others.

We need to look toward their needs.

We need to help them and not ignore them.

Whether it's our friend, or maybe even in some cases, our enemy,

that outward orientation is what will train us

to do the inner work.

In some ways, it anticipates

the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who almost 100 years

later, will write that the basis

of human ethics begins not from me and my ideas and theories,

my metaphysics, my sort of principles, but instead

morality.

Ethics begins with the pure encounter with the face of the other.

And so for Levinas, seeing another human's

naked face opens up an entire world

of obligation, of morality, the foundation of all ethics.

It begins with seeing someone's face

and seeing in their face the command, thou shalt not kill.

And then everything flows from there.

And so if we want to grow spiritually or morally,

we need to look outward and not just inward.

I'm not saying we should find people who want to hurt us

and look into their faces

and return their donkeys, and then transform them into our friends.

That would be lovely.

And maybe sometimes it's even possible.

Maybe. Possibly sometimes.

But what I'm saying is that we are the inheritors

of a rich tradition that sees human relationships and human connectivity,

and our obligations to others and to strangers.

Our tradition sees all of these things as an ethical imperative,

and it's part of our

own path of growth and transformation.

And that work is so much harder to do when we're feeling scared.

It's so much harder to do.

But I don't want to let the real enemies

we have in the world take that away from us.

I don't want to give them that victory

of closing us off

to this crucial work.

The necessary work of keeping ourselves and our communities

safe should not prevent us from accessing this treasure

that we have as Jews, which is a tradition that pushes us

and demands things of us and challenges us on Shabbat,

during Elul, during the I'm in Nora team and every day

it challenges us to do Tuva,

to transform ourselves by transforming how we relate to others.

And I have faith that we can do it all.

We can build safe communities.

We can attend to our genuine fear,

and we continue to grow together.

Shabbat shalom.