Parashat Beha’alotekha | Rabbi Felicia Sol | June 6, 2026

Shabbat Shalom.

You may be seated in.

There are many things that keep me up at night these days.

Or maybe wake me up very early in the morning,

where sometimes even give me nightmares.

Issues of the future of liberal democracy,

both here and in Israel.

The profound questions facing our people,

both internally amongst us,

and how we are being seen by the wider world.

However, in addition to the myriad of these

very large existential questions,

one of the things that has disturbed me the most over these past couple of years

is the dearth of space in which our smaller and wider Jewish

communities are able to wrestle with these questions in meaningful ways.

Instead of dialog about ideas, fears, convictions,

and doubts, we encounter toxic accusations,

abuse of language, and the degradation of the humanity of each other.

We make assumptions about one another's motives.

There are campaigns to de-legitimize

rabbis and leaders in so many places right now.

We presume to know what lives in another person's heart.

We imagine we can read another person's soul.

We are often so self-righteous.

We lack curiosity.

We often believe we know everything about the other

and therefore we don't have to ask any questions or be in conversation.

Of course, this is being modeled

by the leaders of foreign nations and including our own nation.

Alongside this posturing is a deep feeling that we are stuck.

Everyone has gone to his or her corner and is playing their assigned role.

There is less curiosity, less moral imagination,

and less capacity to articulate

an inspiring vision for our people and for the state of Israel.

I am worried

not only because the world makes us feel so unsettled.

I am worried because instead of digging deeply into what we are

facing, it sometimes feels as though the Jewish people

are trapped in a middle school fight, playing out on social media.

Vicious, demeaning and unbecoming.

In the rapid news cycle, we read, it's much easier

to react to an op ed by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times

or the list, the letter, the list college students

wrote to Chancellor Schwartz asking that they disinvite

President Herzog as commencement speaker, or a sermon

given by a rabbi, or the latest letter that should not be signed.

Then to think about the bigger questions.

What has October 7th and its unfathomable crimes

done to the soul of the Jewish people?

How are we

and dealing with the fact that we are, in

some ways, the victims of a relentless and undying hatred

that is increasingly manifesting itself in violence

while also being accountable

for our own moral failures as a people and as a Jewish state.

When it comes to the Palestinians.

How can we build faith

and relationships with the next generation of Jews who don't mirror

the beliefs of the organized Jewish community of the past?

What will it mean for our future?

We can debate the purpose of the Israel parade

and our participation in it or not.

The boycott vote in the park Slope Food Co-op and the merits or demerits

of our mayor and many of these issues

are deserving of those debates.

We can have it out over Facebook

or TikTok or Instagram.

But what are we not willing to really

talk about and deeply dive into?

Too often, we seem unable to sustain

the kind of conversation these questions demand.

It feels better to have a win

and diminish somebody else in their position

to say they are not loyal to the Jewish people,

then tackle the bigger questions and grow

and live with a little bit of doubt.

Their doctor, Aria Kruger Lansky, a Holocaust survivor,

psychologist and professor of the University of Maryland,

studies human motivation, radicalization, and the psychology of extremism.

He has devoted much of his career to understanding what he calls

the need for cognitive closure

when confronted with uncertainty.

Human beings often seek definite answers and clear categories.

We seize upon certainty.

We become more dogmatic, more judgmental.

We freeze our thinking in order to eliminate ambiguity,

doubt, and complexity.

Some people are temperamentally more inclined toward this need than others.

But it is all also deeply situational,

and I think we are deeply in that situation.

Perhaps, given all the

given, all that we are navigating.

In this post, excuse me,

October 7th, World.

With rising authoritarianism, anti-Semitism

and extremism from both the right

and the left.

Our greatest temptation

is the need for cognitive closure.

We long for easy answers to enormously

come to an enormously complex world,

because certainly feel certainty feels safer.

Perhaps we are not so different from the Israelites in the wilderness

complaining, deflecting, rigid,

uncompromising, exhausted and despairing,

unable to glimpse a vision of the Promised Land.

The journey is too long.

The challenge is relentless and the future unclear.

And it is precisely here that our parish

offers an extraordinary teaching.

Just a few moments ago is he chanted the words that we recite

each and every time the ark is opened, via he being so our own.

Vilma.

Moesha Kumar I don't IVR food to IVR.

When I knew Soumis unaccompanied when the ark was said

Alec Moselle would say advance, O eternal one,

may your enemies be scattered, and may your foes flee before you.

And when the Torah is

returned to the ark after this Torah service at the end, it is traditional

to recite the verse that follows that verse over new who over new.

Hello, Umar. Shiva.

Shiva. Adonai our fe. Israel.

And when it halted, he would say, return you, O Eternal one,

you who are Israel's myriad of thousands.

These two verses, Amir, 85 letters in total,

serve as the bookends to our ritual

parading of the Torah around the Kajal, recalling the Israelites

journeying through the wilderness, guided by the Ark of the covenant.

And when it comes to rest.

But in the Torah itself, these two verses

are set apart in a striking way.

They are bracketed by two inverted noons.

Has anyone see that?

If you I it's demarcated in the hummus.

Not as clearly as in the Torah, but they're covered by these two inverted

noons.

The rabbis ask, what is this?

What is the meaning of this unusual demarcation?

And an intricate discussion is gone through in my Shabbat in the Talmud

chat page 115 B through 16 eight

and 116 A and three responses are offered.

The first answer is given by the sages.

They say in Zen, the Como mc

homa that this is not in its place.

The Holy One Place signs before and after the section to indicate that

it doesn't belong there, meaning it's hard enough to say it doesn't cohere.

It must go somewhere else.

However, Rabbi Yehuda Hanna C disagrees,

and he says it is not for that reason that the signs were inserted.

Rather, the signs meaning the inverted no names

are there because this portion is considered a book in and of itself.

Two verses are considered a book in and of itself.

Rabin Shimon Ben Gamliel offers a third possibility

that one day this passage will be moved to its proper place.

So it he agrees with the first opinion of the sages.

But he says, but it is here, in our position now,

to separate between two feel failures of the Israelites in the wilderness.

First, they're turning away from God when they moved away from the mountain.

It's based on a verse right before these two pursue came,

and the second is about their bitter, complaining,

three interpretations which at first glance seem unrelated.

Yet Mark Allen, wakening in his book The Burnt Book, reads them

as variations on a single profound idea.

Torah resists closure.

The first interpretation teaches

that this text is not in its place, like the journey of the Ark.

The verses between the two nuns are unable to settle.

They don't have a final resting place,

meaning the Torah is never static.

It resists permanence.

Wakening, writes, the ark must travel because the law,

the Torah, is in becoming.

Meaning is never where it is a given.

Meaning is

not something possessed once and for all.

Torah remains alive

because it remains in motion.

The second interpretation deepens this idea.

If these two verses constitute a book unto themselves,

then the Torah does not contain five books, but

seven books.

Who knew?

These verses become a kind of generative, center

splitting and multiplying

what seems fixed and complete.

Rabbi Yonatan affirms the position of Rabbi Yehuda on a scene

by offering a proof text for the seven books,

which occurs in Proverbs chapter nine, verse one.

Homo tban to be to hearts

a modern Hashem, a wisdom has built her house.

She has hewn her seven pillars, meaning seven pillars.

Books of the Torah walk nine calls this

the bursting of the book into books.

The breaking open of the text

creates the possibility of new meanings,

new understandings, new futures.

The third interpretation interpretation,

perhaps, is perhaps the most surprising.

This little book is placed here not to continue the narrative,

but to interrupt it.

It stands between one act of failure and another.

Wakening, writes the book, that

which hinders violence from lending violence assistance.

The book is thus an interruption.

Torah interrupts inevitability.

It disrupts the assumption that the only response to failure

is more failure, that the only response to evil is more evil,

that the only response to violence is more violence,

that there is only one story to tell.

The Torah in this idea is provocative.

It unsettles what appears, settles, settled.

It builds discontinuity into its own narrative.

It invites in imagination.

Now you remember, May remember that I said earlier

that these two verses contain 85 letters.

And according to the rabbis, that number is not incidental.

This whole time unit discussion that is occurs in Shabbat

in the Talmud begins with the question, what is the smallest

fragment of a Taurus girl that must be rescued from a fire?

The answer

85 letters

and the

proof text is our passage via he being so our own.

Vilma.

Masha, those 85 letters that occur in this little book

held by those upside down nuns,

85 letters are enough

to preserve Torah because they preserve everything

the Torah represents the journey of Torah,

the capacity to generate meaning,

to open possibilities, to interrupt certainty.

And all Hebrew letters, of course, have a numeric value.

What is the numeric value of 85?

Pay the bill two letters pay.

Hey, pay is stands for 80 and hey stands for five,

which means the word mouth pay means mouth.

The minimum required meant for saving a fragment of the Torah

from a fire, is the point at which the written word becomes speech.

The written word becomes oral

through the mouth, through the pair.

The point at which text becomes

conversation, the point at which Torah is not merely preserved,

but actually needs to be interpreted, spoken

as the people of the book.

We are bound to this book that refuses

to remain on the page

and fixed.

Torah is not a monument to certainty.

It is a practice of opening, birthing,

provoking, and interrupting.

It unsettles settled meanings.

It breaks open narratives that have become too rigid

in moments of profound uncertainty.

Our instinct may be to seek cognitive closure,

to retreat into certainty, to divide the world into righteous

and the wicked, to make every disagreement

a zero sum contest.

Yet Torah, our Torah, points in the opposite direction.

Its transcendence lies precisely

in its wandering, in its demand of us.

The rabbis understood this long before

modern psychology gave it a name.

There is a powerful story in the Talmud

in Misha about Rabbi Yohanan and Rais Lachish.

They were not only study partners, but they were brothers

in law and intellectual companions.

After a terrible dispute raised Lachish dies

and Rabbi Yohanan is inconsolable.

The sages worried about him and asked

who can sit with Rabbi Yohanan and ease his grief?

And so they choose Rabbi Eleazar Ben Pardot,

a brilliant Torah scholar.

Rabbi Eleazar comes and begins studying with Rabbi Yohanan,

and each time Rabbi Yohanan offers an insight.

Rabbi Eleazar responded, there is a teaching that supports your view,

but instead of finding comfort, Rabbi

Yohanan becomes distressed.

He said, you are not like the son of Lachish.

When I study with reach lucky, she challenged me.

For every idea I have proposed.

He raised many objections and together we work through them.

Through that struggle, the law became clearer and deeper.

You simply bring proof that I am right.

With this, there we go.

I already know my argument has support.

I don't need you to tell me.

What I miss is the challenge that sharpens it.

Rabbi Yohanan tore his clothes

and cried out, where are you, son of Lachish?

Where are you, son of Lachish?

And his grief overwhelmed him.

The sages saw that his mind could not recover,

and they prayed for mercy, and soon after Rabbi

Yohanan died.

Rabbi Yohanan did not miss agreement.

He missed the challenge.

He missed the person

who pushed against his assumptions,

who forced him to think harder

and helped truth emerge through the friction of disagreement.

And the truth wasn't a neat synthesis or unity.

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas

writes, true thinking is not a silent dialog of the soul with itself,

but a discussion between thinkers.

What made race Lachish indispensable

was not that he stood on Rabbi Yohanan side.

It was that he stood across from him.

At a moment when the Jewish community

is increasingly tempted by certainty and polarization, perhaps what we need

most are not more people who can prove us,

prove to us that we are right.

Perhaps we need our more locations, people who can challenge us

without dehumanizing us, who disagree with us, without abandoning us,

and who help us expand rather than narrow our understanding.

We need to do that for each other, in our own community

and outside of it.

I don't want to live in the route

of Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Elazar,

a place that affirms only my ideas and beliefs,

not at bay and not in the wider Jewish community.

Here or in Israel.

This is not, I believe, what I believe the Torah of wandering demands of us.

Part of why I love this story of Rabbi Yohanan and reach Lachish

is that they don't have to give up on their convictions.

I promise you, they did not.

They don't expect to become unified.

It's an illusion that we as a people are going to become unified

or that in order for you to be you and me to be me,

that we have to give up on our convictions.

That is not the best route to.

They are for each other.

They are to destabilize one another,

to hold some humility,

to make themselves accountable for their own opinions,

and to be a mirror to each other's souls.

I want to live a Torah that unsettles us,

to be in a community that lives, a Torah

that unsettles us, that makes us journey.

I want to live up, lift up a Jewish life that interrupts complicity

and laziness and a lack of moral imagination.

And I want us to thrive as a Jewish people

with this gorgeous tradition

that makes us wake up at any given moment and demand

that we respond to big questions and not live in small arguments.

There is no way to the Promised Land except through wandering.

That's what these books are telling us.

That is what the book of Bob Barr lives out.

Perhaps that is the greatest certainty

and the most profound blessing the Torah has to teach.

All encapsulated in 85 letters

bracketed by two upside down nuns, Shabbat Shalom.