Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Becca Weintraub | January 9, 2026

Shabbat Shalom to everyone.

It's nice. It's like

full of the light and the energy of Shabbat.

And it also comes as our world continues to feel

impossibly heavy.

I wanted to just begin just noticing the weight

that it feels like we're just carrying over and over again as we sit here.

When we come into this space, and that our world feels

just overwhelming.

And there's grief.

With the unfathomable shooting of 37 year old mother,

a mother of three, Rene Nicole Goode,

by the Ice agent in Minnesota,

which just is layered on the fear and the exhaustion.

The uncertainty.

And this is what we're feeling globally and nationally.

And then personal level.

We also go through life holding all of that, and Shabbat comes.

And it's not that we need to push that all away.

I think we're just allowed to hold it and we feel it

and we can arrive here as we are, which is the beauty of community,

the beauty of the law, the beauty of our tradition.

And it's with all of that

and what we hold that we can also turn to the Torah

and we turn to parchment as we begin a new book of the Torah.

And the opening of this book

gives us two different midrash,

two different rabbinic stories or texts

with the same wise message

that feels like it's much needed today.

These two midrash hymns say to us, even when the world

or the hurdles that are before us

feel impossible, we have to keep trying.

We have to hold on. We have to keep trying.

So the first of these Midrash theme come,

and it's about Moshe's father, Amram,

and it says that when Porro, when the Pharaoh decrees

that all the baby boys have to be thrown into the Nile,

that the baby girls should live, but the boys have to be thrown into the Nile.

The rabbis imagine that Amram divorces

Moshe's mother, Yoav Ed,

and not only does he divorce her, but he was a leader in the community

and he inspires all the other men to leave their wives.

Why bring children into a world that's like this?

Why should we even do that?

But then the rabbis imagine

their daughter Miriam, who confronts her father and she says.

ABBA says, dad, your decree is

even more severe than Paros because Pharaoh's decree

only is against the boys, but yours is also against the girls.

And Pharaoh's decree is in this world, but yours is in this world,

and it's in the next world.

And Pharaoh's decree.

Dad, Pharaoh's decree may or may not be fulfilled.

It might or might not come true, but yours absolutely.

Well.

And he listens to his daughter and he remarries.

His mother is in the Midrash imagines it.

He remarries. You're covered.

And all the men also take their wives back.

And it's here in this

place of imagination, where Miriam teaches us

that when leadership and rules feel like they're suffocating us,

that giving up can feel reasonable or even responsible.

But when we don't know what will happen and we don't know what will happen,

and if we stop, and if we stop trying,

if we stop hoping in the future at all,

then we know it actually won't happen and it will not be.

And it cannot be.

No matter what.

And we can't and shouldn't hold ourselves back.

And this

lesson comes up again and it comes up again.

But this time it's on the banks of the Nile,

and with another woman in our parsha this week.

And it tells us that Sparrow goes down to the Nile,

that she walks down to bathe in the river, and her meetings

are walking along with her, that these young women are with her.

And it says that she looks out

and she sees along the river

the basket with Moshe in it.

And among these reeds she sends out an armor.

And the text is not clear about what this armor is.

This armor to fetch or to catch the basket.

And the Torah says to us that Pharaoh's daughter,

when she was going to bathe, she sends out this armor.

And the rabbis are curious in the Talmud, because the armor can mean

two different things.

It can mean that it's a maid servant.

Did it mean a maid servant? One of them says.

Or it can also mean a measurement or even the length of your arm.

So it can mean your hand.

And so if this

basket, if we read it as hand,

the image of her coming down is that this basket's just out of reach.

It's beyond her reach.

There's no way that she can really get there.

If she's on the banks of the river and the baskets all the way in the reeds.

So why would she stretch her arm out at all?

And that's what we live in.

So often we face suffering that feels so impossibly large or so far away.

Something cries out for help.

But by all rationale and all of the measures

that we have, there's nothing that we feel like we can do.

And so we just don't act.

We tell ourselves it's better if we don't do anything at all,

that nothing I do would be big enough or could maybe

make any kind of an impact while I reach for the basket,

when you know you're not actually going to reach it.

But the scarab teaches us that Pharaoh's daughter

hears that child, and she hears the cry, and she stretches out this arm.

She stretches out her hands,

and the distance is real, that the act seems pointless.

And yet, because she does the maximum of what she's able to do, she pushes herself.

The impossible becomes possible, and the Midrash tells us that her arm

actually extends and becomes long enough

so that she can reach moksha.

And the rabbi says that she reaches

and God extends her reach, saving a life and raising up

the greatest human being the world would ever know.

According to The Cut, Scarab.

So by Paro, she decides to reach out her arm

despite the impossibility of catching the basket,

and lo and behold, the Midrash says that her arm extends

and she saves baby Moses,

and that is the unfolding of the saving of each one of us.

And just like

Paro, Shabbat comes each week as our opportunity to reach.

It's our weekly Miriam. It's our weekly.

But Paro, no matter what the week has held, we pause.

We push back.

We unplug.

Not to escape the world, but to remember

what is worth trying for.

And Shabbat reminds us that even when things feel unbearably

heavy, it's still on us to reach and to hope.

To believe in a better future.

Because if we don't try, we know what will happen.

And if we do, maybe

even redemption, though it feels incredibly far

away, becomes a little bit more possible.

Shabbat shalom.