Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Felicia Sol | January 2, 2026

Shabbat shalom.

Happy New Year!

The beginning of a new year often,

often offers the comfort of a clean break,

a chance to turn the page,

to bid farewell to a deeply challenging 2025,

and to welcome the possibilities of 2026.

But this week's portion, Torah

portion, placed right in this moment.

That kind of clarity.

If you look closely at the Torah scroll, you'll notice that there is no space,

no visual pause between the end of last week's

Parashar Vegas and the beginning of this week's Pius VI.

It is a Parashar summa.

That's what it's called.

Which means a sealed or closed portion.

Unsurprisingly, the commentators

ask, why is this passage sealed?

Because normally

you can see some kind of visible break between one person and other.

Rabbi Ariel the Astro Verster

Astro Stern Rabbi offers a striking answer,

even though his name is very hard to pronounce.

He says this entire parasite

exists on the border between past and future.

In the previous parasite, Yakov is still alive,

and in Shimoda, which follows, we see the first stirrings of redemption.

But here the people are suspended in between,

far from their beginnings

and not yet able to glimpse their future deliverance.

With no signs pointing forward,

no clear sense of direction.

The Torah itself reflects that uncertainty.

The parasite is silent.

This sense of closure appears again in the parasite,

because another understanding of it is that when Yakov longs to reveal

to his children what will happens at the end of days, his vision slips away.

According to the commentators.

Even Yakov is shut off from prophecy.

There is

something painfully honest in this teaching.

Limbo is deeply unsettling

and often makes us close up.

We long for markers.

We long for clarity.

We long for reassurances that we are firmly rooted

or clearly on our way.

It is easier to live when the path is lit.

Welcome to 2026.

In this moment of uncertainty

in the parasite, Yakov gathers his sons to his bedside bedside

before he dies and says he comes to visit juvenile Yakov, the Schimmel alias.

Our living room.

Gather and listen, O sons of Yakov, listen to you.

Surrounding your father.

Rabbi Art Greene notes that the that Yakov calls his children

using both of his names, asking them

to learn from both of his legacies.

You are the children of Yakov, he tells them.

The trickster, the morally complex figure whose life included

failure and fear and survival through cunning.

That story, too, is your inheritance.

Learn from it.

Use its wisdom when you most need it,

but remember as well and in some way more importantly,

that you are the children of Israel, the one who emerged.

Transformed from a long night of wrestling with God,

with an angel and with himself.

It is Yisroel.

Rabbi green reminds us, who in tradition asks us to emulate.

We are not called the children of Yaakov most of the time,

but the bananas surround the children of Israel.

It is that legacy of inner struggle and the courage to be changed by it

that ultimately defines us.

And so we enter 2026

not with answers, but with responsibility.

When the parasite is sealed and the future refuses to reveal itself,

we are not asked to predict redemption,

but to live in a way that makes it possible

to stay gathered,

to keep listening, and to remain faithful to who we are.

Children are close.

Who know how to survive, but more importantly,

children of Israel who dare to be transformed,

maybe walk together into this new year.

Wrestling.

Honestly, hoping stubbornly,

and trusting that even without clear signs of redemption,

the path forward is shaped by how we choose to walk to it.