Parashat Miketz | Rabbi Sarit Horwitz | December 20, 2025

I hope everybody received

the wonderful, marvelous news that Rabbi

Alex Braver will be our next rabbi here

beginning July 1st of this coming year.

Many of us are absolutely thrilled that

he will be here again

but uh in Alex 2.0 version.

And when one thinks of Alex, often many

of us think of Sarit.

And when we think of Sarit, we think of

Alex because they were here fellows at

the same time. And they were one of the

Sugot, you know, like the we had a

number of fellows that were came in

pairs,

Jessica and Mayor, John and Adam,

and Sarita and Alex. And we have the

real pleasure of having Sarit here again

after so many years.

Sit was a fellow

for two years, but she stayed for four.

We couldn't let her go.

Sarit is now the Rabbi Sarit Horowitz is

now the director of rabinicic leadership

programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute

of North America.

Previously, she served as rabbi of Beth

Scholom Synagogue in Memphis, Tennessee

since 2017. If you talk to her, you'll

see detect a little accent.

>> You just have to call her rabbi.

>> What is it?

>> Remember, they just called her rabbi.

>> Rabbi. Yes.

>> Rabbi.

>> Rabbi. I can't do that.

Rabbi is busy.

Prior to Beth Shalom, Sarid was a the

senior rabbinic fellow at BJ on

Manhattan's Upper West Side. That's what

it says in her bio.

Where she spent four years deeply

engaged in spiritual leadership,

teaching and community building. Sit was

ordained in 2015

at the Jewish Theological Seminary where

she also earned a master's degree in

Jewish women and gender studies and was

a Wexner graduate fellow. She's married

to Rabbi Abbe Shakar Gampel who is here

somewhere with their children and

together they are the proud parents of

three sons

and I had the pleasure of attending

their wedding in 2015 and it's was

unforgettable.

So it's a great pleasure and honor to

have Sit back in the area again. They

live in Riverdale, so sometimes they're

going to come down to Manhattan. It's

great to great to see you.

>> Thank you.

>> Shabbat shalom.

>> When speaking about different types of

longing,

we often use hunger as a metaphor.

We'll speak about people that are hungry

for knowledge or say that someone has a

hunger for a deep spiritual dive.

It's a useful metaphor because hunger is

an experience we all know and I hope

satiation is one we know too. We know

the feeling of having a craving

fulfilled. The transformational shift

that happens when we move from longing

to fulfillment.

The svat wrote about the different

dimensions of longing that are present

when one is hungry. hungry for food and

hungry for meaning, for spiritual depth,

for emotional connection.

This raon,

hunger, he says, is something we usually

experience primarily on the physical

level. The need to satiate ourselves,

which of course can only be satisfied

once we eat food.

The met refers to this as hagashmi

physical bread.

We continue to feel that deep hunger

until the food is quite literally in our

bellies. And sometimes as we all know

the hunger actually intensifies when we

can see the food but we haven't eaten it

yet.

But the emtt also speaks about the

spiritual dimension of hunger about

receiving what he calls leashim

heavenly nourishment.

This is about our souls feeling the lack

of one of their most basic needs.

Unlike physical hunger, he teaches this

spiritual longing begins to feel

satiated even when one merely sees the

leashim

and knows that that need will be met,

even if it hasn't been fully received

yet.

You might be familiar with that feeling,

knowing that you just need to come to

Shul on a Friday night after a rough

week and feeling better the moment you

walk in before you've even opened your

seed door. Or when you feel like you

haven't had a lot of social connection

lately and someone reaches out to you to

make plans, you haven't even had the

experience yet and somehow something has

already shifted. It's mean hashim

heavenly bread satiating before it

lands.

Both of these kinds of raon hunger and

longing appear in this week's para of

mikates and it begins of course with the

most painful form of physical hunger

famine.

There is famine in the land.

Yakov and his sons are suffering from

the famine that Joseph foresaw in his

dreams.

They are in Kanan.

Yoseph is in Mitraim.

He dreamed of those seven years of

plenty followed by seven years of

famine. And because of that dream, he

became an adviser to Pharaoh, storing

enough during the years of abundance so

that the famine would not be

catastrophic.

But Yakov and his sons, the ones that he

knows are still alive, are suffering all

the way in Kanan.

They didn't know the famine was coming.

They didn't prepare.

And the Torah tells us

saw that there was Chev.

And Jacob said to his sons, "Why are you

helplessly looking at one another?"

He said, "Behold, I have heard

there is init.

Go down there and get us food so that we

can live and not die."

Yakov sees that there is chevitim.

From context, it seems that this word is

food or grain.

But chev is a curious choice. Just a few

verses later, when the brothers actually

go down to Mitzim, the Torah uses the

word for food, the one that's a little

more straightforward.

Oh.

On the shot level, the plain meaning of

this, Yakov is doing what any parent

would do. He sees where there is food

and sends his family to go get it. But

this famine, as we'll see, suggests that

the prospect of food for this

heartbroken, fractured family is about

more than physical satiation.

The Torah's language hits at something

deeper because chev carries deeper

meanings as well. The root shin bet

usually means brokenness.

What you would say if you broke a bone

or a vase. Some teachings suggest that

chev is used specifically in moments of

food emergency when things feel broken.

And it can also refer to emotional or

spiritual brokenness. The psalmist says

kyov adonai lenish barev

is close to the brokenhearted.

So yakov saw that there was chev in

mitzim.

Perhaps he saw not only that there was

food there but also brokenness.

But the Torah adds a puzzle. First Yakov

saw vayar Yakov that there was chevitim

and then it says he shamati he heard

that it was there. How could he see that

there was chev in mitime?

Some commentators understand this seeing

as a form of prophecy.

Perhaps Yakov perceived that there was

something there that could already

nourish and heal him because part of his

raon, his hunger was not only physical.

Part of his longing was for a wholeness

that had been absent for decades since

his son sold Yoseph.

And so while Yakov did not know that

Yoseph was in Mitraim, perhaps on some

level he knew

that a shift was possible. And already

with the sight of Chev and Mitraim

began to f to feel a little bit satiated

because Chev is also connected to

another word spelled with the same

letters.

See meaning hope.

In the Psalms we read al Adonai Elohav

that we look to God with hope.

The difference is only a dot. The vowel

that makes the letter a shen or a sin.

Read this way.

Yakov saw that there was hope in mitz.

A midash plays with this connection,

highlighting how intertwined brokenness

and hope can be. There was brokenness,

the verse says. The midrash responds,

this is the famine.

There was hope, the midrash says, these

were the years of plenty. There was

brokenness.

Yoseph was taken down to Mitraim. There

was hope. Yoseph rose to power. There

was brokenness. The Israelites were

enslaved. There was hope.

They were redeemed.

Maybe Yakov saw the brokenness that

would become

Israelite slavery in Mitzim.

Maybe he saw the brokenness within his

own family. And perhaps he also saw se

hope that it would be in Mitzraim where

they would find food where he would

ultimately learn that Yoseph was still

alive.

Where reconciliation would begin

brokenness and hope are nestled within

one another.

The midash moves back and forth, but I

don't think it wants us to see the

relationship as merely sequential.

See hope is not simply a response that

comes after chev brokenness

but the dialectical tension reminds us

that we have the possibility of hope

after brokenness.

As Aviva Zornberg writes before such a

crisis in a condition of wholeness and

security hope is irrelevant.

after it some plausible reconstruction

of the shards become essential.

Hope is the work of trying to reassemble

what has shattered even when it can

never be whole. In the same way,

what's remarkable about Yakov is that

despite the deep pain he has endured, he

acts from hope. He sends his sons into

motion rather than allowing them to

remain frozen, helplessly staring at one

another.

Hope is not naive, denying the pain, but

an orientation that Yakov has, insisting

that things don't have to remain the way

they are.

It's the antidote to despair. Not

because it erases the suffering, but

because it allows for the possibility of

emerging from it.

Moving from the world of chev to se is

daring to trust that a shattered

condition won't always be such.

In reality, it doesn't mean that we

won't ever be disappointed. As Zornberg

writes, that is the nature of the chev

world into which Yoseph has disappeared.

There is hope in Mitzraim and there is

also brokenness in Mitzraim.

They are too intertwined for us to

expect that we can have one without the

other. But in order to bear the

brokenness, we must figure out how to

find the se, the hope.

This past summer, I had the opportunity

and the pleasure of speaking with

podcast host Christa Tippet about hope

and despair. In this moment,

she describes an exercise in which she

asks people

what in this world is pushing them

towards despair

and separately what might be giving them

hope. And she finds that the two are

often intimately linked.

Hope tends to emerge precisely at the

sight of despair.

There is brokenness in Egypt

sever there is hope there too. The way

to find hope is by entering the place

itself. Yakov sends his sons into the

brokenness because perhaps he sees that

hope lives there as well.

Christa described to me hope as

connected to human imagination.

the ability to envision a world that

does not exist yet.

The world only changes when human beings

imagine something different and then

work to make it real.

Perhaps that is the type of imagination

that was exactly what Yakov's seeing was

about.

Yakov's instructions to his sons end

with the words

and so we will live. Yes, food sustains

the body, but perhaps hope sustains life

as well. Their physical lives depend on

the spiritual belief that something has

the possibility to get better.

That is hope.

And that too is the Kaneka miracle. Not

only that the oil lasted eight days or

that the Mcabes won a war, but the

miracle of the first night,

if the oil was expected to last one day

and lasted eight, then the miracle of

the first night when they knew that it

would last for one is that the people

chose to light at all in their defiled

temple.

They entered into the place of

brokenness and they dared to dream of a

different future.

And this too is Jews Davka after a

horrific attack at a Kaneka celebration

in Sydney showing up in even greater

numbers to celebrate publicly.

This is young students, our future

mobilizing against gun violence,

refusing to be governed by fear.

We live in a world of yes Chevitz.

There is brokenness in that very narrow

place.

But we can draw on Yakov who saw who

imagined that perhaps there is also se

there is also hope.

And just as Yakov looked into Mitsraim,

a place of deep darkness for our people,

and was able to discern hope,

so too may we find light in these days

of darkness, daring to imagine a

different world.