Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Alex Braver | December 5, 2025

Shabbat Shalom to everyone.

So much alone.

So very special.

So every Shabbat is a special Shabbat.

But this is a particularly special Shabbat.

As we welcome our.

Lead finalist

for rabbinic candidate to have the day.

Who is, Rabbi Alex Braver.

And he's here with his husband, Alex Heisler.

And we're so happy to have them in our sanctuary.

And for those who have had the chance already to be with them, and,

we have a whole Shabbat together to, get to know them.

If you didn't know them already.

Rabbi Alex Craver was a former BJ fellow.

He was here from 2013 to 2016, and a lot has happened since then.

Rabbi Alex Favre brings a deep well of compassion,

intellectual curiosity, and spiritual creativity to his rabbinate.

He currently serves at Congregation Israel in Columbus, Ohio,

where he is known for his joyful approach to Jewish learning.

His nurturing presence with children and families, and his heartfelt

accompaniments of community members through celebration and sorrow.

Rabbi braver is also the author of A beautiful, beautiful upcoming book

called The Snail in the Shell Seven Faces of God, World

and Self by Soon Books, which is a passion project exploring the surprising

and creative metaphors for God and spiritual life in traditional

Hasidic texts, with original translations and commentary.

He's a graduate of Brandeis University,

and Rabbi Braver first dedicated himself to a year of service

as a math and English teacher teacher at a charter school in Boston.

He then pursued intensive study at the Hudson Institute

Egalitarian Yeshiva before receiving rabbinic ordination

in 2016, along with an Ma

in Midrash and Certificate in Pastoral Counseling.

He lives in Columbus with Alex LaFleur and their two young children,

who are not here tonight.

Ezra, who's six, and Margot, who's almost three, and their dog Benji.

In quieter moments, he enjoys Jewish mysticism, long runs,

sci fi novels and vegan restaurants.

So we're really honored and joyful to welcome him this summer.

He sounds very impressive. I.

I just standing here and,

looking out at your faces,

I can't describe what it feels like to be in this moment,

and to be in the community that invested so much in me.

At a critical moment in my own life.

My own journey.

And to be back here now, for this moment, I'm

blessed and grateful just to be here tonight.

Thank you to my teachers, to this whole community

back in, in Columbus

when I lead kids services in our religious school.

I try to make it fun, and we sing and we dance.

I picked up guitar in the last ten years, so I play some guitar,

and we move and wiggle and bend and stretch and.

And along the way, maybe they learn some of the words,

some of that fiddler, hopefully.

And then when we get to the Amida,

you know,

we go through the words of the Amida, and then I sort of have a silent moment,

and I say, okay, now, you know, this is the most important part.

I want you to think, you know,

kindergartners, first second graders, third graders.

And what is the to feel?

What's the prayer in your heart?

And once you have it, you can sit back down, right.

And, and then sometimes I'll let them just have their private moment

and sometimes I'll ask, you know, what was the moment in your heart?

What was the moment in your heart?

And I'll go around with the microphone and let them all share.

And every now and then they'll say the prayer in my heart was for a Pokemon card.

You know, the prayer in my cart was was for a bicycle.

But but usually they have this sort of intuitive sense

that prayer really is something deeper than than Pokemon cards.

As attractive as the those are.

And so they'll say, my family, you know, it was your prayer in your heart

for peace.

You know, for for my friends, for my class, for the world.

And, and I think that sort of gets it

a deeper question and deeper need about why we do see Lao, why we do prayer,

why we do any of the spiritual practice that we all care about.

Otherwise, you wouldn't be here.

And I think this is the same problem,

that comes up in the parsha when when Yaakov and Jacob,

encounters this moment

where he knows that his brother is coming.

The brother who has sworn to kill him.

The brother who is approaching

with 400 of his closest friends with unknown intentions.

And he has a very difficult night.

And during that night, before the wrestling match with the Angel,

which is a whole other sermon.

He he says a prayer and he says, oh, God, my father,

the God of my father, Abraham, the God of my father Isaac.

Oh, eternal God, you said to me,

return to your native land, and I will do you good.

The value of 80 value, Mark.

So you said you would do good for me.

This is the moment. God. I'm paraphrasing a bit.

This is the moment, God where you need to follow through on your promise.

And then at the end of just a very short prayer,

just a couple lines,

he repeats this and he says, God, you said, hey TeV ATV mark you.

Not only did you say you will be good to me, you said hated ATF.

You'll be double good. You'll be really good to me.

So as my brothers approaching

me, please remember you said you would be good to me right?

Simple enough.

This is a promise that Jacob is coming to collect on.

But Aviva Zorn Burg, who is a,

brilliant Torah scholar, contemporary writer, points out

something that I was very struck by, which is that when God.

But when, when when Jacob quotes God,

Jacob is misquoting God.

Because if you look back at the promises that God made, God never said

ATV man or hated ATV.

God never said, I would be good to you.

God said, I know Imma,

I'm with you or yeah Imma I will be with you.

It was never that I will be good to you.

It was only that I would be with you.

And so for for Eve his arm burg.

And I think she's right.

This is not just a misquote or Jacob forgetting

the essential nature of the promise.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding on Jacob's part

about what our spiritual lives are supposed to be about.

We all, obviously, we hope for good, right?

We hope for new Pokemon cards.

We hope for new bikes. Right?

We hope for a new job.

We hope for whatever it is we're hoping for.

And there's nothing wrong with wanting good.

And there's nothing wrong.

Even with with crying out to God and saying, I want, I need.

You know, these are my longings. Please.

That's that's one of the essences of Selah.

But the promise from God is not the ATV.

Mark, I will be good to you.

I will do good to you.

The promises.

Yeah, I will be with you.

I'll be with you through it.

There's a lot of daylight between.

I will do good to you, and I will be with you.

And it reminds me, of something I learned when I was in Jerusalem.

As rabbinical student, I took a meditation class with the rabbi

James Jacobson, myself, who is an amazing teacher.

And, he talked about for him the definition of money or beacon of faith

or trust in God.

And he said, it's not the faith that God will stop anything bad from coming at you.

It's not the faith that you will be protected from any harm.

Anyone who's seen real life knows that that's not how God works.

Faith

is finding the trust that whatever comes at you,

you have the capacious ness and the and the room inside of you to hold it

and to get through it

with your practice, with your community, with your friends, with your family,

with God's help.

That's what faith is.

Whatever comes at me, I can hold it and I can be through

it, and God can be with me through it,

and I'm with you through it.

Not necessarily.

I'm going to be good to you through it.

And so, lo and behold, as Jacob goes through his grappling with the angel

and then gets his new name, Israel the Wrestler.

He discovers, I think, through the rest of his life, which is not all good.

From this point forward, things go okay with Assaf,

and that's a great that's great, you know, good job.

But but there's still plenty of sorrow in his life.

So plenty of suffering in his life.

And I think, I hope for him that he has sort of taken the same lesson

from Sheila that my, you know, kindergartners first, second, third

graders have, which is that Sheila, it isn't about getting good things.

It is. You can want the good things.

You can yearn for the good things.

You can share that yearning.

But it's about recognizing there's a presence with you

and cultivating the practice to help recognize that presence, even in

the most difficult of times.

It's realizing that

spiritual practice and prayer are not transactional.

It's not tit for tat.

It's not metaphysical bargaining.

It's about looking for something beyond,

and it's about the deeper yearning beneath our more pedestrian wants and desires.

It's about finding the capriciousness within ourselves

and about allowing a moment like Shabbat, where we just

sit and just are and aren't asking, aren't

trying to get more and trying to do more,

but just to build that resilience and build the space in ourselves

to recognize those moments when God is with us,

even if it doesn't always feel like God is being good to us.

Shabbat Shalom.