Parashat Vayishlah | Rabbi Alex Braver | December 6, 2025

As, Rolly wrote

so beautifully about in the towards Shabbat.

We are in a season of change and transition and trying to find our footing.

And I want to acknowledge in this season of change,

that we've had a group of members of the community led by Leah Silver,

who is our vice president, and has been the head of the search

committee, for the past.

It's been almost six months at this point, and I want to acknowledge

Leah's incredible, graceful, wise and diligent leadership

and invite also all the other members of the search committee who are here to rise.

Just to be recognize that this is a very intensive effort.

Ellen Metzger, Toby.

Ballinger, Jacob complain.

Laura Spier is here.

I know Rebecca Rosenthal is not able to be here tonight at today.

And Joel Casas as well as, Ellen Mantle and Ali Vinny.

And did I forget anyone?

I think that's it.

So thank you for, so many,

hours of work in planning

the job description and the, all the work to put out the job

and then all the efforts to interview candidates and get us to this moment,

which is very significant, bringing our lead finalists,

this Shabbat, which, many of you know, but not everyone knows.

And, and, it's a particularly moving, I think Rollie and I both last night.

It's hard to get through even the bio without, without getting emotional

just because it's, we've had a very robust process.

Dozens of candidates.

Leah, I think and I interviewed 11 people.

The search committee interviewed seven people.

And so to arrive at this moment with someone who we know

so deeply, at least really and I know so deeply,

and the committee has got to know, over this

last period has, is a very special and moving moment

to have, our student come back as, as a teacher.

Rabbi Alex

Graver is a former BJ rabbinic fellow.

He was here from 2013 to 2016.

He brings a deep well of compassion,

intellectual curiosity, and spiritual creativity to his rabbinate.

He currently serves as congregation to ferret

at Congregation to Israel in Columbus, Ohio,

where he is known for his joyful approach to learning,

his nurturing presence with children and families, and his heartfelt

accompaniment of community members through celebration and sorrow.

Rabbi Raver is also the author of a forthcoming book,

The Snail in the Shell 70 Faces of God, World and Self.

Which actually really?

And I got a preview last year, last spring at the Fellows

Retreat, when?

He's due to write the prolog of beautiful

which is a passion project exploring the surprising

and creative metaphors for God and spiritual life

in traditional Hasidic texts with original translation and commentary.

A graduate of Brandeis University, Rabbi Braver first dedicated himself

to a year of service as a math and English teacher at a charter school in Boston.

He then pursued Jewish intensive study at the Hadassah Institute's

egalitarian yeshiva before before receiving rabbinic ordination

from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2000

2016, along with an Ma in Midrash

and a certificate in Pastoral Counseling and Care.

He lives in Columbus with his husband, Alex Meisner, who's here

and, works at the joint distribution committee with a lot of BJ members,

and their two young children, Ezra and Margo, who I think

will appear in a little while, and their dog, Benji, who will not appear

in a little while in quieter moments.

He enjoys Jewish mysticism, long run sci fi novels and vegan restaurants.

Barrel Harbor and, welcome and Welcome Home.

Sure.

I don't know which microphone to use.

It's a new set up since ten years ago.

That's.

I could use just about five minutes to go cry in the robing room, if that's okay.

And I'll be right back.

I'll pull it together and I'll pull it together.

About ten years ago,

I, was sitting upstairs in his office in the community house behind us.

I just accepted an offer, to serve as the assistant rabbi

of, this large conservative synagogue in Columbus to Israel.

My, at my home for the last ten years.

And I was checking in with Rolly and sort

of sharing my excitement and my fears and my worries.

Worries about leaving New York and and the great unknown of anything,

you know, sort of west of, of the river and,

and, and, and the fears of leaving BJ, which were very strong

and it was a particular sting to to say goodbye to BJ at the time.

And, and he said to me, I, I promised myself

I was not going to do the accent now, so I will not do it now.

I'll save it for the search committee on Sunday, maybe as part of my interview.

But he said, you're going to go out to Columbus and you're going to get settled,

and you're going to get to your new office and start to meet people and

lead services.

And one day you're going to say, why did Hashem send me here?

And, and you'll ask yourself that in moments of exasperation

and in moments of joy, in a moment of curiosity and and over time, that answer,

will become clear. Why did Hashem send me here?

And for a decade.

He was right.

And that I've had many moments of asking myself that question

and many different answers depending on the day.

And through it all, I've had the very consistent

joy of circling back here to BJ to check in,

to return for rejuvenating retreats with the former,

the other BJ rabbinic fellows in the network every couple of years

and soaking up the soulfulness of Shabbat here

when I was in town for conferences or to see family.

I got to travel to Costa Rica with Marcello,

a number of years back and join in one of his mindfulness retreats.

I've circled back here in joyful moments and in painful moments.

I've circled back here looking for inspiration and also

coming to share my own inspiration and my own growth.

I lived a lot of life when I was a fellow here.

2013 to 2016.

I met my husband, got married by Felicia.

I mourned, my mother's passing here sat Shiva,

walked into the down that aisle.

In an unforgettable, powerful moment.

I sat shiva for her in my 89th Street apartment,

and I've lived a lot of life since leaving and going to Columbus.

I got a dog, a house, a mortgage, four cars over the course of ten years.

Two were blessed memory.

Two kids and and some significant

gray in my beard and temples, which you may notice.

And through it all, BJ has remained my North Star,

the steady reminder of my core values as a Jew and a rabbi and a person.

And so to be standing here,

in this moment and in this context is really a tremendous honor.

This week,

we will read, about a similar

recurring theme in the life of Jacob, of Jacob

and his own, circling back again and again to one particular holy place.

Of course, we'll read about, Jacob's dramatic wrestling with the Angel

and his fraught reunion with his brother and other stories.

Painful and powerful.

But I, I most intrigued this year, by the end of the partial, when Jacob

gets a reminder from God to return to battle.

Battle is the place where he had once built an altar to God

when he was fleeing from a save his brother who had sworn to kill him.

And it was the place where, as a young man, in that moment of flight,

he had dreamed of a ladder or a stairway stretching

to heaven, with angels ascending and descending,

and it was the place where he woke up.

It was many years before and said, Manorama, how amazing,

how awesome is this place?

And back then, filled with awe, but still on the run

from his murderous brother and with nothing to his name

but his walking stick and a rock, he had turned into a pillow.

He made a promise. He made a vow.

A vow that if God would support him through his difficulty,

he would return and consecrate this site Beit El.

But according to the rabbis of the Midrash,

Jacob seems to have delayed fulfilling the promise to re consecrate the site

even once he'd come back to the land until the very end of the parsha,

when God says, get up and go, go to bed.

L and the rabbis, noticing this, they say in the Midrash, am I, Rabbi?

Other bar Kahana, rabbi of a bar Kahana, said, a malo a cottage.

Barak Ya'acov the Holy Blessed one says to Jacob, be shot.

Akita Nidra at the moment of difficulty, you vowed,

be sure to vaca shanti.

But at the moment of calm, of expansiveness, of ease, you forgot.

At the moment of difficulty, you vowed.

At the moment of ease you forgot.

And so now, years later, Jacob has a dozen plus children.

More than two wives, maybe at least kind of two wives

or more untold herds and property.

And why has he not fulfilled his promise?

Why has he delayed?

Why does he need a reminder from God at this moment

for God to say, Kumalo, Bethel,

get up and go to beat l.

Better late than never, right? That's true.

That he gets up and goes and builds an altar,

but he maybe shouldn't have needed the reminder.

Still, Beit El is not done with Yaakov, and the narrative for a whole chapter

seems to linger around this place as life continues to happen to him.

Deborah Devorah, the nursemaid of his mother Rebecca,

dies, and Deborah is buried right by Beit El.

And, according to the Midrash, the rabbis imagine that also at that same moment,

his mother dies.

Rebecca also dies herself.

And then we have another story where Jacob again

returns to the same place and God re renames him.

Re renames him, gives him a second

repetition of the name change from Jacob to Israel.

The God Wrestler.

At this same place, Beit El,

and then Jacob again sets up a pillar and consecrate it again.

And then, as he sets out from Beit El,

his wife Rachel dies in childbirth

and she's buried along the way,

and he sets up yet another pillar, another monument, a gravestone.

In this time.

All around the same place of battle.

And so Jacob seems to have two opposite

reactions to this place, I think, in the course of his life.

The first is delay, delay, delay.

Right.

Bishop Atkinson needs right at the moment of difficulty.

You vow the shot to revocation T.

But once things are good, you forget.

You delay.

But his soul can feel the pull to this place.

And once he does return, he is circling it again and again around this holy site

and this place that holds the memory

of awe and wonder of Manorama Coleman.

How amazing is this place?

The memory of angels, the memory of fleeing,

the memory of trial and tribulation.

The memory also as he continues through his life,

the memory of searing grief for his mother's nurse and his mother

and his wife, all circling this same place.

I think I know this feeling.

There are times in my life where I have felt

very connected to my own battle.

Not necessarily a physical place, but part of my core being my my own house

of God, my own inner place where God dwells within me.

I think about the moment after my mom died, and I remember,

very clearly, the sense of tunnel vision or of blinders like horse blinders

and all the other gods in my life did not matter.

It disappeared, and I could only focus on a few core

things and a few core people, and all the other stuff was just

it was just me, and it was frivolous, and it kind of fell away.

And I promised myself when I could kind of breathe again.

You know, I'm never going to forget what it means

to have that

focus, to know what's really important.

I promised myself.

And then, of course, big shot Rebecca someday.

Right? And, you know, then you got to do the laundry and got,

you know, things are good.

And the Michigans kind of creeps in at the edges

of your vision, you know, and you can't quite get rid of it.

I think about this same feeling, you know, my wedding day.

I think about this.

When my kids were born, I found that same sort of sense of, this is what matters.

Here at prayer and BJ back in Ohio, in my congregation on retreats,

I get that feeling sometimes if I'm in the zone teaching, preaching, running.

When I was on sabbatical

on the beach in Tel Aviv, that was a particularly powerful moment.

Or running on a random Thursday along the Allen Creek Trail in Columbus, Ohio,

but always

besides vacation, right?

There's always the, you know, things get calm again

and you forget.

And there's laundry to do and there's emails to answer

and there's diapers to change.

Although my daughter is a very proud

she's she's in her first couple days of, of no, no diapers.

So we're we're working on it.

I don't want to I don't want to jinx anything, but, but that's its own.

Its own sort of stress, right?

So I think this is a very common experience of,

Bishan Akita Nidra, which I.

Raja Shanti. Right.

We always forget

what it means to return to the beach.

L the sort of house of God.

And so this, I think, is why having Yaakov sort of circling

beit L for this whole chapter feels like

maybe a moment of growing maturity for Jacob in a moment.

That also epitomizes what a community

or a synagogue like BJ or any spiritual community.

But especially this one, epitomizes what it ought to be about.

And it's not only Manorama com Hazar.

Right. Wow.

This is incredible.

I'm swept away off my feet. I'm.

I'm in Costa Rica.

I'm having an experience. I.

Those moments are so important.

But it's also about creating

the sacred center and the charged holy place that we feel drawn back to.

And that anchors us

not just in the moments of overwhelming joy or overwhelming grief,

or moments of feeling scared, but

the place where we turn

over and over again, the place we circle back to again

and again and again to check in with our deepest values.

When we're celebrating, when we're grieving,

and in the inevitable moments where we realize we have forgotten

the vows that we've made to ourselves and to each other and to God.

This is not just

a physical place, Bates al the house of God.

It's something deeper.

When Rafael, when Rachel, his wife, dies in childbirth

and route from Bates El to France,

Jacob doesn't turn back to beat El.

He sort of pulls the biblical car over to the side of the road,

and he does this ritual there on the side of the road,

the same ritual that he learned at Beat El.

He knows he doesn't need to go back there every time.

It's not about the place.

And so he builds a massive, this pillar,

the monument to Rafael.

Because I think I think in some way he knows Beit El

has kind of come to live inside of him now, in a deeper way.

And this is a secret that we as Jews have learned the hard way in our history

through exile and through everything that we take our sacred spaces with us.

So for communities and for

societies and for people

we circle around, we circle back.

We vow to live up to what

we learn in these core moments, and then we drift away again,

and then we return again, and then we drift away again.

And like Jacob, our journeying patriarch,

we wrestle, we struggle, we vow.

We forget.

And then we are reminded and we vow again.

And like Jacob, we are promised a new name of Israel, the one who struggles.

And that name reflects not only who we are,

but who we aspire to be.

And then we lose sight of that, and we become Yaakov again,

just plain old Jacob.

And then we remember, and we become used

for elegant for a moment, and then we go back to being Jacob.

And that's just the journey,

the looping return

back and forth from Bates L2 Bates all reminds me,

of what Jewish life and spiritual life are about.

Not just one transcendent moment, but building a life around the search

and the circling of those moments.

It's about building communities that are elastic enough to support us

through those moments, and building ritual and study and prayer and action

that are all sort of primed to bring us back to that place

when we inevitably vow and forget.

It is

to me, like the teaching of Seneca Cohen of Lublin,

19th century rabbi, one of my

friends, who

who quotes the line from proverb Sheva, you pulled Sadeq to come, right?

Sheva, you pulled Sadeq the righteous.

That Sadeq falls seven times the come and gets up again.

And, And he says it's the Shiva you pulled, Sadeq.

It's the seven falls that allow the rise,

that allow the

rise, the falling itself and the drifting and the forgetting and the circling back

even seven times that is what allows us to get up

and to rise higher and to grow.

And so in my own circling around BJ these many years, it's

not only the physical space, although I really do love being here,

and I think this is genuinely the most gorgeous sanctuary

in the world, personally speaking, and not just pandering.

It doesn't hurt, though.

But it's really

about the circling and returning to the massive, the pillar

that is inside and that pillar of the values that this place stands for

and circles back to, and drifts and circles back and drifts and circles back.

And I know that BJ is a place that is constantly in this process of circling,

departing, returning, and checking back in with what is the massive veil?

What is the pillar?

What is the battle of this place?

What is the house of God at the center of this community?

What is the Torah that guides it?

What is it that this community aspires to be?

And like Jacob,

it is laser focused on that Beit El, the sacred center.

And then there's budgets and there's committees and there's stuff

and there's staff and, you know, all the all the things that happen.

And then always, always, always it circles back,

of course corrects and it finds the true north always engaged

in that holy quest of circling closer and closer and closer to the core.

And so at this moment of transition

for the community, as the community finds its feet

and sees the earth spread beneath it

as a firm foundation held up by God,

as we keep an eye on the massive, the pillar, the Bates,

the home of God at the center of this community's commitment

to each other, to God, to each other, to to the world.

That's the heart.

I think of the whole thing.

That's the most important challenge.

And I know it is one

that this community is well equipped to meet.

Shabbat Shalom.