It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of challenges in the world today. It’s important to be honest and clear-eyed about the reality in which we live if we’re going to have any shot at making it better.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we can remain positive, hopeful, and engaged during hard times. Not surprisingly, I look to Jewish wisdom for guidance.
Judaism encourages us to remember the long arc of history and the extraordinary stories of which we are a part. This month is Jewish American Heritage month, which you can learn more about here. There are so many ways to engage and learn about American Jewish history and culture — including great opportunities to come together in community — and I encourage you to explore the many ways we can be proud, joyful Jews this month.
On a deeper level, this month recognizes that Jews have been part of the fabric of this country since its founding, and that the U.S. is still the greatest place to be Jewish outside of Israel in our people’s history. Our past reminds us that we have lived through challenging times before; we have persisted, and we are still here. Even when the ground underneath us feels shaky and the future is unclear, knowing where we come from can give us the strength to keep moving forward with confidence and hope.
In Judaism, we also have a sacred responsibility to teach our story to our next generations, ensuring that they can walk through the world as a proud, confident, knowledgeable, resilient Jewish people today. This was on full display earlier this week at Birthright Israel’s Boston gala celebrating my extraordinary predecessor at Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP), Barry Shrage.
Barry has led this community with vision and passion. Cultivating our next generation’s love of Israel and the Jewish People has been his life’s work. At the gala, we heard personal stories of young leaders in our community whose Jewish identities have been formed, whose lives have been changed, and whose souls have been ignited by the transformative experience of travel to Israel through Birthright. I left feeling hopeful that our future is in good hands.
This week, we conclude the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) with a double Torah portion. I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the names of these two portions: Behar and Bechukotai. Behar means “on the mountain,” and it refers to Mount Sinai, where the Israelites experienced the magnificent revelation and on which Moses received the Torah. Bechukotai means “My laws or my ways”: we are instructed to live out the teachings of the Torah in our day-to-day lives or “to walk or go in the ways of God.”
What do these two names and concepts, and their proximity to one another, teach us?
To live lives of meaning and purpose, agency and hope, we need to return to the mountaintop: turn our eyes toward the heavens, stay open to experiencing the Divine, and keep renewing a sense of awe and wonder that keeps our tradition and our story dynamic and alive. The vision of “being on the mountain” gives us the energy and motivation to keep going, and to keep striving to be our best.
We also need to come down from the mountain and translate that inspiration into action. We live in the real world, as messy as it is. That means wrestling with competing values and making hard decisions, knowing that we sometimes get them wrong. We strive to live Torah with the urgency of revelation, through how we speak, act, and relate to every person. Mount Sinai wasn’t meant to be a one-time event, but rather an ongoing way of life. That is what Behar and Bechukotai teach us, no matter how uncertain the world may feel.
The challenges we face are real and can be daunting. Yet there is so much in Jewish history, in teaching the next generation, and in the wisdom of our weekly Torah portions from which we can draw hope and strength.