As we continue to mourn the losses of October 7 and pray for the safe return of the hostages and the IDF troops, this week’s kavanot will focus on Israeli poetry and music. Each week in Ulpan, our Hebrew language class, we would listen to a news report. All of us – even in the higher Hebrew level – waited for the mezeg avir, the weather report. It was easy to understand – we knew shemesh, sun, or later in the year, geshem, rain. The soccer scores were fun too – usually it involved Israel, efes (zero). My first year of rabbinical school was 2001-2002. While on paper it seems unremarkable, other than being longer ago than I might care to admit, the reality of those dates means that I lived in Jerusalem through what many would agree was the worst year of the second Intifada. From September 2000 through August 2002, 260 Israelis were killed and [...]

As we continue to mourn the losses of October 7, and pray for the safe return of the hostages and the IDF troops, this week’s kavannot will focus on Israeli poetry and music. Israeli poet Dan Pagis arrived in pre-State Israel in 1946, having spent much of his adolescence in Nazi concentration camps. With that particularly Israeli blend of Biblical knowledge and modern sensibilities, he wrote perhaps his best-known poem: “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.” here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i Published in 1970, it was haunting then – and still now. So, when I saw a poem by modern Israeli poet Yochai Shalom Hadad making the rounds, it took my breath away. Entitled “Written In My Family WhatsApp Group,” it reads (translation is mine, so are any errors): here [...]

As we continue to mourn the losses of October 7, and pray for the safe return of the hostages and the IDF troops, this week’s kavannot will focus on Israeli poetry and music. There is a wonderful, albeit potentially apocryphal, story about a tourist looking for water in an Israeli grocery store. Interested in a particular brand, the tourist calls out: Hey, where is Mei Eden (“the waters of Eden”). Completely nonplussed, as Israeli checkout workers usually are, the secular woman sitting at the cash register responds almost immediately: Genesis 2, verses 10-14. Because, of course, that is where the waters of Eden appear in the Torah. It is a story that, to me, has always spoken about the deep connection between our ancient texts and this modern land, about the beautiful ways in which Jewish language and history plays out in even the most ordinary encounters in Israel today. Over the past [...]

As we continue to mourn the losses of October 7, and pray for the safe return of the hostages and the IDF troops, this week’s kavannot will focus on Israeli poetry and music. Each Friday, I log on to my computer to lead Mourner’s Kaddish for over 75 people from all over the United States — and sometimes the world. Beginning early in the COVID lockdown, My Jewish Learning has been offering a daily chance to say kaddish, and over these three-plus years, we have created a small community that holds each other briefly each day and each week. I am the Friday leader, and each week, I watch new and now-familiar names scroll through the chat, as each person names the loved one — or ones — they are remembering. And so I found myself sitting outside on a beautiful Los Angeles day, wondering how to lead kaddish for these individuals on October 13, 2023. How [...]