Leiah Moser's Blog

One thing I’ve always liked about being a congregational rabbi is the way this role mixes the tachlit with the tachlis. To risk ruining the joke by explaining it, tachlit is a Hebrew word which means “end” or “ultimate.” In Jewish philosophical and mystical texts it sometimes refers to the ultimate, highest, most fully-developed form or purpose of something. In its Yiddish pronunciation, however, tachlis is generally used to mean the basic, practical work of earning a living and taking care of business. I think it’s important to spend time contemplating the tachlit (ultimate things), but it’s also important not to neglect the tachlis (practical matters).

The practical matter I’m going to attend to today is the matter of writing a d’var Torah. I’ve been thinking about this lately because we have a number of b’nei mitzvah students right now who are getting ready for their big day, and it occurred to me that there might be others out there who could use a little advice on practical homiletics (the art of sermon writing).

What is a d’var Torah?

In Hebrew, “d’var Torah” simply means “a word of Torah,” or alternately, “a matter of Torah.” In basic terms it is a short lesson about values and morals typically connected in some way with the Torah portion for that week. Part of what it means to be Jewish is that the Torah belongs to all of us, not simply the clergy. Everybody has something to teach!

Coming up with an idea

If you’ve agreed to give a d’var Torah, it may be because you’ve already got an idea for something you want to teach. If so, then great! But sometimes (and this is particularly the case for rabbis as well as for b’nei mitzvah students) the obligation comes before the idea, and it is going to be necessary to come up with something to say. Here’s a simple procedure that often works for me:

Read and reread the text you’re going to teach about (generally the Torah portion for the week you’re going to be speaking). The first time you read through, do it with the goal of getting a general sense of what the text is saying. Then, go back through it again, this time paying attention to specific details that catch your eye. If there are parts that are difficult to understand, make a note of them so you can do some research or ask a teacher about it.Pick out one or two things that you want to focus on. You can’t write a good d’var Torah about the whole Torah portion, there’s just too much there! It’s better to find one or two things to focus on, something you find interesting or challenging.Ask yourself what lesson is this particular text coming to teach you? Why does it feel particularly relevant right now? When it comes to teaching a particular text, I think of it in terms of two roads:The positive road is when the text is saying something I need to learn from and emulate, when it’s expressing a value we need to incorporate into our lives.The negative road is when the text is saying something that feels particularly challenging, problematic, or out-of-date, and and I need to wrestle with it a little, to see how what it’s saying may be flawed or incomplete and to acknowledge that our beliefs and values may have grown and changed over time.Both of these roads are perfectly good ways to learn from Jewish text! Judaism has grown and evolved over time precisely through wrestling with challenging texts and filling in the gaps in the tradition as we have inherited it.Figure out how this lesson is relevant to the current moment. I genuinely don’t think that a d’var Torah has to be topical, but I’m enough of a philosophical pragmatist to believe it definitely ought to connect in a meaningful way with the needs and lived experience of you and the people you are speaking to. Ask yourself: What does this teaching mean for me, and for us?Writing your d’var Torah

Now that you’ve got a basic idea of what you want to teach, it’s time to sit down and actually write the thing. In my opinion, a d’var Torah ought to be around ten minutes long, maybe longer or shorter depending on the situation. One way to approach it is to follow a basic structure:

Introduction — Give a brief explanation of what your text is about and the piece you’re going to be focusing on. If you are teaching about the Torah portion for that week, don’t fall into the trap of recapping the entire Torah portion. Generally, a given parsha contains a number of different segments that may be more or less unrelated to each other. Focus on the part that is going to be relevant to what you have to say. Response — Help your listeners understand what you find interesting, important, or challenging about the text you are focusing on. This might involve talking a little about your personal emotional response to the text and where that came from, or perhaps it will involve talking about what has been going on lately that makes this a relevant piece of text to explore.Teaching — What lesson do you think we ought to learn from what the text has to say here? Should it motivate us to treat other people differently, or to take action to help fix some problem (tikkun olam), or to look at the world in a different way? How do you interpret this text, and what is the basis for that interpretation? This is also a good point to bring in other, related sources that may help to shape our perspective.Reflection — How does this teaching directly relate to our lives, or the situation in the world around us? Why is it important in this moment?Questions for discussion (optional) — As a Reconstructionist rabbi I tend to want to finish a teaching with an opportunity for my listeners to respond in some way, with questions or reflections of their own. In order to facilitate this, I try to keep my teaching reasonably brief and focused, and give one or two questions for reflection at the end to get the conversation going.

So there you have it, some very basic advice for writing a serviceable d’var Torah. Of course this isn’t the only way to do it — it certainly isn’t how I do it every time — but if you’ve been asked to give a teaching in a Jewish space, or maybe just want to stretch yourself a little and try being a teacher (because as I said, everyone has something to teach), then I hope this will help you get started. If anyone reading this happens to make use of this advice, I’d love to hear about it sometime!

For a long time I have wrestled with my identity as a “trans rabbi.” In a sense, the case is very clear and unambiguous — I am a rabbi, and I am a transgender woman, no question about that. So why do I sometimes instinctively hesitate for a moment before describing myself as a “trans rabbi?” I suppose it is because I don’t feel like these two things really have anything to do with one another. Certainly I make an effort to publicize my belief that transgender people should be enthusiastically included in Jewish spaces, and in my teaching I like to hold up examples of gender diversity in our tradition, but I feel like this would be true whether I were trans or not. I don’t teach these things because I am trans, I teach them because they are right. 

The thing about being trans that cisgender folks sometimes seem to have trouble understanding is that most of us don’t actually spend a lot of our time thinking about being trans. This is because, despite what the anti-trans bigots out there would like you to believe, being transgender isn’t an ideology, it’s just something we are — like being tall or short, left handed or right handed, preferring chocolate ice cream or lemon sorbet. I don’t think about my preference for lemon sorbet unless I happen to be ordering dessert, and I don’t usually think about my gender much unless someone else is making trouble about it. 

Which brings me to the real issue at hand: Lately I, like many other trans people, have been thinking a lot more than usual about being trans. It isn’t because I want to — I would much rather be thinking about what I want to teach in my next Torah study, or the upcoming season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, or board games. But due to the world having been delivered into the hands of the attribute of harsh judgment (or in less kabbalistic terms, due to the world having apparently lost its ever loving mind), many trans folks, particularly those of us living in the United States and in the United Kingdom, are having to cope with life under a government that actively hates us and wants us to vanish from the face of this earth — more than usual, I mean.

The urgency of this situation has caused me to rethink somewhat my stance on being a “trans rabbi.” I still bristle somewhat at the idea of being pigeonholed like that, because — and I say this hopefully without arrogance — I feel like I have a much broader Torah to offer than what that somewhat limited phrase implies. But I cannot deny that these days I am feeling more like a trans rabbi than ever. 

When I say that, I mean it in two different ways: I feel like a trans rabbi, in that I feel singled out and imperiled in specific ways the majority of my congregants — the ones who aren’t trans, anyway — cannot directly relate to. There is a unique kind of dread that results when you and people like you are being steadily erased from official existence day by day. Like many people around me, I am trying to do everything I can to speak out against encroaching fascism, to protest, to resist — both because it is the right thing do do, and because of the need to model this behavior for those who look to me as some kind of moral exemplar. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a great deal of hesitation to put myself in any kind of situation where I might be arrested — because I am extremely aware that doing so would likely result in my being sent to a men’s prison where I as a trans woman would be in serious danger of getting raped and murdered. That is the kind of knowledge that tends to impact a person’s thinking about resistance.

At the same time, the other way in which I feel more like a trans rabbi these days is in a heightened sense of my own obligation to speak out more forcefully than ever about the inherent dignity and worth of transgender people specifically from a religious standpoint. As a rabbi, I have a very particular perspective on the anti-trans rhetoric of the current moment, which often tends to present itself as being rooted in traditional religious values when in reality it is anything but. It is vitally important, in the midst of the religious right’s attack on our nation’s core principles, not to cede ownership of religion to fascists who misappropriate the trappings of religion in the name of a twisted and hateful ideology. 

One of the worst things about living in a time like this is the way everything tends to get warped in a manner corresponding to the harshness of the times. Even otherwise sane and loving people all too easily lose track of their inner sweetness because a climate of fear and hatred is corrosive to our sense of self. In such an environment, we all need to adapt in order to survive. The challenge before us is how to adapt without losing track of who we really are. For me, that involves hanging on to a belief in the transformative power of rachamim (mercy) in a world which often laughs at simple human kindness. The only way forward, I have to believe, involves stubbornly asserting our own humanity and the humanity of others in the face of overwhelming pressure from the powers that be to get us to stop doing so. To paraphrase Rabban Gamliel: In a place where there is no humanity, how much more important is it to strive to be human.

When someone afflicted with tzaraat — a mysterious, possibly supernatural skin disease which causes ritual impurity — finds themselves healed, the Torah establishes a process whereby they begin to be assimilated back into the community. Initially, the priest joins them outside the camp — the afflicted person being required to remain outside the camp for the duration of their affliction — and performs a ritual involving two birds:

The priest shall order one of the birds slaughtered over fresh water in an earthen vessel; and he shall take the live bird, along with the cedar wood, the crimson fabric, and the hyssop, and dip them together with the live bird in the blood of the bird that was slaughtered over the fresh water. He shall then prinkle it seven times on the one who is to be cleansed of the tzaraat and cleanse them; and he shall set the live bird free in the open country. (Leviticus 14:5-7)

In a way, these two birds are like an emblem of the person who has just emerged out of a time of trouble, illness or severe danger. It is as if there are two of me, the one who escaped, and the one who did not. And the problem is that it is very difficult to know, to really know in my bones, which of those two people I actually am, the one who escaped… or the one who did not. That other self, the one who did not escape (or is it the one who did?) remains right there with me — sometimes standing a ways off, sometimes standing just a little to one side, sometimes right there in front of me casting a shadow between me and the rest of the world.

This ritual in the fields can be compared to the gomel blessing, which is to be uttered before the Torah by someone who has just recovered from a severe illness, escaped a dangerous situation or come home after a long journey:

Blessed are you, Adonai our God, ruler of the universe, who rewards the undeserving (in fact, the word chayavim feels much more forceful than that — the ones condemned to die) with goodness, and who has rewarded me with all good.

The rituals are not at all the same in form, but they are similar in function, forcing a separation between those two people — the one condemned to death and the one inexplicably rewarded with life — reminding us who we are, that we are the one who got away, the one still standing on this side of the gateway between life and death.

And the fact that the blood of the bird who did die acts as an agent of purification — isn’t this like a sign of forgiveness from that other self, a sign that that person, the one we aren’t but could be, somehow loves us and wants to be happy that this person, the one we are, made it through alive?

From the Zohar, parashat Toldot: 

Come and see: Everyone who busies themselves with the Torah, they preserve the world and preserve every single one of God’s works in its proper form. And there is not a single part of the human body which does not have an aspect of creation which corresponds to it. For indeed, just as a human is divided into many body parts, and all of them exist on their own level and are arranged in relationship to each other, so too is  the world. All the aspects of creation are like body parts which are joined together and arranged in relationship to each other — it is a real body! And everything is like the Torah, since the whole Torah is divided into parts and sections joined together, and when all of them are arranged properly, they from a single body. When David saw this work, he opened up and said, “How great are Your works, Adonai – You made them all with wisdom. The earth is filled with Your creations!” (Psalm 104)

What Rabbi Chiyah is articulating here is a kabbalistic concept sometimes expressed in the form of the acronym עש״ן (ashan, “smoke”), standing for olam, shanah, nefesh — world, year, and person. The idea is that phenomena existing at all different levels of being, from the individual human up to the world as a whole and the cycle of the year, share a common structure. 

Just as the human body is an organic whole comprised of individual parts with a defined relationship to one another, so too does the world constitute such an organic whole on a different scale. And not only that, but the distinct parts of the one correspond functionally to those of the other. In other words, there is a part of the world which is geographically equivalent to the back of my right knee. And similarly, there is a part of my body which corresponds anatomically to Mexico City.

The key takeaway from this way of thinking is, I believe, the idea that every part of the world is as necessary to the greater whole as each part of my body is for me. Some of humanity’s greatest moral transgressions arise from ignoring that principle. Every person is sacred and necessary to the organic being of the world, and every people likewise. For one people to attack or oppress another is as absurd, and as self-defeating, as if a person’s stomach determined to wage war against their liver. This is no mere metaphor. As Rabbi Chiyah forcefully asserts, “it is a real body!”

There is a blessing customarily recited in the morning (and also after going to the bathroom) which praises God as the former of the human body, asserting that if even one of the body’s many vessels and channels were to be inappropriately opened or closed, “it would not be possible to survive and to stand before you, even for one hour.” Just as we rely upon the interdependent network of our body in order to survive, we need to cultivate the awareness that we really, fundamentally, cannot do without each other. Because right now it seems like we are dying of the sort of autoimmune disorder where the body is at war with itself, and such a body cannot stand, “even for one hour.”

This past weekend on Shabbat I spoke a little bit about the challenge of Aaron’s silence. If you recall, in parashat Shemini, the dedication of the mishkan (the portable sanctuary constructed by the Israelites in the wilderness) is interrupted by a terrible calamity when Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu are burnt up in a heavenly fire after offering “strange fire” before God. The response to this traumatic event is interesting:

Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what HaShem meant when God said, ‘Through those near to me I show myself holy, and gain glory before all the people.'” And Aaron was silent. (Leviticus 10:3)

The oddness of this response might be summed up in this way: That Moses seems to be saying too much in this moment, while Aaron seems to be saying too little. In any case, their motivations are obscure. Is Moses trying to comfort his brother in some way over the deaths of his sons, or is he trying to articulate some kind of theological understanding or justification of the event? Does Aaron’s silence indicate shock, displeasure with Moses’ words, or something else entirely?

What I think is that sometimes silence is simply the only real response to something we have experienced. That is a difficult thought to articulate, particularly in a world and at a time when the cultural zeitgeist seems to demand that we speak out at all times, constantly. I think the trouble we have is with the inherent ambiguity of silence, the way that all the things we don’t say invite interpretation while denying the possibility of any definitive interpretation. Silence can have many meanings, but to settle absolutely on any one meaning would be to break the silence.

All of this, of course, applies to the experience we have of the silence of others, the external garment of silence, as it were. But silence also has its internal side, which tends to be very different from the face it presents to the world. The internal face of silence is not a mystery to interpret, but an authentic response to an experience for which we have no words — a lived truth which defies, at least for the moment, our ability to communicate it to others.

If it is hard for us interpret Aaron’s silence, and if that fact makes us uncomfortable, I believe this is because of our own tendency to fill that silence up with whatever words come most naturally to us — words emerging from our own grief, our own losses, our own sense of grievance with God. But in this moment the key thing to understand is that whatever the internal face of Aaron’s silence may be, it is very much his, personal to him in a way that defies our efforts to capture it in language. We fail to do justice to the silence of others when we (like Moses, perhaps) rush too quickly to fill the gap with our own interpretations.

You see, the other important thing about silence is that it marks the boundary of a kind of sacred space different from, and more personal than, the communal sanctuaries we build to connect with God together. Within the walls of this sanctuary of silence, we come face-to-face with the deep, troubling, inscrutable silence of God, and come away changed by that experience.

What emerges from that encounter is hard to predict, and even harder to define, but still it is an essential component of that mysterious process we call healing, or acceptance, or spiritual growth, or whatever other label may be handy at the time to define the ineffable. In time, Aaron may find the words to describe that experience. But for now, we need to recognize that there is also a wisdom in silence, in the honest acknowledgement of those moments when we don’t have the words to frame what has happened to us. Before the light, darkness; and before the words, silence.

Holding on to the value of our work in a volatile world.

Being a congregational rabbi gives you a very particular perspective on the world’s events. People tend to share things with me about what’s going on in their lives, and in the lives of their relatives. From all those little conversations I tend to get a picture of what people seem to be worried about, what problems they’re currently facing, how they’re trying to deal with those problems — a highly localized picture, to be sure, but as the teachers of the kabbalistic tradition remind us, the microcosm is often a mirror of the macrocosm.

One thing that emerges from that microcosmic picture these days is that a lot of people are either actually struggling with job loss or in the position of having to worry about their job security because of the massive upheavals going on right now in the U.S. federal government. This kind of disruption has a tremendous impact on people’s financial wellbeing, as they suddenly find themselves scrambling for a job or having to help relatives in that situation. But this also has a spiritual impact, because most of us care deeply about the work we do, and it is a wrenching experience to see the work we’ve dedicated our lives to upended seemingly on a whim.

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I was in communication recently with a person who has a book that’s about to be published. They are feeling really concerned now that the book they have been working so hard on might end up facing book bans and other forms of pushback in the current political climate. They asked me for a prayer appropriate to the moment and I searched my head and came up with this one from Psalm 90:

ויהי  נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃

“May the favor of the Lord, our God, be upon us, let the work of our hands be firmly established for us, and make firmly established the work of our hands!”

Note that the last part of the verse could also be read to say, “and may the work of our hands make God firmly established!” This, for me, is the prayer of the moment, because this is the way it works: We pray to God to establish the work of our hands, but we also do our best to make sure that our work is establishing God in the world by promoting a just and righteous society and helping people in need. When that is happening, our hands and God’s hands work in partnership, the same hands dedicated to the same good ends. 

In times such as these when, as the sages of the Zohar might put it, the attribute of Gevurah seems to have reign over the world, it can be incredibly hard to hang on to that perspective — which is a pity, because maintaining that attitude toward the work we do is even more important at such times. Come what may, may God establish the work of our hands, and may the work of our hands help establish a godly world.

Today I was thinking about Earth Day in connection with Jewish values, and it occurs to me that we desperately need to find a way to get beyond the traditional framework of “baal taschit” (do not be wasteful) in our discussions about protecting the natural environment, to the more difficult work of uncovering Jewish perspectives that regard the nonhuman world as a moral subject worth considering in its own right.

The standard biblical text we tend to refer to in discussing our obligation to protect the environment from a halachic standpoint is Deuteronomy 20:19:

“When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city?” (Source: Sefaria.org)

Aside from the morally problematic context of a war of conquest (i.e. “when in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it…”), this commandment’s specific emphasis on fruit-bearing trees indicates a concern that is primarily focused on preserving a natural resource useful for humans. Admittedly the end of the verse seems to expand the field of concern somewhat with a question that seems to at least open the possibility that the trees themselves might have their own concerns. However, the way in which this commandment has been treated in the halachic literature tends to avoid that path, viewing the commandment primarily through the lens of the natural world’s utility to human beings.

I think this is an area where the only way forward is to look beyond the halachic framework and begin interrogating poetry for values. In biblical poetry, where the trees and the mountains sing praises to God, we can find a willingness to explore the avenue of empathy toward the natural world that tends to be ignored in the halachah. In poetry, nature (or rather, the variety of natural phenomena existing in the world) does not appear simply as a resource to be preserved for humanity, but as a subject to be related to – what Martin Buber refers to as a you rather than an it.

This may not be the only realm in which it would be necessary to go to poetry in order to supplement a gap in the incomplete moral vision of the halachic system. I tend to think that aggadah (i.e. the fields of narrative, poetry and speculative thought) ought to have at least as important a role to play in developing our sense of the Jewish ought as the halachah.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been doing much with this site in recent years, but the recent terrible election news here in the US has inspired me to reach out a little more than I have been doing. I’ve started by doing a little housekeeping here on my website, particularly to reflect the fact that I am now serving at a new congregation. Here is a message I sent out to my congregants at Temple Concord the day after the election. I hope it will also have some meaning and comfort for you:

My dear friends,

I know that many of you are hurting right now. I know that many of you are scared about what comes next. I feel that way too. I am not going to tell you that everything is going to be alright, because I have no way of knowing whether things will be alright. In any case I feel that saying such things tends to minimize the stark reality of the situation we are all facing, particularly those who are most directly targets of hateful rhetoric and discriminatory legislation (for my trans siblings, and for all others who have been a particular target this year: I see you).  

What I will tell you is that we have been through this before, and while contemplating that fact may be utterly exhausting and disheartening, it can also help us by reminding us what we have to do: We have to hold on to our fundamental values and stand up for them, no matter how others try to bully, mock, or scare us into letting them go. We need to reach out and look for allies. We need to find ways to help those who are most under threat. We need to take care of ourselves and others. And through it all, we need to pray for the strength, the courage, and the wisdom to do the work of repairing a world as broken and hurting as our own hearts. Karov HaShem l’nishberei lev — God is close to the brokenhearted.

With great love and prayers for our country and the world,

Rabbi Leiah

In this lesson we take a look at the life of Rabbi Eliezer ben Horkenos, a first-generation Tanna perhaps best known for his excommunication over the oven of Achnai affair. Respected by all his fellow rabbis, he exemplified a conservative approach to halachah that emphasized a reliance upon received tradition as opposed to teachings based on logical inference and interpretation.

We look this week at the life of Rabban Gamliel, who served as the Nasi of the Sanhedrin in the years immediately following the destruction of the Second Temple. Among other things, we take a look at majority rule as a principle of rabbinic decision making, the importance of respect/honor as a rabbinic value, and the difficult position in which Jewish leaders found themselves vis-a-vis the Roman government in the aftermath of the Great Revolt.