Part of a yearlong series on resilience in spiritual life.

Meet a 99-year-old gentleman who yesterday circumcised himself and today runs a fever. Age and Infirmity aside, he runs to greet surprise guests at his door, then rushes to help his wife feed them.  Missing an ingredient in the kitchen, he keeps running – first to get food, then to coordinate preparations.

What stamina and commitment!  Who is this guy, and what special juice powers him up?

Meet Abraham, resilience superstar and rushing champ of this week’s Torah portion (Vayera).

Tradition acclaims Vayera for Abraham bargaining with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, the ruin of those cities, the unlikely birth of Abraham’s sons Ishmael and Isaac, the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael, and the binding of Isaac. Often unnoticed is Abraham’s heed of speed. Seeing his visitors, he “ran to greet them” (Gen. 18:2), from which Torah derives the mitzvah of welcoming guests.  He then “rushed” to his wife, Sarah, and told her to “hurry” in preparing food (Gen. 18:6). Then he “ran” to his herd for calf and “hurried” his servant to prepare it (Gen. 18:7).

Why the rush? A traditional explanation for Abraham’s hurry is to show that one should strive to host guests with alacrity, joyful welcome and uninhibited generosity. We can ask a more basic question: how did a 99-year-old guy run around one day after circumcising himself?

Put another way, what gave Abraham resilience?

To me, two answers arise that really are one answer.  Either Abraham transcended his pain because cared so much about his guests, or he transcended his pain because he sensed he was doing God’s will.  Either way, the fount of Abraham’s resilience was that he cared about something more than himself. Tradition links Abraham with chesed (loving kindness) partly for this reason – his loving care that transcended himself.

As for Abraham, so for us. Love is our resilience updraft. When we care about another (or a cause, or a community) more than ourselves, we naturally boost our inner capacity to do, be and become. By lovingly serving something greater than ourselves, our love boosts our resilience.

Just ask our resilient rushing champ, Abraham.

– Rabbi David Evan Markus

Part of a year-long series about resilience in Jewish life.

Picture it.  The world as you know it will end.  You have time to prepare yourself but must bear the derision of disbelievers. When massive change comes, you are kept physically safe amidst tumult but suffer the darkness. Then you must rebuild in a world turned upside down.

So went the story of Noah and the Flood – and understood allegorically, so goes our story today.  Our world rocks in waves of death, divorce, illness, raging fires, major hurricanes, political revolts and economic dislocations. Collectively our planet hurtles toward an environmental brink.

How did Noah summon the resilience  before, during and after the Flood? How can we moderns summon the resilience to move through changes reshaping our lives and our world?

Perhaps it’s weird to call Noah a teacher of resilience: he had no choice. Perhaps it’s difficult to draw lessons from a story that sounds too much like a Twilight Zone episode to be believed.  Maybe it’s a reach for us imperfect souls to learn resilience from one whom Torah called uniquely “righteous” and “blameless” (Gen. 6:9). Still, Noah offers many resilience lessons.

One resilience lesson concerns agency. Maybe Noah seemed to have no choice, but then again, do we?  Most survivors of anything would prefer not to need to put their resilience to the test, and surely as a species humanity would prefer not to face today’s global threats. But when challenge comes, sometimes resilience boils down to having no choice, then drawing strength from capacity to survive, look back and marvel that we made it.

A related resilience lesson concerns hope.  God told Noah to build an ark hoping that construction would be so time-consuming that even the most corrupt would have the opportunity to repent (B.T. Sanhedrin 108b; Rashi Gen. 6:14). Even when odds are most slim, God hopes.  Noah, too: how much hope did Noah need to stay sane aboard the ark, then send a raven (once) and a dove (twice) to find dry land amidst a planet-sized sea (Gen. 8:6-12)?

A third resilience lesson concerns empowerment and vision. The ark would have been pitch black except that God told Noah to build a skylight (Gen. 6:16). But what light could a skylight cast in a 40-day torrent so dark that “floodgates of the sky” covered the earth? Teachings abound about that light – shining from Noah’s illuminating defiance to build the skylight at all, from good living aboard the ark, from a mystical stone, from the purified soul. Resilience sometimes means acting not because but despite, seeing not only what seems obvious but also what seems impossible.

A fourth resilience lesson concerns relationship. Noah insulated the ark in “pitch” (Gen. 6:14) – in Hebrew kofer, from the same root as “atonement” (Yom Kippur). Keeping waters out of the ark, staying afloat amidst life’s floods, asks not total separation but rather a quality of relationship we call forgiveness. We need to stay dry, but we can’t stay afloat without giving and receiving forgiveness. (It’s telling that this reminder comes just weeks after Yom Kippur, lest survival’s exigencies cause us to forget our High Holy Day atonement journey just recently completed.)

A fifth and maybe most important resilience lesson concerns memory. After the flood, God vowed never to repeat the Flood, and set a bow in the sky to recall this covenant (Gen. 9:11-16). Human resilience and survival, in Torah’s narrative, flows from this moment. Never again would God set out to obliterate humanity, and henceforth our fate rests in our own hands. God has remembered that covenant, but have we? Can we now see and remember, and draw the inspiration and resilience to save the only planet we have?

Agency, hope, empowerment, vision, relationship, memory – these are Noah’s tools of resilience, and ours.  We need these resilience tools now. Let’s use them.

– Rabbi David Evan Markus

Here they come again – those great, holy wondrous Days of Awe.

Something about the 10 days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur calls us back to ourselves – back to community, back to our souls, back to parts of ourselves that maybe we forgot (or we’d rather forget). Maybe it’s changing light of the seasons. Maybe it’s music or ancestral memory that grabs our kishkes. Maybe it’s something utterly beyond understanding.

Whatever it is, it calls now. How will you hear that call, and how will you answer?

As if to prime us, inspiration comes in this week’s Torah portion (Ha’azinu), which is Moses’ own call and answer. Moses’ “swan song,” presaging his own death, are his parting words to his people. Moses begins by calling out (Deut. 32:1) –

Ha’azinu ha-shamayim v’adaberah,
v’tishma ha-aretz imrei-fi!

Listen up, heavens, and I’ll speak;
hear, land, the words of my mouth!

Moses invokes heaven and earth as witnesses to his moment of meaning, just as heaven and earth are our witnesses for our own moment of meaning.

Witnesses to what? Cosmic forces aim us to the autumnal equinox and re-balance light and dark. Forces of climate change re-balance sky and sea. Forces of societal change re-balance politics. Everything, it seems, is changing and seeking a new equilibrium – and we might not like what we see.

As above, so below; as beyond, so within. As the world outside shifts on its cosmic, climactic, societal and political axes, we feel inside what is off-balance. If we’re paying attention, this time of year calls us to renew inner balance in an off-kilter world.

How? The Hebrew word Ha’azinu is a pun. Literally it means “give ear” (from ozen, “ear”), but colloquially it connotes a scale with weights equally balanced (like our two ears balance our heads). Ha’azinu calls us to re-balance by listening to the call of this moment, to forces of change beyond and within, to the shifting weight of this hour, to heaven and earth straining to hear our response.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: our souls, our communities and our world hang in the balance. We start by listening, by giving ear, by internalizing deeply that heaven and earth really are our witnesses. What we do will matter fundamentally in every way to who we are and what our world will be.

In these days of meaning, may each of us summon the courage to listen deeply, act boldly and renew balance for ourselves, each other and the world.

From all of us at The Jewish Studio, shanah tovah tikateivu v’tichateimu – may you and your loved ones be signed and sealed for a year of goodness.

– R. David Evan Markus

Urgent pleas to help flooded Texas and Louisiana flood my inbox. Many of these fundraising emails are from Jewish nonprofit organizations – which stands to reason: charitable giving is hardwired into Jewish tradition.

There are many reasons that Judaism makes a high priority of helping others. One reason hails from theology and human equality. Each person is made b’tzelem Elohim (in the Divine Image), so helping others uplifts each person’s innate holiness. A second reason hails from ancestral experience. We who descend from slaves, exiles and the impoverished carry empathy’s imprint for all who suffer. When we remember who we are, we naturally open our hearts and wallets to others.

A third reason reflects gratitude for the blessings we enjoy, a teaching from this week’s Torah portion (Ki Tavo). Torah teaches that we “shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which [we] harvest from the land that … God is giving [us], put it in a basket and go to the place where … God will choose to establish God’s name.” The obligation to share reflects not only our gratitude but also our covenant to be in relationship with the sacred.

Gratitude, though seemingly straightforward in theory, can be elusive in practice. In the moments we reap the successes of our lives, those precious and delicious fruits most seem like the blessings they really are. It’s easy to be grateful and generous in moments of bounty and success – though even then it’s not automatic. Often we over-attribute what we have to our own efforts, and not also the love, education, connections, opportunities, generosity and luck that helped make it possible. However hard we work for what we have, we have much to be grateful for.

Then we see the news from Texas and Louisiana, where 19 trillion gallons of flood waters inundated tens of thousands. Gratitude by comparison is part of the human condition – there but for the grace of God go I – and if we really mean our gratitude, the impulse to help should be automatic.

Amidst such devastation in our land, we return to Torah’s words and note that God’s gift of our land is in the present tense – “the land that … God is giving [us],” not “the land that … God gave us.” In the context of Moses’ life, the “land” meant the Land of Israel. But in Torah’s words, God keeps giving, in the present tense of this very day, so the “land” must mean where we are now. The first fruits – the best our communities and country have to offer – therefore belong to the first Source of those blessings.

From our homes in this land of the free, we can click on a PayPal link and send money to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. That’s the easy part. We believe that Torah is urging something more. Give money, and also give the best that we can for our communities and country – protecting wetlands, redressing climate change, building wisely, supporting the vulnerable.

The land is commended to our care because we, each other and the land all are holy. As we give the first fruits our blessings each year, care for suffering people and for this suffering planet. Make your charitable giving and your advocacy an expression of covenantal relationship with the Source of all. In so doing, acknowledge God for our freedom to help improve life for others who suffer. What a blessing that is!

R’ Evan J. Krame and R’ David Evan Markus

The demonstrations in Charlottesville and the distressing statements of Donald J. Trump spurred much conversation. Within my family, my mother recalled feeling the same sense of fear on the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan and Germany. Violence threatened by Nazis in neighboring towns is harrowing in its own right.  And then I compared my mother’s reaction to that of the many people who shared with me that they weren’t following the news at all. I’ve been thinking about how to respond to those who hide from the challenges of hate groups.

Torah this week tells us exactly what to do.  Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof – Justice, Justice shall you pursue. (Deut 16:20). Tzedek is the foundation of a free and open society. It is not the mere need for orderliness. Otherwise the Torah would have said the word “justice” once, and it would have been enough. Rather, we are compelled to seek a justice that represents righteousness. That is a path of virtue, decency and morality.

To ignore the hate mongers, to turn the channel on the television when the news comes on, is to abdicate this foundational principal of Judaism. We can debate whether or not we should be counter-protesting, which by some measures is also counter-productive by drawing more attention to the KKK and neo-Nazis. Yet, indifference should not be a choice. As many have recently quoted nobel laureate and Shoah survivor Elie Wiesel, “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”

Among my heroes of the past week are Rabbis who were ordained by Chovevei Torah, which is a seminary of Open Orthodoxy.  Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of the District of Columbia and Rabbi Uri Topolosky of Aspen Hill, Maryland among others went to Charlottesville on Monday. They visited with the police chief to demand protection for the synagogues. They visited the hospital to meet the chaplaincy staff and offer them encouragement. And they went to a park which they renamed in honor of Heather Heyer, the young woman mowed down by a car in Charlottesville. That’s the kind of leadership I most admire and the example of how to pursue justice. But leadership is not reserved only for Rabbis.

So here are some of the things you can do to pursue justice.  Make sure your elected representatives on the state and local levels know that you are concerned. The issues before us are many. We must demand that synagogues and mosques and African American churches be protected. We must advocate for universal voting rights and not unfair limitations on registration. We must support organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which are on the front lines of addressing racial inequality and bigotry in the courts. We must reflect on how we demonstrate that we cherish our rights of free speech, religious observance, and gathering in public in a way that strengthens our country. As for me, I’m not comfortable that so many guns were on display in Charlottesville and that the Second Amendment could have “undermined” the First Amendment.

Pick one thing to advocate or pick several but be a pursuer of justice. As Hillel said, “if not now, when?”

R’ Evan J. Krame