thinking jewish

Regarding Health Care Reform

President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

September 2, 2009

Dear President Obama,

I have been meaning to write you for some time now.

Since the days of your inauguration and last year’s campaign, I have wanted so much to share with you my congratulations and thanks for all that you have done for our country already; for the inspirational being that is your persona and all your ideas.

I’ve wanted to share with you my experiences recently, on a delegation of fellow Jewish rabbinical students to Senegal under the auspices of the American Jewish World Service: what I witnessed in West Africa, the dire effects of abject poverty contrasted with the deep admiration and excitement felt towards you, and by extension, the United States, by villagers who have never so much as picked up a newspaper or turned on a light bulb.

I’ve also wanted to share with you my thoughts following many weeks this summer in Israel, where skepticism towards you and your peace efforts are so very disconnected from the sincere promise that your work brings to the region and its hopes for the future. My prayer is that you will not confuse Israeli recalcitrance with a lack of support for your policies amongst American Jews, and that you will continue to push forward in your policies of peace.

But all those thoughts must now wait for another opportunity. Because now is the time for more pressings matters: I am writing this letter to support your struggle for Health Care Reform.

As a twenty-six year old, mostly healthy man from an upper middle class suburb of San Diego, I have never had to worry much about the costs of health care. I have been privileged with the freedom to choose from amongst this country’s best doctors for any ailment which has afflicted me. The prohibitive costs of health insurance have been shielded from my eyes for most of my life thanks to the generosity of my parents. The promise of the American dream has given me more than I could ever want in my life, including access to top quality health care. I may currently be a poor graduate student, but I am surrounded by a safety net of giving family members.

Our system is unfair, unjust, and broken to its very roots.

The fact of the matter is that health care, just as much as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is a fundamental human right. In the wealthiest country on the planet, it is abhorrent that millions of Americans are unable to afford health insurance. It scares me to death that so many of my fellow citizens - those even with health insurance - have been driven into bankruptcy and debt because of sky-high medical bills following an illness. It saddens me that it has taken this long for a serious debate about health care to even begin.

So I thank you for all that you have done so far in this effort. I know just how serious the political risks involved are. I know how very complicated it may be to effectively reform health care. I understand just how difficult it may be to include a public option.

Yet I am writing you today having just witnessed first hand the brokenness of our health system.

You see, three weeks ago I came down with a stomach flu. Within a day of contracting the bug, I was severely dehydrated and unable to retain fluids. I had no choice but to go to the Emergency Room to seek treatment. I was admitted for a little over two hours, during which time I saw a doctor for less than ten minutes, received an IV of fluids and antibiotics, and was given two glasses of apple juice. I left the ER still sick, but saved from more serious complications.

The bill for this short visit to the hospital was $9,575.27. Even after my insurance coverage kicked in, I have been billed the staggering amount of $2,547.38. Let me be clear: for basic health services resulting from a common flu, despite my health insurance, I, a graduate student living off of Federal Stafford Loans, have been charged two and a half thousand dollars.

I am blown away that our country’s health system exists in a way that I must question whether I can afford emergency medical attention. I am astounded that, because our system is so backwards, such a routine and simple health service costs such extreme amounts.

I am saddened that, while I, either through further loans, or the generosity of my family, or both, will find a safety net to help me pay these bills and avoid more serious financial complications, I know that this is a luxury that most Americans are without.

President Obama, your leadership, your vision, and your work has been beyond inspirational to date. The tasks ahead of you are more than anyone could wish upon their self. Yet I beg of you to not stand down when it comes to Health Care Reform.

This issue goes to the very core of who we are as Americans. Are we a country that takes care of our fellow, or would we rather leave those most sick and poor to wallow in their pain and debt on the streets of our cities? Can we really achieve the dream of liberty and justice for all? I pray that the answer is yes. And I know that you are our greatest hope for success.

Thank you for all you do, and for trudging ahead the long, difficult road ahead,

David Singer
521 Avenida Primavera
Del Mar, CA 92014

Bamba in Dakar

On my final day in Senegal, I left the comfort of Thies, the friendship of my friends in Darou Mouride and Keur Songo, the routine of waking up each morning and spending the subsequent hours confronting the horrors of abject poverty. I left all these things and more and headed back towards the nation's capital, Dakar.

The drive was long and arduous. The forty mile trek should be a straight shot, but can take as long as five hours, depending on things like traffic, police checkpoints, and donkeys stopping along the road.

And so it was, that, on the outskirts of Dakar, still an hour from our destination, our van made a pit stop so people could do their business. I joined the parade of tubobs (Wolof for "white person") towards the gas station's latrines. Yet, after nearly two weeks without touching money, two weeks without even a hint of capitalism, I could not help but enter into the snack shop and walk around.

The refrigerator filled with neatly stacked bottles of Coke Light beamed with angelic light as a heavenly chorus filled my ears with song. I grabbed one from behind the glass. My mouth began to water, my heart beat a little faster. But there, just as I turned around, my eyes gazed to my left and were met dead on with the comforting stare of a large blue and white bag of Bamba.

Bamba, if you did not already know, is a favorite snack of Israelis. Something only conceivable in this land of Milk and Honey, Bamba is like cheese puffs, only with peanut butter instead of orange cheese powder. Sounds gross. Tastes delicious.

I bought a few bags and triumphantly returned to my van, providing gastronomic solace to twenty five future rabbis removed from civilization for far too long.

We all enjoyed the snack, taking little time to think about the experience. But, in retrospect, most surprising about finding the Israeli national snack at a gas station in the capital of this West African Muslim nation was the fact that it wasn't all that surprising at all.

A week prior, we had met with the Israeli ambassador to the country. The tall man - a walking caricature of himself - spoke proudly of the work his home country is doing throughout the Western Coast of Africa.

Not prone to believing others' hyperbole and an eternal sceptic at heart, I was adept at taking everything he said with a grain of salt. Could the massive amounts of development work that he is describing really be possible? Is it true that the Israeli embassy in Senegal is behind a giant tolerance program taking place soon in Dakar. What are the ulterior motives? What is behind his message? How could such a small country be responsible for so much good?

Not that I wouldn't want Israel to be such an or lagoyim - light unto the nations - in this hell on earth. It just seemed too good to be true. Could the country really be funding tzedakah to help non-Jews merely because it is the right thing to be doing?

Surely, Israel has much to gain from such work. A heavily tolerant, Suffi, non-Arab country has much to offer the Jewish State. But the support is real. Is real. Israel?

Low and behold, NGO after NGO that we met with described the great support they receive from the Israeli government. Not the American government with its gag rule and bureaucratic stipulations. No, the Israeli government.

In a country without stable sources of water and an agricultural system stuck in the Iron Age, Israel's drip irrigation technology has giant potential. In a country forgotten by most of the world, that small Jewish state, so embroiled in its own quagmires, is not forgetting.

The Jewish state's embassy is doing the hard groundwork to help this underdeveloped nation and its neighbors realize their potential. All Israel gains is the love of an unknown people ignored by modernity and a market to sell its national treat.

Let's remember after all: most Senegalese have never met a Jew. In fact, most don't even know that such a thing exists. For two weeks, I found it easiest to describe myself as an Israelite. And the Senegalese know what that is only because they read about them in the Koran.

Stellar.

This is the ultimate form of tzedakah, is it not: giving to a people who do not even know you.

In the age of Lieberman and Netenyahu, of showdowns with the US, and ultimate fears of annihilation from Iran, of violent protests against parking lots and never ending hate-mongering, as I chewed on my delicious bites of peanut-coated puff, I felt good, very good.

Surely, the Diet Coke helped.

But each bite of Bamba seemed to carry in it a morsel of redemption. The food was symbolic of everything that I had learned to work for during my time in Africa. This is what giving is supposed to be about. This is human beings helping fellow humans alleviate their most dire problems. This is the work ahead. This is what it means to be a Jew, to be a human, to be privileged and ready to give back.

ברוך אתה ה' הזן את הכל.

Yiddishkeit in Darou Mouride

Fiddler on the Roof

Amidst the dew
And soup-thick humidity,
The sounds of roosters and people waking.
The muezin calls his people to prayer,
In a land devoid of color.

There, in the distance, is a yellow house;
The only color among miles of brown.

A woman comes out.
She cleans a mat and tends to her chores,
In poverty,
In filth.
She is so unlike me.

But there!
On the roof
Of the small yellow house.
Is a fiddler.

A man and his fiddle, sitting on the roof.

He fiddles away the morning,
With the tune of donkeys and cattle, goats and hens,
As the people come and go,
Doing their things,
Waiting for a better life.

He fiddles, she cleans.
The rooster welcomes the morning.

In an instant,
The fiddler dissapears.
But she is still there.

And so is her yellow house,
Surrounded by dirt,
In a land devoid of color.

A Week Ago, In Africa

Standing on a rooftop, I looked around, and felt anywhere but home. As far as the eye could see was a morass of concrete and dirt. The thick humid air smelt of smoke. The sounds of donkeys, and horses, and a muezzin filled the air.

I was surrounded by twenty four colleagues - fellow rabbinical students from throughout the United States - as we prayed the morning service from atop a building in downtown Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.

For two weeks, our delegation joined the American Jewish Service to work with its grantee, Tostan, aiding in community-led development in rural villages facing extreme poverty throughout Africa.

No prior experience could have prepared me for what I saw in Senegal: children with flies in their eyes; distended bellies; open sores; bare feet; hunger; sickness; a land parched by drought. At first glance, the place seemed like hell. How could God allow such a place to exist?

For ten days we worked with locals in the villages of Darou Mouride and Keur Songo, building latrines and helping them in their daily chores. I swept, I tilled soil, I brought forth water from wells. All the while, I built bonds with people so different from me, and yet so similar. They love, they cry, they laugh, they play.

I played with many kids. Two in particular I will never forget, Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop showed me firsthand the power of the AJWS and its grantees to bring positive change to the world.

As I butchered their names time and time again, the two kids laughed in a way that any would at a blubbering foreigner standing before them. "Tubob" they called me - white man.

Finally, Tidiane Geye crouched down and spelled out his name in the sand below him. In a country with almost no literacy, this defiant act writing was nothing short of miraculous.

But my new friends need far more than an education. They need food. They need mosquito nets. They need basic health services and access to a world which has left them behind. They need shoes.

They need an American Jewish community that remembers them, and does all we can to help the billions of people like them who live in abject poverty, trying to make ends meet on as little as a dollar a day in conditions more horrific than most of us could imagine.

I returned from Africa inspired by the work of the AJWS. I returned motivated by my new cadre of rabbinical students dedicated to bringing our message of social justice to our home communities. I returned ready for the hard work ahead.

The Wolof word used in response to a greeting is "mangifee," which translates literally as "I am here." The Hebrew equivalent is "hineini", the response by Abraham when God first calls out to him in service.

To all my brothers and sisters in this world stricken by the disease of poverty - to Tidiane Geye and Popmusonjop - to all of the communities where AJWS works and those yet to be helped, I cry out Mangifee. I am ready to help you. I am here to work on your behalf. Hineini.

We Pause for These Messages

In a few days I'll head with a delegation of rabbinical students and the American Jewish World Service to the West African nation of Senegal. We will spend two weeks building latrines in villages outside the regional capital Thies, and learn about the work of the NGO Tostan. The trip will conclude with a visit to Goree Island.

From there, I travel back to the States and, then, four days later, to Israel. Come July 1 I will have the time and the commitment to return to my writing.

I look forward to sharing the journey with you then.

-David

In the Meantime, This

The semester is finally over, and final papers are near their end. There is finally time again for the real work in life: travel to far-off places, relaxation and, of course, writing.

I have plenty of things that need commenting; many encounters which need to be explored on this blog: racism and anesthesia, autonomy and movementalism, social justice and earthquakes.

All this in due time.

Meanwhile, I give you two gifts before Shabbat.

First, two letters were written to "Plainviews" in response to my piece, "Turkey, Chaplaincy, and Pastoral Care." I encourage you to check out this thoughtful feedback, here (about a third of the way down the page).

And, second, after much anticipation, the text book I wrote last fall for Torah Aura Productions is being published. "Yisrael Sheli" teaches Israel to third and fourth graders through the Jewish heroes who have been connected to the land over the last few millenia. It will be in religious school classrooms beginning this fall. You can check out a preview of the textbook by clicking here.

Shabbat shalom,
David

My Work, This Shabbat

In the months preceding a move to the other side of the world, and with it the expiration of my all-encompassing, overly-expensive, perfect-example-of-America's-health-system-malfunction-disaster health insurance, I decided to take a trip early this week to the Allergist.

Since college I have struggled with my body's auto-immune response to problems non-existant. You're a fighter, David, I was always told. And so I am. In the absence of a real fight to pick, my body chooses to attack things like dust, and pollen, and pet dander.

Cue the histamine, the runny nose, the congestion.

In the fight against allergies, I buy pillow covers and mattress covers. I use air filters which suck all of the impurities from the air I breath at night. I flush salted water through my sinuses each morning with a bottle shaped to fit a genie. I vacuum and sweep and vacuum again.

It is a never-ending battle against a microscopic invader against which I am helpless. The evil fills every space into which I enter, floating harmlessly in the air, until I breath it in, and my body reacts, and, low and behold, my sinuses no longer function.

So I went to the allergist to pinpoint the exact nature of my allergies. Forty pricks on my back of forty common things on this planet later, my body was charted like a connect the dots picture yet to be used.

And within minutes, my back had exploded in redness. The itches could not be contained. Scratch me! Scratch me. I could not. Fifteen minutes of not scratching passed, as I awaited the doctor's eye.

Then came the moment of truth. The list of offending allergens was brought forth. Dust. No surprise. Cats and dogs and hamsters and cockroaches. There goes veterinary work. Olive tree pollen and some grasses and mold. Fair enough.

And then, there, at the end of the list, the one allergy I have to food. Screaming blatantly from the page, as if it were highlighted two times over and written in red-ink, circled around with arrows pointing to it: shellfish.

And not just a small allergy, at all. Rather, it's about as severe as any other allergy I have, a '4+' on a scale of zero to four.

Yet what exactly that means, I do not know. I will not know. I cannot know.

In the days of my youth, there were times aplenty when I dined on various parts of the swine. Bacon, pepperoni, sausage - all delicious delicacies which have found their ways into my mouth throughout the ages. To be clear, I never ate ham. No such goyisher item would be allowed near me. But derivations of the pig so delicious as these were never forbidden to me.

As much as I did eat pork, as I did not eat kosher, as I made little distinction between what is treif and what is not, I still never touched shellfish. Shrimp and crab and lobster and such, always seemed so not-Jewish, not to mention unappetizing.

I'll confess that I did eat clam chowder, but only because it was creamy and in a giant loaf of bread. Once I was old enough to realize that something called "Clam Chowder" has clams inside, I gave up that practice entirely.

And once I did eat shrimp. But only because it came deep fried and battered - there was more crispy goodness than pink living animal of the sea. And I was seven. Dinner called "Popcorn Shrimp" is much more appealing than grilled salmon.

That is all to say, that in the twenty six odd years of my life, shellfish has entered my lips maybe a handful of times, all of which the taste of the shellfish was so utterly covered and masked by some other delicious substance. And now it turns out that I am very allergic to shellfish. Very allergic.

Maybe so allergic that I would die if I ate it. Maybe not. Probably not. But I will never know.

I won't ever know what will happen to me if I eat it. I will never know the taste of these most-celebrated of dinner items.

I won't know. I cannot know.

I can't because my both my body and my God are in agreement that this is a forbidden fruit.

It seems that there is so much I can learn from that. There are so many good drashes to give.

What does it mean that my body seems to be screaming out in support of the halakha? What does it mean when the natural order and my religious system are in utmost agreement? And what if I were allergic to not wrapping tefilin, or allergic to putting a stumbling block before the blind.

I'll ponder that.

And what does it mean to be so removed and unable to know something as simple as shrimp, or crab, or lobster? All the more so, what if I cannot know God, or the meaning of the universe, or my place in this world?

I'll ponder that too.

Time to go start.

Rounding Error

A few Shabatot ago, I ran into an old friend at a new shul. It so happened that it was March 13, the day before March 14, Pi Day. And this friend was a student of math - read, nerd. That's the context.

Pi day, of course, is the annual event when the Gregorian calendar date - 3/14 - looks a lot like the first three digits of Pi - 3.14. Nothing to sacred there. (For the record, on March 14, 2015 the date will replicate five digits. Thanks to Mr. Jackson's ninth grade math class, I know Pi out to twenty digits. See nerd comment, above.)

And this Shabbat with the new shul and the old friend, it so happened that this old friend was doing some teaching at the end of Kabalat Shabbat. And he was a mathematician and it was almost Pi day. So this was the Torah about which he taught.

So often in this modern world of ours, we take for granted the ignorance and stupidity of pre-modern peoples. We know everything, they knew nothing. We have it sorted out, we are not blinded by baseless assumptions. We are Enlightened. We are rational. Boundaries no longer exist like they once did. Or so the line of thinking goes.

You see, the pre-moderns, in their Biblical lives of togas and scrolls and animal slaughtering, even they knew a bit of the world around them. If you study some of the parts of the Bible and Rabbinics dealing with the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, you pick up very quickly that these men had full knowledge of such a concept as Pi. Yes, they knew, maybe more than we, that the diameter of a circle is always a little more than three times it's radius squared.

Crazy.

But, you say, Pi is not three times the radius of a circle squared. No! It is 3.14... times that square number! The Bible is wrong! The rubrics for the Temple are impossible! Mathematically!

Nerd.

In this moment of lucidity, you seem to have proven the Bible of God, and, through that act, one-upped God as well. But not so fast.

The rabbis saw this Biblical error. They knew well and fine that Pi was not three. And in one midrash, we gain the following insight:

Pi, the most abhorrent of numbers, a never-ending string of non-repeating digits that nonetheless represents one of the most stable constants in reality, is, in fact, they argue, only temporary. In our world, in this time, Pi is what it is. But one day, in the world to come, in the time of Messiah, Pi, like it's Biblical basis, will actually become three.

It seems, say the rabbis, that in this time yet to be had, Euclidean Geometry goes out of the world. The very nature of nature, then, will be fundamentally different. What makes Pi Pi, will no longer exist. Pi will be a whole number. The fractional difference will no longer remain.

I could not help, as I sat and learned this Torah, about some wider metaphors that this math may teach. Because that decimal difference of the Pi of now and the Pi to be seems so present in this world, the fractional differences that make all the difference between who we are and who they are, between what I am and what I am yet to become.

And one day, those differences, those schisms between us that seem unending and infinite, one day, those differences will be flattened, they will no longer remain. They are, in fact, a mirage.

The divisions, the labels, the barriers between humans are, it seems, the rounding error that prevents us from realizing a better world, a Messianic world.

And that's all well and good. It's a nice idea that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. But can it actually change my behavior? Can it infuse my being on a day to day life?

I walk down the street and ponder whether I can help to realize a better world just by realizing that the differences between me and my fellow - albeit important differences, ones that I will uphold as that which makes me unique in this world - are also only superficial, temporal markings of an imperfect world.

That man, over there, whom I hate, whom I find annoying, whose national existence challenges my own, whose politics are so abhorrent that I wish at times he did not exist, can I flatten the differences between us and approach him as another creation of God?

And in this time of our redemption, when I remind myself that I too was a stranger in the Land of Egypt, there seems no better a time to try.

This is the bread of affliction, let all who are hungry come and eat.

Whoever you are, it is for you. We all are afflicted. We all are slaves.

We are all strangers, and in that strangeness, one.

One Shabbat, on the Other Side of the World

This is a story about a wall - a wall of meaning and emotion, ideas, struggles and triumphs. It is a wall with history and a story, a wall of man - put together by human hands to stand the test of time.

And so it has.

No. Not that wall. Not the stacks of stones at the base of our Temple that-once-was. Not that tower of limestone that stretches as high as the eye can see, in front of a plaza of pilgrimage for generations. This is not a story about religion. This story is not about the Kotel.

I never made it there.

I went to Jerusalem for a Shabbat, flew to the other side of the world for little more than forty-eight hours of rest, imagination and meetings - meetings of ideas, meetings of people, meetings of planning.

I showed up at LAX, and within a few hours was whisked away to another country, to another land with a foreign language and foreign culture. That land, I call my own. But it is not the same.

It is not the land of the brave and the free. It is the land of the learned and bearded, of the biblical farmer and the longed-for pilgrimage. The land of congruent conflations of hypocrisy. The land of history and memory so in-your-face that sometimes it seems difficult to breath.

I went all the way there, all the way to the land of my birth right, the land that my father - a wandering Aramean - found his way to so long ago, and I not once found the time to get to the site of my ancient Temple. I flew 8,000 miles only to stay at a hotel less than one mile from the center of the Jewish world - only to never visit that site. I came within feet, but didn't go.

Not for lack of time. No, for lack of want.

It dawned on me during this visit that there is so much more to that land, to that country, than the binary lens through which so many of us have traditionally understood the Jewish state. There is more to Israel than cafe Aroma and the Kotel, more to it than Maccabees and Merkava tanks.

Israel is a dynamic place where six million Jews live, a troubled country stained in black and white, struggling to find room for the grays - for pluralism, for democracy, for tolerance.

And I think that the slow progress is OK. Israel is not America. It should not be. There is no one direct path, no singular end-place. the struggle is what it is all about.

Which is why I did not visit the Kotel. I didn't go there because I wanted to see more than the three sites we all visit every time we go. I wanted to open up my mind a little wider. I wanted to figure out more clearly what it means to be a Jew living in Los Angeles in the twenty-first century who can hop on a plane and spend a weekend in the only country on Earth where I can gain citizenship instantaneously because of my blood.

But that is not what this story is about. This is a story about a wall - a man-made construct that separates and divides. A structure which keeps some things on one side and some things on the other.

No. Not that wall. Not the barrier stretching hundreds of miles which only a few years ago divided, permanently, theoretically, Jew from Arab. Not the fence/path/monstrosity that tears through neighborhoods, farms and countryside.

This is not a story about politics.

But my few days on the east end of the Mediterranean were overwhelmed with political tensions nonstop. I flip the channels between BBC, and Sky News, and France 24 and Fox. Everywhere I turn I am reminded of the war that just ended. From the Israelis visiting from Sderot, to the banner at the entrance to Jerusalem expressing solidarity with "our brothers" in the South.

Another year, another war. And this time the world is crying fowl, again. There are declarations that war crimes have been committed. Capitals in Europe are calling for the arrest of Israeli politicians.

I am not so naive as to believe that Israel - that any country - is incapable of committing wrongs in the course of war. I am not so idealistic as to believe that the world is merely out to get Israelis, no matter what. It is entirely plausible that war crimes were committed. I have faith in legal systems to separate between hyperbole and facts and, in the end, bring justice where justice need be brought.

Yet I am increasingly saddened by the story that is Israel, as time marches on. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Israel was meant to be about the ingathering of the exiles, about the cultivation of a land separated for two-millenia from its inhabitants. Israel was supposed to be about a cultural renaissance, a religious explosion unseen in centuries.

All that it has been.

But the politics of hate and fighting continue. Israelis are made into soldiers. Israel's story is one of battle, not burekas, terrorism, not talmud torah.

Time marches on and I become more and more pessimistic. Elections are coming, and with them, I hope, a new path. Hope, these days, seems to be a uniquely American creation, even if it is the namesake of Israel's anthem.

But this is not a story about politics, just as it is not a story about religion. This is a story about a wall, the wall which I found myself face-to-face with on a cool Shabbat morning in Jerusalem.

In a synagogue within which I had never been, sitting next to a new friend with whom I shared so much and so little in common, I was a world away from home and yet firmly surrounded by things I knew. My people, my God, my tradition.

The scroll was unrolled and I heard the story of my ancestors in Egypt. Let my people go, God commanded. I had gone. I had come. Where was I?

I was scrunched up next to the wall of the building, three inches away from plaster and paint, supposed to - there, in that place - fulfill my morning's obligations.

But who were these people surrounding me? Eight thousand miles from home, things should not be so familiar - the words, the melodies, the struggles.

My row-mate was bored. We'd already been there for an hour and a half. The time was coming to leave. We wanted food, and Shabbat menucha.

We gave time for one more moment, one more stab at prayer. So there I was, stuck up against and facing a wall as I reached out towards the Divine.

And I could not help but smile in appreciation. There was so much to be sad and angry and anxious about. The world was in turmoil. Religious intolerance reigns. I had not yet had my morning coffee.

Such is the state of the world. There is always repair work to be done. Such is to be human.

But if I can come so very far away, if I can travel by automobile and airplane, travel through space and time and still come to that same twenty five our period of rest and timelessness, if there, against that plaster wall of some synagogue to which I will never again return I can still find the space for my people, for my God, for my optimism, then I am content.

It was a Shabbat buffered by exhaustion and travel, wandering through the world with little moments of rest.

Such is to be a Jew.

I bounce from one place to another and hope that I can improve things a little along the way - to bring light to places that are dark, to bring hope to people who have none.

Along the way, we all hit many walls. Walls of religion. Walls of politics. Walls aspirations unmet, intolerances not undone.

But if even in those spaces, in the inches between one's face and plaster or stone or concrete, if we can find the beauty in it all there - especially there, even there - then there is reason to move on.

We go forward. Continue to work. Continue to try. Continue to make sense of it all.

So few answers. So many questions.

Shabbat has come again.

Shalom.