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D’VAR TORAH — PARASHAT VAETCHANAN
Moses sets the standard for living our best selves
BY RABBI AMY FEDER
At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Moses has finally led the Israelites across the wilderness and he turns his eyes to gaze on the Promised Land. It seems as if it should be a joyous moment, but we know that it’s actually bittersweet, even devastating: Moses may be able to look upon the land, but God has determined that he will never enter it.
Moses pleads with God, hoping to appeal to God’s mercy, but God responds harshly, telling him: “It is enough for you; speak to Me no more regarding this matter.”
What a terrible disappointment and loss this must have been for Moses. For years, he had been tirelessly leading the Israelites, with all of their kvetching and rebelling, carefully laying the groundwork for the new society they’d build together based on God’s laws. Yet because of one mistake, he’ll never have the chance to see the future he has spent so many years working toward.
How unfair this must have felt. There are so many ways Moses could have responded to this moment. He could have lashed out in anger against God. He could have tried to prove God wrong and attempted crossing into the Land anyway. He could have refused to move from his spot and left the Israelites to finish with journey without his assistance. This kind of disappointment could stop anyone in their tracks or lead them to acts of denial, jealousy or despair.
But instead, Moses moves on, and in the most beautiful of ways. He gathers his community with words of hope and blessing. He reminds them of how much they’ve been through together and gives them the tools they’ll need to move forward. He puts his energy into strengthening the position of the next leader and urges the people to have confidence in their future.
Each of us will have our own moments of disappointment and loss. And more often than not, those moments can seem profoundly, deeply unfair. It can be heartbreaking to not achieve what we most want, especially when we’ve put our all into it.
Yet Moses’ example teaches us how to live with the understanding that while we may not get what we want, there are still so many ways to make sure we and our loved ones are able to keep fighting, keep flourishing, keep moving forward.
Even in his disappointment, he lives the remainder of his days as the best version of himself, ensuring that his legacy will continue on.
May we all have the wisdom, even in times of disappointment, to know how to keep living out our ideals and to ensure that the stories of our lives will not have been told in vain.
Amy Feder is senior rabbi at Congregation Temple Israel and the immediate past president of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
An image released by NASA on July 12, 2022, shows the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, captured in infrared
light by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. PHOTO: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI/HANDOUT VIA XINHUA
NASA’s James Webb Telescope looks at the universe through the eyes of God
BY BENJAMIN RESNICK
Back in December, human beings, a weird variety of uniquely frail, lithe and hairless monkeys, launched into space a new, $10 billion dollar telescope, 21 feet in diameter and, like many great temples, covered with golden mirrors.
The James Webb Space Telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope. It traveled a million miles from earth with a mission — the first fruits of which we saw in July with the photographs released by NASA — that is almost unfathomably grandiose: to peer out (that is, to look back) at the moment when the first stars turned on and cleared away limitless clouds of primordial gas, seen as light that has been traveling towards us for 13.6 billion years.
Readers of Bereshit — Genesis — learn about a time when all was tohu vavohu — when all was formless and dark — and there is a strong chance that Webb will show us the very moment when something happened and then there was light.
We will be able to see that moment of creation. The moment when the first stars began to burn, unfathomable vessels of brightness that would create the carbon, the nitrogen and the oxygen that make up 86.9% of our bodies, which would later shatter to create our heavier atoms, which would combine with the hydrogen created during the Big Bang. All of this means, by some alchemy of thermodynamics that is, for me, still shrouded in darkness — or perhaps by some act of primordial grace — we are mostly composed of starlight, our mass coming from some mysterious vibration of immortal and timeless energy, echoing through the universe from the beginning of time.
This energy has existed from the moment when the very first lights went on and will exist after the very last lights wink out. When all returns to a formless nothingness, those little pieces of starlight that are me will still be there, perhaps joining in a cosmic dance with those that are you, forming something new, maybe something wonderful. These are and were and will be the very same atoms that now make up my bones and blood, and which — through whatever unfathomable, godly magic — fire electricity through my brain, so that one day, also out of darkness, I look out on the world, see its lights and colors, discover the taste and fragrance of milk, come to smile and laugh and walk and speak and eventually (not me but others like me) grow up to build machines to look back in time. We are the universe coming to know itself. We are the eyes of God peering out into endless darkness, lighting fires of imagination and ingenuity that allow us to reach into our bodies to make them well, and to travel to the great orbs in the sky, and to look deep into the past, with a golden vessel like the altar of incense overlaid in gold, burning through time and thick with the fragrance of memory, hiding its illuminations somewhere beneath the smoke. And we come to understand what and where and when we are. And we will see the moment that we’ve been reading out for all of Jewish history: “Vayomer elohim yehi or, vayehi or” — God said, “Let there be light and there was light.”
We cannot — and perhaps will never — be able to see further, into those 250 million years after the Big Bang but before the stars, when all was a dark, hot soup, unformed and void, tohu vavohu.
Like you, perhaps, like everyone in the world who has ever looked seriously into the thermodynamics of man, I don’t know what to make of all this. I don’t know what to do with the knowledge that I was forged in starlight or that the space between my atoms is empty, a vacuum, like the void into which, according to the Kabbalists, the Unending poured first light. I don’t know what to make of the fact that every piece of me has existed and will exist for all time.
It seems as though the fires of my imagination are endless, that my capacities of love and hate, laughter and tears, are endless and abiding and real. And I believe that I am indeed looking out on the world through the eyes of God and, as the great Christian mystic Meister Eckart famously said, that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
I don’t know what to do with the knowledge that all the electrons in my body hum and create this divine illusion of being which is the same as the divine majesty of nonbeing.
But when I imagine myself one day returning to the stars — and when I looked at the new images of the universe released this week by NASA — I am indeed filled with a sense of wonder and humility and comfort and gratitude. Maybe someday we will build a telescope even more mighty. Maybe we’ll go back farther and marvel at the dark work of creation, the world before the letter “bet” in bereshit, the blank whiteness concealing and revealing all mysteries.
Until then, each year, we’ll roll back the scrolls, we’ll read the story again and, with our clumsy and marvelous fingers, we’ll try to touch creation.
Benjamin Resnick is rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in Pelham, N.Y. He previously served as the Rav Beit HaSefer of Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago. His commentary was distributed by JTA.
Lasagna and chesed: Food is love
BY GAIL WECHSLER

As a Jew, there are two core tenets that guide my life. The first is tikkun olam, repairing the world. I feel I have an obligation to make the world better than I found it during my lifetime. The second is chesed, or lovingkindness. I truly believe, as the sign on my front lawn says, that Kindness is Everything.
Lately I’ve been thinking about chesed. It has become a big part of my life and it explains why I make lasagna.
It started back in the 1980s. A dear friend and one of my study group partners in law school, John, was absent from class for a while. Someone else in class said he was dealing with an illness but it was not clear yet what was going on.
What could I do to provide support? Baking chocolate chip cookies sounded about right. I got his home address in Westchester, N.Y. and started buying, mixing, baking and then wrapping up his care package.
It turned out that John had a brain tumor. He did come back to class. As soon as he saw me, he wrapped me in a big bear hug. He told me that those cookies helped him during a time of great worry and uncertainty. I guess that’s where I got the spark to cook for friends dealing with illness.
Although John’s cookies were not the last time I baked for a sick friend, somewhere between the 1980s and the 2000s, I changed my focus. Lasagna became my go-to dish. Maybe it was because some of my cooking was in response to Meal Train requests, which require a main course. Perhaps I remember lasagna as a comfort food from my own young adulthood (I don’t recall having it much as a child, at least not the homemade kind).
During this time, it also was not lost on me why giving a meal meant so much. I, myself, was a cancer patient in the early 1990s and again in 2005. (I’ve been in remission since then.) My family and I were recipients of many a casserole. These meals nourished us in more than the obvious way. I told myself at that time that if I could, I would return the favor to others as a pay-it-forward gesture.
I started stocking lasagna noodles, pasta sauce and various kinds of cheeses and veggies in the refrigerator so they could be used as needed. With apologies to Mollie Katzen, my recipe was a variation I concocted based on the original in the “Moosewood Cookbook.”
In those initial lasagna making years, I cooked for friends and spouses of friends. Most, like John, were dealing with a cancer diagnosis: lymphoma, breast cancer. Thankfully, these first recipients of my veggie lasagna all recovered. Maybe there was more than love mixed in with the noodles, tomatoes and mushrooms. I’d like to think so.
Since the start of the pandemic, my services have been needed too much. I say that because over the past year I have been cooking for four friends with four different cancer diagnoses. I’d love to put my informal lasagna making business to rest due to lack of customers. At the same time, it stills give me a deep sense of contentment when I am able to deliver a piping hot meal to a dear friend who needs it.
I don’t have a medical degree. I can’t perform miracles. But if I can bring a smile to someone’s face with a simple lasagna (and keep them fed for a week), I know I’m doing what I can to provide support and, yes, love.
My friend John didn’t make it. But his words and his big bear hug stay with me. They motivate me to never forget how we need to cherish each other and hold each other close. And how providing food from my kitchen can be my way of doing that. It is my personal version of chesed.
PHOTO: STOCK.ADOBE.COM Gail Wechsler is a law librarian and social justice activist. She is a member of Central Reform Congregation.
Gail’s Lasagna Recipe
INGREDIENTS:
Approximately 2 15 oz. jars of pasta sauce (preferred: Newman’s Own or Classico) 2 cups of shredded mozzarella cheese 2 cups of shredded 5 Italian cheese blend assorted vegetables (ex: onion, mushroom, tomato, broccoli) 12 lasagna noodles
Some parmesan cheese to sprinkle on top
DIRECTIONS:
Prepare the lasagna noodles according to package
Saute the veggies in olive oil; then set aside
Once noodles are drained and veggies cooked, layer the lasagna as follows:
Pasta sauce 1/3 of the noodles ½ of the 5 Italian cheese and the cooked veggies
More pasta sauce ½ of the mozzarella cheese 1/3 of the noodles ½ of the 5 Italian cheese
Pasta sauce ½ of the mozzarella cheese 1/3 of the noodles
Pasta sauce top with grated parmesan cheese
Cook, covered in foil, in a 375 degree preheated oven for 45 minutes.
Identifying with the invisible residents of southern Israel
BY RUTHIE BLUM
JNS
Four hours before the “Operation Breaking Dawn” ceasefire officially went into effect on Sunday night, a barrage of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) projectiles was launched at Tel Aviv and other central Israeli areas. When the dust had settled, literally and figuratively, the Israel Defense Forces reported that eight rockets had been fired at the White City. Six of these were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile-defense system, and the other two landed in the Mediterranean Sea.
Lacking a bomb shelter, my neighbors and I gathered in the rickety stairwell of our apartment building and huddled in a spot that wasn’t facing one of the large windows to the courtyard. Like the rest of the country’s citizens, we were already well-versed in the drill: to wait 10 minutes after the end of the inevitable loud “booms” before considering the coast clear.
It was only the second time that Tel Aviv had been put on alert during Israel’s threeday military operation against PIJ terrorists and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip— and, thankfully, nobody got hurt—but it was touted as significant. For one thing, it was an indication of the range of some PIJ rockets. For another, Tel Aviv is a bastion of secularism, not what the Israeli left views as a Jewish “settlement,” though the Palestinians make no such distinctions.
So, when pub-frequenters and bikini-clad beach-goers rush to take cover at the sound of air-raid sirens, the press takes particular notice. Scenes of this sort are very telegenic, after all.
This is not to say that the hardest-hit Israelis—those in the Gaza-border communities, Sderot and Ashkelon—don’t get media attention whenever there’s a so-called “flare-up” from the Hamas-run hornets’ nest. On the contrary, reporters are stationed in those places as soon as the drums of war start beating, at the ready to run to safe rooms, microphones in hand, to probe parents and children about how frightened they must be.
It’s just that these interviewees are the people who live under fire on a regular basis, including during breaks between formal battles. And most Israelis don’t give them a second thought during “peace” time. What’s worse is that missile landings in the south, even while fighting is going on against Gaza, don’t elicit among the general populace the appropriate degree of horror. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that despite—or, perhaps, due to—Israel’s tiny size, a few miles of separation can feel like the distance between Earth and Mars. This struck me more with each phone call I received on Saturday evening from friends in Jerusalem and elsewhere inquiring whether I thought there would be additional Red Alerts later that night. Each expressed surprise when I responded that the rockets were still flying, every few minutes, without let-up, as they had been for the past 24 hours. The thing is that the bulk was felt in the south.
Contrary to what these friends had assumed, my knowledge about this untenable situation had nothing to do with my having to write about it. Nor was my cognizance the result of a permanent perch in front of the TV and internet.
No, the reason for my keen awareness of what the residents of the south were having to endure was the Red Alert app that I had downloaded on my phone. I didn’t need to have it; I could hear the sirens in my own neighborhood, and lists of rocket launches and their locations were visible on every television channel.
But it was a way to get a sense of how often the people who live close to Gaza were under immediate attack. The fre-
quency of the app’s notifications was chilling. Indeed, the chime barely ceased, around the clock, for two-and-a-half days. Residents of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon run for shelter during a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket attack on Aug. 6. PHOTO: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90 Every eerie “cling” sound represented innocent Israelis—from communities whose names are unfamiliar to most of their counterparts to the north—hurrying to hole up in safe rooms, bomb shelters or stairwells. It’s no wonder that many took their kids and fled, until the ceasefire, to homes farther away from the missile-equipped murderers next door. The Israeli government, especially the current interim one, constantly calls for unity. What might help in this virtually impossible endeavor would be a heavy dose of empathy for those bearing the brunt of the enemy’s will—and repeated attempts—to annihilate the entire Jewish state. When the next round of rocket barrages begins—and there will be a next round—I urge everyone, Israelis and sympathizers abroad, to arm him/herself with a Red Alert app. It’s an eye-opener, including for those of us who think that we can identify with the plight of our civilian brethren on the front lines. Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ”
