Month: April 2026

Stones With a Human Heart

Even in times of uncertainty, the human heart can remain open to hope and the promise of a better tomorrow.

This past week, the lyrics of the classic Israeli song “HaKotel” (“The Western Wall,” written by Yossi Gamzu and Dubi Zeltzer and made popular by singer Ofra Haza) have echoed in my mind: “Yesh anashim im lev shel even, yesh avanim im lev adam, There are people with hearts of stone, and there are stones with a human heart.”

These words have lingered with me as we move through days that feel both fragile and profound. The ceasefires between Israel and Iran, and between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, remain deeply fragile. Each report of a rocket or missile reminds us how quickly calm can give way to escalation, how urgently peace must be protected and sustained.

The reverberations are not distant. They reach us here in North America, shaping how we gather, how we pray, how we care for one another. Just days ago, Reform Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, Texas, and its school community faced threats that forced early closure. Fear entered a sacred space, a place meant for learning, for prayer, for belonging. Yet what followed was not silence or withdrawal. It was community. It was vigilance joined with resilience. It was a reminder that even when confronted with acts that attempt to harden hearts, we are called to respond differently. We are called to be among those who refuse hearts of stone, choosing instead to live with hearts open to life, connection, and responsibility for one another.

And this week as well, we marked Yom HaZikaron, Israel Memorial Day, for fallen soldiers and victims of terror in Israel and Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day. These sacred days ask something powerful of us. We move from remembrance to celebration, from grief to gratitude, from honoring loss to affirming life. The transition is not simple. It is not meant to be. It reflects the fullness of our story as a people.

“Am Yisrael Chai – The Jewish People Lives!” is not only a declaration of survival. It is a commitment to purpose. It reminds us that even in moments of tension or uncertainty, our task is to hold fast to what binds us together: memory, responsibility, and hope.

In these days, I return to a moment of learning that has stayed with me. Years ago, I stood on Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery, a place that carries the weight and the wonder of the Jewish story. Guided by Professor David Mendelsson, we were invited to see the site not only as a place of burial, but as a living testament to the values of a people still becoming.

We stood at the resting places of Theodor Herzl, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Hannah Senesh, alongside countless young soldiers whose lives were cut short in defense of the State of Israel. Each name, each stone, tells a story of courage, sacrifice, and enduring vision.

As we walked, we saw how the diversity of the Jewish people is etched into that sacred ground. Communities from Morocco, the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and beyond have all shaped the unfolding narrative of Israel. Their voices, traditions, and dreams are woven into the fabric of the nation.

While we stood there, the rain began to fall. It came softly at first, then steadily, until we were soaked through. It felt as though the heavens themselves were joining in remembrance. We paused together and recited memorial prayers and Kaddish:

“Remember the fallen of the State of Israel, our brothers and sisters, the victims of terror. May the darkness of their loss not obscure the light of peace. …Yitbarach v’yistabach v’yitpa’er…”

In that moment, physical discomfort faded into the background. What remained was clarity. Memory is not passive. “Never again” is not only a statement of the past; it is a call that shapes how we live now.

To pray for peace is to commit ourselves to its possibility. To speak of hope is to act in ways that make hope real. To honor those who have fallen is to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.

The stones of Mount Herzl speak. They speak of lives lived with purpose. They speak of a people bound together not only by history, but by shared responsibility. They remind us that even in times of uncertainty, the human heart can remain open, resilient, and directed toward goodness.

The vision of Israel, and of Jerusalem as its spiritual heart, was expressed long ago in the words of the Psalmist:

“Pray for the well-being of Jerusalem;
May those who love you be at peace.
May there be well-being within your walls,
Peace within your citadels.
For the sake of my kin and friends, I pray for your well-being;
For the sake of the house of Adonai our God, I seek your good.”
(Psalm 122:6–9)

Jerusalem is more than a place. It is a vision of wholeness, a call to pursue peace with courage and with faith.

May we have the strength to listen to the stones. May we allow their stories to guide us toward compassion, toward unity, toward a future shaped by dignity and hope. May our hearts remain open as we continue the sacred work of building a world worthy of those we remember and those who will come after us.

Shabbat Shalom!

Between Heaven and Earth

This week asks something profound of us.

It asks us to hold wonder and grief, hope and heartbreak, memory and responsibility, all at the same time.

Just days ago, NASA’s Artemis II began its journey, circling the moon and sending back images that stop us in our tracks. There is something almost spiritual in those photographs. They expand our sense of what is possible. They remind us how small we are, and at the same time, how capable we can be.

And yet, even as we look upward, we are pulled sharply back to Earth.

This past Sunday, an Iranian ballistic missile smashed into an apartment building in Haifa, killing four members of the same family: Vladimir Gershovitz and Lena Ostrovsky Gershovitz, their son Dimitri “Dima,” and his wife Lucille-Jane. Dima was part of our Reform community, having grown up at the Israeli Reform Movement’s Leo Baeck School in Haifa. Their loss is not abstract. It is personal, and like all such deaths, it is devastating.

At the same time, we are living through a fragile, short-term ceasefire between the United States and Iran. We want to believe in it. We need to believe in it. However, we are not naïve for we know how tenuous such moments can be.

So what does Judaism ask of us in a week like this?

It asks us not to choose between awe and anguish, but to live within both.

That is why, in these past weeks since the war with Iran began, we have added an extra candle before we light the Shabbat candles. Not because light erases darkness, but because it insists that darkness is not the final word. A candle for hope. A candle for peace. A candle for the sacred worth of every human life, created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

This evening, our Temple Beth Or (TBO) Tikkun Olam Committee will host a special “Earth Day Shabbat,” grounding us in our responsibility to care for the world we have been given. In this week’s parasha, Sh’mini, holiness emerges not in abstraction, but in the details of how we live. Holiness is not removed from the world. It is enacted within it. In how we care for all living creatures, how we protect, how we choose to live.

Then, on Sunday, we turn to memory in a way that is uniquely our own. Per TBO’s custom, we will gather in the sanctuary for our annual 12-hour reading of names of those who perished in the Holocaust: “Unto Every Person There is a Name.” Hour after hour, name after name, we restore dignity to those whose lives were taken and whose stories must never be forgotten. At 6:30 pm, TBO’s own Kathryn Struminger will share her family’s Holocaust story, and we will conclude at 7:00 pm with prayers and songs of commemoration.

What, then, binds all of this together?

It is the quiet, stubborn insistence of Jewish life that even in a fractured world, we are called to respond with meaning.

This is not easy work. It never has been. It is sacred work.

To look at the vastness of the heavens and feel humility.
To face human suffering and refuse indifference.
To care for the earth as something entrusted to us.
To remember those who came before us, not as numbers, but as individuals who had been known by their names, personalities, deeds, and so much more.
And to live our lives with purpose and meaning.

The Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever gives voice to this in the poem that follows. He writes of a friendship that stretches across time and place, a bond that endures even in the face of loss. It is, in many ways, a reflection of who we are as a people: bound to one another, across generations, carrying memory, carrying hope, carrying responsibility.

We hope you will join us tonight for a very special Erev Shabbat and then again this coming Sunday as we gather not to escape the world, but to meet it with courage, with community, with song, with commemoration.

A Remarkable Friendship Exists (Poem by Abraham Sutzkever, translated from the Yiddish by Maia Evrona)

A remarkable friendship exists, when both friends

inhabit different centuries, different countries.

People meet like wandering roots beneath

treetops split in two: Are you that friend? –Yes, I am he.

There is a friendship like a biblical scroll, which you find

in caves and which joy and tenderness can unwind.

Unfurl it—Then it will narrate our saga too. Otherwise,

it will flake away and fall to pieces in your fingers.

There are friends whose bond is stronger than love, than hate,

twinned together by fate, they must accompany each other:

The friendship when trained hounds sniff out a hiding place

and though one friend can escape, he remains with the other.

Creator, you have gifted me friends of all sorts,

and among them a special one, who stays most devoted:

At dawn, he will rise early to water my garden

so I may distribute his grapes among spirits.