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.
