May 3, 2026
Antizionism Is Not Normal, Nor Should We Normalize It
Antizionism Is Not Normal,
Nor Should We Normalize It
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I am a child of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
List College, class of 1997. The Davidson School, 2002. The Rabbinical School, 2002. My father walked those halls. My sister did too. My family’s story, like that of so many American Jews, is braided into the sacred mission of JTS since its founding in 1886. My family dried pages of books, one by one, from water damage after a fire ravaged the JTS library stacks in 1966. So for me to speak of JTS is not to speak of an abstraction. It is to speak of a living covenant between generations of Jews who believed that Torah, peoplehood, and the Land of Israel are inseparable threads of an enduring, unbreakable fabric.
So let us speak plainly.
The decision by JTS to honor President Isaac Herzog as a commencement speaker is not a betrayal of Jewish values. It is an affirmation of them.
The recent controversy, amplified beyond all proportion, tells us far more about the current moment than it does about JTS. Six graduating seniors signed a letter opposing Herzog. Six. Twenty-four, four times as many, signed in support. Four JTS rabbinical students, none of them even graduating this year, added their names to the protest letter. This is not a groundswell. It is not a generational rupture. It is a small but loud dissent that is being misrepresented as something larger, something normative.
It is not.
And we must not pretend otherwise.
JTS has never been neutral about the Jewish story. Nor should it be. From its earliest days, shaped by figures like Rabbi Sabato Morais, himself heir to the trauma of Iberian exile, the Seminary understood what too many now forget. Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile. Jewish dignity without a homeland is contingent. Jewish learning untethered from Jewish peoplehood is incomplete.
Zionism was not an ideological add-on to Judaism. It was from its inception and remains its historical and spiritual unfolding.
To deny that is not nuance. It is willful amnesia.
There is a dangerous confusion taking root in parts of our community, a claim that one can stand within the tradition of serious Jewish learning while severing Judaism from Zionism. That one can graduate from institutions built on the covenantal relationship between people, Torah, and land, and then declare the Jewish state a moral aberration.
This is not intellectual courage. It is a rupture with the very foundations of Jewish existence.
No serious student of Jewish history can miss the pattern. From the destruction of Jerusalem to the expulsions of Spain and Portugal, from the ghettos of Europe to the ashes of the Shoah and the Shavuot 1941 Farhud in Iraq, Jewish vulnerability in exile is not theoretical. It is the central fact of our past. The founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination. They carried its urgency in their bones.
And now, in a moment when Israel is under sustained assault, militarily, morally, rhetorically, we are told that honoring the President of the Jewish state is somehow beyond the pale.
No.
As current junior at JTS’ List College Noah Lederman put it, “commencement is not a “safe space.” It is a sacred space. It marks the transmission of responsibility from one generation of Jewish leader to the next. To invite the President of Israel is to remind graduates that their learning is not detached from the fate of our people. It is bound up with it.
President Herzog does not represent a political party. He represents the State of Israel and the Jewish people. To refuse to hear him is not an act of conscience. It is a cowardly refusal to engage the complicated reality of Jewish sovereignty itself.
We can and must debate policies. We can and must wrestle with moral complexity. That is what Torah demands of us. But there is a line, just as rooted in the Torah and tradition, that must not be crossed. When critique becomes a denial of Israel’s legitimacy, when it echoes the language of those who seek not reform but eradication, it ceases to be Jewish discourse.
It becomes something else.
Let us be honest about the stakes. In a world where antisemitism is resurging with terrifying clarity, antizionism offers a convenient vocabulary through which ancient hatreds can be reframed as moral virtue. When Jews lend their voices to that project, even in the name of justice, they do not purify it. They legitimize it.
We dare not offer that gift.
Zionism is not political preference. It is the modern expression of ancient covenant. It is the insistence that Jewish life, Jewish memory, and Jewish destiny require a home in the world. To strip Judaism of that commitment is not to refine it. It is to hollow it out.
JTS knows this. It has always known this.
That is why it sends its rabbinical students to study in Israel. That is why Israel remains central to its mission. That is why honoring the President of Israel at commencement is not controversial in any deep sense. It is consistent.
The real danger is not that a handful of students dissent. Dissent has always been part of our tradition. The danger is that we begin to treat antizionism as just another legitimate Jewish position, one among many, equally rooted, equally valid.
It is not.
Antizionism is not normal. Nor should we normalize it.
To the graduates of JTS, I say this with love and with urgency: You are heirs to a tradition that refused to disappear, that commits to a Jewish evolutionary tradition. You are beneficiaries of generations who dreamed not only of surviving, but of returning, rebuilding, renewing Jewish life in its fullness, the deepest meaning of three words that have become, once again, defiance: Am Yisrael Chai!
Do not be the generation that forgets why that dream mattered.
Stand in the fullness of your inheritance. Study deeply. Argue fiercely. Care about justice. But never sever yourselves from your people. We were once denied our national identity as the cost of emancipated thinking. Do not imagine that Judaism can be disentangled from the reality of Jewish sovereignty without losing something essential, something irreplaceable, something necessary.
Zionism is not an accessory to Jewish identity.
It is one of its core expressions.
And JTS, in honoring the President of the State of Israel, is not betraying its mission.
It is fulfilling it.
May 1, 2026
Apr 29, 2026
Apr 23, 2026
Testimony and Presence on Long Island: A Yom HaShoah Reflection
Testimony and Presence on Long Island: A Yom HaShoah Reflection
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I am still sitting with the strangeness of it.
I stood as keynote speaker at a Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah commemoration on Long Island, the place of my childhood, and I am not a survivor. I am not the child of survivors, nor their grandchild. I carry no direct familial testimony of the Shoah. And yet, I was entrusted with words in a space defined by memory that is as sacred as it is searing.
And perhaps that is precisely the point.
Shoah Survivor Egon Salmon z”l spoke through recorded testimony, his voice bridging the abyss between then and now. My beloved friend, Shoah Survivor Ben Stern z”l, was with me in spirit, as he so often is, his moral clarity still marching, still teaching. And I felt, with unusual force, the truth of Shoah Survivor Elie Wiesel z”l’s teaching that to be witness to a witness makes one a witness. That sacred chain does not end with biology. It extends through sacred listening, through carrying, through refusing to let memory dissipate into abstraction.
Returning to Long Island for this moment carried its own emotional weight. This was not only a communal gathering. It was, for me, a kind of homecoming into responsibility. To stand there and help articulate a response to the Shoah, to hatred, to the persistence of antisemitism, while also insisting on Jewish beauty, on Jewish life that is not only reactive but generative, felt like a delicate and necessary balance.
The purposes of Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah are many. Education. Moral formation. Historical clarity. But the ritual itself is profoundly clear. Testimony. Knowledge. Awareness. Honoring the dead. These are not abstract ideals. They are acts. They are obligations.
I was deeply moved by the presence of Scouts BSA Troop 240, who sang the national anthem. I shared with them that I, too, was once a Long Island Cub Scout, formed in part by the values of that movement. And then I noticed something that stayed with me. There were no identifiable Jewish scouts in that troop. There were boys and girls. One scout was wearing a hijab.
I found myself speaking not only to the Jewish community gathered there, but to her. To all who were listening from outside the boundaries of Jewish identity. I spoke about the blasphemy of the Shoah as the denial of the full humanity of the Jewish people. And I spoke about what Judaism demands of us in response.
Our ethical reflex is ancient. Emerging directly from the memory of our own enslavement in Egypt, the Torah commands us not to oppress the stranger, precisely because we know the experience of being othered. That memory is not meant to harden us. It is meant to sensitize us.
And then Hillel, under Roman occupation thousands of years later, sharpens the teaching even further. What is hateful to you, do not do to another. Not only to your fellow Jew. To another. Full stop.
At one point I locked eyes with that scout. I wanted her to know that I saw her, not as a symbol, not as a contrast, but as a human being standing in a sacred space of Jewish memory. And I wanted her to feel that the values I was teaching demanded that I see her that way. Just as her presence there suggested, to me, that she saw me.
Was it a full reckoning between communities, histories, and identities? Of course not. That is not what a single gathering can accomplish. But there was something real in that moment. Something intentional. A shared willingness to be present within a structure that asked something of us. That held us steady for the moment.
It was not the chaotic, unbounded, often dehumanizing space of public discourse we have grown used to. It was a ritual. And ritual, when it works, creates the conditions for truth to be carried with care.
I left feeling humbled. Grateful. A bit unsettled in the way that sacred responsibility often leaves a person.
And I pray that, in some small way, it brought honor to the memory of the six million.
____________
Photo: Jewish Community Relations Council - Long Island (JCRC-LI)/Congregation Shaaray Shalom Holocaust Remembrance Service, April 19, 2026 (photo: Raya Creditor)
Apr 21, 2026
Apr 16, 2026
Apr 15, 2026
Reentering History: The Days of Rising
The Days of Rising
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Yesterday we gathered in learning and in testimony for Yom HaShoah veHagevruah, the Day of Holocaust and Heroism. But that day does not stand alone. Time, in our tradition, is never isolated. It flows.
We now find ourselves in the quiet current between Yom HaShoah and what awaits us next week, Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Independence Day). This stretch of days asks something of us. It is not empty time. It is sacred transition.
We are used to thinking of sacred arcs in the calendar. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Repentance carry us along a path of introspection and return. So too, I believe, these days form their own sacred arc. A modern cycle of holiness. Beginning in the depths of memory and loss, and moving, not abruptly but deliberately, toward remembrance, sacrifice, and ultimately, renewal.
What shall we call these days in between? They are not Days of Repentance, “Yemei Teshuvah.” They are something else. Perhaps they are “Yemei Tekumah,” Days of Rising, Days of standing again.
For what is the journey we are tracing, if not the movement of a people from devastation to dignity, from powerlessness to the fragile, necessary assertion of self-determination. From the Shoah, through the memory of those who fought and fell, toward the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral home. This is not a simple progression. It is a trembling ascent. And we are still within it.
This week’s Torah portions, Tazria and Metzora, meet us in this space with their own unsettling language. They speak of bodies out of balance, of conditions that disrupt, that isolate, that render a person uncertain of their place within the community. There is a deep discomfort here. Not only with the physical realities described, but with what they represent. A loss of control. A vulnerability we cannot easily master.
And yet, the Torah does not leave a person there. It creates a process. When something is unclear, when the body or the self feels out of order, there is a path of discernment, of separation, and ultimately, of return. A way back into community. A way back into time.
We know that feeling. Not only in our bodies, but in our history. The long experience of exile carried with it a profound sense of dislocation, of insecurity, of not being at home in the world. Zionism, in one of its deepest readings, is a response to that condition. Not a denial of vulnerability, but a refusal to remain defined by it. A commitment to stand again.
Still, not everything comes under our control. Not then, not now. There are forces within and beyond us that unsettle, that confuse, that frighten. And unlike the biblical world, we do not have a single figure who can definitively tell us what is happening or what comes next. But we do recognize the feeling. The uncertainty. The longing for clarity and for return.
That is why these days matter.
We cannot move directly from Yom HaShoah back into ordinary time. To do so would be to deny the weight of memory and the work of grief. Instead, we are invited into a process. A sacred interval in which we begin, slowly, to reenter.
Yom HaShoah opens the space of remembrance. It asks us to witness, to mourn, to refuse forgetting. But it does not ask us to remain there. It begins something. A movement, however tentative, toward standing again.
And so we walk these days with care. Not rushing. Not collapsing the distance between loss and renewal. Trusting that, like our ancestors who sought a path back into the community, we too are learning how to reenter history with strength, with memory, and with hope.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Yesterday we gathered in learning and in testimony for Yom HaShoah veHagevruah, the Day of Holocaust and Heroism. But that day does not stand alone. Time, in our tradition, is never isolated. It flows.
We now find ourselves in the quiet current between Yom HaShoah and what awaits us next week, Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Independence Day). This stretch of days asks something of us. It is not empty time. It is sacred transition.
We are used to thinking of sacred arcs in the calendar. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Repentance carry us along a path of introspection and return. So too, I believe, these days form their own sacred arc. A modern cycle of holiness. Beginning in the depths of memory and loss, and moving, not abruptly but deliberately, toward remembrance, sacrifice, and ultimately, renewal.
What shall we call these days in between? They are not Days of Repentance, “Yemei Teshuvah.” They are something else. Perhaps they are “Yemei Tekumah,” Days of Rising, Days of standing again.
For what is the journey we are tracing, if not the movement of a people from devastation to dignity, from powerlessness to the fragile, necessary assertion of self-determination. From the Shoah, through the memory of those who fought and fell, toward the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral home. This is not a simple progression. It is a trembling ascent. And we are still within it.
This week’s Torah portions, Tazria and Metzora, meet us in this space with their own unsettling language. They speak of bodies out of balance, of conditions that disrupt, that isolate, that render a person uncertain of their place within the community. There is a deep discomfort here. Not only with the physical realities described, but with what they represent. A loss of control. A vulnerability we cannot easily master.
And yet, the Torah does not leave a person there. It creates a process. When something is unclear, when the body or the self feels out of order, there is a path of discernment, of separation, and ultimately, of return. A way back into community. A way back into time.
We know that feeling. Not only in our bodies, but in our history. The long experience of exile carried with it a profound sense of dislocation, of insecurity, of not being at home in the world. Zionism, in one of its deepest readings, is a response to that condition. Not a denial of vulnerability, but a refusal to remain defined by it. A commitment to stand again.
Still, not everything comes under our control. Not then, not now. There are forces within and beyond us that unsettle, that confuse, that frighten. And unlike the biblical world, we do not have a single figure who can definitively tell us what is happening or what comes next. But we do recognize the feeling. The uncertainty. The longing for clarity and for return.
That is why these days matter.
We cannot move directly from Yom HaShoah back into ordinary time. To do so would be to deny the weight of memory and the work of grief. Instead, we are invited into a process. A sacred interval in which we begin, slowly, to reenter.
Yom HaShoah opens the space of remembrance. It asks us to witness, to mourn, to refuse forgetting. But it does not ask us to remain there. It begins something. A movement, however tentative, toward standing again.
And so we walk these days with care. Not rushing. Not collapsing the distance between loss and renewal. Trusting that, like our ancestors who sought a path back into the community, we too are learning how to reenter history with strength, with memory, and with hope.
Apr 12, 2026
Apr 1, 2026
Mar 23, 2026
Mar 20, 2026
Mar 19, 2026
Mar 11, 2026
Mar 4, 2026
Reclaiming Aaron (Ki Tissa)
Reclaiming Aaron (Ki Tissa)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
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Ki Tissa sits like an island inside the Tabernacle narrative that defines the end of the Book of Exodus. Before it, Torah teaches the building of the Mishkan. After it, Torah returns again to the Mishkan. And there, in the middle, we are thrown into the calamity of the Golden Calf. It is not only about a statue. It is also about fear. It is about what happens when the spiritual center of a people disappears into the clouds.
Moses ascends Mount Sinai and is gone from sight. The people cannot locate him, cannot read his face, cannot hear his voice. The text is painfully direct. They approach Aaron and say, “make us a god, because we do not know what happened to this man, Moshe.” Their language is filled with panic.
Aaron responds in a way that has mystified readers for thousands of years. He tells them to take the gold earrings from their sons and daughters, and from themselves, and to bring them to him. They do. From this material Aaron fashions a molten calf. (Ex. 32:1-4)
How are we to understand Aaron’s personality and character after that? The episode happens at the base of Mount Sinai, so soon after the splitting of the sea, so close to Revelation. Aaron is already (or about to become) the High Priest. How can this possibly be part of his story? What is his legacy of leadership?
Tradition refuses to let the question go. Commentators reach for explanations, sometimes in attempts to exonerate, sometimes to interpret a narrative that defies conventional reading. Some suggest that when Aaron tells the people that they will celebrate “tomorrow, (Ex. 32:5)” he is buying time, hoping Moses will return and interrupt the impending disaster. Some suggest he never imagined the people would surrender their gold so quickly, that he underestimated the fervor of their fear. Some suggest the people did not believe Moses was a god at all, but they could not survive without an intermediary, without something tangible that helped them aim their hearts toward Heaven (32:1). In that approach, they were not looking for a new deity. They were looking for a new access point.
There is also a haunting midrash that says first Aaron witnessed Chur, another leader, refuse the mob and be killed, causing Aaron to say to himself: “Better to delay, better to survive, better to say yes than to be torn apart and leave the people with no leadership at all. (Vayikra Rabbah 10:3)” It is a disturbing teaching, and perhaps it is meant to disturb us. Sometimes Torah provides something other than heroes.
What compounds the mystery is what happens next. Aaron is not punished in the way we might expect. When Moses descends, Aaron defends himself in a way that is almost surreal. “I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf. (Ex. 32:24)” The Torah itself has already told us that is not what happened. The narrative is tangled, and Aaron’s character becomes, at first glance, indecipherable.
Later in textual history, the rabbis do something even more surprising. They do not freeze Aaron in the moment of his failure. They reshape him in the moral imagination of our people. Aaron becomes the one who loves peace and pursues peace (see Pirkei Avot 1:12). We even pray that we should be disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace.
It can feel like a whitewashing of the text, a willful ignoring of history. But Perhaps it is something else. Perhaps the rabbis, in this obvious rereading of Aaron, are insisting on complexity, warning against the spiritual laziness of a single story.
They go further. In a Talmudic discussion about whether conflict is best resolved through strict law or through compromise, Moses becomes the model of law that pierces the mountain, and Aaron becomes the model of mediation (TB Sanhedrin 7a, as per Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l), of bringing people close enough to each other that a future becomes possible. Yes, you’d be right to ask in response to this suggestion where that is to be found in the biblical text. It is not obvious. It is interpretation. It is aspiration. It is a community trying to learn how to live.
So what do we do with all of this?
One lesson is that history is complicated. If we flatten Aaron, we flatten Torah. If all you know is that Aaron made the calf, you will miss both his history, other moments in his life, and what later generations struggled to discover. Similarly, if all we know is the Aaron-centered prayer about loving peace, you will miss the dark valley that prayer is trying to climb out of. We are not allowed to claim certainty when we only hold one strand of the story.
The moral lesson here is urgent. As the modern civil rights leader, Bryan Stevenson, has taught, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” That truth does not erase accountability. It does not excuse harm. It does not pretend consequences do not matter. But it does insist on the possibility that a human being is larger than their collapse. Aaron is more than the episode with the golden calf, even if the calf and its consequences are real and weighty.
And that lesson pushes against something that is corroding our public life. We have grown addicted to instant verdicts. We meet a person in a single sentence, a single post, a single moment, and we declare we know who they are. We do not say, I wonder what is happening there. We do not often say, tell me more. We do not ask, what fear is driving that? We frequently substitute snap judgment for relationship.
Ki Tissa refuses that substitution. It forces us to sit inside panic, inside absence, inside spiritual adolescence. We were newly free then. We did not yet know how to be a people without a taskmaster. And when the one who carried our confidence disappeared into the cloud, we panicked like children panic when the trusted adult leaves the room. That does not make the Golden Calf acceptable. It does make the human story legible.
Perhaps Aaron saw a mob, trembling and spiraling, and made a decision in a moment of impossible leadership. Perhaps he tried to contain damage. Perhaps he failed. Perhaps he compromised when he should have stood firm. Perhaps he stood with them when he should have stood against them. The Torah does not let us resolve him neatly, because life is rarely neat.
But out of that complexity, the rabbis extract guidance for us. We should aspire to be the kind of people who endure the slow work of repair. Be the kind of people who do not presume to know the whole story of another human being, because so much context is invisible from the outside and deeply felt on the inside.
To love peace and pursue peace is not to avoid truth. It is to refuse cancellation as a strategy. It is to choose curiosity over certainty. It is to choose relationship over the quick dopamine of condemnation. It is to believe that people can be brought closer, and that closeness can change what seemed fixed.
Our world needs peace. It is hard to know what peace looks like in every situation, but it is not hard to know we need it.
May we learn from the strange, complicated, unresolved figure of Aaron. May we become disciples of the part of him the rabbis refused to let die.
May we do our part to bring more understanding, more patience, and more healing between people. And may that pursuit of peace be one of the ways we keep faith when the clouds feel thick and the path feels uncertain.
Mar 1, 2026
Upon the Death of an Enemy (2011)
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Feb 26, 2026
Feb 25, 2026
Feb 18, 2026
A Prayer for Australia: May This Land Know Peace
A Prayer for Australia: May This Land Know Peace
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Sydney Airport. My heart is full.
As I prepare to travel home, I carry with me profound gifts - of healing, of presence, and of unexpected joy. This journey has been sacred in ways I could not have anticipated. To sit with survivors. To listen. To embrace. To pray. To witness courage that does not erase pain but grows around it. I have been blessed not only to offer strength, but to receive it.
One afternoon, my beloved sister Tzeira and I walked through the Royal Botanic Gardens. We came upon this ancient eucalyptus tree. The moment I saw it, I felt drawn in. Its vast branches stretching outward, its trunk impossibly wide, roots gripping the earth with quiet insistence. When I placed my hand upon it, I felt time itself pulsing - rising from deep within the soil into my palm. The land carries memories. All of them. Sorrow and celebration. Trauma and tenderness. Standing there, I felt the ache of recent violence and the deeper, older resilience of life that refuses to disappear, something I’ve witnessed and appreciated in Australia’s culture - acknowledgement and reverence for the land and those who have walked it.
Healing is not forgetting. It is choosing to remain open. It is choosing presence. It is choosing joy when joy returns.
I am deeply grateful to my UJA-Federation of New York family for making this journey possible, for standing behind the sacred work of Jewish solidarity, for ensuring that no Jewish community feels alone, and for supporting me in being physically present here in this tender time. That embrace was felt across oceans.
As I board my flight, I offer a prayer for safety and protection for our Jewish family here in Australia, for all Australians, and for the world we share. May our roots hold firm. May our branches reach wide. And may the memories yet to be written on this land be blessed with peace.
Feb 17, 2026
Feb 11, 2026
The Aftershock of Revelation (Mishpatim)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Parashat Mishpatim is dense, an intricate weave of civil laws: torts, damages, guardianship, personal injury, property, and responsibility. Case after case unfolds in careful detail. It does not read like poetry. It does not soar. It arrives immediately after Sinai, after thunder and lightning, after a mountain aflame, after what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, called God’s entry into history. Our ancestors had just seen the sounds and trembled before the Infinite, and then the Torah turns to oxen, loans, damages, lost property, Shabbat rhythms, and judicial integrity. The transition is jarring; it feels like spiritual whiplash.
The Israelites had walked through walls of water and survived plagues that dismantled an empire. They stood at the foot of Revelation itself. These moments, the splitting sea, the trembling mountain, the Divine Voice, are the peaks of biblical Jewish memory. And then comes Mishpatim. No fireworks, no spectacle, only law. It can feel almost disappointing. How can a list of ordinances compete with a sea that splits or a mountain that burns?
Perhaps that is precisely the Torah’s point. Life cannot be lived at Sinai every day. If the only places we encounter God are in the miraculous, then we will miss God almost all the time. The sea does not split each morning, and mountains do not regularly blaze with revelation. But neighbors borrow and lend, workers labor, property is damaged, words are spoken, and power is exercised. The Torah moves us from spectacle to structure, from ecstasy to ethics. Mishpatim teaches that the aftershock of Revelation is responsibility. The thunder fades. Justice must endure.
There are miracles in the quiet textures of daily life: the flower that stops you mid-stride, the unexpected kindness that softens a difficult day, the subtle shift in air when winter loosens its grip and hope returns. These, too, are revelations. Yet Mishpatim insists on something even more radical: that a society committed to fairness, accountability, and dignity is itself a sustained miracle. The connective tissue of this parashah is justice, protection of the vulnerable, limits on power, sacred regard for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. Financial systems are infused with compassion, and courts are animated by integrity. God is not only in the thunder but in the terms of the loan, in the boundaries of ownership, and in the restraint of the strong.
I think of my beloved teacher, Rabbi Elazar Diamond z”l, who taught that God is in the details and embodied that truth. He once described stepping off a bus moments before Shabbat began, holding a challah he was bringing to a meal. As the sun dipped and Shabbat arrived, he still had miles to walk. The halachic challenge was real, for one may not carry from domain to domain on Shabbat. So, he walked less than four cubits and stopped, then less than four cubits and stopped, again and again. To an onlooker, it might have seemed like a strange, halting promenade. To him, each measured step was an act of devotion, each pause a recalibration, each movement a conscious invitation to the Divine. He was not merely transporting bread; he was sanctifying space and bending time as he walked with God.
Mishpatim is that walk. Law at its best is not dry regulation but disciplined love. It is a framework that trains the heart toward attentiveness and insists that every action matters, that no encounter is trivial, and that justice is enacted step by careful step. As Dr. Jacob Milgrom z”l taught, Leviticus is not merely a book of law but a book of love, and Mishpatim prepares us for that truth. Law becomes the architecture through which love enters public life.
How we step matters. Every vote cast, every policy shaped, every interaction at work, every moment of restraint when we could dominate but instead choose dignity, these are Sinai extended into the street. We are still standing at Sinai if we understand that Sinai was not meant to remain on the mountain but to descend into contracts, courts, kitchens, and marketplaces. Revelation becomes real only when it transforms the mundane.
Rabbi Diamond held a challah, but he was also holding covenant, community, and sacred time with trembling care.
That is the purpose of law: to carry God carefully through the world.
May the next action we take, whether small or large, be infused with intention. May we walk in a way that might seem peculiar to those who measure life only by spectacle, and may we walk as those who know that every step can hold Presence. Sinai echoes still, not only in thunder but in the steady, unceasing building of a just society. May we find God in the details, and may our careful steps make the world more compassionate, more beautiful, and more whole.
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