May 14, 2026
May 13, 2026
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May 8, 2026
Olam Chesed Yibaneh | The Lauder-Morasha School | in Warsaw, Poland | May 8, 2026
I share a deep and enduring connection with the Zespół Szkół Lauder-Morasha (The Lauder-Morasha School) in Warsaw, Poland, a relationship that began at the very start of its life. In 1995, just a year after the school opened, I traveled there with Pizmon, the Jewish a cappella group from JTS/Columbia. We were part of an extraordinary moment in Jewish history, as Jewish life in Poland was beginning to rebuild itself with courage and love. Singing with those children in those early days left a permanent mark on me. Their voices, their presence, their very existence in that space of renewal shaped my own spiritual path. They helped inspire the way I sing, the way I reach for the Divine, and ultimately the rabbi and composer I have become.And then, this morning, that circle of connection came alive again in a way I could never have imagined. My beloved friends Mark Medin and Kim Hartman were visiting the school as part of a UJA-Federation of New York delegation, and heard the students at that same school were singing my song, Olam Chesed Yibaneh, including a Polish translation!, led by the Head of School Karolina Szykier-Koszucka, moved me profoundly. [CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO]
Those children, in a historic place that helped form my own voice decades ago, are now giving voice to my music once again. It is a powerful, full circle moment, a living expression of continuity, creativity, and love.
Am Yisrael Chai!
May 6, 2026
Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint
Masks, Moral Certainty, and the Collapse of Restraint
Rabbi Menachem CreditorA Rabbinic Reflection on the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again, Season 2
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Last night two things happened. The “Daredevil: Born Again” Season 2 finale aired on Disney+, and Antizionist protesters once again chanted for Israel’s demise outside Park East Synagogue in New York City.
Let’s start with Daredevil. (Major spoiler alert.)
In the season finale, Dr. Heather Glenn, a disturbed and corrupt mental health professional, testifies in court while cloaked in the authority of her expertise, by reading from her own book, “Men in Masks: The Psychology of Vigilantes” (Chapter 2, Page 35 - the level of constructed detail in the Marvel miniseries is remarkable).
“The mask does not conceal, it reveals. The vigilante’s true self, she argues, is not the one hidden behind fabric and shadow, but the one that emerges when accountability is stripped away.”
In cross-examination, Attorney Matt Murdock’s, himself the hidden vigilante known as Daredevil, asks Dr. Glenn,
"Does a vigilante need a mask, if she never cultivated an alter-ego?"
His question lingers in response, almost like a quiet challenge to the premise itself: what happens when there was never an alter ego to begin with?
The show does not leave that question in the abstract. It answers it with images. A crowd gathers, animated by a sense of justice, fueled by righteousness. The target is clear (the Mayor of NY, also known as Kingpin), the moral lines feel clean, and the energy builds with a familiar and dangerous momentum. A powerful element of the crowd is that they’ve donned cardboard Daredevil masks in solidarity with their champion. (They also wear gaiter facemasks, from the neck to the middle of their faces.) And then, when they’ve got Kingpin cornered, the crowd becomes a mob and attacks him violently (the scene is gory and not easy to watch). The masks remain, but something else is revealed. Not just anger, but permission. Not just protest, but chaotic release. Without giving the ending away, suffice it to say that Daredevil intervenes and demonstrates actual heroism on the deepest level, especially according to the rabbinic maxim that true might is restraint.
It would be easy to dismiss this as comic book storytelling, as the genre’s reliance on presenting and challenging stark binaries of hero and villain. But that would miss what feels uncomfortably close to the surface. The visual language is not accidental. The gaiter masks, the slogans, the sense of collective moral clarity, all of it echoes scenes that have become part of our own civic landscape. In cities across the country, including here in New York, protest has increasingly taken on this aesthetic and this psychology.
The rationale for the masks is the fear of being recorded, identified, and harassed (“doxed,” in today’s parlance). The instinct toward self-protection in a hyper documented public square is understandable.
But masks do more than protect. They can also transform, creating distance between the individual and their actions. They lower the cost of escalation, inviting a kind of moral outsourcing, where responsibility absorbed into the anonymity by the group, removing personal accountability through collective identification.
What we witnessed outside Park East Synagogue last night, where protesters rallied outside for the second time in six months, including some scuffles between the police and Antizionist demonstrators was not an isolated eruption. It was part of a pattern that is becoming harder to ignore. A crowd that sees itself as righteous can begin to act as if self-determined righteousness itself is license. When Israel, and the Jewish commitment to national self-determination in Israel more broadly, are cast as embodiments of evil (a this-worldly stand-in for Kingpin, as it were), the complexity of reality is flattened into something far more combustible. Social media accelerates this, feeding narratives that reward outrage and certainty over nuance and truth.
And then there is leadership, or the absence of it. The recent veto by Mayor Mamdani of the city-council affirmed buffer zone bill which was designed to safeguard houses of worship and vulnerable communities, sent a message that the line between protest and intimidation is negotiable. That the burden of navigating that line falls not on those who gather, but on those who must endure the gathering.
The most unsettling part of the Daredevil sequence and most Antizionist protests is not only the violence itself. (I speak from personal experience, not only as the rabbi. Of UJA-Federation of NY during the last 3 years of incessant attacks on our local community but also having served as a congregation rabbi in Berkeley, California for 11 years, where such intense dynamics have long been at play.) The true danger is the self-perception of the crowd. They do not see themselves as a mob. They see themselves as a force for justice, as necessary, even heroic. That is what makes the moment so resonant. The danger is not only in what people do, but in what they believe they are justified in doing.
A mask can hide a face. It can also reveal a willingness to act without being seen, without being known, without being accountable. The question is not whether protest is legitimate. Protest is an essential response to the abuses of power. The question the mask represents is what happens when the structures within the protestors’ worldview that sustain nuanced, moral thinking begin to erode.
We are living in a moment when the line between conviction and absolutism is under strain. The language of “good and evil,” “hero and villain,” has its place, but when it becomes the only language available, it leaves little room for restraint. And without restraint, even the most deeply felt sense of justice can tip into something else entirely. Quickly.
Antizionist crowds, who scuffled with the NYPD last night and seem to see themselves as a vigilante army, ready to violently battle their perceived arch-enemy, are not a demonstration of justice. They are misguided and dangerous, vigilantism barely concealed behind ubiquitous masks.
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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