It's Time to Break Free

We all know an E-L-U-L acronym.

The most famous is “Ani l'dodi v'dodi li - I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.” (Shir HaShirim 6:3). The High Holidays are not simply about judgment; they are about relationships. Elul is the month to recapture our relationship with God and to remind ourselves that we are connected to each other.

Another familiar Elul acronym is “Ish l're'ehu u'matanot la'evyonim - One person gives to another and gifts to the poor.” (Esther 9:22) The verse is about Purim, but it teaches us something important about Elul. Preparing for the High Holidays cannot be only about me and God. It must also be about how I relate to other people. Teshuvah requires generosity, kindness and repairing relationships.

Then there is an Elul acronym that I suspect many people have never heard. In describing the ir miklat, the cities of refuge for those who kill accidentally, the Torah says: “If he did not act intentionally, but God caused it to happen, I will designate for you a place to which he can flee.” (Shemot 21:13) The Arizal, Rabbi Isaac Luria, noted that the words in this verse “ina l’yado v’samti lecha” begin with the letters אלול, Elul. What does a city of refuge have to do with Elul?

A city of refuge is a place to which someone runs after something has gone terribly wrong. It is a place of protection, but it is also a place of reckoning. The person cannot simply continue life as if nothing happened. He must stop, confront what happened, and commit to live differently. The city of refuge may be a place for the individual to flee, but it is also a place for him to break free. That is what Elul is. It is a refuge. It is not a refuge from reality. It is a refuge in which we can confront reality and break free to a new one.

Rabbi Norman Lamm, in a 1954 sermon on Elul, warned against settling for what he called a philosophy of simply “holding on.” Jewish life, he argued, cannot be reduced to survival, identification or maintaining what we already have. Elul demands something more. We must seek, confront, and grow. As Rabbi Lamm notes, “I’m not satisfied with not slipping. Now I’ve got to climb.”

The path of Elul is not simply staying upright. It is moving upward. We often think of teshuvah as looking backward. We review the past year, identify our mistakes, and ask forgiveness. But teshuvah is not only about the direction from which we came. It is about the direction in which we are going. Similarly, the question of Elul is not merely what did I do wrong? It is where am I going next?

There is something very human about resisting change. Psychologists have long noted that we cling to what is familiar. Change introduces uncertainty. We fear the unknown. We fear failure. Sometimes we simply do not want to expend the energy required to change. What is familiar becomes comfortable and eventually what is comfortable can begin to feel morally right.

We know this in our spiritual lives as well. I have always been this kind of Jew. I have always treated that person this way. Why change? Elul does not allow us to confuse stability with growth. We should be proud that we have maintained our religious commitments. At the same time, Elul asks more of us. Have those commitments changed us? Have I become more patient, generous, and thoughtful? Am I more connected to God? More sensitive to other people? More willing to confront the parts of myself I would rather avoid?

There is a term I find particularly helpful for understanding Elul: creative disequilibrium. Disequilibrium means that we are no longer completely comfortable where we are. Something is unsettled, off balance. That can be uncomfortable. But sometimes discomfort is exactly what makes growth possible. If everything feels perfectly comfortable, why would we change? We need enough stability to feel secure but enough discomfort to realize that we cannot stay exactly where we are. Elul creates that space. It allows us to break and free from the routine and familiar. We may be great, but can we become more? Can our Judaism be even more meaningful? Can our relationships become deeper?

Breaking free is the point of Elul.

The world around us may feel unsettled. Instead of waiting for life to unsettle us, Elul invites us to unsettle ourselves. To ask questions we have avoided. To challenge the assumptions we have taken for granted. To move beyond spiritual autopilot. The disequilibrium of crisis makes us feel that we have lost control. The disequilibrium of Elul reminds us that we have the power to change direction.

Rabbi Lamm describes the Elul mood as containing both “fear of the unknown” and “thrill of expectancy.” The great temptation of life is to remain where we are. We tell ourselves that we are protecting what we have, preserving our traditions, and maintaining our relationships. We are holding things together. But sometimes “holding on” becomes an excuse for not moving forward.

Elul comes to disturb us in the best possible way. During this season, we recite Tehillim 27. King David describes a path of “Et panecha Hashem avakeish – Lord, I will seek Your face.” We are on a quest. We cannot remain static. We need to move. The path may not always be clear and the next step uncomfortable, but we need to start somewhere.

Elul is a refuge for the journey. It is an opportunity to pause long enough to ask where we are going and bold enough to break free and take the first step. We cannot stay in one place forever simply because we are afraid of moving forward. The destination is still ahead, and the path begins now.

Closure After a Storm – 44 Years Later

Last night, Atlantic Beach was hit by a tornado.

You read correctly. It does not happen often. For a few frightening minutes, there was chaos and uncertainty. People watched the sky, listened to the wind and wondered what was happening. Thankfully, the storm passed without significant damage. In the morning, the sun came out.

Sometimes life is like that. We endure moments of fear and uncertainty when we don't know when the storm will end. And sometimes, even after the storm passes, its effects linger.

For the family of Yehuda Katz, the storm lasted 44 years.

Katz was an IDF soldier who went missing in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in Lebanon in 1982. For 44 years, his family waited. For 44 years, Israel searched and did not give up. This week, his remains were finally recovered and brought home to Israel for burial.

There is something profoundly Jewish about refusing to leave a person behind even after death. The Torah says, “Kavor tikberenu - You shall surely bury him.” (Devarim 21:23) The Torah could simply have said tikberenu, “bury him.” Instead, it says kavor tikberenu. It emphasizes and accentuates the obligation. There is no negotiation or mitigation. You must surely bury him.

Jewish burial is a sacred obligation. Jewish tradition treats the deceased with extraordinary respect. The body is handled gently, privately and with reverence. Every single bone, body part, or remain must be buried.  Throughout history, Jews have taken extraordinary risks to recover and bury the dead. The IDF inherited that commitment. There is a special unit, Eitan, which stands for Itur Ne’edarim, which means collecting those that are lost. These soldiers are willing to risk their lives to bring every last fallen soldier home. Their work, rarely visible, involves years of investigation, intelligence gathering, and following seemingly insignificant leads.

In Yehuda Katz’s case, some may say he died 44 years ago. His parents are gone. We have mourned him. We have moved on. Instead, Israel said he is ours; bring him home. When he was finally found, something else happened. His family could finally begin to mourn. At the funeral, Yehuda’s brother poignantly announced that the family will now sit shiva “because until now, we had not given up hope of finding him alive. As far as we are concerned, Yehuda was killed this week, not 44 years ago.”

Rabbi David Stav, reflecting several months ago on the return of the remains of Lt. Hadar Goldin, observed that bringing the fallen home for burial is simultaneously an experience of terrible pain and the beginning of comfort and closure. For 44 years, Yehuda's family lived in a storm of uncertainty. Now, the storm is over. There is pain and grief, but there is also certainty. There is a place to mourn and a grave to visit. There is also finally a beginning to the process of healing.

Jewish burial does not only provide closure. It points forward.

There is an intriguing Hebrew word for a gravesite, tziyun. The more familiar matzeivah refers to the gravestone. A tziyun is the marker that identifies the place where the deceased is buried. The word has a clear connection with the word Tziyon, Zion, as well as metzuyan, excellent. Rabbi Asher Pollak explains a tziyun is like a road marker. It tells us where someone is and, perhaps, where we are supposed to go. A Jewish grave is more than a place where the past is remembered. It is a roadmap for the future. The graves of those who came before us ask something of those who come after them. Remember, continue, build, live lives worthy of those who came before.

Yehuda Katz has come home as a reminder that we are still here and always will be. The Jewish people endured Sultan Yacoub. We have endured exile, persecution, and destruction. We endured 44 years of painful uncertainly. We are still here. Yehuda Katz’s grave points toward the future.

These events take place against the backdrop of an auspicious time of year. Elul is a transitional month. The old year with all its ups and downs is coming to an end, but the new year has not yet begun. We stand between what was and what can be. Like the morning after a storm, Elul gives us the opportunity to look at what happened, take stock of what remains, and prepare for what comes next. It is about remembering and looking backward before we move forward. It is about asking ourselves what and whom we have allowed ourselves to forget. Who have we stopped calling? What relationship have we allowed to become distant? What responsibility have we quietly convinced ourselves is no longer ours? Elul asks us to return to God, to people, to commitments and to values we may have neglected.

Kavor tikberenu has a message for the living as well as the dead. A Jewish grave is a marker but also gives direction. It’s a reminder of death, but ultimately an affirmation of life. It amplifies the message of tziyun, of Zion, and of Elul itself. Remember where you came from. Know where you are going. Keep moving toward redemption.

Last night, the sky over Atlantic Beach was stormy and frightening. This morning, the sun came out. Today, after 44 years, Yehuda Katz's family has closure. There is pain, but there is also a grave, a place to remember, and the possibility of moving forward. The storm is over. There is closure. The sun has come out.

May Yehuda’s family find comfort and strength and may the calm after the storm inaugurate a glorious new year to come.

Keep It Simple, Keep It Real

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

The quote is often attributed to Blaise Pascal and reflects the sentiment that simplicity is hard. Anyone can make something complicated. It takes real wisdom to make something simple.

There is a story about a rabbi who delivered a forty-minute sermon. A congregant who was a TV producer loved the message and told the rabbi, “This belongs on television so more people can hear it!” The rabbi was thrilled, but there was one problem. The television program could only give him two minutes. “Can you shorten your sermon to two minutes?” the congregant asked. “Of course!” the rabbi replied enthusiastically. “So why didn’t you?” retorted the congregant.

We live in a world that prizes complexity. We admire complicated ideas, sophisticated arguments, and people who seem to know everything. Judaism, however, teaches us that sometimes the deepest truth is the simplest one.

“Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha - You shall be tamim with Hashem, your God.” (Devarim 18:13)

The word tam means simple. We recognize it from the Haggadah and the simple child who asks, “What is this?” But simple does not mean stupid, and wholehearted does not mean naïve. In fact, becoming a tam may be one of the most difficult things a sophisticated person can do.

Rashi understands tamim tihyeh in the context of the verses which prohibit various forms of divination and attempts to discover the future. Do not consult those who claim to know what tomorrow will bring. Instead, “Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha,” be wholehearted with God. Trust Him and accept that there are things we will not know. Ramban emphasizes that we should not place our faith in the predictions of others. We want certainty. We want to know what will happen next. Judaism says, “You may not know what tomorrow holds. You can, however, know Who holds tomorrow.”

There is a famous story about King Shaul. Before his final battle with the Philistines, he visited a Baalat Ov, a medium, who told him that he would lose the battle. Shaul subsequently went to war and was defeated. That does not mean the Baalat Ov was right. Perhaps Shaul had already been psychologically defeated. Once he believed that defeat was inevitable, he acted as someone who had nothing left to fight for.

Orde Wingate, the British military officer and passionate Christian Zionist who spent time in pre-state Israel training members of the Haganah, reportedly stood on Mount Gilboa one day looking down at the Jewish settlements in the valley below. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Saul was a fool!” His Jewish companion asked, “Saul who?” “King Saul,” Wingate answered. Why? Because, in Wingate's view, Saul had an opportunity to defeat the Philistines. He had a small, mobile force positioned behind the enemy. But the prediction had gotten into his head, and he allowed the prophecy to become his reality.

Sometimes the greatest danger is not what someone tells us will happen. It is when we start believing that it must happen. The lesson of tamim tihyeh is not that experts are always wrong; it is that experts are not God. Predictions are not destiny. The future belongs to God.

One of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's most famous stories is “The Sophisticate and the Simpleton.” Two childhood friends take radically different paths through life. The Sophisticate is brilliant. He studies medicine, languages, philosophy, and every conceivable field of knowledge. He travels the world and accumulates wealth. He is impressive, but he is also miserable. He analyzes everything and questions everything. Nothing is ever good enough. He becomes trapped in his own sophistication until he loses everything.

Then there is the Simpleton, a shoemaker, who makes crooked shoes. His clothing is simple, his food is plain, yet he is happy. When people laugh at his crooked shoes, he doesn't become defensive. He finds joy in what he has. He experiences gratitude instead of comparison. Ultimately, the Simpleton becomes beloved by the king.

Rebbe Nachman is not advocating ignorance or opposing wisdom, but wisdom without simplicity can become its own form of foolishness. You can know more and understand less. You can analyze everything and appreciate nothing. You can become so sophisticated that you are incapable of being happy. Perhaps most dangerous of all, you can become cynical. The Sophisticate has a voice in his head that keeps saying, “This isn't perfect. This isn't real.”

We sometimes hear a similar voice. It is the voice that prevents us from simply enjoying a Shabbat meal or a family activity because we are comparing it to someone else's or what we see online. It is the voice that tells us that our Judaism isn't meaningful unless we have reached some imagined level of perfection. Rebbe Nachman's Simpleton teaches us something fundamental: Keep it simple. Keep it real.

Onkelos translates tamim as sh'lim, which means complete or whole. The opposite of tamim is not intelligent; it is fragmented. We live increasingly fragmented lives. We can be one person at work, at home, in shul, or online and another when no one is watching. Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha calls us toward something different. Be whole. Let our values and actions line up. Let the Judaism we profess in shul influence the way we treat our spouses at home, our neighbors in the community, and strangers we encounter on the street.

In the Megillah, Mordechai is described as in “ish Yehudi,” a Jewish man. Our Judaism should be as apparent as our humanity. Children do not need a DNA test to know who their parents are. They just know. Judaism, at its best, is not supposed to be an elaborate performance. It is supposed to become part of who we are.

Of course, Judaism demands thought, questioning, and growth. We should never be afraid of intellectual sophistication. But there is a difference between depth and complication and between doubt and cynicism. The greatest sophistication may be the ability to return to something simple. That is what tamim tihyeh ultimately asks of us. Not to know the future or be perfect. Rather, to bring our whole selves to God. Our faith and our doubts. Our learning and our simplicity. Our private selves and our public selves. All of it.

We may not know what tomorrow will bring. We do know Who holds the future, and we can choose how we live today. We can choose authenticity over pretense, wholeness over fragmentation, and simplicity over cynicism. We can stop trying so hard to impress and start trying to be real. The deepest wisdom is not discovering something complicated; it is remembering something simple: God is with us. Our task is simply to walk with Him wholeheartedly, authentically, and as ourselves. 

Keep it simple. Keep it real.

The Grandparents of the Father of Zionism Have Come Home

The Herzl family plot on Mount Herzl has been filling up for 77 years.

Theodor Herzl was reinterred there in 1949. His parents and his sister Pauline were brought there as well. The bodies of his two eldest children, Pauline and Hans, came from Bordeaux in 2006. The remains of his grandson Stephen Norman, who died by suicide in Washington in 1946, followed in 2007. Only one member of the family is still missing. Trude, Herzl’s youngest daughter, was murdered by the Nazis in Theresienstadt in 1943, and her remains were never recovered.

On Wednesday, Shimon Leib and Rivka Herzl, the grandparents of Theodor Herzl, were reinterred on Har Herzl. More than a century after their deaths, the State of Israel has fulfilled one of the last wishes contained in Herzl's will and another chapter of the family's journey has reached its destination. More accurately, it has come home.

The Torah repeatedly speaks about the central place where the Jewish people would gather, but it never identifies Jerusalem by name. Instead, it calls it, “Ha-makom asher yivchar Hashem – the place that God will choose.” (Devarim 12:5) We don’t know the exact location, but we do know, “L’shichno tidreshu u’vata shamah – Seek God’s presence and come there.”

We don’t know where we are going, but we know that we will get there.

The destination is left unnamed, because every Jew is expected to discover it. Jerusalem is not merely a city on a map. It is the place to which the Jewish soul is drawn. For nearly two thousand years, we face toward it in prayer, end the Seder and Yom Kippur with "Next Year in Jerusalem," remember it at every wedding, and mourn it on Tisha B'Av. Long before we could point to it on a map, we knew where "there" was.

U'vata shamah - you will come there. This week, Herzl's grandparents finally did. It is not merely a family matter. Their reinterment is a statement of Jewish mission and a commentary on continuity.

Many recall Herzl as the assimilated Viennese journalist and intellectual. A man of tremendous vision who declared “Im tirtzu ein zo agadah – If you really want it, it is no dream,” and who accurately predicted the birth of the Jewish State. He was a man whose children drifted from Judaism, two of whom were baptized, whose family line ended in heartbreaking tragedy. But that is not the whole story. Herzl did not invent Zionism from thin air.

Shimon Leib Herzl was born in Zemun, Serbia in 1805, the son of a rabbi. He served as gabbai in the Sephardic synagogue of Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai, one of the religious pioneers of modern Zionism. Decades before political Zionism existed, Rabbi Alkalai was preaching that Jewish redemption would begin when Jews returned to their ancestral homeland. Those ideas were discussed around the Herzl family table, and some contemporary scholars conclude that Herzl's own implementation of modern Zionism was influenced by these ideas.

President Isaac Herzog spoke at the reinterment ceremony about inheritance. He said, “Dreams are not bequeathed in writing. They pass at the Shabbat table, they pass in the living room, they pass in the story a grandfather tells his grandson.” Herzl may have strayed from the religious life of his ancestors, yet something remained alive within him – an inheritance deeper than memory, an inheritance stronger than assimilation. That may be why this reinterment feels so profoundly moving. The grandparents who helped plant the dream have now been gathered into the reality their grandson helped create.

There is another lesson here.

The Torah does not simply say, “U’vata shamah - You shall come there.” It first says, “leshichno tidreshu – Seek God’s presence.” Coming home is not merely about arriving at a destination. It is about seeking a Presence. The return to Zion was never intended to culminate with passports, parliaments, or even sovereignty. Those are extraordinary achievements, but they are not the destination. They create the possibility for something greater: a society shaped by Judaism, families that transmit Jewish values, and a nation striving to make God's Presence felt in the world.

Herzl built the road home; we must decide what kind of home we will build.

That challenge feels especially urgent today. Oded Feuer, who directs the World Zionist Organization’s Herzl Center, noted, “Zionism is again being attacked from all sides. And the first answer to those attacks is within ourselves. Strengthening our Jewish identity will help us give answers, though not everyone who attacks is willing to get an answer.”

Since October 7, we have been under attack, and we have also pushed back. Jews who had felt distant have begun asking deeper questions. People have put on tefillin or lit Shabbat candles for the first time. Others have discovered Hebrew or a renewed connection to Israel and the Jewish people. Around the world, countless Jews have realized that Jewish identity is not simply an ancestry to remember when it is threatened. It is a life to be lived every day. That is u'vata shamah.

Coming home is not only boarding a plane to Ben Gurion Airport. It is returning to Jewish purpose. The Herzl family journey reminds us that Jewish continuity is rarely linear. One generation may drift while another returns. Children may disappoint while grandchildren rediscover. Seeds planted quietly can blossom decades later in ways no one could have imagined.

The Jewish story has always been one of seeking and returning - to God, to Judaism, to the people, to Israel. The grandparents of the father of Zionism have finally come home. For us, the seeking and returning continues.