Late one evening in early August, my wife, my eleven-year-old daughter, and I went outside to watch a meteor shower. We lay on our backs, staring up at the night sky while conveying to our youngest the same things we were told as children. See that star? It might no longer be there. It can take light decades, even centuries to reach us. There’s the Milky Way, and there’s the Big Dipper. Can you believe the universe is expanding? Yes, it’s hard to understand infinity, but it’s also hard to understand finitude, as if there’s some wall with nothing beyond it. How could that be? We shared with her what we know—what she already knew and listened to anyway—as we had previously with her older brothers who were away. It’s a familiar story, parents helping their children confront the sometimes overwhelming and awe-inspiring aspects of our reality, sharing what we do know, marveling at what we don’t. Even the earth draws a thin blue curtain across all that enormity during the day, as if modeling a way to deal with the so-called big questions: sometimes you ignore them. But that only works part of the time. That stardust overhead is us, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood.
I thought back to that night as I wrote this piece about entering Rabbanut North America: The Hartman Beit Midrash for New North American Rabbis. I started the program wanting to do what I already do as a law professor—write and teach—albeit with an increased focus on Judaism. But in some ways, I would say that my writing life to date has been about daytime problems. As part of my rabbinic calling, I feel myself increasingly wanting to write about night too.
Writing has always been my outlet. I have spent my professional life publishing pieces on politics, law, and markets, all wonderful subjects, but in many ways daytime, 9-to-5 topics. I love reasoned argumentation and analysis, but increasingly feel the limits of reason’s empire. I’m not sure I ever believed that the unknown was merely the place that would one day be conquered by reason, but if I ever felt that way, I no longer do. I grapple more and more with nighttime reality, the idea that much of life is simply beyond our grasp, and that “grasping” may not even be desirable, as if the goal were to make life as explicable as, say, directions in Google Maps.
This past summer at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem felt like a night-sky experience at communal scale. The city itself embodies that feeling, ancient as it is, yet human and accessible. It’s a bit easier to grasp thousands than billions of years, to contemplate the world-historical impact of the surprisingly small Old City. More intimate still are our Jewish texts. The Siddur, the Tanakh, the Talmud, the Kabbalah, books and more books. You can whisper these texts, you can sing them and chant them, hold them in your mouth or your hands or on your lap. And you can share them with your teachers, your fellow students, and your friends, as I had the chance to do with the twelve other members of our cohort, an extraordinary, beloved group. There, in the holy city, we contemplated questions like:
Some of these questions we grappled with as a group, some in hevruta, some alone. Some in class, with texts, and some through other modalities like mindfulness, singing, field trips, and birdwatching, mostly in Jerusalem, all in Israel, in this agonizing moment.
What will I do with all this learning? Something useful, I hope! Try to write about it, of course, from divrei Torah to midrash to op-eds to fiction and, yes, maybe even scholarship.
In the near term, I’ll aim to teach a seminar in Jewish Law and Philosophy at my law school, perhaps with a little mysticism smuggled into the syllabus. I’m trying to be a public Jew on my campus, wearing my kippah, and trying to reclaim Zionism from all the hate it’s been doused in. Though I don’t see myself leaving my current job to take on a full-time pulpit, I could envision serving as a guest rabbi on holidays or perhaps performing some life cycle rituals. Though I am not sure I have the pastoral touch, I was riveted by the stories of cohort colleagues with pulpits-in-waiting already doing that work. And this summer in Israel, I did officiate at the funeral of a beloved aunt, a meaningful experience both for me and for my uncle and cousins.
Still, I feel that my path as a rabbi has not yet been charted. There’s no GPS to tell me where to go. This itself seems true to the calling, to the rabbinate, to our lived life as individuals, as a community, as a people. At times this summer I experienced—I believe we all experienced—a kind of bliss that overtakes you when you are sitting with teachers and peers you respect and love, learning, creating the feeling that the answers we’re looking for aren’t proofs but ways of being. We can use our texts and our tradition and the often bad news from this broken world to broaden our sense of the unknown, to find a more creative vision of the future, to experience a new kind of living, the kind described by Maimonides at the end of the Mishneh Torah, imagining the Messianic Era: “There will be neither famine nor war, envy or competition, for good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust. The work of the entire world will be solely to know God.”
