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When it comes to gun violence, it’s personal. I was raised with a visceral opposition to overly-excessive gun ownership and a strong political upbringing to oppose the possession of assault weapons.

This is because in 1939, on a spring day in Milwaukee, a man walked into my late grandfather’s workplace, demanded his job back after a medical and mental health leave, and when he was denied, he murdered my grandfather and then took his own life. My mother was six years old. And in the midst of the Depression, her single mother raised two daughters with incredible fortitude, faith and hope.As a rabbi I have always felt it my duty to speak out against unbridled gun ownership. We Jews are people of the Law and the Talmud certainly supports an inherent human right to self-defense. But gun advocacy organizations like the NRA and a number of civic advocacy groups err, I believe, in their defense of the 2nd Amendment and to our detriment as a nation, block meaningful legislation to protect human lives.

It is not as if elected officials, their constituents and advocates don’t try to pass reasonable laws. Like a parade of failure, however, mass murders in this country are always followed by declarations of moral outrage, prayers for innocent victims and their families, rallies and spirited demands for sane gun laws. Columbine; Aurora; Virginia Tech; Sandy Hook; Charleston; Parkland; Las Vegas; Orlando; Pittsburgh. The list goes on and on. And yet, legislation remains stalled. The NRA, by nearly every measure, has a stranglehold on politicians unwilling to pass a law as basic as requiring a driver’s license, an auto emissions test, or even seat belts.

Among reasonable gun-control advocates, no one argues the right to self-defense. But the devotion to semi-automatic weapons, designed only for the purposes of mass killing, is an irrational beast that has inhabited American politics.

Of course, this dreadful situation is only exacerbated by the heightened levels of division, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and a number of other hatreds that have been unleashed in our national discourse in recent years. It would be a mistake to think these two ideas—unbridled access to weapons and extreme hate—don’t go hand in hand. They often do. In the killers’ manifestos, we read their words with alarm and do what we can to respond with reasonableness, love, strength and determination to build bridges, not tear them down; to build alliances, not destroy them; to exemplify hope and love and life, not despair, hatred and death.

What a model of moral strength and courage we witnessed coming from New Zealand this week. Fewer than six days after the horrifying murder of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, the nation banned semi-automatic and automatic weapons, along with their overly excessive magazines. “It’s about all of us, it’s in the national interest, and it’s about safety,” New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told her people. So they acted. “Fooled twice, shame on me,” they say. It only took this one mass shooting for the Prime Minister to act, a stunning and humbling reminder to Americans of what is actually possible.

After all, the hate-fueled bloodlust in New Zealand is no different in its aim than the murder of Jews in Pittsburgh or African American Christians in Charleston, or countless other places. And so we return again to our vigils, in homes and schools and houses of worship, offering love and hope and reminding one another that our differences are an inherent part of the beauty and majesty of life. There is, really, truly, more that unites us than divides us.

In this week’s Torah portion, Tzav, we read about the laws related to a variety of offerings required of the priests for their own expiation from sin as well as the sins of the greater community. “And this is the law of the guilt offering; it is most holy. וזאת תורת האשם קדש קדשים הוא”The phrase, “most holy” immediately catches our eye. In Hebrew, it can be translated as “holy of holies,” evocative of the innermost sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem where sacrifices were made and where, Tradition teaches, the Divine Presence dwells. I thought of all those in our own country and in our Congress who robe themselves in the priestly mantle of their religiosity and defend gun rights to absurd lengths; who bastardize their language by cloaking their defense of the 2nd Amendment as a “God-given” right while often remaining silent when hate, prejudice and bigotry are used to charge the very weapons that take innocent lives. And I thought of what a guilt offering might look like from those modern-day elected officials who continually block legislation that can both protect the right to bear arms while simultaneously ensuring the safety of innocents. Surely this is possible. We sent a man to the moon, didn’t we?

We have more learning to do as a nation to find our way to that innermost place, that holy of holies of understanding, tolerance, love and peace. The rabbinic sage Rava said, “One who occupies oneself with words of Torah about the guilt offering is considered as if he or she brought the guilt offering.” This was classical Judaism’s way of demonstrating an evolution of thought—that while we no longer sacrifice, we keep the words of Torah intact by continually studying these words, even when they appear to be no longer relevant.

But they are! They are!

For when we look deeper into the Torah text, we see that the priest is supposed to wear a special linen garment for carrying out the offerings. He is meant to be ritually clean and the rabbinic tradition, generations past the destruction of the Temple, understands this commandment to be about ensuring not only external but internal garments as well. Put another way, how we look on the outside—what garments we wear—is only one manifestation of our “appearance.” There is our inner robe, as it were, our holy of holies, which the Gaon of Vilna suggested was evocative of the first garments of the original human beings, Adam and Eve. “On the outside it is skin,” he wrote, “But on the inside it is the light of the Divine who animated man and woman into being.” What is most real about us—no matter our position in life—is our innermost selves, our capacity for, and expression of, what all faiths regard as paths of goodness and truth.

Our true selves, the way we really look, is seen in our actions, our expressions of the Divine attributes like kindness, goodness, compassion and love. We all have two sides, the sages say; and our task in life is to always be turning evil into good. Thus, “a learned person is one who is particular about turning his robe to the right side, to the side of light,” wrote Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler.

Guy Pearce was the name of the man who killed my grandfather, Norman Mueller, in 1939. The story in The Milwaukee Journal recounted what witnesses said was the brief conversation that took place before the killing occurred. “Mueller: ‘How are you Guy?’ Pearce: ‘Well, pretty good, but still not so hot.’ Mueller: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’”

I love that those were my grandfather’s last words. “Is there anything I can do for you?” They echo down through the generations to today, 80 years later, and animate my fingers on the keyboard of this laptop where this Dvar Torah is being composed.“

Is there anything I can do for you?”

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Be kind to the stranger because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.

Pick up the phone and call your elected officials and tell them how you feel about gun violence.Subscribe to organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety and New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and get involved.

And allow the prophet Micah’s words to ring loudly in your ears: “It has been told to you O mortal, what it is good, and what the Eternal requires of you: Only to do justice, to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Let’s get to work.

There is a beautiful midrash that accompanies the moment the Ten Commandments are given to Moses atop Mount Sinai. “And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tablets” (Exodus 32:16). It’s the Hebrew which draws the rabbis’ creative and exegetical impulses. והלוחת מעשה אלוהים המה והמכתב מכתב אלוהים הוא חרות על הלוחת

By changing one vowel in the Hebrew word for graven, or carved in stone, which the tablets most certainly were, the word חרות can be read not as “graven” but as “freedom.” This renders the end of the passage thus: “And freedom was on the tablets.”

For the rabbis, adherence to a moral law was a necessary corollary to having been freed from slavery. The opposite of the degradation of slavery in Egypt, in other words, is not total freedom to do what one chooses but rather the freedom and responsibility of living in a civil society. The chaos, brutality and idolatry inherent in Pharaoh’s scheme was to break the will of the Israelites, deny their desire to serve God and create a dystopian world in which Pharaoh was worshipped and obeyed. For ancient Israel, this was anathema. Worship another human? Impossible. After all, look at the price. The killing of Israelite males; oppression and work with no pay; no time off; no Sabbath rest; and the attempted obliteration of a unique Jewish identity. One of the most inspiring aspects of the story, which Jewish tradition has preserved and passed down through generations, has been the sheer force of will to non-violently resist oppression.

Why did God save the Jews from slavery? Because even through the oppression, they continued to give their children Hebrew names. How did Moses know he was a Jew? His mother secretly sang him Hebrew lullabies when she was hired by Pharaoh’s daughter to be his wet-nurse. In other words, as the interpretive tradition makes clear, culture can be preserved in remarkable ways, in sustaining ways, in redemptive ways, when we resist dehumanization by the very system of oppression that slavery is designed to be.

In the American context, we recognize this in a number of remarkable slave narratives that have been preserved and published: Solomon Northrup, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass are among the most well-known individuals whose stories of survival are beacons of hope; human dignity triumphing over the idolatrous evil of the institution of slavery. And FD, the most prolific of all former slaves, struggled mightily with the morality of violent resistance. When John Brown, the radical abolitionist, tried to recruit Douglass to help in the raid on Harpers Ferry, Douglass refused violence. But it was an agonizing choice and one he returned to and questioned in later stages of his life. Moses, after all, killed an Egyptian taskmaster and fled into the Midian desert. It was there he discovered the Burning Bush and met God. And it was God who commanded Moses to return, not to fight, but to argue with words for the freedom of his people. And it was the site of the Burning Bush, Horeb, that would be the very same mountain range (Sinai) which Moses would climb to receive the Law after winning the Jews their freedom.

For generations, Jews followed the Law through the agency of the priestly sacrifices. As an analogy, this was one manifestation of our judicial system. Moses and other non-priestly leaders were often called upon to adjudicate matters of dispute and the Torah makes very clear that in the case of three judges a majority opinion is what binds the people to a decision. God can’t intervene all the time, Moses learned; and so he received the law of self-rule. A kind of proto-democracy, as it were. And when one was required to pay one’s debt for sin or breaking the law, one would bring a sacrifice as a kind of formal recognition of guilt and acceptance of responsibility for having breached the law.

It was a fairly basic system and it held as long as there was an institution—the Temple—and a caste of servants—the Priesthood—to carry it out. And as we have noted before, once the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, a new adaptation was in place. Learning, Prayer and Deeds of Loving Kindness became the new sacrificial system. The rabbinic court replaced the priests and the prophets and for nearly 1700 years, Jewish communities were subjected to the rulings of their rabbis. Until Napolean changed everything.

When the bright sun of reason dawned and the French Enlightenment swept over civilization, the Jews were emancipated again from the confinement of second-class citizenship and invited into European societies that were consciously remaking themselves as post-monarchical states and into democracies. A Jew, as Napolean put it rather succinctly, could be a French citizen of Jewish faith. The notion of the Jewish people was problematic for Enlightenment thinking (and ultimately a foreshadowing of Zionism), but what fundamentally changed was the radical notion that still adheres today and forever transformed Jewish life. When Jews lived in the shtetls, or in the Pale of Settlement, in segregated areas away from equal participation in European life, they were granted a degree of self-rule among themselves. In these societies, rabbis enforced their decisions by means of excommunication. A rabbinic court could meet and if it so decided, could banish someone from a community. You break Jewish law, you lead others astray, you don’t grant a divorce to your wife, or in the case of Benedict Spinoza, you suggest that man, not God, wrote the Bible—you can be excommunicated.

But when you are a Jewish citizen of France or Holland or Germany or America or any free nation, the rabbinical court loses all power over you. You answer to the state, to the civil society in which you are an equal participant. This is the new paradigm of Jewishness that applies to most communities with the exception, ironically enough, of Israel. One of the ongoing challenges of democracy in the Jewish state has to do with the rights of non-Orthodox rabbis to conduct the business of Judaism like weddings, funerals and conversions (they cannot). Another challenge has to do with the application of equal rights for Arab or Palestinian citizens of Israel, those who are Muslim or Christian living within a Jewish state. Since Israel is still without a constitution, both of these matters remain unresolved and make for endlessly interesting, and at times frustrating, even maddening, discourse.

In democratic societies, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” There is a covenant of sorts written into the law that presumes we won’t always get it right in our civil societies, but we are obligated to keep trying. What is it that Rabbi Tarfon said? “You are not obligated to complete the task; neither are you free to desist.” What enjoins us to our neighbors is the shared effort, the attempts over time, to polish the stones of law with our unceasing efforts.

When I served Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn and we celebrated our 150th anniversary in 2012, I used to say at various gatherings, “When this synagogue was established, women couldn’t vote and African Americans were slaves. But today the President of the United States is an African American.” Martin Luther King, and now Bryan Stevenson say, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” We owe it to ourselves to remember that.

All these seemingly disparate ideas come to mind when reading this week’s parshah, Shemini. In one of the Torah’s most disturbing incidents, the sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, are killed by Divine fire for offering their own sacrifices out of order, in contravention of the law of sacrifice. The rabbis are quick to note the context. That Nadav and Avihu’s sacrifice was brought on the “eighth day” after the seven day celebration and consecration of the priesthood. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch notes that the “seven day week symbolizes a complete unit, and an eighth day represents starting over at a new level,” albeit a dangerous one. And the rabbis in the Talmud note that whereas the seven days are akin to the Creation story, the eighth day represents the obligation to live in the real world. This is what made Nadav and Avihu’s act so egregious: they refused to leave the veil of protection in their spiritual “Garden of Eden” and instead arrogated to themselves a kind of righteousness that was not only unmerited but transgressive, indulgent and idolatrous. Again Rabbi Hirsch on why God may have punished Aaron’s sons: “The more a person stands out among the people as a teacher and a leader, the less will I show indulgence when that person does wrong.”

Biblical, rabbinic and civil societies all share the mandate that leaders ought to be held to a higher standard, ought to be incorruptible, because doing wrong is fundamentally a threat to the rule of law which, at its core, is meant to safeguard and protect, not undermine or crush our freedom in its application.

Covenants, whether religious or democratic, are fragile things. They require humility and vigilance in order to thrive with integrity.

With elections looming in Israel and the 2020 U.S. presidential campaigns already gaining traction, it would serve us well as citizens and as Jews to be reminded that there is no perfect solution for a problem or challenge; that there is more that unites us than divides us; and that when we step out into the enlightened areas of life, when we engrave our laws with freedom and justice and love, we offer hope for a better future for all.

“When a woman gives birth to a male child, she shall be impure…thirty-three days. She shall not touch any consecrated thing, nor enter the sanctuary… if she bears a female…sixty-six days.”

For a woman, the birth of a child is life-changing. Yet, how does the Torah respond to this utterly transformative experience? By putting mother, and baby, in a corner. For thirty-three or sixty-six days (depending on the sex of the child), the mother is barred from participating in the ritual life of the community.

This is how this week’s Torah portion, Tazria, opens. No wonder it is often viewed as one of the most troublesome, challenging passages in the entire Torah.

But the impulse of the Torah to create a ritual for a mother after she gives birth actually seems logical, even wise. After all, we would balk at an employer who proposed that new mothers (and, increasingly, new fathers) come back to work immediately following the birth (and, increasingly, the adoption) of a child. We can certainly resonate with the biblical idea that a woman needs time to orient herself to her new reality after she becomes a parent. If we read this Torah portion generously, we can actually see this time of ritual purification as the ancient precursor to paid family leave.

The biblical authors created this post-birth ritual for women using the ideas and tools at their disposal. In this case, the ritual involved cleansing a woman of the “impurity” that she contracted during the messy and cumbersome process of childbirth. When we moderns hear the word “impure,” we hear the heavy baggage that accompanies it; in our minds, impurity connotes something tinged with filth, with evil, and with immorality. But “impurity” in the Torah means something very different. According to the Torah, a person—male or female—acquires impurity when they come into contact with some substance that temporarily disqualifies them from participating in rituals. Contact with a dead body, menstruation, and skin disease all render a person ritually impure. So long as the impure person waits a predetermined amount of time and immerses in a body of flowing water, he or she will again become “pure” and can re-engage in all aspects of religious and communal life. Indeed, people often contract ritual impurity in the course of performing a commandment, like burying a relative. Impurity isn’t evil or demonic; it’s simply part of life, a state of body that occurs in the course of normal events.

The way I see it, the problem with this Torah portion is not that a post-childbirth ritual exists. Quite the contrary. To me, it is a major innovation that our most sacred text and our ancient forebears honor this transformative life experience. They recognize the injustice of forcing a woman to re-enter her normal life and routine immediately following the birth of a child.

The problem with this ritual is that women—the only people who were to undergo it—had no say in its creation. It is almost certain that the architects of this ritual were our male forebears, not our female ones. They conceived of this ritual, but they would never themselves experience it. Without female ritual authors, or without even the input of women, how could men know what women needed in these precious and vulnerable moments after the birth of a child? Perhaps women would have argued against the distinction between the rituals for the birth of a boy verses the birth of a girl. Perhaps they would have been able to decide the exact type of sacrifice that they would offer as they re-entered the community. While I am almost certain that some sort of ritual would have existed had the voices of women been taken into account, I am equally certain that this ritual would have looked very different than the one that appears in the Torah.

The great correction of modernity is that all people are invited to participate in the creation of Jewish life and ritual. No longer is Jewish decision-making solely in the hands of a certain echelon of men. Instead, we are all partners in the formation of Judaism. The only prerequisites are interest and open-mindedness.

Jewish tradition invites us into this role of ritual authors at a very young age. Through the Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremony, we tell our thirteen-year-olds that they are adequately prepared to take on the role of architects of Jewish life. We initiate boys and girls into this ancient conversation by telling them that their opinions matter, that their words are mighty, and that our community is ready to learn, to grow, and to innovate based on what they have to teach. To be the one imparting this message to our young people is humbling, to say the least.

As we enter Shabbat, may we see ourselves as architects of Jewish meaning and ritual. It’s in our hands now.

September, 1946. Buried beneath the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto after the failed uprising of Jewish partisans against Nazi forces nearly three years earlier, excavators and survivors and historians found rusted milk cans, the contents of which comprised a kind of modern Dead Sea Scrolls of the Holocaust.  

The telling of this story is most cogently and elaborately conveyed by Samuel D. Kassow, whose monumental work, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, is an essential documentary on this darkest chapter in Jewish history.

Ringelblum and a small circle of intellectual Jewish leaders understood well the impossible predicament of Jews in the face of the onslaught of genocide. Ringelblum, Rachel Auerbach and others had the desperate prescience to record for posterity this moment in history, bequeathing to the future this unparalleled testimony.

Other works bear witness as well to the varied forms of resistance against the Nazis. David Fishman’s The Book Smugglers, chronicles the Vilna Ghetto partisans who saved tens of thousands of Yiddish and Hebrew books from destruction; Nechama Tec’s Defiance, is the stirring account of Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielsky, partisans from Belarus, whose bravery and daring are nearly impossible to imagine. The child psychologist Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, is among many intellectuals who kept a diary before he was deported to his death in Treblinka with more than 200 children from his orphanage.  

I recently read Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary, a brief walk on the razor’s edge of madness as the evil of the Holocaust closes around him: like the “narrow place” of slavery that the rabbis of the Talmud used to describe our slavery in Egypt. In a moment of reprieve from caring for his orphaned children, Korczak would “rage, rage against the dying of the light” by writing until dawn before stealing a few moments of rest and getting on with the preservation of life. He saw his orphanage as a laboratory for clinical observation, according to his biographer Betty Jean Lifton. He believed we needed a “grammar of ethics,” to understand children because, as Korczak put it, “the unknown person inside each child is the hope for the future.”  Even inside the ghetto, as Korczak tried to instill a sense of normalcy among his children, he had a court system set up to teach children how to manage and adjudicate their own affairs. Deliberations should always strive toward forgiveness, he taught them, but ultimately decisions had to be made and responsibility to be taken when fights or conflicts occurred. “The court is not justice,” he taught them, “but it should strive for justice.”

Imagine that line for a moment. In the midst of the Holocaust, with death and destruction all around, with a seemingly absent God powerless to stop the bloodshed, with no plagues or Red Seas parting to save the Jews this time, Korczak and countless others persisted and resisted their own dehumanization by continuing to erect the eternal teachings of Judaism and the law. Striving for justice in the absence of justice is a form of resistance in a world where justice, and even God, are distant. It is Abraham accusing God at Sodom and Gomorrah: “Will you really wipe out the innocent with the guilty? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put to death the innocent with the guilty! Far be it from You! Will not the Judge of all the earth do justice?”

Passover night this year is ushered in on April 19, which is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It is particularly moving to consider for a number of reasons. First, there is the profound and humbling reality of the resistance itself; impossible odds met with the jarring and reorienting refusal to relinquish human dignity by fighting back. Second, there is the ever more humbling fact that a generation of survivors is passing away, making our own telling of their telling that much more essential to our shared definition of what it means to testify as a Jew in history. “Troubles overcome are good to tell,” Primo Levi once said, quoting the Yiddish proverb. And isn’t that what the Seder is about? Is not the Hagadah the telling of the ultimate overcoming, with food and song, and therefore a model of how we Jews have survived, by resisting our dissolution for more than three thousand years? We have fought, to be sure, but we have resisted more prevalently in other ways, too.

The Passover Seder is built upon fours. Four children, four cups, four questions. And so we can imagine, when thinking of resistance throughout history, but especially during the Holocaust, that resistance took on four manifestations as well: spiritual, intellectual, artistic and military.

There was spiritual resistance: Even under the harshest circumstances, many Jews clung to their religious customs and rituals as a way to preserve a sense of normalcy and dignity during the war. Whether it was clandestine observance of rituals and holidays or the secretive singing of Jewish songs in Hebrew and Yiddish, Jews were able to maintain a sense of self in the face of unimaginable destruction.

There was intellectual resistance: Jews risked their lives to document the Nazi crimes and preserve Jewish culture from destruction.

In the Warsaw ghetto Emanuel Ringelblum worked with a team of colleagues to create an underground archive called the Oyneg Shabes which documented the crimes of the Holocaust as well as Jewish life during the war. Rachel Auerbach, who was among those working on the Oyneg Shabes archive, survived the war and went on to found and direct the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

In Vilna, the Nazis created a forced labor brigade to sort, catalog, and pack rare Jewish cultural treasures the Nazis were looting for shipment to Germany. A group of these forced laborers, including poets Avram Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, smuggled material back with them into the ghetto where they hid and buried thousands of books, documents, and works of art in hopes of returning after the war to retrieve them. Much of this material is now at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in NYC where it is being digitized and united with other material that exists in Vilnius on an online platform.

There was artistic resistance: Many Jews resisted the Nazis by writing diaries, stories, poetry, and songs documenting and reflecting on their wartime experiences. These activities helped keep spirits up during the war, and remain today as a lasting testament to the creativity and resilience of the Jewish people.

One particularly moving example is a poem by Yiddish poet Avram Sutzkever in which the lead plates of Vilna’s Romm Printing Press, famous for its edition of the Talmud, are imagined as having to be smelted down, its lead used for bullets.

מיר האָבן װי פֿינגער געשטרעקטע דורך גראַטן
צו פֿאַנגען די ליכטיקע לופֿט פֿון דער פֿרײַ ־־
דורך נאַכט זיך געזויגן, צו נעמען די פּלאַטן,
די בלײַענע פּלאַטן פֿון ראָמס דרוקערײַ.
מיר, טרוימער, באַדאַרפֿן איצט װערן סאָלדאַטן
און שמעלצן אויף קוילן דעם גײַסט פֿונעם בלײַ.
…

Like fingers stretched out through the bars of a prison
to capture the bright air of freedom —
so we ran through the night, to capture the plates,
the lead plates of Romm’s printing house.
We dreamers must now become soldiers, and melt
into bullets the soul of the lead.
…
September 12, 1943

And particularly on April 19, we remember military resistance: Contrary to the oft-quoted assertion that Jews went like lambs to their slaughter during the war, many Jews—young and old, men and women alike—fought back in armed resistance. The most notable example was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising which took place on April 19, 1943—the first night of Passover. 220 Jews staged an historic uprising, holding the Nazis at bay until May 16th. It was the biggest organized rebellion in a Jewish ghetto during the war. Greatly outnumbered and out armed, Jews fought so that they would not die in silence. In Vilna, Jews who escaped from the ghetto formed a commando unit of partisan fighters. Shmerke Kaczerginski reflected in his song, “Jew, You Partisan”:

פֿון די געטאָס תּפֿיסה־װענט,
אין די װעלדער פֿרײַע,
אַנשטאָט קייטן אויף די הענט,
כ′האָב אַ ביקס אַ נײַע.

דער פֿאַשיסט, ער ציסערט, הערט,
װײסט ניט װוּ פֿון װאַנען,
שטורעמען װי פֿון אונטער דר′ערד ־־
ייִדן פּאַרטיזאַנען.

From these ghetto prison walls,
Into the freedom of the forests.
Instead of chains on my hands,
I carry a new rifle.

The fascists will tremble,
And won’t know who from where
Is storming up from hell —
Jewish partisans.

Students of the Hagadah often ask, “Why the number four?” And it’s a good question. The rabbis had a ready answer which I have always found rather compelling. In explaining the dialogue between God and Moses in Egypt, when God tells Moses that God has heard the suffering of the Israelites and is now promising action, God says, “I am the Eternal. I will take you out from under the burdens of Egypt, and I will rescue you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great retributions, and I will take you to be My people and I will be your God and you shall know that I am the Eternal your God Who takes you out from under the burdens of Egypt.” That’s four. But then God adds, “And I will bring you to the land that I raised My hand in pledge to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, and I will give it to you as an inheritance, I am the Eternal.” This is national redemption, our entering into and being in charge of our own history and destiny in our land. This is the fifth cup, the cup of redemption, which on our Seder tables for generations is the Cup of Elijah.

It is the cup of “we are not there yet” and it is why, still to this day, even with a state of Israel in existence, we still close our Seders by singing “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Our sages long recognized that until there is peace and justice and harmony for all, our world is unredeemed. This means that the telling of stories, of heroism, of resistance—ever-weaving the fabric of memory which comprises our enduring peoplehood—is essential to the Passover ritual.

One peculiarity of the Seder is that we tell the story of Passover from the perspective of victors, leaning at our tables, drinking wine, laughing, and singing; and yet, we end our meal with “next year in Jerusalem,” with the stunning admission that we are not there yet.

Poverty and hunger and homelessness persist; ethnic, national and religious conflicts continue; the stains of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia remain for us to eradicate. Our planet is in peril. Remembering our own suffering, telling the story of our overcoming and building bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood with others in order to continue that climb, is core to our understanding that we are to “be kind to the stranger because we were strangers in a strange land.”

One of my favorite rabbis from history was also in the Warsaw Ghetto. His name was Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaczezner Rebbe. A Hasidic teacher with an expansive heart, mind and soul, the Piaczezner Rebbe’s writings were also discovered buried in the ghetto rubble after the war.  Their survival is a literary and spiritual gift to future generations.

In one of his Passover sermons, the Piaczezner Rebbe said that one unique aspect of Passover is that it creates for us a moment of history and redemption that we remember and reenact with song and that this is significant because the human voice in song is a glimpse into divinity, into our angelic selves, into an otherworldly existence, into paradise. To imagine writing this sermon in the Warsaw ghetto is as shattering as it is thrilling, and how fortunate we are to be able to read Rabbi Shapira’s words still to this day.  

We all have our favorite Passover songs—the Four Questions, Avadim Hayinu, Dayenu, Who Knows One?, Had Gadya, Eliyahu HaNavi.  Whatever it is, we are invited by Rabbi Shapira to see ourselves as being lifted up into a higher state merely by remembering and by singing, by conveying, through song, a mode of human communication made manifest in the most sublime occasions.

He writes of the Seder, “He sits down to the seder, makes Kiddush, recites the Hagadah and sets the table for the feast, which is like the feast of the world-to-come…Even the table, the candles, the walls, gather with us into one unit, together we bow and sob and in ecstasy, praise God’s splendor and beauty. It is really like the world-to-come, when ‘the fields and everything in them will rejoice, and all the trees of the forest.’”

All the trees of the forest. All Jews. People of all faiths. Believers and non-believers. Democrats and Republicans. Israelis and Palestinians.  Immigrants and native born. All people. To know suffering is to be empathic toward the unredeemed reality of the other, which, according to Emanuel Levinas, is to know the Other, the face of God.

May your lives be deepened and enriched in this Passover season. May you and those you love be blessed with good health and peace. And may we all, together, build a world of tolerance and hope and justice and peace.

The Jewish Community Project Downtown mourns the senseless loss of life and violence inflicted upon the Chabad Jewish community of Poway, California this Shabbat afternoon. As reports have indicated, more than one hundred Jews were observing Shabbat, celebrating Passover, and offering memorial prayers for Yizkor on the last day of the festival when a hateful young man killed one person and wounded others with an assault weapon.

Six months to the day since the attack at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; one week after the Easter Day massacre in Sri Lanka; and another attack in a dark and evil series of assaults on innocent Jews, Christians and Muslim across the nation and the world, we must stand together in communities of love and tolerance even when there are those determined to shatter our resolve. In this season of Redemption — Passover, Easter and Ramadan — people of faith and hope must continue to be united in our shared resolve to “love our neighbor as thyself.”

Within moments of the news breaking, we received messages from clergy colleagues across our city — from pastors and imams from Brooklyn to Harlem. Together we can defeat this inexcusable scourge of hatred and violence and together we can build a world of justice and peace.

For families who entrust to us their children for learning and education, please know that our building remains secure at the highest level and our vigilance for the safety of your loved ones is of paramount importance.

In times like this we are reminded again of the wisdom that there is more that unites us than divides us; that the eternal language of hope will sustain us; and our unity in love and friendship with all our neighbors will remove evil from our midst.

Our thoughts and prayers remain with our brothers and sisters in Poway. As stated by one member of the synagogue: “They cannot break us.” Amen.

One of the exciting new programs on offer this year at JCP is a Basic Judaism class co-taught by our inspiring rabbi-to-be Deena Gottlieb and yours truly. The course meets on Tuesday evenings in various members’ homes and is centered around a few books, plenty of texts, and a lot of conversation. In my nearly 25 years as a rabbi, classes like this always hum with new and old questions for those born Jewish and those choosing to express their curiosity in this millenia old tradition. Pirke Avot, a collection of Jewish ethics from the first century, a sage named Ben Bag-Bag once taught of learning, “Turn it and turn it again, for all is in it; see through it; grow old and worn in it; do not budge from it, for there is nothing that works better than that!”

That’s the thing about the Jewish timeline: it is not so much that it leads to a specific point in time as much as it represents a continuum of life and learning that allows us to always improve ourselves and our relationships with others in an effort to bring more justice, kindness and peace to our world. Like an ellipse comprised of a double helix, Jewish time returns over and over upon itself as well as pointing to a goal—what some refer to as the messianic age of universal perfection. But the rabbis themselves, who were aware of this propensity in humans to find all-encompassing solutions for the knotty pine of life’s enduring challenges, once said, “If you are planting a tree by the side of the road and someone announces the coming of the messiah, first finish planting the tree; then go greet the messiah.”

I’ll believe it when I see it, one might say; and in the meantime, our obligations are to build here, where we are now. And so, as one looks over a year in the life of a Jew, we see from Shabbat to Shabbat; from holy day to holy day; and from one Yom Kippur to the next the opportunity to polish the stone, to cultivate the soil; and to invest in a forward facing future that aims to achieve what Rabbi Tarfon taught in Pirke Avot as well: “It is not your duty to finish the work; but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

These teachings come to mind with this week’s Shabbat reading, Kedoshim (Leviticus 19:1-20-27) one of the core ethical tractates in the entire Torah tradition: The oneness of God; the centrality of Shabbat; sharing our fields with the poor; honoring parents; being kind to the stranger because we were once strangers in Egypt; not placing a stumbling block before the blind; showing deference to the aged; and on and on and over and over.

Rabbi Akiva was once asked by a student what was the most important principle in the entire Torah and he quoted Kedoshim as well. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he said.

These days we need to be reminded of that over and over again. There is too much division in our land; too much denigration of the other; too much anger, too much violence, too much hatred. But you know what? We have been there before and we may be there again and so in recognition we need to learn and keep learning; do and keep doing; love and keep loving.

This past week, our Basic Judaism class visited the Center for Jewish History on 16th Street where Dr. Annie Polland, who runs the American Jewish Historical Society, hosted Eric Ward, Tony Michels, and Christina Greer. They discussed “Antisemitism, Identity Politics, and American Identity.” Ward and Greer are African American; Michels and Polland are Jewish academics. Each is deeply aware of the scourge of hatred of Jews and Blacks and countless others in American history that has yet to be eradicated, presenting for another generation, the challenge of facing history in ways old and new.

Someone asked Ward during the program if he was optimistic about the future, given the past lives sacrificed on the altar of the Civil Rights struggle (Medgar Evers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Martin Luther King and more and more and inexcusably more) and the rise again of hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ideologies. “I don’t think about optimism but I do have hope,” he said.

It’s not so much that the messiah will come, I thought; but we must plant trees of tolerance and neighborliness and love and justice and peace.

One of my favorite rabbis in history was Joachim Prinz, who was a Berlin rabbi and refugee to Newark, chased about by the Hitler regime for his activism and willingness to fight Nazism from the pulpit. Prinz delivered one of the great speeches at the 1963 March on Washington, nestled between Mahalia Jackson’s gospel song and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream.” I guess it’s why some people never heard of him. But Philip Roth had heard of him and placed him at the center of his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, which imagines the anti-Semitic, “America First” leader Charles Lindbergh winning the 1940 presidential election and entering an alliance with Hitler. After Roth died this year and after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, the 92Y explored Roth’s prescience in seeing the rise of a new hatred in America today, from MAGA to the Alt-Right.

Prinz’s speech was in fact written by Naomi Levine and Phil Baum, two civil rights lawyers at the American Jewish Congress, who regularly filed amici briefs on legal fights in alliance with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. For instance, Naomi and her legal team at the AJ Congress helped create the original psychological research that helped overthrow “separate but equal” in the Brown v. Topeka Supreme Court decision.

Prinz’s words continue to ring out to us today and in the spirit of “love thy neighbor as thyself” from this week’s Torah portion, I want to close by sharing words from these great and brave Jews of one generation to inspire us in our own to move ever closer to the promised land of peace, equality and justice for all.

“Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.

It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.

When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.

A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder.

America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent. Not merely black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.”

Love thy neighbor as thyself can break the silence, can shatter the rock of hate, and can plant a forest of trees for all to enjoy the fruit and the comfort of peace.

Please join us in welcoming the newest additions to our Board for 2019-2020:

Jonathan Fayman is Co-CIO of Glen Point Capital, an emerging markets fund manager that he co-founded in 2015. He is the head of the New York office for the London-based firm, which manages an EM-focused macro hedge fund and an absolute return emerging markets fixed income fund, and he is one of two lead portfolio managers for the macro fund. Previously Jonathan was a Senior Portfolio Manager at BlueBay Asset Management LLP, until his departure in 2014. He joined BlueBay in December 2009, upon the inception of BlueBay’s Macro Fund. Prior to that, Jonathan spent five years at Rand Merchant Bank, a South African investment bank, as a portfolio manager on the Global Macro proprietary trading desk. He received a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics and an honours degree in Advanced Mathematics of Finance from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Ben Feder is author of Take Off Your Shoes, President of International Partnerships for the U.S. at Tencent, the Chinese Internet titan, and formerly CEO of Take Two interactive, the publisher of the smash video game hits, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, and NBA 2K. He serves on the boards of directors of public and private companies in the media and entertainment industries and is a director of Save a Child’s Heart, a nonprofit that works globally to rescue children with congenital heart defects. Ben lives in Tribeca with his wife, Victoria, and their four children, Sam, Oliver, Nava, and Rita.

Jared Friedberg is the Founder and Managing Partner of Sycale Advisors, an investment manager, and Portfolio Manager of the Mercator Fund. Prior to founding Sycale, Jared was Co-Founder and Partner of Compass Global Investments LLC, a single-family investment company. Jared was a Principal at Cortec Group for seven years, a U.S. middle-market leveraged buyout fund. Jared earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the boards of Sirenas Marine Discovery, Sandton Capital Partners, and Globalpak Holdings, Ltd. Jared and his wife live in Greenwich Village with their two daughters, one of whom is enrolled in JCP’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah Program. They actively support children’s education in Latin America through the Genesis Foundation.

Corinne Goldman spent more than a decade as a practicing attorney with a focus on securities litigation. A graduate of Yeshiva University and The University of Pennsylvania Law School, Corinne spent most of her career at Dewey Ballantine and then Dewey LeBoeuf, her practice centered on M&A-related litigation and contests for corporate control. More recently, she has dedicated a substantial portion of her time to consulting and/or volunteer work for charitable foundations and organizations, including spending several months in Tanzania, Africa, teaching in orphanages and local schools. Corinne currently serves on the Emerging Leadership Council of the 92nd Street Y and recently served as a member of UNICEF’s U.S. delegation to Nicaragua. Together with her husband, she founded the Daniel and Corinne Goldman Charitable Fund, through which she supports a number of organizations focused on international poverty. Corinne and Daniel live in Tribeca with their children, three of whom are enrolled at the ECC.

Rachel Katz graduated from The George Washington University with a degree in Sociology. She received her J.D from Cardozo Law School. Thereafter, Rachel worked as a pro bono attorney at The Door, a nonprofit organization that provides legal, career and other development services for impoverished young people. At The Door Legal Services Center Rachel helped represent undocumented youth gain access to protections under immigration law. Together with her husband, she oversees The Rachel & Drew Katz Foundation, which is dedicated to supporting programs that provide a direct and measurable benefit to organizations addressing medical, educational, social, emotional, and cultural needs to those less fortunate. Rachel is currently a full time mother who lives in Tribeca with her husband and two children who are both students in the ECC.

Rachel Ziff is a graduate of Emory University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and a minor in Jewish Studies. She has served in a variety of roles in the financial services industry, beginning her career at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and most recently serving as the Chief Compliance Officer and Head of Investor Relations at an equity and credit hedge fund. A resident of downtown Manhattan for 11 of the past 13 years, Rachel is now a full-time mother living in Tribeca with her husband, Eric, their daughter, Madeleine and their Goldendoodle, Totti.

Like many of you, I have watched horrified these past few weeks as states have raced to pass stricter and more extreme laws regulating abortion, one after another like a twisted Margaret Atwood-inspired domino theory. The most extreme case, out of Alabama this week, allows no exceptions for rape or incest. This law, though unlikely to take effect anytime soon, is designed to be a direct challenge to the underlying constitutional principles of Roe V. Wade. That decision states that a fetus at six weeks is not a person. This law says that it is.

I am distressed and I am outraged. As a woman, I feel violated by these predominantly white male legislators who want to tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. If you are raped; if the lack of access to safe and affordable abortion care would leave you physically damaged or unable to have children in the future; if the fetus is not genetically viable; if you’re a teenager, unready to meet the challenge of motherhood—none of that will matter. Further, where women of affluence and privilege will be able to travel across state lines to receive the care they need, these dangerous laws will disproportionally affect poor women of color.

If I were only a woman watching from afar, wanting to help fellow women who will suffer if this law should make its way to the Supreme Court (and if the Supreme Court should choose to hear it), that would be enough. But I am also a Jewish woman who is guided and compelled to action by the teachings of my tradition—those that inspire me and ground me and contextualize my every day existence. And the overwhelming consensus of my tradition (though of course there is always a preserved minority opinion) is that a fetus is not a life.

This principle is rooted in an occurrence in the Torah, where two men are struggling and they accidentally injure a pregnant woman and she miscarries. The Torah itself states that the woman’s husband should be paid a recompense for the injury. The Torah explicitly states that if “other damages ensue”, the penalty shall be a life for a life.

The vast majority of Rabbinic interpreters of this verse, from the Talmud to Rashi, understand that the first payment is for the miscarriage as if it were damaged property of the owner, similar to the shaky constitutional ground that Roe currently rests on, in that this is a matter of private property belonging to the woman (or whoever owns the woman). But if “other damages ensue”, meaning if the woman should be killed, the biblical punishment of a life for a life takes effect. The mother’s life. Not the life of the fetus. According to Jewish law, the fetus until birth is property. Or as Rabbi Judah says in the Talmud, a person receives a soul at birth.

But America (for obvious and good reasons) is not founded on Jewish law and we now have a constitutional process that needs to play out. If I were only a citizen of this country, I would feel compelled to help protect rights, preserve freedoms and to act to make this country a little more just for all its citizens. If I were only a woman, a white woman of privilege and means, I would donate to the organizations that will be fighting this law and who may one day argue on my behalf at the Supreme Court. I would raise awareness for and donate to organizations that actively support women of financial need in these states seeking to strip access to abortions and safe maternal health care. I will fight like hell in 2020.

But I am also a Jewish woman and all of these obligations compound in my most sacred one: to serve and interpret God’s will as it exists and is revealed through Torah, which at this time in the Jewish calendar between Passover and Shavuot, we move towards the merit of receiving day by day. But also how this Torah, this law, impacts its people, who are commanded to live by it, literally, live by it, and to help others live a life by its principles as well. Because our tradition also teaches that the world is a little bit broken, now more than ever, and it is our moral, human AND Jewish obligation to repair it, one piece at a time.

As I look back on my first year at JCP, I am thrilled by the depth of enthusiasm among so many of you to build a permanent Jewish home downtown. It is an irony of sorts that in an area of New York City so suffused with history—Native American tribal lands; landing sites of Dutch and English settlers; the African burial ground and slave market; the tavern where revolutionaries tipped pints as they threw off British rule; the Shearith Israel cemetery, where our ancestors buried their first Jews on these shores—there has been very little continuous and ongoing Jewish life. Early synagogues in New York City established themselves further east before migrating uptown to make way for the ever renewing and regenerating waves of immigrants that continue to make America truly great.

And so when Jewish families and individuals began moving downtown again nearly twenty years ago, the founders of JCP did what Jews have done for generations: established a house of learning for children and adults, placing study and friendship and community at the center of their enterprise. JCP operates exceptional programs for children of all ages, from birth to bnai mitzvah to high school and beyond. JCP celebrates Shabbat and holy days with joy and an openness of expression to all walks of life. And JCP extends its hands and hearts to those in need with community service and acts of lovingkindness that link each of us, made in the Divine image, to one another in the broader fabric of our society.

From the earliest records of Jewish communities going back nearly two thousand years, Jews have always supported institutions related to the education of children and support for teachers; aid to the poor and those in need; and burial plots for our dead. JCP is another such institution in the chain of tradition that through these commitments, makes Jewish life possible for another generation.

When Jewish communities settled in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, schools, synagogues, charitable organizations and cemeteries were immediately established through donations large and small from the various communities where Jews lived. Tzedakah, often translated as “charity,” is in fact an obligation in the eyes of the Jewish tradition. Our shared generosity makes our shared community possible.

For the greater part of the past generation, among some Jews, there have been a number of critics of the membership model. “Money shouldn’t be an impediment to Jewishness,” goes the critique. Or, “Why pay so much money if I only go to synagogue twice a year?” says another. And much ink has been spilled and philanthropic dollars spent finding new and exciting ways to engage another generation of Jews who eschew the membership model. Heck, I worked two summer jobs to pay for my first trip to Israel in 1985; now it’s a “birthright” and it’s free!

But seriously, while there may be existing impediments to involvement, money isn’t truly one of them as long as communities are sensitive to being truly open and welcoming; making needs based assessment where necessary, and communicating clearly that a Jewish community can serve as a sustaining and fulfilling and meaningful connection to others and to the eternal values of our ancient civilization.

While membership in the Jewish community is technically voluntary, the membership model does assist communities in establishing a baseline for involvement. It says “I am a stakeholder!” It’s a declaration of pride and commitment. In fact, this commitment among the members of the community allows Jewish institutions like JCP to exist and thrive where each of us do our part. It’s not unlike voting in a civil society. We don’t like the direction of politics and our leaders? We have a way to change that—by using our voices to make a difference. Similarly, membership in community is like voting. It says the direction of my people matters; my part in this sacred tradition makes a difference; I want in.

So as JCP takes another step into the future of this inspiring journey we are sharing, making a permanent home for an open, pluralistic Jewish life downtown, I hope you will join us on that journey. It promises to be rooted in learning, connection and deeds of loving-kindness toward all those we encounter. Together, let’s create a world founded on our sacred values of justice and peace.

Click here to join or renew your membership, or email our team at membership@jcpdowntown.org. We would be happy to answer any questions and walk you through the process.

Could you give up shopping for a year?

In a 2017 New York Times article, author Ann Patchett wrote about her endeavor to do just that. At the start of the experiment, she created a list of rules for herself: she could purchase groceries, go out to restaurants, and replace any product that she had used up, but only after ensuring that she didn’t have an extra lying around the house. The results were astonishing. In lieu of running to the store to buy a new lip balm, she opened her cabinet to discover that she already owned five. She saved countless hours, as her two-day searches for a perfect new outfit were now out of the question. She expressed her love in meaningful ways, offering to clean a friend’s home or to watch their child instead of purchasing them an item of clothing. It turns out that gifts of time can be more valuable than those of money.

Though we live in a society largely focused on material consumption, Patchett quickly adjusted to her new lifecycle. “It doesn’t take so long for a craving to subside,” she reflected. “Once I got the hang of giving shopping up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The trickier part was living with the startling abundance that had become glaringly obvious when I stopped trying to get more…I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered.” Indeed, her life changed in such incredible ways that she has yet to end her experiment.

But 3,000 years before Patchett’s experiment the Torah taught us about the joys of limiting our frantic consumption. In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Behar, we receive an interesting set of instructions about agriculture in the Land of Israel:

“When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Eternal. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Eternal” (Lev. 25:2-5).

Much as modern industrial societies center around consumption, the society of ancient Israel revolved around agriculture. To suspend all agriculture for an entire year must have seemed unimaginable to the Israelites. Indeed, in next week’s Torah portion, God outlines the harsh punishments for violating the laws of the sabbatical year (called shemita in Hebrew), showing us just how tempting it was to keep farming, to keep producing, even when God said to stop. God also anticipates the very real concern of how the people will sustain themselves during this seventh year: “And should you ask, ‘What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?’ I will ordain my blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years” (Leviticus 25:20-22).

Millenia later, we now know the practical wisdom of this policy, as research and experience has shown that over-farming leads to soil erosion, habitat loss, and water waste. Land that is over-farmed will eventually become arid, and the soil will be unable to sustain the growth of crops. But there is a spiritual purpose to the shemita system as well. By ceasing production for an entire year, the Israelites were able to discover and appreciate the abundance that already existed in their lives. They could eat what they had harvested in past years, and it would be enough. They could curb their desire to consume without end. They could honor the needs of the land, and thereby honor themselves.

Our impulse to consume is not unique to the modern era; humans have always wanted the latest and greatest version of anything, from wheat and grapes to phones and fashions. But the Torah reminds us that there are times to stop pursuing the next best thing. We already have the bounty we need, if we only stopped seeking, stopped searching, and simply noticed.