Both Sides of the Glass: the Art of Jewish Self-Consciousness with Shavuot Guest Speaker Joshua Foer

What is your word cloud? What are the leading words that take in how you feel about your life? Our reading this week reminds us of the very intimate connection between word and world. The words we speak create the world we live in. Our word cloud becomes us, who we are. The Israelites’ word cloud: “Why did you take us out of Egypt? We used to eat fish for free in Egypt, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. Our gullets are shriveled. Nothing but manna.” Their negative energy word cloud reinforces and deepens their negative energy world. Our complaints are not costless but spread negative energy to the people in our life. Moses is driven to a meltdown. “I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!” There is a straight line from their negative energy this week to their negative energy next week in refusing to enter the promised land.  But what are we supposed to do with our negative energy if we feel it, especially if we feel it for a good reason, if our negative energy is well earned? What if we are depressed or anxious or worried for good reason? Surely Judaism does not counsel us to repress and suppress hard emotions. We will look at an old friend, one of the prayers that is most familiar to us, which suffers precisely for its familiarity: Ashrei. The Talmud teaches that if we say Ashrei three times a day, every day, we gain a portion in the world to come. Ashrei is an alphabetical acrostic poem about abundance, blessing, generosity, goodness, radiant positive energy. Say it every day, three times a day, every day, and we begin to feel it. But is it even possible to offer a positive energy Ashrei word cloud if we feel anxious, depressed, worried? What is an example of a real person with real worries, eschewing the negative word cloud of the Exodus generation for the positive world view of the psalmist? Can we do that?

I want to talk to you this morning about a pivotal moment, a fork in the road moment, faced by the greatest rabbi who ever lived, Maimonides. And while we are not Maimonides, and we live in a very different time and place, we all face our own version of Maimonides’s moment. His story has so much to teach us.

Please do yourself a favor. Listen to the commencement address that country star Eric Church recently gave at the University of North Carolina. It’s 18 minutes—and very much worth our time.Church offers that there are what he calls "six strings" to a life well lived. If all six strings are properly tuned, our life can be a beautiful song. If any one of those strings is not properly tuned, the song of our life is off.  We can hear it. The people in our life can hear it, too. Take a good look at the list. What strings of ours need tuning? Church observes that the need to tune our strings is never-ending. At every age and stage some string or strings needs our attention. Which makes sense. Faith is an important string, but events like illness, death, and loss rock our faith. Family is an important string, but families are ever-changing. Loved ones die, loved ones are born, people grow up and out. Marriage is an important string, but every marriage has its different chapters. And so on for all the strings.On Shabbat morning we are going to look at three Jewish values—listening (shema), focusing (kavanah), and returning (teshuvah)—that can bring our strings into attunement.Church’s commencement address has gone viral because it is artful and true. Matching his six strings with our three Jewish values will add beauty and meaning to our song and our life.

May 23, 2026

Last week, we cut Eder’s hair for the first time in celebration of his third birthday. As he grows, Solomon and I find ourselves thinking more intentionally about the kind of parents we hope to be. How do we offer the scaffolding and boundaries that help a child to flourish? What does it mean to guide with love, clarity, and presence? What does it mean to be a good parent? As it turns out, Shavuot has something to say about all of this. Revelation wasn’t a single moment or a single style. God didn’t give Torah once, in one voice, with one emotional tone. Instead, revelation unfolded gradually — sometimes with thunder, sometimes with quiet, sometimes through story, sometimes through relationship. Each moment was shaped so the people could actually receive it. In this class, we’ll explore Torah’s revelation stories and midrashic portraits of divine communication alongside different models of parenting. But beneath the texts lies a deeper question: How do we share wisdom, values, and truth in ways that can truly be heard — by our children, by our communities, and by the world we’re trying to build?

Author and social entrepreneur Joshua Foer is the co-founder of several initiatives to make Jewish learning and cultural exploration accessible worldwide, including Sefaria, the open-access library of Jewish texts, Lehrhaus, a community hub in Somerville, the Jewish film and TV production company Leviathan, and the design competition Sukkah City. He is also the co-founder of Atlas Obscura and author of Moonwalking with Einstein, an international bestseller published in 37 languages. Josh was recently named one of the 50 most innovative Jews of the last 50 years in Moment Magazine.

In his new book A Time to Gather, our friend and multiply published bestselling author, Bruce Feiler, delves into the role of rituals in our lives, how traditional old and innovative new rituals might work together, and our empowered role in creating them.In this podcast, he offers a one-sentence recipe for the diversity of innovative rituals that help and heal, that anchor and inspire: Something new, something old, something borrowed, and something You.Bruce will also be our speaker on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, September 21, before Ne'ilah; the day that is most filled with ritual: not eating, not drinking, not having relations, not wearing leather, praying, beating our chest as we offer the vidui, the confessional, together as a community.

May 16, 2026

In 1290, Jews were expelled from England, only to return in 1656, three-and-a-half centuries later. William Shakespeare published his works between 1589 and 1613. Except for perhaps a smattering of crypto-Jews, 275 years prior to his birth, 40 years past his death, there was no Jewish presence in England. Dr. Stephen Greenblatt, in his introduction to the Norton Shakespeare, notes that Elizabethans were fascinated by Jews and Judaism. We are going to explore the bard’s roll in this phenomenon, the inordinate number of Talmudic and Mishnaic references in his writings, along with his possible Jewish roots. More importantly, let’s address the phenomenon of why a nation that never encountered a Jew was so intrigued, and what that might mean for us today.

I recently sent Solomon to the store. He came back with everything I asked him to purchase, but I sent himback because he mistakenly bought Children’s Tylenol with red dye #40. As he headed out, I started bath time with the kids. Eder, my soon-to-be three-year-old, was happily drawing on the tub with his “dots”—he is obsessed with these Crayola “bath dropz” which are little tabs of concentrated dyes designed to turn the water of the bath into crazy colors. Sadia, my 8-month-old, was splashing away in her bath seat. I turned my attention away for just a moment to respond to an email on my phone. Suddenly, I heard Eder saying, “here you go,Sadia, that’s so yummy...good job…” What he said registered a second too late. I looked up with horror to see Sadia happily chewing up pure, concentrated green dye. I reached up to try to fish it out of her mouth as quickly as I could. Just then, Solomon walked through the door with the dye-free Tylenol. Sadia smiled at him with a mouth full of green.After bedtime, Solomon and I were processing the night. There were some feelings. I know I should have been watching the kids more closely—three-year-olds are unpredictable and Sadia will eat anything. And yet, it’s so hard to stay focused. I know I’m not alone in this. Recently, I came across a Speaking of Psychology podcast with psychologist, Gloria Marks. Since at least 2004, she has been studying people just like me. She wants to know how well we can focus with the interruptions of technology and social media. She wants to know how much of our attention is conscious, and how often we are unconsciously shifted from our priorities.