Ariana Katz: Well, well, well. Jewish tradition understands that when you do something for the third time, it's called a chazakah, the root of chazakah, strength, chazak. And it means that we mean business. So welcome to the third episode of Left at Sinai, Parshat Lech Lecha. We mean business. Count on us every Monday morning, Kinahora, B'li Neder, without calling in the evil eye and without making any vows.

But count on us to be with you Monday mornings to talk about the weekly Torah portion with some incredible guests I'm so honored to share this conversation with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the greats of our generation, about this week's Parsha.

This week's parsha is Parshat Lech Lecha, Bereshit 12:1 through 17:27. I am thrilled to be joined today by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb.

Lynn Gottlieb, one of the first 10 women to become a rabbi in Jewish history, is a ceremonial, visual, and performing artist and author. Her books include Shomeret Shalom: Replanting Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence, Hanukkah Book, and She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist View of Renewed Judaism.

Recently, she collaborated with future guest Rabbi Brant Rosen to create a new liturgy called Even As We Speak These Words, which she illustrated. Founder and project director of Shomeret Shalom Ordination Program, Lynn currently serves on the board of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity and the Rabbinic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace

Thanks for teaching us Torah, Reb Lynn. Can you give us a quick rundown of what happens in Parshat Lech Lecha to begin?

Lynn Gottlieb: I am so glad to be with you, and I feel very privileged and honored to be sharing Torah. Lech Lecha, go forth or go unto yourself. Leave your country, your generational home, to a land I will show you. I will make you a great nation and bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.

All the families of the earth shall be blessed through you. This is the famous beginning of the story of Abraham. The journey itself the impact of this journey from his home in Mesopotamia and his family's home in Mesopotamia impacts a name change for both him and his wife, Sarai, and

Hajar, whose name means stranger, in some ways that designation becomes a name. However, the first thing that happens to Ab- Avram, he brings a curse upon both his wife Sarai and upon Pharaoh by lying or misrepresenting an important cultural piece of information that sister means wife. And so God sends a plague upon Pharaoh, and then it is upon Pharaoh to clarify what is going on, and he sends Avram away.

The story continues as Avram arrives at the land I will show you and recognizes this is the place he is supposed to settle in this story. Avram is traveling with Lot, a relative, and he offers Lot the ch- the choice where to graze. The first choice where to graze. And Avram continues to settle near Sodom, famous Sodom, in what now is called Al-Khalil or Hebron Then Avram goes to war, there's lists of war, and he brings his kidnapped brother-in-law back.

He meets Melchizedek, who offers Avra- Avram gifts. There is a vision of inheritance that he has where he envisions being able to take over the lands that are currently occupied by other tribes. There is the story of Hajar or Hagar, and the vision she has of her child, and the portion concludes with Abraham whose name is now Abraham.

He is again given the promise to be a blessing and to receive blessings in the form of many children. And currently, he does not have the line that he considers w- which will eventually become the line of the, of what will become the Israelites and the Jewish people through Sarai and Yitzhak.

So that is a very brief summary of this portion thank you so much for the summary.

AK: There is a huge amount that goes down in Parashat Lech Lecha, and we will get to talk about some some of it. Of your long and historic career one of the, the pieces of Torah that you've brought to our people is the talking about non-violence as a Shomeret Shalom, as a guardian of peace, but I'm sure you might have a different, more poetic translation than that. And you, you talk about this practice in your book, Shomeret Shalom: Replanting Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence, which I encourage everyone to go grab at Pushcart Judaica. And I'm wondering, with a text as expansive as this that covers so much ground where and how do you read this text?

Where do you even begin to find purchase?

LG: Thank you for asking that question. As someone devoted to nonviolence as the core of my Jewish practice for the past 60 years, I have like Rabbinic tradition, I have prioritized a set of values through which I read the text. The values include thou shalt not profit from violence, and thou shalt not commit acts of violence.

Violence, in particular, as embedded in systemic violence, such as systems grounded in racism, apartheid, war, militarism, climate devastation. And when one encounters in, in the text and in practice texts and practices which violate those core concepts A Shomeret Shalom renegotiates the relationship to those texts through the lens of nonviolence.

That has been my practice for more than half a century. And one of the most painful wounds regarding this particular text is the tension between being a blessing through which all the nations will be blessed or the nations will be cursed, and this expansive vision of of the land of Israel or this land I will show you extending from the Euphrates to Eretz Yisrael, to the Nile.

And that has been the driver, one of the drivers and justifications for colonial settlerism that is the core practice or the core motivating, the, the policies of Israel and other Jewish people who identify as Zionists, and has led over the past 75 years to the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and now the absolute destruction of Gaza, and pogroms in the West Bank, and the erasure of Palestine literally from the land itself.

And so this requires a perspective of teshuvah, of a process of reparations in order to be able to read this text at all And it is a painful journey and yet a hopeful journey because it is only through Teshuvah as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Maimonidean concepts, that we can even begin to heal the relationships with our cousins.

And especially poignant in this story is a kind of another root cause of the violence which is also confusing. On the one hand, Hajar Hajar's name in Arabic, Hajar or Hagar, who is both cast out and blessed by the divine spirit. We have to choose which one of those we're going to follow.

AK: This is the first moment of Brit, of covenant between God and the people that we descend from as Jews. And it also is the first moment wherein A relationship between the Jewish people and the land Eretz Yisrael, is established. And you've been devoted to nonviolence for over 60 years, and I wonder what arises for you as you read a text like this that can be used in so many different ways, knowing it has been used as a proof text for the dispossession of the Palestinian people from the land?

LG: With great sorrow. I read this with great sorrow because to me We have to choose our values, and we can't read the Bible as a justification for claims to geography. That is a colonial settler approach. Therefore, we have to reject those aspects of the covenant or any kind of behavior that leads to immense harm.

And I, I've-- By journeying to Eretz Israel in 1966 and beginning long conversations with Palestinians, the first one being with Atallah Mansour in Bethlehem, who graciously told me the story of the Nakba, of the dispossession of Palestinians. I have been trying to bring this narrative forward among Jewish people and in places where Palestinians were not even invited to speak, and that is pretty much still the case, and it's heartbreaking.

We have to supersede the covenant here with another mitzvah, which is that we cannot follow the majority to do evil, nor can we profit from harm. And I-- Th-this is not just an intellectual concept for me because over the years I've led 20 delegations to Palestine, one of which I sat with the mourners whose families were slaughtered by Baruch Goldstein, who lived in Hebron in Al-Khalil.

And sitting on stone floors in a houses that had been destroyed because just being a relative of the deceased, of those who were slaughtered by Baruch Goldstein, meant that their houses were destroyed. This is in the '90s. Their houses were destroyed by the Israel, by the Israeli occupation forces.

And in that moment, in the cold, damp weather, we were served tea. And water is a precious commodity among Palestinians because it's so often denied.

And so I recognize that even drinking the tea and coffee that was offered to us might mean that this family could not take a shower or a bath that day because water's limited And now the reality of the death of so many Palestinian children.

In this moment, as we read this sort of promise of multiplying the, people like stars, and the generative feeling you have with this portion, and the reality of the death of tens of thousands of Palestinian children over the years, including at least 20,000 children who have died as a result of this genocide and continue to die, as well as over 20,000 children who have been made amputees, as well as the tens of thousands of children who are now orphans, as well as the many children who are literally assassinated by soldiers.

The dissonance between reading this text and the promise of this abundant future, and the reality of where we are sitting today is a profound tragedy and fills so many of us with untold grief. And it is not enough to simply hold grief circles or to grieve. Certainly, we must do those things, but as well, we must take on the task of teshuvah, of educating ourselves deeply about what's going on and acknowledging what is happening, not just by saying that it's happening, but actually acknowledgement must come with reparative action.

It cannot-- There is no acknowledgement, true acknowledgement or regret without reparative action. And reparative action can only take place when we center the voices of those who are directly impacted by harm, in this case, Palestinian community in all of its diversity. And there are many people engaged in this, thank goodness.

But it, it is going to be the task of the next many generations until Palestinians can return home in peace, migrate in peace, and receive all the financial and healthcare resources that they need to reestablish themselves on wherever they choose.

That is what awaits us. Until that time, myself, like many of us, feel dispossessed ourselves from the Jewish community, and I'm extremely heartened to see so many new communities like your community Rabbi Ariana, which can become a home for people who have been feeling dispossessed from, let's say, mainstream Jewish life and dispossessed even when expressing the idea that Palestinians have a shared humanity with us. And I remember one year I was leading a, a mural arts delegation to Palestine, and I returned to Nyack, New York. I was living there for a couple years at Stony Point Center, where I was directing a program called Farm the Land, Grow the Spirit. And in Nyack having returned to Nyack, I knew I, I could not go to synagogue. I just could not get myself to go to synagogue, having experienced what I just did in Israel, which was, which was completely heartbreaking. And I took refuge among the Jerrahi Sufi order, where I had friends, and where I had set up an interfaith summer camp run through the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

And it was ironic to feel Taken in by the Muslim community in the midst of feeling so isolated. And I know that Reb Zalman famously felt at home and be- and was ordained in a Sufi order. he felt at home among Sufis For different reasons than I did. For me, it was because they could accept all of who I was and comfort me in my grief. And their prayer is so beautiful and so direct that it, it, that modality of praying And the radical hospitality that I experienced in Palestine and by the Sufi order over the years has drawn me very close as well to the Muslim community, and especially to Palestinians in the Muslim community, and now Lebanese, and then visiting Iran.

And there is this push in my life that nonviolence means not just speaking words, but lit- but going to the front lines or places of people considered enemies, and realigning my understanding and my experience of the humanity of people, and trying to convey that to others, and working very hard to build the movement for change.

And luckily, in this moment we're sort of in the midst of it, where we're seeing the rise of amazing amazing candidates like Mamdani and, El-Sayed in Michigan, and seeing the backlash of members of our own community. And again, we must be in the mode of teshuvah all the time so that we can courageously reignite our steadfast hope and continue to Lech Lecha, go into our own selves and unpack the places of systemic violence embedded within ourselves, and continue the journey, the covenant, f- which for me is very simple.

Let us treat our neighbors with the same love that we treat ourselves if we do, and to treat each other with care and loving kindness. That's really all the religion that we need. we don't need huge tradition if it obscures the simple truth of loving our neighbors as ourself and treating each other and everyone with loving kindness so that we can create a beloved community.

We can create a place where everyone feels safe. Where everyone can thrive, where we've dismantled all the negative isms like, like patriarchy and apartheid, genocide, climate devastation. And we can continue this journey for the sake of the generations to come who will be reading our responses to tremendous violence some years, some decades, it's impossible to read the week's Parsha and not see a particular in our own lives or in the lives of our neighbors in the Parsha. And I'm curious for you, is so much in this Parsha speaks about land, but also call, covenant, safe partnership, and so on. And I hear in your, in your remarks that if there is not, if that there is not love for self, love for neighbor, love for Hashem, then none of the rest matters. I'm curious, what do you do with the parts of Torah that are not speaking about the most urgent moments in our time? We have to be talking about Palestine when we read Parshat Lech Lecha but what about everything else that's in it?

I know that for many of us, we love to study, and I do treasure that. And it's not just Torah, the written Torah, which in and of itself contains a thousand years of oral tradition, and also Midrash and Talmud and medieval period. we go on this amazing journey of different generations' response to the written word.

And we even see in the address, for instance, of Moses his final address, to the people of Israel that rather, for instance, than emphasizing the Exodus story, he is emphasizing the revelation at Sinai. So even within the Torah, we see that through the persona of Moshe, certain elements of Torah are chosen over others. Hmm. Nice and every generation has to do that. we have to decide what our values are what values are needed for us to navigate the current moment.

We can pull on the threads and stand on the sacred ground of those places that give us resiliency, strength, and courage on the one hand, and on the other hand, use the platform of teshuva, the five-step platform of teshuva in the collective sense to look at what--how to embody charata or this, this feeling of, regret and sadness and grief as an opportunity to educate ourselves, how we acknowledge the harm, how we create public forums for those who are directly impacted by the harm to speak their truth and to follow up through nonviolence with the kinds of direct actions that we need to block the harm and to build bridges in our movement, and to create shelters of communities of peace where you can see the possibility, you can live into the possibility of beloved community.

This is what keeps me resilient. I'm just returning... by the time this comes to, to the fore, but it will continue to be true that I am part of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity here in California. And we are an interfaith organization run by people of color, and I feel incredibly privileged to be to have been on the board of that community for 11 years, and to participate actively in the many actions that we create to shed light on the harms done to migrant communities.

And we have also risen to embody how to move and educate our communities around Palestine by creating a decolonial pilgrimage. So w- the opportunity is to create practices that we have not really invented yet, and to draw on our incredibly rich tradition to fuel those practices into newly emergent forms of global interfaith community building, even as we redefine, and perhaps queer up is the best way to say that, queer up Judaism so that the same expansiveness that we have welcomed around gender, gendering, we can apply to all our relationships.

The work of teshuva, like the absolute labor of it, not just the yearning for it is really present your work and in, in what you're seeing the parsha call for. Do you see any building blocks in the parsha, not just to narrate the harm, but to narrate the antidote?

Yes. I have always been very moved by the story of Hagar that her story is lifted up and that she is, along with Abraham, has, has a direct access to the divine message. And in the face of the almost certain death of her child, she is renewed by seeing a l- the living waters rise up.

And this idea that in a wasteland, like Miriam the prophet, in, in a wasteland, we can start to envision the sources of water, the sources of renewal, the sources of resiliency, and run to them.

So it is something to partner with the Muslim community and hear stories of Hajj, which enacts the running of Hagar, running back and forth for the sake of her children. This, to me, is what we're called to do because the children, I think this portion suggests to us that all the children are ours, as James Baldwin said, all the time.

All of the children are our children, even as we love up our literal children that have ... that are in our communities, that are ... that we have given birth to, or our grandchildren. Mm-hmm. are invited to see all the world's children as our children, and to ask ourselves, y- what does it mean to be a blessing? It says, "You shall be a blessing." Clearly now, many of us are, many in our community have embodied the curse. The curse is to see some lives as not worthy. That is a curse. When you objectify people, dehumanize people, criminalize people, that is a curse upon all of us. It dehumanizes us. It makes us ugly. It- we've seen those videos of Israeli soldiers, for instance, this ugliness that is so shameful to watch. We cannot turn away. Instead, we are to become a blessing and to ourselves and our neighbors, what does that look like in our communities? To be a blessing, another way to translate that is what does loving solidarity look like to people who are directly impacted by harm? What does harm relief look like?

And there is no one answer to that, nor one response. But clearly, whatever our response is, it has to be mediated through those who are experiencing the harm so that we don't cause more harm. And it is a continual process. It's not once and done. And that's what our Torah teaches us as we read these, these verses again and again, and year by year, we ask ourselves yet again, what does it mean to be a blessing to the world?

How can we put that resonant blessing that resonates into the world so that we can create a different blessing ecology in our communities? And we can be the source of that

AK: Thank you so much. The challenge for us for this year that was given to us by Judith Plaskow is to build a Haftarah Beyond Conquest. I am curious as we the canon what Haftarah, text sacred through our understanding of it would you add instead of the traditional Haftarah assigned to this year's parsha, this week's parsha?

LG: I believe that, when we take Judith's challenge, which I believe has been around for a long time It has. We're trying to answer it. Not new. I think every generation needs to discover it. But as, first seven women to become a rabbi in Jewish history, there's been a lot of need to to relook at the text for many different issues around patriarchy, racism, transphobia, homophobia, all of these things.

But again, it's not really enough to just do the textual work. Because no matter what haftarah you choose to replace this, you, you still have to be doing something. You still have to be doing a mitzvah in the world. Free Palestine, is a mitzvah my haftarah is reading the texts, the, the texts which have been invisibilized by us, and those words do not lie so much in the haftarah. Of course, everybody loves Isaiah, which Isaiah is a good, a good place to begin. I could read oh, I, we are firmly accepting non-Jewish, uh, texts for this canon exactly. So perhaps what we could do is there's a couple things, is reach to Palestinian poetry, to reach to those readings, to reach to the readings of the communities of Black people who share Jewish identity, and Christian identity, and Muslim identity, and and, and non-religious identities to make Haftarah the time, as you said, an opportunity to read the text which we need to hear, which can inform and help us resource, the kinds of teshuva that we need to make.

And this to me creates steadfast hope. We- we're expanding our canon beyond the Jewish traditional texts. And honestly, when you read, if you're a scholar and you read these texts, you know how influenced they were by the stories of the people around them, right? And this is important for us too.

We, we have to be influenced by the power of the spirituality of the people around us who have written out of their experience. and this includes, in addition, the beautiful and the, the new, expressions of Yiddish that are happening in our midst. The- also the Jeswana communities the, BIPOC people in our own community, the Sephardic traditions, Mizrahi traditions. For those of us in the Ashkenazi community, we have to expand our canon to incorporate and become familiar with sacred texts from other traditions and other communities which have a lot to say to us right now, even as we bring the gifts that we have in our own tradition into the street and into communities with humility, so much humility, and of course, always through permission and invitation.

In that way, we can build the beloved community together.

AK: Reb Lynn, rejecting the premise and bringing her own Torah instead, and the question. If you, people wanna, because people will want to cert- most certainly follow your work and continue to learn from you, where can, they get more of your Torah?

LG: They can, of course support, They can read through Shomeret Shalom, replanting seeds of Jewish revolutionary nonviolence. They can stay tuned to, the Shomeret Shalom program.

Right now, we're in the midst of a two-year ordination program, ordaining people in the practice of Shomeret Shalom, which will be opening up in March. They can, subscribe to mail, the MailChimp newsletter that I put out the scrolls that I put out monthly. And, just reach out to me personally through my email, it, with questions. They could-- You could do that through my website, through the newly, about to be newly launched Shomeret Shalom website, and, through my email, rabbilynng@gmail.com. I'm always happy to speak with people and support people, in their learning and activism and spiritual journeys.

AK: Rev Lynn, thank you for calling us to be the blessing, and see you in the streets!

LG: Stay in the streets! Thank you so much, and wishing everyone a very hopeful year ahead in spite of what we're facing. May we continue to say the blessing. Blessed is the spirit of life who prepares the way of peace. Hameychin mitzadei, may it be for all of us.

AK: Amen.

Thank you for listening to Left at Sinai, Parshat Lech Lecha with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb. Your support for Left at Sinai allows us to put out episodes weekly for the entire year ahead. Head to our GoFundMe, link in the show notes, to contribute to the show. Sponsor an episode of learning and dedicate it in honor of a loved one, upcoming celebration, campaign victory, or yard site, or give at any level.

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Left at Sinai was edited by Ev Bowen, music by Molly Bajgot, art by Liora Ostroff.

I'm your host, Ariana Katz. Follow the show and me at leftatsinaipod and at rabbiariana on Instagram. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Ariana Katz

Parshat Lech Lecha with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb

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