On Thoughts and Prayers

To kick off this section of the website, I want to take a moment to share my intentions for it.

I want to dedicate this page to words of Torah. Torah that expands our understanding of ourselves and our communities, and challenges us and our assumptions about the world. Torah that demands we do better, but also Torah that comforts us in a broken world. If Torah cannot speak to us in our moments of joy and pain, and everything between and beyond, then either we have failed in our interpretation of Torah, or the Torah has failed us. I can’t accept the latter, so I hope to embrace the former and expand the faces of Torah. All we need to do is turn her, Torah, over and over again.

I want to dedicate this page to prayer. My relationship with prayer has been tumultuous. My adult prayer life has, for the most part, centered on the traditional liturgy. While our tradition’s prayers continue to hold significance for me spiritually and communally, in a post-October 7th world, I’ve found them, at times, to feel lacking. When I returned to the United States in June 2024 after two years of living in Jerusalem, I began a process of falling apart. The horrors of October 7th and living next to the genocide in Gaza for 8 months demanded deconstruction.

To heal and allow myself to do the work necessary in these troubling times, I needed to spend my last year of rabbinical school studying theology and questioning my ongoing experiment of believing in G,d. It turns out that questioning how you think of and relate to G,d can make prayer difficult. To help this process along, I took a class on liberation theology at Boston College, my first class in all my time in rabbinical school on systematic theology, and a class on writing prayers and creating liturgies at Boston University.

While I spend a lot of time on the border between atheism and theism, prayer has stayed important. So, in addition to reflections on the traditional liturgy, I hope to share original prayers and liturgies I and, hopefully, others create to meet the ever-changing needs of our time. Sometimes this will have a theistic nature and sometimes it won’t.

Finally, I want this to be a space to speak openly and frankly about what’s happening in our world. With the rise of fascism, late-stage capitalism, genocide, and the climate crisis, the stakes are too high for us to do otherwise. Politics as usual will not save us and no one can save us but us. Now is the time for us to reach out and build networks of mutual aid that are resilient in the face of the threats we’re facing.

On that note, I would like to offer a prayer against fascism I wrote in January:

G,d who defeated Pharaoh, his magicians and their gods,

Now is the time to intervene, now is the time to support us.

There are tyrants desecrating your divine image.

Reach out your right hand and humble dictators.

With the other, embrace your exhausted children and their struggle for freedom.

And let us say: Amen.