Back to the Beginning

In the days after October 7, 2023, which was also Simchat Torah, while Jewish families were still burying their dead and the hostages were still in Gaza, crowds gathered in cities around the world. In some places, the massacre was minimized, excused, or openly celebrated. On university campuses, in public squares, and online, we heard “Free Palestine” used not as a plea for the suffering, but as a verdict that Israel has no right to exist. And we heard the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Those who use it often say they mean freedom and equality for all. But the river is the Jordan, and the sea is the Mediterranean; between them lies the State of Israel. For Jews, who heard the phrase from those who had just carried out a massacre, it sounded like the erasure of Israel and its people. Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate, and Jews themselves practice it vigorously. Denying that the Jewish people belong in their ancestral homeland at all is something else. Both in the physical and online arena, many Jews were being gaslit for the audacity to believe in the Jewish claim to its ancestral homeland. Rashi, the famous commentator, addresses this timely issue in his first comment on the Torah. Citing Rabbi Yitzchak, Rashi asks: since the Torah is primarily a book of commandments, why doesn't it begin with the first mitzvah given to the Jewish people, “This month shall be for you the first of months”? His answer comes from Tehilim/Psalms 111:6: “The power of His works He declared to His people, to give them the inheritance of the nations.” If the nations ever tell Israel, “You are robbers, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations,” Israel can answer that the entire earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He. He created it and gave it to whomever He saw fit. By His will, He gave it to them; by His will, He took it from them and gave it to us. Rashi wrote nearly a thousand years ago, yet the accusation he anticipated is the one we hear today. He might have been addressing the UN at one of its many forums, denying the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. Rashi is communicating a few things. First, our claim has a source, and it begins at the beginning. Our relationship to the Land does not rest on a treaty, a war, or a moment of political fortune. It rests on a Torah that opens by declaring that the world has a Creator, and that He gave this land to Avraham’s descendants. We need not apologize for this foundation, and we should not let others define us as outsiders in our own story. Second, the claim comes with responsibility. The same Torah that tells us the land was given also tells us we can lose it. Our claim is not a license; it is a trust. The Torah warns that the Land will “vomit out” those who defile it. Standing firm in our right to be there goes hand in hand with striving to be worthy of it, through justice, compassion, and holiness. Rashi’s answer is addressed to believers. It will not persuade everyone, and it was never meant to. Its purpose is to give us clarity and confidence, so that when others deny our legitimacy, we do not begin to doubt ourselves. This Shabbat Bereishis, as we begin the Torah again, we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice on October 7. We also recommit to the story that opens with “Bereishis.” The entire earth belongs to G-d. Our task is to live on it and in the Land He gave us, so His gift becomes a blessing. No matter where a Jew lives, he must always remember this important comment from Rashi. Have a Peaceful Shabbos, Rabbi Yaakov Fisch

Shelter in the Sky

For the last couple of days, I've been thinking about a plane I was never on. On Wednesday, during Chol HaMoed, I read that flydubai Flight 1073, bound from Dubai to Tel Aviv (I have flown flydubai on that route before), with 174 Israelis aboard, had nearly been brought down. According to reports, one pilot stabbed the other and tried to crash the aircraft. Brave passengers and crew subdued him. The wounded pilot opened the cockpit door so they could help, and the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia. As I suspect was the case for many others, I was juggling a few emotions. I will admit my first feeling wasn't joy. It was a shudder. A plane carrying a load of Jews was nearly hijacked, and the trauma of 9/11 and its consequences triggered deep worry. At the same time, it was nothing short of miraculous on so many levels that this plane and its passengers were spared from horrible tragedy. It didn’t escape me that this happened during Sukkos, the season the Torah calls a time for happiness. The Torah describes Sukkos as the time of harvest. The farmer has finally brought it all in, and he is told to rejoice. For years I read that as being about grain and grapes. This week I read it differently. The harvest is everything we're handed and rarely notice: a breath, a phone call from our children, a plain Tuesday that ends the way we expected. That is why we sit in a sukkah. The roof lets in the stars, and the walls shake in a strong wind. King David writes in Tehillim/Psalms 27 (we have recited that in the daily tefila since the beginning of Elul), I will be sheltered in God’s sukkah on an evil day.” During Sukkos we practice what the passengers on that plane learned in minutes: that our security was never in walls. ​ Our tradition insists that gratitude is an obligation. The Mishna teaches, drawing on Tehillim 107, that those who cross the sea, travel the desert, recover from illness, or are freed from captivity must give thanks. I wasn't on that plane, but I felt a little of what those passengers must have felt: shaken first, then grateful, then more awake to what I have. ​ So here is my wish for all of us as the Yom Tov draws to a close: may we say thank you more often than we think we need to, may we count the blessings we cannot see, and may we remember that true Guardian of Israel shelters us even after Sukkos ends. Have a Peaceful Shabbos and Yom Tov, Rabbi Yaakov Fisch

When the Roof Comes Off: Sukkos in an Age of Economic Anxiety

For much of this past year, Americans have absorbed a confusing story about their own economic security. The 10-year Treasury yield, what the U.S. government itself pays to borrow, has hovered near 5%, reaching 5.009% in mid-September 2026, up from 4.28% a year earlier. Overall inflation has held stubbornly around 3.4%, well above the Fed's target, driven largely by energy costs that are up double digits year over year. Within that broader picture, observant Jewish families are absorbing something sharper still: kosher food businesses report that their narrow pool of specialty suppliers, combined with tariffs and an ongoing meat shortage, has amplified price increases far beyond the general grocery rate—even as nationwide grocery inflation sits near 2%. Keeping a kosher home, already a more expensive proposition than the general market, has gotten more expensive, faster. For a country that has spent eighty years building the most materially secure Jewish community in our history, this feels unfamiliar: the ground beneath the house is not as solid as it looked. Which is exactly what Sukkos wants us to feel. The Mitzvah of Sukkah itself is jarring. The precise language the Torah uses to describe our Sukkah experience is teishvu, or dwell. The language is precise, and it is clear that the Sukkah is not supposed to be just visited. The Mitzvah is for us to now dwell in a temporary structure for seven days and be subject to all the whims of the weather season. The Mishna rules that the sukkah's covering, known as Schach, must not be unfit for ordinary construction and must be built from natural overgrowth and not good construction material. The point is that no one could mistake it for permanent shelter. If that undermines our sense of security, that is the point. The Talmud records a dispute about what the sukkah recalls: R' Eliezer says literal huts our ancestors built in the desert; R' Akiva says the ananei kavod, the Clouds of Glory that surrounded and fed them. Either way, the sukkah commemorates something we did not build and could not have sustained ourselves, our homes, or our tables. The Zohar calls it tzila d'mehemnusa, "the shade of faith." The sukkah isn't shelter from weather; it's a structure whose whole function is to teach that the roof, and the food beneath it, were never really ours to secure alone. ​ This isn't a call to indifference toward earning a living. It’s important to distinguish between faith and passivity. Trust in G-d doesn't replace the effort to earn a livelihood. Faith displaces the illusion that we personally engineered our comfort. It’s an illusion easiest to hold when the grocery bill is predictable, harder when yields are near 5%, and the kosher aisle keeps outpacing the rest of the store. King Solomon authored the sobering Koheles, and in it we learn about the unsparing catalog of how wealth dissolves into vanity.It is read specifically on Sukkos. Sitting exposed in a temporary hut enacts its conclusion after all the accumulation; what remains is faith in G-d and fidelity to the mitzvos. ​ A year of rising yields, rising energy costs, and an even steeper kosher grocery bill is a fair occasion to ask Koheles question honestly: what in our sense of security was ever really ours? Sukkos gives us seven days sitting in a structure that cannot lie to us about the answer, then sends us back to our tables at home, still remembering what we felt outside them. Have a Peaceful Shabbos and Sukkos, Rabbi Yaakov Fisch

Choosing to Forgive

There is a peculiar arithmetic to the High Holidays. We spend Elul and the Ten Days of Repentance mentioning our failures before G-d, certain that the hardest work of teshuvah is the reckoning we do with Heaven. The Talmud in Rosh Hashanah suggests the opposite: the shortest, surest path to divine forgiveness runs through the grievances we hold against other people. The Talmudic Sage Rava teaches “whoever forgoes the reckoning owed to him for wrongs done against him has all his own transgressions forgone by the Heavenly court in turn.” He grounds this in a verse from Micah: "He bears iniquity and passes over transgression." Rava reads the verse almost mathematically: whose iniquity does God bear? The iniquity of the one who himself passes over the transgressions done against him. Measure for measure. The forgiveness we extend becomes, quite literally, the forgiveness we receive. The Talmud doesn't leave this as abstraction. It tells us of Rav Huna the son of Rav Yehoshua, who fell gravely ill — so ill that Rav Pappa, visiting, quietly instructed the household to prepare his shrouds. Rav Huna recovered. When his friends later asked what he had seen at the threshold, he reported that the Heavenly court had indeed been prepared to judge him strictly until G-d intervened on his behalf: "Since he does not stand on what is owed to him, you too should not be exacting with him." The man's own willingness to let go of grievances became the very argument for his life. This is not a comfortable teaching, because letting go rarely is. And it lands differently when you consider how many of us are carrying these grievances. A 2025 YouGov survey found that 38% of American adults are currently estranged from a close family member — a sibling, a parent, a child, or a grandparent. That is not a fringe phenomenon. It is more than one in three of the people sitting beside us in shul this Yom Kippur, and quite possibly some of us reading this. Estrangement has become so common that it barely registers as newsworthy anymore — which is itself the problem. We have normalized the silence. Researchers who study the trend, like the psychologist Joshua Coleman, point to something else worth naming: estrangement has become culturally destigmatized in a way it wasn't a generation ago. What was once a private shame is now, on social media, sometimes framed as an act of self-protection or identity — a closed door celebrated rather than mourned. That shift makes Rava's teaching more urgent, not less. A culture that increasingly rewards walking away needs, more than ever, a countervailing voice that asks what is gained by staying in the account. The Talmud is not asking us to pretend the wrong didn't happen, or to reconcile with someone who remains unsafe. Choosing to forgive is not naivete; it is a deliberate relinquishing of the accounting — the decision to stop keeping score even when the ledger is accurate. What Rava promises is that this act, difficult as it is, is precisely what unlocks Heaven's own accounting on our behalf. So before the gates close, there is a question worth sitting with: Is there someone whose debt to me I am still holding? A sibling I haven't called. A parent whose apology I'm still waiting for. A child who cut off contact I've never truly examined my part in. Rava's teaching offers a striking trade: let go of what is owed to you, and Heaven lets go of what you owe. This Yom Kippur, that may be the most direct route to being written and sealed in the Book of Life. Have a Peaceful Shabbos and a Meaningful Yom Kippur, ​ Rabbi Yaakov Fisch

Rosh Hashanah and 9/11 Converge

Tonight, as we usher in Rosh Hashanah 5787, we cross a threshold that will not come again: the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th falls on the very evening that zichronos — remembrance — becomes the operative theme of our prayers. We did not engineer this coincidence. The Jewish calendar simply placed it before us, and it is worth pausing on before the shofar sounds. Zichronos is one of three central sections of the Rosh Hashanah Mussaf, alongside Malchuyos (Kingship of G-d) and Shofros (Sound of Shofar), each crafted from ten verses in Tanach. The Zichronos verses describe G-d "remembering": "וַיִּזְכֹּר אֱלֹקִים אֶת נֹחַ". Translation: "And G-d remembered Noach"; the covenant with the Patriarchs and the cry that precipitates the Exodus (Shemos 2:24). On its surface, the language is strange. Does the Master of the Universe forget? The Maimonides answers this the way he answers all anthropomorphic language about G-d: "remembering," applied to Hashem, cannot mean recall. Unlike frail humans, G-d does not forget. Rather, it means the covenant becomes operative—providence enters into a specific relationship, at a specific moment, with consequence attached. In Zichronos, memory is not a mental event. It is the hinge on which judgment turns. This is, in fact, how memory works throughout Jewish law generally. Our obligation to remember Shabbos or the Exodus is not an invitation to nostalgia. The Haggadah does not ask us to recall the Exodus; it obligates each of us, in every generation, to see ourselves as though we personally left Egypt. Memory, in this context, is not preserved. It is transmitted, and the transmission itself is the mitzvah. That is the bridge to this particular anniversary. A member of our shul born after 2001 has no personal memory of that Tuesday morning — no memory of the smoke over two cities, of a nation's synagogues filling that Shabbos, of neighbors checking on neighbors regardless of faith. In another decade, no one leading davening on a random Tuesday will have lived it firsthand. This is exactly the problem the machzor was built to solve for a covenant three thousand years old: how do you bind a generation to a memory it did not experience? Not by relying on the dwindling number of people who were there. By ritual seriousness, repeated with enough weight that the memory becomes structural rather than personal. There is a further layer particular to Zichronos that a purely civic day of remembrance does not carry: it ties memory to din or judgment, to consequence, to what we owe because of what we remember. A Jewish remembrance of September 11th is not only grief for what was lost. It asks what vigilance, what gratitude toward those who still stand guard, what unity across difference, we owe because we remember rightly. We enter 5787 tonight having been reminded, by the calendar itself, that memory and judgment arrive together. May we merit to remember well — and to be remembered for a year of life, health, and peace. כתיבה וחתימה טובה Rabbi Yaakov Fisch

One People, One Covenant

This week, an extraordinary piece of Israel's history resurfaced. After 78 years beneath the Mediterranean, the wreck of the Altalena was discovered off the coast of Israel. The ship had become one of the most painful symbols of the early years of the State of Israel, a reminder of a moment when Jews, only weeks after declaring independence, found themselves fighting one another. In June 1948, the Altalena arrived carrying weapons purchased by the Irgun, the underground organization led by Menachem Begin. The new Israeli government, led by David Ben-Gurion, insisted that all weapons come under the authority of the newly formed IDF. Disagreements over the distribution of the weapons escalated into a confrontation. The Altalena was shelled off the coast of Tel Aviv. Nineteen Jews were killed—sixteen members of the Irgun and three IDF soldiers. The tragedy could easily have led to something far worse. Yet Menachem Begin made a remarkable decision. Despite the deaths and the anger of his followers, he called upon them not to retaliate. He understood that the Jewish people could not afford a civil war. Whatever their profound disagreements, they remained brothers. The story of the Altalena is therefore not only about what happened in 1948. It is also about a question that remains with us today: Can we disagree deeply and still remember that we are one people? There could hardly be a more appropriate time to ask that question than the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah. In this week's parsha, Moshe describes a remarkable ceremony that would take place upon the Jewish people's entry into Eretz Yisrael. The twelve tribes would gather together at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and accept the covenant with Hashem. Six tribes would stand on one mountain and six on the other. They were twelve tribes with different identities, different responsibilities, and different blessings. Yet they stood together as one nation and entered into one covenant. The Torah's message is profound: Jewish unity does not require Jewish uniformity. ​ We will always disagree with our families, our friends, our communities, and our fellow Jews. We will have different perspectives and different priorities. But there are moments when we must remember what stands beneath those differences: we are bound by a common Torah, a shared history, and a covenant that makes us one people. Perhaps that is why the discovery of the Altalena is so timely. A ship that became a symbol of Jewish division has resurfaced just as we prepare to stand before Hashem on Rosh Hashanah. May we enter the new year with the lesson of those twelve tribes firmly in our hearts: many tribes, but one people; many opinions, but one covenant; many differences, but one Klal Yisrael. Have a Peaceful Shabbos, ​ Rabbi Yaakov Fisch

Rooted in the Field: What Silicon Valley and the Labor Movement Both Miss

Google is a leader in Silicon Valley in many ways, not least for its famous employee perks. They include free gourmet cafeterias, gyms, nap pods, laundry/dry-cleaning services, and massage services. Google is the benefactor and so committed to its people that it removes every friction from their day. A very different workplace model is the one worker rights are typically associated with unions. The language of worker rights has grown louder in recent years: quiet quitting, benefits reframed not as gifts but as entitlements owed. The workplace as a site of extraction, where anything beyond a paycheck must be fought for and named as a right. These look like opposites, but they share a weakness. Corporate perks are generous yet voluntary. They are granted this year, quietly cut the next, as tech employees have learned repeatedly. Entitlement claims are durable yet unbounded, and once made, they tend to expand rather than settle. This week's parsha offers a third model, sitting in plain sight in the Torah for over three thousand years. The Torah states: כִּ֤י תָבֹא֙ בְּכֶ֣רֶם רֵעֶ֔ךָ וְאָכַלְתָּ֧ עֲנָבִ֛ים כְּנַפְשְׁךָ֖ שׇׂבְעֶ֑ךָ וְאֶֽל־כֶּלְיְךָ֖ לֹ֥א תִתֵּֽן׃ "When you enter a fellow Israelite's vineyard, you may eat as many grapes as you want, until you are full, but you must not put any in your vessel." כִּי תָבֹא בְּקָמַת רֵעֶךָ, וְקָטַפְתָּ מְלִילֹת בְּיָדֶךָ — וְחֶרְמֵשׁ לֹא תָנִיף עַל קָמַת רֵעֶךָ. "When you come into your neighbor's standing grain, you may pluck ears with your hand — but you may not swing a sickle over your neighbor's grain." (Devarim 23:25–26) Rashi, following Chazal, is precise: this is a law about a sachir — a hired laborer, working the field on his employer's behalf, mid-task. The Gemara in Bava Metzia works out the boundary: he may eat while he labors, to the point of satisfaction, but may not fill a sack, use a tool to harvest more, or take produce home. He eats k'nafsho sav'o — to his own appetite, not his household's pantry. Notice what kind of right this is. Not a perk the landowner chose to offer, and not something the worker organized to win. It is a chiyuv — an obligation built into the employment relationship itself, binding on the employer regardless of his wishes, and bounded for the worker regardless of his. It is not corporate largesse, because the employer has no discretion on this perk. Google can end free lunch; an employer that operates according to Torah Law cannot end this right, because it was never his to give. But it is also not entitlement culture, because the labor itself bounds the worker's claim. The moment he tries to convert it into ownership — filling a vessel or sending food home he has stepped outside the right into theft. Dignity here never detaches from the relationship that generated it. The same chapter continues with b'yomo titen sech'aro — wages must be paid the same day, "for he sets his life upon it" (24:14–15). The Torah legislates real economic responsibility on the employer. ​ Silicon Valley ties worker wellbeing to an employer's continued benevolence, and those perks can evaporate the moment margins tighten. A purely entitlement-based framing, whatever legitimate grievance drives it, risks severing the worker's claim from the work itself, turning every benefit into another demand. The Torah roots the right in the labor — he may eat because he is in the field, working. That rootedness gives it both permanence, since no employer can revoke a mitzvah, and proportion, since no worker can expand it past what the relationship calls for. It is an employer's responsibility, made law (halacha) precisely so it no longer depends on anyone's kindness at all. That is a sturdier foundation for a workplace, or a community, than either a free cafeteria or a picket line. Have a Peaceful Shabbos, Rabbi Yaakov Fisch