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AJ Helman (they/them/theirs) is an educator and artist with a focus on Jewish and LGBTQ+ theater and education. After graduating from Emerson College with a BFA in Theater Education and Performance, AJ remained in Boston, working in the local theater and film industries as both an artist and a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion liaison. As part of their activism and educator work, they facilitated workshops on gender diversity in theater and spearheaded better inclusion practices for transgender employees in the film industry thanks to the support of Ryan Reynoldsâ and Blake Livelyâs Group Effort Initiative. AJ proudly marched with Keshet at San Francisco Pride directly following the Supreme Courtâs overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, effectively making LGBTQ+ marriage in the United States legal. In addition to their activism and artistry, AJ is thrilled to be a part of the Temple Emanuel staff as the Ritual Coordinator.
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How did you sleep on Thursday night? When I first learned that Israelâs war with Iran had begun in earnest, I, like so many of you, did not sleep much at all. Because of the 7-hour time difference between Boston and Israel, in the early hours of Friday morning I was able to reach Micah Goodman, our beloved teacher and friend who lives in Kfar Adumim, twenty minutes outside of Jerusalem. What Micah had to say was both inspiring and concerning at the same time.First the inspiring part. Micah shared that Israelâs attack on June 13 exceeded its wildest dreams. As Micah put it, the start of the war was all of Israelâs best military victoriesâthe Six Day War, Entebbe, the destruction of Iraqâs nuclear reactor in Osirak in 1981, the exploding pagers that crippled Hezbollahâall at once. Using intelligence, covert operations, Mossad agents on the ground in Iran and drone technology, Israel was able to eliminate Iranâs leading generals and nuclear scientists in their homes, in their beds, in targeted attacks, in which Israel did not also kill their families. Why were Iranâs leading generals and nuclear scientists at home, in the first place? Why werenât they in a bunker? Micah answers his own question by observing that we cannot prepare for something that has never before happened in history. What Israel accomplished on June 13 had never before been accomplished in the history of war, the kind of chutzpah, planning, skill and savvy that allowed these targeted assassinations. Add to that Israeli fighter jets that evaded Iranian air defenses, allowing Israel to attack more than 100 sites. Micah observed that Israelâs morale is very high.But there is a but. Micah and his wife and their teen-age daughters, like so many Israeli families, spent their night in a bunker. Shul throughout Israel has been cancelled. Micahâs public lectures for next week have been cancelled. All public events have been cancelled. Since the airport is closed, Israelis are worrying about food. Where will their food come from? Israel imports much of its food supply. He went to the grocery store on Friday morning, worried about whether his family will have enough food, and the store was jam-packed with nervous grocery shoppers, and the shelves were largely empty.So there is edge in Israel. Iran remains formidable. The Houthis remain formidable. There still is Hamas. There still is Hezbollah. While the beginning of the war could not have gone any better, where it will go next, nobody knows. There is what Micah calls âradical uncertaintyâ about what this war will mean for Israelâs future and for the region.What do we do with this complex picture? How do we understand and respond to it? What does it mean to us? What does it ask from us?
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Fehlende Folgen?
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I called my brother-in-law Ari this morning in Jerusalem. He and his family spent the night in their bunker. Two of their sons have been mobilized yet again. He shared one story that speaks to this moment.This morning (Friday is typically a day off for many Israelis, kind of like our Sunday, though it is spent getting ready for Shabbat) a friend of theirs has a daughter who was go get married. She had a dress. She had a groom. She had a venue. She had a guest list. She had a caterer. She had a mazel-dick day, 6/13, June 13, which corresponds to the number of mitzvot in our tradition. 613 embodies a fullness of hope and experience.The wedding was cancelled. For now. How do we process Israelâs existential war with Iran? What texts from our canon speak to this moment? What can we do to support Israel now?
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Last week, I went to the bank. The teller was quite friendly. He looked vaguely Middle Eastern and had an accent I couldnât quite place. We were chatting about the weather and the start of summer as he looked up my account. And then, he asked as he was typing away, âso, what do you do for work?â I paused, looking at him.Should I tell him what I do? Is that safe? What if he hates me for being Jewish and sabotages my bank account⊠And then, I thought to myself, âwhat, are you crazy, Aliza?! There are how many thousands of Israelis literally fighting on the front lives, fighting for their lives and the safety and security of our beloved Eretz Yisrael and youâre going to shy away from simply disclosing your profession?!â I tried to put on a warm smile. âIâm a rabbi,â I said.
âHmmmâŠâ he said, as he typed away on his computer. Click, click, click. I heard the keyboard, but nothing else. My mind was racing, worrying, wondering what he thought of me. Suddenly he stopped and looked me in the eye. âWait, thatâs a steak!â
I burst out laughing. I could barely form my next sentence. âNo,â I choked out, âthatâs a rib eye. Iâm a rabbi.â He furrowed his brow and handed me a piece of paper. âWrite it down,â he said. I did. He took the paper thoughtfully and began typing away at his computer. âOh,â he said after a while, âa spiritualleader for the Jewish peopleâŠâ
What a crazy time. To think that I was nervous about sharing my work with a random teller at the bank. And yet, every week we are inundated with stories about people in similarly benign situations that quickly devolve into tragedy.
The attack on the Jewish community in Boulder this week hit me particularly hard. You must know that Boulder is the epicenter of hippie life in Colorado. Itâs a crunchy granola college town at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Itâs so progressive that you have to work hard to find dairy ice cream. You can get avocado ice cream, soy cream, hemp cream, rice cream, oat cream, but if you want ice cream with cowâs milk you practically have to go to a specialized store or milk your own cow. I grew up visiting the Pearl Street Mall every week. We would go to religious school and then have dinner on the grass right there, where the attack happened, in front of the courthouse. It always felt like the safest place.
How is it that in 2025, Jews are publicly torched in the middle of a hippie college town in broad daylight? How is that an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor finds the strength to go out with their community in solidarity with the hostages for the first time only to end up in the ER with severe burns over their body? How is it that caring members of our community in their 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s are now coping with life-altering injuries simply for the sin of being identifiably Jewish in public? How is this our new normal?
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How do we know when an old era ends? How do we know when a new era begins? Is that happening to us now?
Do we now live in an era where we might be going about an ordinary day and be attacked because
we are Jewish, the attacker shouting âFree Palestine.â
It happened in Pennsylvania to the Governor of the State. While Governor Josh Shapiro, his wife Lori, their four children, two dogs, and another family were inside their home, their home was firebombed on April 13, hours after the family had hosted a Passover seder. The suspect set the fire using Molotov cocktails and did so, in his own words, because Governor Shapiro needed to âstop having my friends killed,â and that he, the suspect, âwill not take part in his (Governor Shapiroâs) plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.â
It happened in Washington D.C. to a young couple about to be engaged. Yaron Lischinsky, age 30, had planned to propose to Sarah Milgrim, age 26, in Jerusalem, but they were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum on May 21. The suspect shouted: âFree, free Palestineâ upon his arrest.
It happened in Boulder Colorado. On June 1, a man shouting âFree Palestineâ threw Molotov cocktails at a group of Jews who were rallying for Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Among the 15 people injured was an 88-year old Holocaust survivor. The suspect stated that he wanted to âkill all Zionist people.â
How do we process this? What does it mean to us and to the American Jewish community? Since October 7, every Hartman podcast of Israel at War has been about Israel at war. But the most recent podcast, for the first time, is not about Israel. It is about the Jewish people. It is entitled the War Against the Jews. Donniel and Yossi do a De Tocqueville for the American Jewish community. Their point: American Jewry is entering a new era, what they call the ânormalizationâ of Jew hatred, and the âEuropeanization" of American Jewry. It is not about the absolute number of haters. It is about the fear that, at any moment, a deranged hater might shout âFree Palestineâ while attacking us. That fear fuels terrorism. Which means that terrorism has come home to us, where we live and breathe. If it has happened in Pennsylvania to the Governor, in Washington, and in hip, cool Boulder to Jews asking that hostages get released, why not us?
Is this a scary new era? If so, how do we respond? Can we imagine a different and better future, and if so, what do we do to bring about that better future?
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Beyond all Consolation: A Jewish Philosophy of Redemption and Tragedy
Rabbi Jason Rubenstein joined Harvard Hillel as Executive Director on June 1, 2024 after six years as the Howard M. Holtzman Jewish Chaplain at Yale. Jasonâs background is as diverse as Harvardâs Jewish community: a childhood at Temple Micah in Washington DC, formative years studying at Yeshivat Maâale Gilboa in northern Israel, and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary. From 2010-2018, Jason taught on the faculty of the Hadar Institute, where he created classrooms, conversations, and communities that bring Torah into an open-ended dialogue with the fullness of studentsâ lives.
From his own formative undergraduate years at Harvard Hillel, where he met his wife, Arielle Rubenstein â07, Jason knows how Hillel can and should transform studentsâ lives â and through them, American Jewish life. For a fuller view of Jasonâs plan for Harvard Hillelâs future, you can listen to his interview with Yehuda Kurtzer (PhD â08).
View his full bio here
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I am not a huge fan of rom coms. But there was one rom com I just had to see the minute I heard about it. I was drawn to its title. Its title was irresistible. Its title conveyed the central problem in the Book of Numbers. Its title conveyed one of the central challenges in our own lives. The title of this rom com is Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.
Jane Austen wrecked my life. Letâs dwell on that. Some other person wrecked my life. Some external person or event or disappointment wrecked my life. If my life is not what I want it to be, there is somebody or something else to blame.
How often are we tempted to say our own version of Jane Austen wrecked my life? Weâve all heard, or said, different versions of this.
My parents wrecked my life. I still remember the time I came home with an examination where I got a 98. And they said: what happened to the other two points? I still remember the time I came home with my report card. All As and one A-minus. And they said: A-minus?
Or: My parents wrecked my life. I was always a creative type. I dreamed of becoming a singer. A writer. An actor. But my parents threw cold water on my dreams: âHow are you going to make ends meet,â they would say. âDo you have any idea how many unemployed singers, writers and actors there are,â they would say. They pressured me to become an accountant. I work at Price Waterhouse as an auditor. I am not living my dream.
Parents are frequently the target of Jane Austen wrecked my life energy, but there are plenty of other targets.
My boss who had it in for me wrecked my life.
My co-worker who betrayed me wrecked my life.
My business partner who cheated me wrecked my life.
My teacher who gave me an unfair grade wrecked my life.
My doctor who failed to diagnose and treat my condition properly wrecked my life.
In each case, the narrative could well be accurate. The feelings could well be valid. Parents did say: where are the other two points? The boss did have it in for you. Your business partner did cheat you. The doctor did not treat your medical condition properly. But hereâs the problem: Even if the claim that Jane Austen wrecked my life has some basis, does this energy serve us? Does this energy help us? Or does this energy consign us to a doom loop of reliving past frustration?
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The Talmud has a famous story from Menachot 29B that invites us to confront three hard truths that we would rather not think about. Our mortality. The limited reach of our legacy. And the unredeemed nature of our worldâwe will live, and we will pass, with the worldâs big problems unsolved.
Why this story now? It is Erev Shavuot, the eve of our receiving the Torah. This story is about the nature of Torah; our life and legacy; and the relationship between our Torah, our life, our legacy and the world.
If this story is true, how do we make peace with it? Is it possible to make peace with it?
We will examine this unsettling story through the lens of two great thinkers, Harold Kushner and Jim Collins.
How does the Torah we will receive on this Shavuot affect how we think about our life, legacy, and relationship to an unredeemed world?
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Standards. Is there an elegant theory for when to enforce them and when to choose not to enforce them?
Parents face this question all the time. We have standards in our home! But our children do their own thing that flies in the face of our standards. Do we enforce the standard, or let it go?
Synagogues face this question all the time. To celebrate a Bar/Bat Mitzvah in our community, a family is expected to fulfill certain requirements, like attending Shabbat services a certain number of times. What do we do when a family does not comply with those standards? Do we enforce the standard, or let it go?
Employers face this question all the time. Post-pandemic employers have rules about in person attendanceâe.g., three times a week in person. When an employee does not meet that standard, is the employer to enforce the standard, or let it go?
We also face this question of standards in larger contexts: our love of America, our love of Israel. We have standards for the kind of conduct we would expect to see in a democracy and in a Jewish homeland. When those standards are seemingly not met, what do we do?
Are standards mere suggestions? Do standards have teeth? Does violating standards have consequences?
Our study tomorrow will focus on a standard that could not be more clear or more explicitâpriests with defects cannot officiateâand it comes from our most authoritative source, the Torah in the voice of God. (In halakhic terminology, it is called a deoreita command).
The Lord spoke further to Moses: Speak to Aaron and say: No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God. No one at all who has a defect shall be qualifiedâŠ.No man among the offspring of Aaron the priest who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the Lordâs gift; having a defect, he shall not be qualified to offer the food of his God. Leviticus 21: 17 and 21.
Yet, in the face of this crystal-clear rule, repeated four times, the Talmud chooses not to enforce this standard in all cases, and offers multiple cases where priests with visible defects were nonetheless allowed to officiate.
What do we learn from the Talmud about when we might choose to enforce, and when we might choose not to enforce, our standards?
To what extent do our personal relationships with people who do not meet the standard but we nonetheless love matter?
To what extent does the communityâs actual practice matter especially when it ignores the standard?
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Fifty-three years ago, on March 31, 1972, the Soviet Union launched a spacecraft that was supposed to go to Venus. But it never made it to Venus. Some malfunction in the rocket prevented it from leaving the earthâs orbit. The Soviets named this spacecraft Cosmos 482âwhich became code in Soviet lexicon for epic failure. For 53 years, the spacecraft that could never make it to Venus circled the earth. Year after year never getting to where it was meant to go. Year after year stuck in a perpetual orbit. But it turns out that every year it lost a little bit of height in its orbital wanderings so that, last Saturday, on Shabbos, Cosmos 482 could finally find rest. Last Saturday, Cosmos 482 fell back to the earth, into the sea, without causing harm to people or property.
I am not a space person. I donât follow NASA. But the minute I heard this crazy story, I thought to myself: There is a sermon in that! Because what happened to Cosmos 482 happens to every one of us in our own way.
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Loving critics. The phrase feels like an oxymoron. In fact it is a willed double entendre.
Perhaps it means that critics are loving. Their words of critique flow from a place of love. In fact, they feel that suppressing their critique, going along to get along, would undermine that which they love.
Perhaps loving critics means that people who are not critics should nonetheless love and appreciate people who are critics. Perhaps they have something to say that we and others need to hear.
Should we become loving critics? If we have never before been fans of critics, should we reevaluate and gain a new respect for loving critics? Perhaps loving critics might be helpful for this current fraught moment in America and in Israel.
Tomorrow we will examine three sources from two thinkers. Elana Stein Hain recently taught the two texts we will encounter from Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago from the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, to a CJP Mission in Israel. And Larry Bacow wrote a piece in Harvard Magazine entitled Loving Critics, from which the title of this class comes.
How do we love the lands we love in their winter of discontent?
Complicated.
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Adina Vogel Ayalon â an Israeli citizen who has lived and raised a family in Israel and worked for decades toward building peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians â and Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz are uniquely positioned to unpack some of the difficult questions facing our communities today, including:
How can American Jews most effectively advocate to bring about the return of the hostages, sideline Hamas and promote a peaceful and safe future for Israeli and Palestinian families alike?What constitutes anti-semitism on campus and how can we best combat it?How should our community encourage the US government to address Iranâs nuclear ambitions and support of terrorism throughout the region?How would the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel affect Israelâs security? -
Last week we encountered one kind of âimperfect peace,â to use the term coined by our teacher, Sara Labaton of Hartman: shalom bayit, domestic harmony, made possible by a lack of transparency in a marriage. We read the ruling of Ovadia Yosef that a wife not disclose the fact of her abortion before she had met her husband so that their marriage could continue.
This week we encounter another complicated rabbinic category of imperfect peace: mipnei darchei shalom, the things we do for the sake of peace. Tomorrow morning we will encounter the Talmudic teaching that encourages Jews to be nice to gentiles: to bury their dead, to visit their sick, and to provide financial support to their poor, for the sake of peaceful relations. Is that transactional or relational? Is that practical or admirable? Is that aspirational or calculated? We will compare the Talmudic teachings of mipnei darchei shalom to Donniel Hartmanâs most frequently taught text about a person who does the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, without calculating any benefit, and in fact losing out financially by doing so.
Is local peace, whether transactional or relational, an adequate response to a world on fire?
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A woman in Israel approached her rabbi with the following dilemma. When she was a younger woman, she was not religious. She had relations with a man and got pregnant. She had an abortion. She then became religious. She did teshuvah, repentance. She committed herself to learning Torah, doing mitzvot and joining an observant community. She moved to a new town, where she was not known, met a young yeshiva student who did not know about her past. She did not tell him. They got married. She got pregnant and delivered a healthy baby boy. Her husband wanted them to do a special ritual ceremony called pidyon haben, redemption of the first born, where they thank God for the gift of their first-born. Under Jewish law, however, the family could not do this ceremony because of her prior abortion, which the husband did not know about. So this wife and new mother approaches her local rabbi to ask: Should she now tell her husband about her past, that she had had an abortion, and that this baby was not eligible for this ritual? Doing so would have spared her husband from saying a prayer at the ritual that he should not have said, a ritual infraction known as a berakhah leâvatala, a blessing made in vain? But doing so might also have endangered their marriage. Or should she permit her husband to say a blessing in vain which would preserve the marriage and family peace, even though doing so perpetuates the omission?
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Sara Labaton, the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently taught a group of local rabbis. She observed that the prophetic ideals of peace (lion lies down the with lamb, nations will beat swords into ploughshares, neither will they know war anymore) are so lofty as to be unattainable. Would we be better off looking towards rabbinic ideals of peace?
The good news for rabbinic ideals of peace: not lofty. Not utopian.
The bad news: rabbinic ideals of peace are small, local, and very imperfect.
On Shabbat we will consider a fascinating source about a most imperfect, indeed troubling peace. Three things about this source are striking.
One the genre. It is sheilah uâteshuva, a legal question and answer, a responsum. Not a genre we have studied before.
Two, the author is Ovadia Yosef, zichrono livracha, who was the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community in Israel and throughout the world. He was incredibly learned and inspired passionate devotion among his followers. When he died in 2013, 800,000 people attended his funeral, the largest funeral in the history of Israel.
Three, the fact pattern. A young woman has sex outside of marriage, gets pregnant, and has an abortion. Later, she becomes very observant, marries a yeshiva bocher, gets pregnant, has a baby boy. She never tells her husband about her abortion. When their child is born, the husband wants to do a ceremony called pidyon haben, the redemption of the first-born boy. Since she had had an abortion, she was not eligible for the pidyon haben. But he did not know. Would it be better to tell the truth, and not have the pidyon haben? Or to perpetuate the omission, and have the pidyon haben that she was not eligible to have, in which case the ceremony would contain a blessing that should not have been said?
Read this short, saucy case. What did Ovadia Yosef decide? Why? Do you agree with his decision? How would you assess pros and cons? What do we learn from his decision that could apply to our very different world?
Is an imperfect peace worth pursuing? Is local peace an adequate response to a world on fire?
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God is always confusing. We never know what to think. But that is especially true now in this fraught theological season between commemorating the Shoah (April 24), honoring soldiers who fell in Israelâs wars and victims of terrorism on Yom Hazikaron (April 30), and celebrating the birth of the State of Israel on om Haâatzmaut (May 1).
Tomorrow we are going to study a modern Jewish philosopher that we have never before studied, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who came up with a new scheme: the Three Eras of Jewish History.
It is new. It is thoughtful. It is engaging. It gives us what to talk about.
But does it work? After all, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel happened within three years of one another, very much in the same era.
We will also look at the special insertions in our Amidah for Yom Hashoah and Yom Haâatzmaut to see what statement they make on Godâs relationship to the Jewish people and to history in 1941-45 and in 1948. We will also examine an important text from the Talmud that shows our sense of Godâs presence or absence is very much affected by what is actually happening in the world.
Spoiler alert: itâs not about the answers. There are none. Itâs about the wrestling. One other alternative: Who needs God? Since there are no answers, since the wrestling never leads to an answer, are we better off if God is not all that important to usâwhich, by the way, is what the vast majority of Temple Emanuel members will say about how they actually lead their lives. âIâm not a God person. I am here for the community.â Maybe that is the wisest posture of all?
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Led by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
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