It’s been quite a roller coaster of a couple of weeks. Coming off the busy-ness and happy excitement of graduations, end of school celebrations, and the start of summer, we’re now in an anxious space of keeping our eyes on Israel and Iran. So many of us have friends and family in Israel who are running back and forth from shelters, multiple times a day. So many of us are skeptical of the Israeli government’s motivations, even if we acknowledge that a nuclear Iran would be a disaster. So many of us are concerned about the potential role our own country may take in this conflict.  And we still must remember not to look away from Gaza - from the suffering of the people who live there, from the seemingly unending war, or from the dire situation of the hostages who have still not been released. Never mind concerns we have about protecting human rights for immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and others who do not enjoy the same privileges as most of us.

So….anxiety feels appropriate. It’s also an unhelpful emotion, keeping us focused on the infinite terrifying possibilities rather than on the present. 

Whenever my children are feeling anxious about something, we talk about the situation and unpack it. First, we talk about what we know or can anticipate about what’s causing them to feel anxious. After defining the terms, as it were, we think about what’s out of our control. Then, we ask what we can control, spending time thinking about that. 

This process usually eliminates most of the anxiety. Rather than fixating on the potential worst case scenarios, we’re planning out how we can make the best of the situation.  Doing so requires a number of things, among them grit, optimism, and a sense of rootedness in our relationships with others. It’s this last quality that I want to explore further. 

Our Torah reading this week, Parashat Sh’laḥ L’kha, is most famous for containing one of the biggest breaches in our relationship with each other as a community, the incident of the spies, which led to an additional 38 years of wandering in the wilderness, during which the generation that left Egypt would perish. 

Devastating as this passage is, it’s not the only moment in the parashah that demonstrates the importance of our connections to each other – and what can happen when those ties begin to fray. At the very end of the parashah, we read of the wood-gatherer, who was collecting kindling on Shabbat – a big no-no. He’s arrested and kept in custody until God declares his punishment: stoning at the hands of the community leaders.

There are several places in this short passage that demonstrate the importance of being rooted in relationship with each other. As a member of the Israelite people, who had presumably left Egypt and stood at Sinai, the wood-gatherer almost certainly knew the rules of Shabbat. His transgression of those rules shows us that there was some disconnect between him and the norms of the community. Either he was separating himself from the community by deliberately going against their practices, or he was so alone, so without supportive relationships, that he had to go out on Shabbat to ensure his own survival by collecting firewood. 
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There’s more: When he’s first brought before Moshe and Aharon, they don’t know what to do and ask God for guidance. The community leaders had never encountered this particular situation before. Their lack of knowledge about how to proceed speaks to how unprepared they were to help support someone who was living, in one way or another, on the margins of society.

The parashah ends on what seems like a non-sequitur, the passage commanding us to put tzitzit on the corners of our garments. We know this text well, saying it daily as the third paragraph of Shema. It explains that when we see the tzitzit, we will remember all of God’s mitzvot and not go astray. At first glance, there’s not much of a link between the two sections. 

When two seemingly unrelated topics follow each other in the Torah, it’s common to ask why to and to find (or create) a connection. In his commentary on our parashah, Rabbeinu Baḥya (Baḥya ben Asher, 1255-1340, Spain) explains that the two sections abut each other to remind us of our reciprocal responsibility for each other, including our practice of mitzvot. Quoting a famous passage of Talmud, he says: Kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh \ כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה. All Jews are guarantors for one another. If there are people acting as the wood-gatherer did, it’s a sign that the community’s commitment to reciprocal responsibility is severely lacking. If only the Israelites in the desert had behaved in keeping with that value, then perhaps the wood-gatherer would not have felt the need to deviate from the community’s norms and violate Shabbat. He would have been steadied by his connections with others, supported by his community.

Back to the anxiety so many of us are feeling during this challenging time. This idea, that all of us are guarantors for each other, has the potential to help restore our sense of calm and our belief in our own empowerment. We bear responsibility for ourselves, but also for those in our community – our family, our friends, our colleagues, and those who share with us in our religious community. Leaning into that reciprocal responsibility doesn’t have to be a burden. It can be as simple as sitting down at Kiddush for a chat, sending a friend a text message to check in, making sure all members of our households feel supported and seen. It might not solve the global problems that are underlying our current state of agita, but it’s certainly an important start. 

Shabbat shalom.