A Jew, Full Stop
Last Sunday we drove down to Zichron Ya’akov to see a friend. Her name is Tal Hartuv, and some of you will know her already, from the news or from the Atlanta Israel Coalition webinar last week. The news put her name in print for the hardest hours of her life. None of it prepares you for the thing that fills a room when she walks into it.
We had beers (the White Rabbit) and a long, easy conversation, her and us and a few new friends around the table. Afterward the two of us went for a walk with her, while everyone else drifted off to watch the World Cup. The movie, as we like to call it. She finds joy in ordinary things: a good beer on a Sunday afternoon, the company around the table, the light coming off the Carmel on the walk back. She has more reason than most to hold the world at arm’s length, and she does the opposite. The joy has come up through everything she carries, and it is contagious. I drove home lighter than I came.
She was always Jewish. There was a particular event, though, and after it, the way she tells it, she stood up as a Jew. No longer Jew-ish. A Jew. Full stop. She says it like a period at the end of a sentence, and you feel the whole sentence land behind it.
Yesterday was Tisha B’Av. We fasted, we sat low to the ground, we read Eicha — the day the tradition sets aside for every catastrophe that ever came down on the Jewish people, folded into one. This morning the fast is behind us. This Shabbat is Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of comfort, and the Torah reading is Vaetchanan. Near the start of it, Moshe reminds the people of a plain fact about who is standing in front of him.
וְאַתֶּם֙ הַדְּבֵקִ֔ים בַּיהֹוָ֖ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם חַיִּ֥ים כֻּלְּכֶ֖ם הַיּֽוֹם׃
while you, who held fast to the ETERNAL your God, are all alive today.
Chayim kulchem hayom. Alive, all of you, today. The verse lands right after a hard one, about the people who followed Baal Peor and were gone. Moshe sets the two next to each other and stays with the living. That is where the Torah keeps its eyes, on the people still on their feet this morning, still holding fast.
This is the part of Jewish life that is hardest to hand across to someone standing outside it. A lot of people were taught a picture of the Jew bent under his law — rules stacked on rules, a long cold list of thou-shalt-nots, religion as a burden carried out of fear. Some of you reading this were handed that picture in a church basement, gently, by people who meant no harm. Here is what the law actually feels like from the inside, on an ordinary Friday.
It walks me out into my own town. Kashrut means I have a butcher, and the butcher knows me. Shabbat means that by Friday afternoon I have been to the baker and the wine merchant and the grocer, the apartment has been cleaned, and there is challah and wine and light waiting on the table. The law takes me straight into the ordinary world, into the shops and the neighbors and the smell of a kitchen before sundown, and lays a little holiness over the whole thing. An errand becomes a preparation. A Friday in Kiryat Shmona becomes the doorway into Shabbat. The joy is right there in the texture of it, in the shopping and the sweeping and the table set before dark.
Every one of those ordinary things comes with a blessing over it. A few words before the bread, before the wine, before the fruit — a small pause that says this moment is worth marking. That is the whole machinery of kedusha, of holiness. It bends down and lifts the world you already have, the meal and the morning and the errand, one notch toward the sacred. A Jew spends his day handing blessings to ordinary things. It is a strange and joyful way to live, and once you have lived it you do not really want to go back.
That is what Tal has, and it is what the fast points back toward. Whatever your affiliation, whatever your practice, or your lack of one, that same wholeness is waiting on a Shabbat table for anyone who reaches for it. You do not need Tal’s story, or mine, to stand up inside your own life the way she stood up inside hers. A Jew, full stop. A people that keeps choosing the living. Tisha B’Av gathers every loss into a single day so the rest of the year is free to be exactly this: a butcher who knows your name, a friend whose joy fills a room, a table set before dark.
On Sunday, once the daily brief is put to bed, we are going down to the Old City of Jerusalem. I have been thinking about it all week — the stone, the crowds, the noise, the plain fact of standing in the middle of the sentence the whole tradition is still writing. Something to look forward to. The fast is behind us. The living have somewhere to be.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham