A few years ago I received an email from Joe Reimer, a professor emeritus of Jewish education at Brandeis, with a request: to be part of a small working group supported by the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at Brandeis that would focus on the teaching and learning of Jewish spirituality. Certainly because of the people who would be involved, and possibly because of my own predilection to say yes to good ideas too quickly, I happily decided to join.

The lens of the study ultimately became trained on the study of Hasidic texts in adult Jewish education settings. There were six of us in the group and we met on zoom for a year (I’m writing this before securing everyone’s permission to share names, so I’m keeping them private). In each session one of us took a turn sharing a reflection on our own experiences of teaching Hasidic texts, standing both inside the experience and on the balcony looking down on it. We practiced noticing and asking questions, and we started to develop a bit of shared language.

After a few months, Joe shared that the Mandel Center was interested in hosting a convening on the topic, and we started to think about a gathering. Then October 7 came, and we, like so many others, were thrown. Our sessions, which from the beginning included one Israeli, became a time to connect and to process the shared pain and grief of the world. We pushed back our plan for a convening by a year.

This week the convening finally happened, with 23 participants from various backgrounds, institutions, and communities. I was especially delighted that so many current and former IJS faculty members were among the group. (You can read more about it here.)

By design, the convening was a space for not only some incredible teaching of Hasidic texts by some of the most talented teachers I know, but also reflection on what’s happening when we teach those texts. And, straddling the worlds of academe and spiritual practice, it also included meditation, singing niggunim, and teaching modes like movement improvisation that helped us play with what we might think of as boundaries between disciplines or realms.

At one point, pulling me back into the real world for a moment, a participant asked me, “How do you justify this kind of thing to your board and your funders?” I honestly hadn’t considered the question that much, perhaps because the Mandel Center was able to foot the lion’s share of the bill. Still, we were making a significant investment in the time of our faculty, which is precious. So the question has been sitting with me.

“And the Holy One called to Moses, and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying:” (Leviticus 1:1). Rashi’s first comment on this verse—his first comment on the Book of Leviticus—reads as follows: “Before every Divine speech act, before every utterance of the Holy One, before every instruction-invitation (tzivui, as in mitzvah—JF), there is a call, the language of affection, the language used by the Ministering Angels: ‘They call one to the other’ (Isaiah 6:3).”

I sometimes hear from Jews that it can feel weird to invoke the language of “calling” or “vocation” (which also means calling) to describe our relationship with the Holy One or the way we came to the professions or relationships to which we’ve dedicated ourselves. Particularly in English, it can feel Christian. And yet—with affection for, but not apology to, my Christian colleagues and friends—this is one of those things we Jews had first. The experience of calling is a central aspect of Jewish life, as suggested in the very name of the central book of the Torah: Vayikra, “And God called.”

Teachers, whether they work in public schools or at universities or in synagogues or at IJS, confront a unique set of challenges when it comes to calling. Those of us who teach texts, yours truly included, often start teaching because we love studying these texts and want to share our love of them with others. If we have some skill, and if we’re blessed to be in the right environment, we come to experience that innate desire as a calling, and we learn to help those we teach discern the voice of the Divine calling to them (you) in the course of Torah study.

Yet like so many other passions in a world that demands economic productivity, teaching can become more labor than love, and that flame of an initial calling can die to an ember if it isn’t tended. Which is why teachers, like all of us, need regular opportunities to renew their sense of vocation, to get quiet enough to hear the roar of the still small voice, to blow air on the embers and add fuel to the fire. In quotidian terms, we call that professional development. In the more majestic register of Torah, we might call it hitchadshut, an act of making new again. That’s my answer.

On one level, particularly as we approach the Passover seder, I’m tempted to say that we’re all teachers and we’re all learners—which is true, we are. But I also think it’s important to lift up the unique skills and talents and experience it takes to do particular types of teaching. Not anyone can teach a high school chemistry class, and not anyone can teach the Sefat Emet. It takes work and preparation, and most significantly it takes a sense of deep love and affection—a sense of calling.

Your call is different than mine. Each of us is on a particular path, which is part of what makes life rich and wonderful. Yet all of us can experience a calling—to forms of work, to types of service, to particular relationships, to Torah and mitzvot. Like many of my colleagues at the convening this week, a large part of the work I have found myself called to do is to help you and one another and as many people as we can to sense and renew their experience of calling through the extraordinary teachings of our tradition.

I’ll begin with a confession: I am a shoplifter.

Well, I was a shoplifter. As a little kid. My Mom and I were shopping at the grocery store. I saw a greeting card I really liked (I remember it being blue) and I wanted to buy it. For whatever reason, my Mom said no. I surreptitiously took it anyway and hid it inside my shirt. My Mom discovered it when we got home. After a serious talking-to about trust, we got in the station wagon and returned to the store, where I gave it back and apologized. Lesson learned.

Now, I’m proud to say that I have never shoplifted since, though I feel like that’s kind of a low bar. But perhaps the bigger imprint this event made on me had to do with trust—its importance and its fragility.

I have written about trust and trustworthiness here many times before. It’s one of my regular themes. In both my personal and professional relationships, maintaining trust and being recognized as personally trustworthy are a major focus for me—more than a focus, more like a preoccupation or a north star. (Plug: It’s why I’m proud that IJS has a 4-star rating on Charity Navigator and a Platinum rating on Candid.) That could come from being in the Boy Scouts or from the example of teachers and role models. But if I were on a therapist’s couch looking for my earliest memory dealing with trust, this incident with the greeting card would inevitably come up.

What’s clear is that the core animating issue, for me at any rate, was less the fact that the greeting card was someone else’s property (for fans of Les Mis: I’m not going to go all Javert on Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of bread) as the effect of the action on the way my mother and others thought of me—and the way I thought of myself (i.e., this is more Jean Valjean singing, “Who am I?”). I feel deeply driven to be, and to be known as, a trustworthy person. I credit my parents in particular with helping to make me that way.

Yet I think this is a pretty core issue for all of us. As a parent I have witnessed that some of the most difficult emotional moments for my children when they were young were just like mine—when they were caught in a lie, when they knew they had violated someone’s (our) trust. And I would speculate that that’s because, at root, our entire world depends on our ability to trust: to trust ourselves, to trust other people. Betrayal is one of the very deepest and hardest things to heal from—and so most of us neither want to be betrayed nor to betray others. We want to be able to trust and for others to be able to trust us.

Taking the phrase pekudei hamishkan in its most literal sense, the Midrash imagines that the opening passage of our Torah portion finds Moses sitting and making a public accounting of the Israelites’ donations in front of the entire people. “All of Israel came and Moses sat and counted,” the midrash relates. But as he counted, he forgot about the 1,775 shekels of silver that were used for the vavei ha-amudim, the little hooks that enabled the posts to be held together. Moses became nervous. He said to himself, “Now the people of Israel will think that I stole from them!” Like young Josh, like any of us—well, any of us who have a sense of honor and shame—Moses began to fear that his integrity would be impugned.

At that moment, the Holy Blessed One opened Moses’s eyes so he could see the hooks. Thus Moses told the people, in what reads like a just-in-time afterthought, “And with the 1,775 shekels he made the hooks for the posts” (Ex.38:22). “In that moment,” says the midrash, “the Israelites were reassured about the integrity of the process of creating the tabernacle.” (Yalkut Shimoni 415:3; my thanks to Rabbi David Schuck for reminding me of this midrash)

The process of building the tabernacle is the work of our collective human creation. It is a mirror to God’s creation of the world. That is why Shabbat is mentioned so frequently in these Torah portions, and it’s why the language of Exodus 39 sounds an awful lot like Genesis 1. And just as we depend on the trustworthiness and reliability of the world that has been created for us, our capacity to work and live together—to build a home in which the Divine can dwell among us—depends on the trustworthiness and reliability of our shared public life.

I would be pulling my punches if I didn’t make the implicit at least a bit more explicit: The behavior of many of our public leaders today, in the United States and Israel and in too many other places, does not reflect these values. As Jews who seek to live lives of integrity, whose mission is to build a mishkan and make the world a place in which the Divine may dwell, we should practice so that our lives may be models of integrity. And we should expect that and more from our own leaders.

I’ve written here previously about my mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease, which officially began seven years ago but which has likely been going on longer than that. For me, the first visible sign was when she had a hard time reading a children’s book to our youngest son, who was then 3 or 4 years old. Since then, the path has taken her through, among other things, a gradual reduction in her ability to read, tell time, and call up words.

A couple months ago Mom reached the point where the care she was receiving in assisted living was no longer enough, and she needed to move to a memory unit. The progress of the disease since then has been quite visible: Her vocabulary is shrinking, her world is getting smaller. And that’s okay—which is to say, I’m at peace with it. It’s the path she’s on, and our aim is for her journey to be as free of unnecessary suffering as possible.

Through all of it, Mom continues to be one of the more remarkable Alzheimer’s patients I’ve known—and even that my wife’s uncle, a world-renowned neurologist, has seen. Her name is Happy, and as we say in Hebrew, k’shma ken hi—she is true to her name. If the disease can bring out a latent essence in a person, then hers really is grounded in positive energy. Even now, what most lights her up is meeting people she can greet.

At this point, the distinction between physical presence and talking on the phone seems to be getting a little blurry for Mom. And while she cannot perform most tasks that most of us would take for granted, she still has the muscle memory to use the speed dial on her cell phone. Add this to the point of the previous paragraph and the result is that I get about 15 calls a day from her—and so do my brothers. Her little red cell phone is a vital lifeline to the rest of the world, and she is not afraid to use it.

The content of these conversations is more or less the same, lasting usually no more than a minute: a little how are you, a few patches of words that don’t make a tremendous amount of sense, and then, “Ok, we’ll talk again later. I love you so much.” Which is really the point: to paraphrase the great rabbi, Stevie Wonder, She just called to say she loves me.

“Everyone whose heart was moved, and all whose hearts were moved, came and brought to YHVH an offering” (Ex. 35:21). Commenting on this verse, Rabbi Chaim Joseph David Azulai (18th c., land of Israel; known as Chida) observes, “We all know there is a great distance between thought and action, between our good intentions and making them happen. Many good impulses evaporate before they come out into the world. Many people carry within them the burden of thoughts generated by the goodness of their hearts, but which have never been made manifest. Thus the Torah relates that, in the case of the construction of the Mishkan, no one suffered in this way—’everyone whose heart was moved,’ ‘whose spirit was moved,’ made an offering. That is, everyone had an impulse to give—but even those who might normally have found that that impulse remained just an impulse were able to bring their thought into action.”

Accompanying my Mom on her journey has afforded me some new insight into the Chida’s beautiful teaching. Unsurprisingly, the rabbi’s words align with one of my Mom’s own maxims that I remember from childhood. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” was a phrase Mom remembered growing up with. But as a parent, she also added her own inversion as a corollary: “And when you have something nice to say—say it!”

Taken together, I experience both these teachers as reminding me that part of my avodah now, my spiritual and human calling, is to help my Mom express her loving impulses into action—and to do the same for myself. I find that isn’t so much a technical issue as much as it’s about an orientation, a way of approaching her and her journey: Attuning myself to the opportunities and gifts, challenging as they may be at times, present in each moment, each interaction, each one of those many phone calls during the day.

While there may be a particularly localized and intensive dimension to this form of avodah in my relationship with my Mom, I would suggest that it can be a way to understand our general spiritual mission in the world. As much as anything else, this work of enabling the expression of loving impulses through words and deeds, is what building the Mishkan was all about—and it remains our work today.