Even though I went to bed early on Tuesday, before the election outcome was clear, I didn’t get much sleep. Try as I might — sleep meditations, visualizations, every trick I know—I couldn’t get my mind to stop spinning: so much uncertainty, so much at stake for so many of us. I just couldn’t settle down, and I tossed and turned all night.

I know many of you felt that way too.

When I finally got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and made some coffee, I checked the news. While I grappled with the results, shaken, my first instinct was to study Torah. I started reading the weekly Torah portion. Sitting there reading Parashat Lekh-Lekha in the early morning darkness, I felt as if the Torah was enveloping me in an embrace, like a warm blanket.

Not because it was comforting to read these stories — they are profoundly difficult stories that touch on the many issues that challenge and divide us: migration, being strangers and welcoming strangers, gender and sexuality, treatment of women, bodily autonomy, war, conflicts over land, the taking of captives and their rescue — but because I found comfort and support in remembering that the Torah is a home, a sanctuary for me. And that’s when my tears started to flow, thinking about the sometimes brutally painful ways many of us have struggled and continue to struggle to feel secure, to feel at home. For many of us, the election results have only sharpened that profound feeling of insecurity.

In this time when many of us are deeply shaken, I want you to know that IJS is here to be a place where you can feel secure, and where you can find comfort and belonging.

Whatever happens in the days and years to come, we are here for you to be a sanctuary of calm, welcome, acceptance, and love that you can turn to when you need to breathe deeply and connect with others in our divisive and in many ways broken world.

On Monday night, during one of our special IJS meditation sits for election week, I led a practice that included a selection of a favorite teaching from Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl’s Meor Einayim. It’s a text in which the rebbe says that every Jew has a root-soul that corresponds to a letter in the Torah. I take that to mean that each of us (and here I would extend his teaching to all human beings, not just Jews) has a spiritual home in the universe. I think that means that our avodah, our spiritual work, is ultimately about building a world in which every human being can experience that sense of belonging.

This is our commitment to you, now and always: Like Abraham and Sarah, who welcomed everyone under their tent and made them feel at home, we will be here for you as a sanctuary and spiritual haven in a turbulent world. It’s what we have sought to do for 25 years, and it is what we are committed to doing this week, next week, and into a redemptive future.

Here’s a historical tidbit I love to recite: Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706. Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism better known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, was born eight years earlier, in 1698. Which is to say, Franklin and the Besht were contemporaries.

I often mention this factoid when I teach Hasidic texts because I think that, while they emerged in different political and cultural landscapes, at root, Hasidism responded to some similar questions as the Enlightenment and the nascent American democratic project. Most significantly, perhaps, was this: What could spiritual experience look like in a world in which power does not reside exclusively in a king or emperor, but is rather shared among all citizens? Put differently, how does our conception of and relationship to the divine, one another, and ourselves, change when we take seriously the idea that all people are created equal?

Hasidism didn’t have a monopoly on these questions, of course. All modern expressions of Judaism—and religion in general—have responded to them in one way or another. And, eventually, some strains of Hasidism took an anti-democratic turn, investing spiritual authority in a tzaddik or rebbe who was treated as something like a king.

But I think one of the reasons that so many American Jews have been drawn to Hasidic teachings over the last two generations is because we experience a profound resonance between this approach to Torah and our deeply held values of liberty and equality. When the Hasidic masters teach that every Jew is the bearer of a divine spark, and that each and every one of us can create a home for the divine Presence with this breath or this word or this action, we hear an evocation of Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal.” We experience a Torah that invites and demands of us a set of democratic impulses—so much so that, intuitively, we extend the sentiment of the Declaration to all people, not only men, and such Torah to all human beings, not only Jews.

It’s not a simple thing, to live life this way. Being aware of our thoughts and emotions, mindful and skillful in how we speak and act, present in every moment, requires practice–as does sacrificing and sharing power the way we have to in a democracy. We constantly have to tread a line–of exercising our agency and making choices, and, when that becomes infeasible or exhausting, trusting institutions and leaders we authorize to make choices for us. Sometimes it can feel easier to outsource our agency—to a rebbe or a Tzaddik, to someone we view as powerful or a savior. And sometimes our need for belonging can lead us down an emotional road in which it feels better, at least for a moment, to be self-righteously angry and resentful at “them,” those “others” who we allow ourselves to perceive as making our lives worse.

But that is not our way. That’s a form of aversion, a way of turning away from deep and difficult truths—most fundamentally, the truth that our seeming separation is an illusion, that we are indeed all interconnected, all created in the divine image, all mutually responsible for one another, as Jews, as Americans, as beings who are human.

Of course, the Torah begins with this teaching: Human beings are created in the Divine image. And, of course, it doesn’t take long for us to lose our way, as we read in this week’s Torah portion: “The earth became corrupt before the Holy One; the earth was filled with lawlessness” (Gen. 6:11). While the commentators offer various interpretations, a consistent theme is that we human beings managed to lose our capacity for self-awareness and self-regulation. We forgot that we are not the centers of our own universes, and instead took people and property simply because we wanted to. We lost our internal sense of honor, and thus we could not honor the inherent dignity of God’s creations. In short, human beings became mindless.

What to do? The answer, after unleashing the forces of chaos upon the world, was to start over with the most basic awareness: Don’t shed blood. Stop killing each other. And then: learn to trust. “I now establish my brit, my covenant with you,” God tells Noah (Gen. 9:9). Rashi observes, “God said this because Noah feared to fulfill the duty of propagating the species until the Holy Blessed One promised to not destroy the world again.” How could Noah bring children into the world again? He had to learn to trust on the other side of intense, unprecedented trauma.

There are lessons here that apply to individuals as much as nations: What does it take to trust after destruction and devastation? What does it take to live mindfully, lovingly, as a home for the Divine presence, when the storm feels like it’s approaching, when the earth beneath our feet feels like it’s turning to mud on the way to being covered in water altogether? These are some dark questions–terrifying questions we may not want to ask. And yet the story of Noah demands that we confront them.

A classic Hasidic teaching on Noah finds meaning in the fact that the word for ark in Hebrew, teivah, also means word. Thus when Noah’s family and the animals enter the ark, they enter into language in its most reduced and elemental form. As the earth unravels, so too does language. And, as the earth is renewed, language too is renewed. But during the storm, I imagine there may have been long periods of silence, or wordless niggunim, inside the ark.

In a letter to John Adams in December 1818, following the death of Abigail, Adams’s wife and partner (Adams’s word) of 50 years, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines.” Around the same time, Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav taught that “Silence is a hedge for wisdom… Like Shabbat, it is above speech, the root of speech, and the remedy for speech” (Likkutei Halachot Shabbat 7:43:6).

As we head into these final days of the election and enter what is likely to be a difficult post-election season, I find that my practice is more important than ever–and I imagine that may be true for you. Our language feels like it’s being tested to its limits, and nourishing silence or wordless song feels like a refuge. And perhaps that’s precisely what we need to heal and renew ourselves, as individuals and as a society–fewer and better words, deeper and richer shared silences, longer and more beautiful shared songs. May it be so; may we make it so.

In the part of the Jewish world I live in, we are approaching the third and final cycle of what are lovingly (well, maybe not entirely lovingly) referred to as “Three-Day Yontifs.”

An explanation: Since ancient times, Jewish communities outside the land of Israel have observed not one, but two days of yom tov–holidays on which work is prohibited–at the beginning and end of Passover, on Shavuot, during the beginning of Sukkot, and on Shemini Atzeret.

Why? Because the dates of the holidays are set according to the New Moon, and according to the understanding of the Rabbis of the Talmud, the New Moon had to be proclaimed by Sanhedrin (the Rabbinic High Court) after they received testimony from witnesses who had seen it. Once they had proclaimed the New Moon, the date of the month could be fixed, and messengers would be sent out to let everyone know, e.g. “Last Tuesday was the New Moon!”

But it could take some time for those messengers to reach their destinations, and in the meantime the Jews in Huppetzville might be wondering, “According to our calculations, the New Moon should have been on Tuesday–but it also could have been early Wednesday. So is Sukkot/Shavuot/Sukkot on Tuesday, or Wednesday?” Thus, it would seem, the custom arose of keeping two days of yom tov–to cover their bases. And even though at this point we have lived with a fixed calendar for longer than the Rabbis were in the proclamation business; and even though today such proclamations would be transmitted instantaneously via livestream and text messaging, many communities including my own still keep two days of yom tov.

(One last note: Rosh Hashanah is the one holiday that occurs on the New Moon itself, which means this uncertainty applies equally inside or outside the Land of Israel. Thus the custom arose to observe two days of Rosh Hashanah worldwide. And Yom Kippur, for reasons that should be obvious, is only one day all over the world–because who could fast for 50 hours?!)

All of this means that, in a year when the holidays start on Wednesday night, those of us who celebrate two days of yom tov (=yontif in Yiddish, which is a lot more fun to say) have Thursday and Friday–and then a Shabbat immediately afterwards: i.e. a “Three-Day Yontif.” And if that happens in the fall, it happens three times. For people like me, it means that fully ten out of the 30 days of the month of Tishrei this year are Shabbat or Yom Tov. That’s a lot of time with family, a lot of time in shul, a lot of time not at work and off screens and away from the news–and also a lot of meal planning, shopping, cooking, eating, and dishwashing.

Yet I find it can also generate an effect that’s something like a retreat, or a series of retreats. Three days of immersion–times three (plus Yom Kippur, which is its own immersive experience–the Talmud compares it to a mikveh). While as a younger person I kind of resented these three-day yontifs, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to embrace them as a gift–an extended series of retreats that supports making the month of Tishrei a month of renewal.

One of the challenges of the three-day yontif phenomenon, though, is experiencing Shabbat as different. It isn’t a three-day Shabbos. Why? Perhaps the biggest distinction between Shabbat and Yom Tov is that on Yom Tov the halakha allows us to prepare food and cook it. While there’s plenty of preparation required, it’s not like Shabbat, on which everything has to be ready beforehand. So Yom Tov isn’t quite full rest. Shabbat is still unique.

That leads to a poetic aspect of this intensive Tishrei experience. After all this activity and this extended series of spiritual retreats, we arrive back at the beginning of the Torah–at the elemental materials of creation: making, forming, shaping, dividing, beholding, naming. And I experience that as an invitation to bring this awareness of Shabbat into everything we do: to be mindful of our words, which bear the power of creation and destruction; to be conscious of our actions, through which we can increase or reduce life, love, and compassion in the world; to be aware of our hearts, which can be a home for the divine presence if we simply attune them properly.

This year, we conclude the chagim and begin a new cycle of reading the Torah amidst war, violence, and profound worry. We need this last retreat as much as ever. So: Whether or not you observe a three-day yontif, I hope you can find an opportunity during this final holiday of the season and the Shabbat Bereshit that follows it to drink from the cups of yom tov and Shabbat, and to re-enter the world renewed from this long Tishrei retreat.