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.

Our family dog, Phoebe, is a 50ish pound Plott Hound (the official state dog of North Carolina, it turns out). Plotts are hunting dogs, and Phoebe certainly likes to be active. She requires at least two long walks a day, and often more. And she will frankly take as much stimulation as we can offer.

Sometimes I play a game with Phoebe: I dangle a rope in front of her, just out of her reach. She jumps at it and I tug up just in time, so that she can’t reach it. We do this a few times (this may well be related to years of my older brothers playing monkey in the middle—where I was said monkey) until eventually I let Phoebe get the rope and we do a little tug of war.

Now, I could just let Phoebe get the rope on the first try. But I’m not so interested in that (since I want to help her get some energy out) and I don’t think she’s terribly interested either (she likes the play of it). But I often feel a little bit of guilt around it, like I’m taunting her. At the same time, I recognize that as soon as Phoebe gets hold of the rope, we’re at the beginning of the end of our game. The adventure here is in the chase, the Quixotic quest for the rope. Once she has the rope, it gets a lot less exciting for both of us.

This is, of course, a conundrum as old as literature, perhaps best summed up by Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya at the end of The Princess Bride after he has finally fulfilled his life’s mission to avenge his father’s death: “It’s very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.” It also goes to a much deeper set of questions about attaining, possessing, and having.

Writing about the study of Torah, the contemporary French rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin observes a similar dynamic in our ability to make meaning, to understand. “The Text can never be attained,” he writes. “One could say that it is caressed. In spite of the analysis undertaken, in spite of the research, the bursting open, the laying bare, the text slips out of our grasp, remains inaccessible, always yet to come. It reveals itself only to withdraw immediately. The text is both visible and invisible at the same time; ambiguous, its meaning twinkles, it remains an enigma” (The Burnt Book, 63).

Making meaning of a text—in this case, Torah—is like my game of rope with Phoebe: As soon as we think we’ve grasped it, the game is over, and the dynamism in our relationship with it fades away. What makes the study of Torah—or our relationships with people, or our experience of the world—interesting, generative, and life-giving is when there is play, a healthy amount of openness and possibility, a caress rather than a grip.

Parashat Ki Tissa provides the Torah’s most forceful lesson in this teaching, as the Israelites, unable to bear the indeterminacy of an ineffable divinity, create a golden calf. Ouaknin quotes Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion: “What the idol tries to reduce is the gap and the withdrawal of the divine. Filling in for the absence of divinity, the idol brings the divine within reach, ensures its presence, and, eventually, distorts it… The worshipper lays his hand on the divine in the form of a god; but this taking in hand loses what it grasps… The idol lacks the distance that identifies and authenticates the divine as such—as that which does not belong to us, but which happens to us.”

If this kind of French philosophy isn’t your thing (I’m a fan, but I get it if you’re not), here’s my summary: Like the ancient Israelites, we too are frequently tempted by the spiritual seductiveness of idolatry. It springs from our natural human desire for certainty, for control, amidst the profound challenge of living in a world of indeterminacy. The challenge the Torah sets before us is to mindfully respond to that uncertainty and our resulting drive for control: to pursue meaning, to seek truth, and yet to hold it lightly, to caress it. In our ability to caress rather than hold tightly, perhaps, lies our capacity to live peacefully with ourselves and one another.

Purim offers us a particularly rich opportunity to live into this challenge, as it is our holiday most explicitly infused with the world’s indeterminacy (even in its very name, Purim, from the lots cast by Haman). When confronted with the potential for annihilation, Esther’s first reaction seems to be despair—which is, perhaps, its own form of idolatry in the way it holds tight to the notion that the story as intended is the story that must inevitably unfold. With Mordechai’s help, Esther musters her courage to loosen her grip on that narrative—or perhaps, the narrative’s grip on her. In that psycho-spiritual gap, she finds the space to take action and change the story.

Twice a day—even on Purim—our liturgy calls us to remember the Exodus from Egypt. The Hasidic masters understood that our enslavement in Egypt was not merely a historical or political fact, but an ongoing spiritual reality. The constriction, the tightness, the idolatry of Egypt is something that haunts and calls to us all the time. Just like our ancestors, from Moses to Esther, we have the capacity to leave that spiritual Egypt in every moment. One might even say—lightly, with a caress—that that’s what our entire tradition is about.

While social media is, generally speaking, a wasteland of toxic drek, there are still some moments when its original hopeful potential glimmers beneath the surface. One such moment occurred for me in recent weeks, as I began to engage with an old acquaintance from my youth whose politics are pretty different from mine. He had posted something about the hypocrisy of political leaders. I couldn’t understand what he was getting at with his post, and, genuinely trying to practice curiosity rather than conviction, I reached out to him privately to ask him to explain it to me.

We had a couple of rounds of exchange, all of which were friendly. (A good lesson here is to do this kind of work in private messages, rather than in public comments.) What I came to understand through our conversation was this issue of hypocrisy was really important to him. He recognized a tendency of conventional political leaders to engage in what he viewed as hypocritical speech, and that really seemed to touch a nerve in him. Like many other Americans, he sees the current president as someone who does not engage in the hypocrisies of conventional political leaders—someone who speaks plainly and says what he means. In my friend’s view, the rest of the political class are phonies, while Trump is authentic.

While I imagine some readers identifying with that view, I suspect the vast majority probably don’t. And if you find yourself gasping for a moment—”But what about… ?!”—I would ask you, in my best meditation teacher voice, to set down your judgment and conviction for a moment, and try to practice open curiosity. (If you’re anything like me, you can, and almost certainly will, come back to the judgment later.)

I found this new learning to be tremendously helpful, because it gave me insight into how someone I know to be a good and decent person could hold political positions I frequently find to be anathema. It caused me to reflect on how I relate to authenticity and hypocrisy, and to consider what my own deepest motivations are in supporting leaders, parties, or policies.

Because of course authenticity is something we think about a lot in Jewish mindfulness practice. So many people find this Torah in a search for healing and wholeness, often brought about by a feeling that their insides and outsides are not in alignment, that they weren’t being true to who they really were meant to be. They (perhaps you) are trying to live a life that looks like the Holy Ark described in last week’s Torah portion: our golden insides match our golden outsides.

Yet I don’t get as worked up about hypocrisy from political leaders. Maybe that’s because I’ve long internalized the leadership theorist Ron Heifetz’s observation that “leadership is letting people down at a rate they can absorb.” Or it’s because I’ve come to believe that no two human beings can ever fully understand each other; only God can fully understand us. Or it’s because I’ve been married for a long time, and somewhere along the way I realized that if I told my spouse everything I was thinking in the moment I was thinking it, I probably wouldn’t stay married for very long. Is that hypocrisy? If so, I’m happy to be called a hypocrite.

Or perhaps I want to be called a peace-maker. “Hillel taught: Be like the students of Aaron: Love peace and pursue peace; bring peace between one person and another, and between a married couple; love all people and bring them closer to Torah” (Avot d’Rebbe Natan 12:1). Aaron, who is the central character of Parashat Tetzaveh—the only Torah portion from Exodus onwards that does not mention the name of his brother Moses—is our tradition’s paradigm for peace-making.

Whereas Moses’s watchword is emet (truth), Aaron’s is shalom (peace). In associating the brothers with these two virtues, the tradition seems to acknowledge a tension that exists between them. If we’re really serious about it, it can be profoundly difficult to arrive at a shared understanding of truth. And yet our ability to live peacefully with one another—whether within the walls of a home or the borders of a nation—depends on both the degree to which we share a version of truth, and on the degree to which we are willing and able to tolerate the reality that the truth we know might be slightly different than the truth of our spouse, our neighbor, or our political opponent.

I hope this isn’t misunderstood as a call for moral relativism. That’s not what I’m trying to suggest. Rather, I’m seeking to invite you and me and my friend on social media to do some serious inner reflection on what we understand to be true and how we hold it: tightly, lightly, something else?

Because that question of how we hold it—that, I believe, is a key to navigating this built-in human tension between truth and peace. I’ll have more to say about that next week. In the meantime, I hope all of us can lean into our practices to help us to both discern what is true and, without sacrificing truth, be disciples of Aaron: lovers and seekers of peace.