Yesterday I got on the wrong train. No, that’s not right at all. I got on the right train, only then it went to the airport, so it was the wrong train after all. As the inimitable Kathryn Shultz has written with wonder: the thing about being wrong is it feels just like being right. I actually cried a little as I stepped off in Elizabeth, out of sheer frustration and perhaps exhaustion and stress too, knowing what the delay meant for the rest of my morning. I called a taxi. I hid from the cold inside the Colombian café across from the station, where no one spoke English and surely had far greater worries than I do right now. I bought pastries filled with guava. From the back seat of the taxi, I called the person I was meeting to tell him I wouldn’t make it after all. Hearing my distress, he asked if I’d taken a deep breath yet. I laughed. No, I hadn’t. Ironic. Hadn’t I just last week spent five days meditating in total silence with Buddhist monks, where all we did was focus on the breath? 

I was going to write something moving and beautiful about the return this week of Ran Gvili, z”l, the last person to come home from captivity by Hamas. I was going to write about the hair-raising coincidence that his body was brought back the same week that we read in the Torah, in parshat b’shallach, that 400 years after Joseph died, Moses remembered to take his bones out of Egypt and back to Israel with them for burial there. The rabbis wondered: how did Moses know where Joseph’s coffin was? They imagined the Egyptians had hidden the coffin as part of the strategy to prevent the Israelites from leaving. That Moses knew he couldn’t leave Joseph behind, and so he found Serach bat Asher, the mythically old lady who knew everything, and she told him to go to the edge of the Nile and call for the bones, for it was time to come home; and sure enough when he did, Joseph’s coffin rose to the surface from the depths of the Nile. Moses shouldered it, and so (Exodus 13) “Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, who had extracted an oath from the children of Israel saying: God will be sure to take notice of you, then you shall carry up my bones from here with you.” The IDF soldiers sang Hatikvah when they found Ran Gvili z”l’s body. 

But on the train, I read a beautiful piece by my colleague Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, published here in the Times of Israel and pasted below, and so I decided to share that with you instead. Tomorrow at services – after our bar mitzvah boy leads us in the Song of the Sea that our ancestors sang as they crossed into miraculous, hope-filled redemption — we will say a collective mourner’s kaddish, joining the entire Jewish people in mourning not only Ran Gvili z”l, this week of his burial in Israel, but also the death of thousands: from those murdered on October 7, 2023 through all those killed in this brutal war, right up through the death this week of Sgt. Major Asael Babad z”l, 38-year-old father of 5, who was critically wounded in Gaza last October and died from his injuries this Thursday.

It turns out that we are often on the wrong train without knowing it, that it’s maybe the wrong train every time, and also the exact right one, too. Ran Gvili’s mother gave a beautiful eulogy, in which she said that she realized her mission is to prove we are one strong people, here to stay, and that we are all on the same side.

I gave the pastries to the taxi driver, who — like the bakery staff — didn’t speak English. The wrong train is the right train, we are all on it together, heading places of our own choosing and also sometimes where we never intended to go, where we never wanted to be. I took a breath, and another. The rest of my day was wonderful.

The Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes To You: The Return of Ran Gvili

By Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt

The ordeal of the last hostage seized by Hamas and taken to Gaza more than 843 days ago came to an end this week with the return of the body of Ran Gvili and with his arrival at his final resting place today. It has not gone unnoticed that it coincides with this week’s Torah portion which tells us that “Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, (from Egypt) who had exacted an oath from the children of Israel, saying, “God will be sure to take notice of you: then you shall carry up my bones from here with you.”

The reception in Israel was one of mixed emotions—pleased that he was finally brought home to receive a proper burial, intertwined with sorrow and grief that it was his body, and not the living man that was returned, coupled with a sigh of relief that for the first time since 2014, there are no Israelis being held in Gaza by Hamas.

The roads carrying the 23-year old’s body to the cemetery where he was to be buried were lined with thousands of people who never met him. The nation paused to witness the funeral which was packed with hundreds of ordinary Israelis and the nation’s leaders.

Every Israeli knows his name. Everyone knows his story. Everyone felt a profound sense of relief that he was finally home.

As his mother said, “Our pride is much, much stronger than our pain.”

Moments like this are difficult for outsiders to fully grasp.

This is what it is like when a nation is a family—an extended family where, despite deep divisions and constant contention, and despite what many outsiders may not understand, there remains a shared sense of fate and destiny that ultimately overrides internal differences.

I think of the Simon and Garfunkel line, “Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” It captures the feeling in Israel. All eyes have been focused on the return of this hero, who, despite being injured, rushed to defend his fellow countrymen as soon as he learned they were under attack. He was as has been noted, “the first one in and the last one out.”

His courage and the outpouring from across the country reveal a kind of national intimacy that is rare in most other nations. It is a source of its strength and resilience, a distinguishing characteristic that makes Israel unique and which its enemies and detractors will never understand.

I was all set to send out a sweet message of hope, of kindling light in the darkness, adding light to the world, all that good-vibes Chanukah stuff. But now, before the earth has rotated around enough for us to be kindling our first lights, we are reeling from the news from another hemisphere. This time from Australia; but it is of a piece, isn’t it, with my having to announce from the bimah on Yom Kippur the murder of Jews in England? Our hearts are with all of the families and the communities grieving right now. We grieve with them… and we fear, for ourselves.

And so our Chanukah lights this year are about more than the very beautiful idea of making the world a little brighter at the darkest of seasons. I think as we light tonight, we can focus on something else, too: our sense of solidarity with the Jewish people. As journalist Ezra Klein wrote in his 2019 book Why We’re Polarized, “The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it.” In fact, as he goes on to explore and brings the studies to prove, a threat to one’s identity can seemingly awaken even one’s dormant identities.

There are lots of reasons to light Chanukah candles starting tonight. Yes, they will remind us to hope and work for light in even the darkest of moods and times. Yes, they will help us pause to gather with loved ones to light or to wish one another a chag sameach, a happy holiday. Yes, it is a mitzvah. But tonight we double down on something else: that lighting the Chanukah lights is an act of solidarity with the Jewish people. We light to recall other generations in which Jewish life has been under threat, and we light because none of that has ever stopped Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people as a living, thriving being. That no matter what happens, no matter how dormant our identities at other times, right now we are awake and ready to keep the flames of the Jewish story burning bright.

This week, we recite the al hanissim prayer after lighting the Chanukah candles and at other times throughout the week. It recounts the Chanukah story and thanks God “for the miracles and wonders and mighty deeds and salvations and victories You wrought for our ancestors in their days and in this day.” Rabbis have long remarked on that final clause, “and in this day.” How can we know that every year that clause will be true? Because when we stand together as a people reciting our ancient words and performing our sacred rituals, we feel the miracle unfolding right here. The miracle is us. That will carry us through this week, this year, and always.

Chag urim sameach – may it be a holiday of light and joy.

This morning as I handed Eloise a plate of pancakes—because sometimes I actually do have my act together early and pancakes on school days can happen, and actually they were oladushki, which as all y’all from the FSU will know are cooked in oil not butter, which makes them perfect for this month of Chanukah, but none of this is the point—the point is that as I set her breakfast down at 6:45 am, she looked at me and said, “Mommy, did you see the sunrise?”

I had not, because while nice weekday breakfasts do sometimes happen, they involve stumbling around in the dark pretending the day has not truly begun, so no, I hadn’t opened the shades or looked outside yet. Turns out it was a gorgeous pink-sky morning, and I’d missed it.

‘Tis the season, dark at breakfast and at dinner again, too. We feel the creeping darkness in our moods as we inch toward the solstice. But more than that—symbolically—isn’t this right on, the way we constitutionally avoid brightness of many kinds, at all seasons, missing what is beautiful and shimmering just beyond the edges of our awareness as we choose the dark and depressing instead? This is what the Sefat Emet and other rabbis noted about this month of Kislev we are now in, at the end of which—around the solstice—we begin lighting the Chanukkah candles. The darkness this month forces us to look for what is concealed rather than what is obvious, to light extra lights. Time to lift up those blinds and see the hidden glory behind.

Which brings me to Thanksgiving. Our National Mood Disorder has us all exhibiting a variety of symptoms. The list is long and I won’t get into it here. All I’ll say is that it can feel hard to see that there is light here with us, too.

According to the Smithsonian, “festivals of Thanksgiving were observed sporadically on a local level for more than 150 years.” The first Thanksgiving celebrations were summer affairs, giving thanks for rain after a drought and related light-out-of-darkness agricultural moments. In 1789, Elias Boudinot, representing New Jersey in the House of Representatives, moved that a national day of Thanksgiving be held to thank God for giving the American people the opportunity to create a Constitution to preserve their hard-won freedoms. After a Joint Committee approved the motion, President George Washington proclaimed that the people of the United States would observe “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer” on Thursday, November 26. It didn’t catch on, however, for another 150 years, with some (like Thomas Jefferson) objecting on the grounds that it violated separation of church and state. But get this:

“Most of the credit for the establishment of an annual Thanksgiving holiday may be given to Sarah Josepha Hale. Editor of Ladies Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book, she began to agitate for such a day in 1827 by printing articles in the magazines. She also published stories and recipes, and wrote scores of letters to governors, senators, and presidents. After 36 years of crusading, she won her battle. On October 3, 1863, buoyed by the Union victory at Gettysburg, President Lincoln proclaimed that November 26, would be a national Thanksgiving Day, to be observed every year on the fourth Thursday of November.”

Note that wonderful 36, double chai, tucked in there. Sometimes beautiful traditions are hidden and take a long time to see the light. And maybe that’s part of the wisdom of this week’s parasha, too, because the Joseph story we begin reading now is as much about what is concealed as what is revealed. Joseph enters the world in this week’s parashah, and from the start nothing about him is straightforward. His dreams will be misunderstood, his identity buried again and again, his gifts and God’s hand invisible until they are brought to light.

Thanksgiving gives us a national moment that mirrors this spiritual lesson. Giving thanks is the practice of noticing what we otherwise overlook, taking stock not only of the things that shine brightly but of the extraordinary that live concealed by the everyday. In a season of darkness—literal and metaphorical—Thanksgiving offers us a chance to pause and try to name the small goodnesses that would otherwise go unnoticed. In that way, it aligns with Kislev’s invitation: Lift the blinds. Light the candles. Let the hidden colors and light in.

And because gratitude is a practice, not just a feeling, I want to offer two simple takeaways for this week.

First: bless your food at the Thanksgiving table. In Jewish life, we go granular, giving thanks not just for the category “food” but for exactly what we are blessed to have on our plates. If the main centerpiece is the turkey, then recite this one—which is one of my favorite blessings in the entire canon:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם שֶׁהַכֹּל נִהְיָה בִּדְבָרוֹ.

Barukh attah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam, she-ha-kol nihyeh bi-d’varo.

Praised are You, Lord our God, Sovereign of the Universe, at whose word all things come into being. For a full directory of food blessings (it’s not always hamotzi, that’s the point!) click here.

Second: join our Gratitude Circle, back by popular demand (or maybe just rabbinic whim) for year two. A WhatsApp group we’re opening this week for you and anyone in your life who wants to join in. Every day from Thanksgiving through the end of Chanukah (December 22) we will each post one thing we are grateful for. No cross-talk, no politics, no commenting besides an emoji, just a running list of things we are grateful for. Think of it like adding one more candle each night. Each person offering one small spark from their day, the light building as we share it with one another.

During this month of searching for light in the dark, I hope this is how we will find it: together noticing, naming, sharing goodness and gratitude, to reveal what is already here but too often hidden from view. Happy Thanksgiving, may our giving thanks be part of the way from darkness to light.