This week's parasha, Tzav, opens with Gd instructing Moses to command Aaron and his sons, not simply to teach them, but to tzav, to press upon them with urgency and intention the laws of the sacrificial service. And then, in Chapter 8, something remarkable happens. Moses gathers Aaron and his entire family, and for seven full days (shivat yamim) he trains them, guides them, corrects them, behind the curtained walls of the Mishkan. Seven days of intimate instruction, of questions and answers, of a family learning together what it means to serve and to lead.
That number is not accidental. Seven days mirrors Creation itself. There is something sacred about the time it takes to build something from the inside out, away from the watching world.
But instruction, guidance, and critical feedback from family is not something to be provided without attention to the surroundings. Imagine a parent who discovers their teenage child has made a serious mistake, nothing catastrophic, but real, and in need of being addressed. That evening, in the home, behind closed doors, the parent speaks directly: "What you did was wrong. Here is why. And here is what I expect going forward." The child is embarrassed, perhaps even defensive, but they hear the guiding words. They absorb them. And because it happened within the safety of the family, there is room to push back, to explain, maybe even to change the parent's mind a little too. That is mussar, rebuke offered in love.
However, now imagine another teen having committed the same infraction. But his parent does not wait until they are home. This parent chastises the child in public in front of their neighbors and strangers. Same adolescent error. Same parental intention, perhaps. But everything has changed. This child doesn't hear the correction anymore; they only feel the humiliation. Those viewing the scene do not see a family working through something. They see dysfunction. And the relationship? It may never fully recover.
Private correction is the soil of growth. Public correction is often just spectacle.
And this brings us to something closer to home.
Many of us recently had the opportunity to attend the Naples Jewish Film Festival's screening of the Israeli film The Sea, a film that swept the Israeli awards circuit, the equivalent of taking home their Academy Award for Best Film. It is a film made by Israelis, for Israelis, holding up a mirror to their own society and its treatment of Arabs. Israel, with its fierce democratic culture and tradition of vigorous self-reflection, is precisely the kind of society that produces such films… and needs them in order to advance a country only 78 years young.
But a mirror held inside a family home serves a different purpose than one displayed in a storefront window.
When we, diaspora Jews, with our own complicated relationships to Israel, to identity, to the images that shape how our communities are perceived, sit in a darkened theater watching Israeli society critique itself, we are no longer inside the Mishkan. We are outside it. And what reads as healthy introspection within Israeli culture can land very differently when filtered through the anxieties and external pressures that diaspora Jewish communities navigate every single day.
This is not a critique of the film. It is a reflection on context.
I want to be clear about something, and I'll speak personally for a moment. The selection committee chose The Sea last summer, months before any of us could have predicted the emotional and geopolitical landscape we find ourselves in today. I believe their intent was precisely in the spirit of what I’ve mentioned above: to bring this film to our community, our family, our closed room, as an opportunity to wrestle together with hard questions about Israeli society in a safe and intentional space. That is a noble and deeply Jewish impulse, and I want to honor it explicitly. And yet, since seeing this film, I have struggled. As someone who carries both Israeli and diaspora Jewish identity, I feel the pull of two obligations that don't always sit comfortably together. On one hand, I deeply believe that Israel must be held to the highest moral standard, precisely because of what Israel represents: the “or lagoyim,” the shining light unto the nations, the embodiment of a Jewish ethical vision for how a society can and must treat every human being within it. When Israel falls short of that standard, silence is not loyalty it is abdication. On the other hand, to voice that criticism today, in this geopolitical moment, with anti-Semitism rising, with Israel under relentless international scrutiny and military pressure, if I'm being candid, risks being weaponized by those who conflate legitimate critique with anti-Zionism. I don't have a clean resolution to that tension. But I think sitting inside that discomfort, together, is exactly what this evening was meant to invite.
So let me say, clearly and sincerely: to the Jewish Film Festival committee, to the generous patrons who make this work possible, and to every single person who showed up and watched, thank you. Thank you for caring enough about Jewish culture, Israeli storytelling, and the complexity of our peoplehood to show up. Thank you for your open-mindedness, your willingness to sit with discomfort, and your commitment to engaging with art that does not offer easy answers. That open-mindedness is itself a Jewish value.
But perhaps the most important lesson of Tzav is this: the seven days Moses spent with Aaron and his sons were not the end of the conversation. They were the beginning of a lifetime of dialogue. Torah does not ask us to agree. It asks us to keep talking.
We live in a moment of staggering polarization, politically, religiously, ideologically. The chasm between us grows wider every day, and the temptation to stop listening, to retreat to our own echo chambers, is enormous. But the antidote is not silence. It is precisely the kind of courageous, uncomfortable, honest conversation, ideally within the family, but sometimes, carefully, in the semi-public square, that films like The Sea invite us into.
Moses didn't command Aaron to agree with everything. He commanded him to show up, every day, and to do the sacred work together.
May we find the courage to do the same. Because we are Stronger Together.
Shabbat Shalom,
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