In the days we are living through, to interpret the Torah is an urgent obligation. For the voices are growing louder—those who take the plain meaning of the text as a blueprint for action. Voices whose certainties erase millennia of doubt, of inquiry, of allusion and mystery. They flatten and trample the godly whispers, the prayers, the murmur of creation we bless each dawn. But there are other voices- of paths of peace and of our own stubborn striving to draw drops of venom from the thorn-tips of the letters.

I flee from the pshat, from the plain meaning, into the nourishing richness of doubt. It fits the place we dwell in this week, our Achsamnia: the portion Acharei Mot – Kedoshim. To me, this parashah is all about the softening and tempering of divine power – carried out by God, mirrored by humans—whether in the veiling required between the high priest and God, or in the social command placed at the heart of holiness. In our portion, the divine does not erupt in consuming fire, but reveals itself quietly, gently, with restraint. Holiness here means holding back.

We find ourselves within the thin, invisible line between holiness and excess of holiness; between intimacy and transgression; between touch and affliction. The death of Aaron’s sons

stands as the threshold to the prohibitions of sexual transgression, variations of excessive closeness. The danger that intimacy (קרבה) may turn into alienation (זרות), that the fire of religion may turn deadly.

And all this unfolds within the flow of laws concerning skin and house afflictions. The Torah of the metzora, in which the fine line between human contact (מגע) and a lethal affliction (נגע) becomes a deep moral teaching: that excessive closeness—between person and person, between person and land—can sometimes lead to spiritual and physical death.

I look upon the ritual of the one healed from tzara’at, a severe affliction—where two birds (Ziporim) are taken, two stories (Siporim), life and death—two opposing narratives, interwoven, each receiving it’s place and validity. The healing process grants us a moment of delicate dwelling between polarities—a gentle lingering in duration.

I, a rabbi in her first year outside of Israel, feel this tension acutely: I look at Israel as the gate to a Judaism that once served as an opening to my spiritual world— and now has become a foreign place, afflicted, scorched by alien fire. Day by day I flee from her into her, searching for Jewish paths, for shelter from her messianism. Today I want to offer us an inverse vision: not Chazon Meshichi משיחי but Chazon Meshichi משיכי, of continuity. Not a vision of End-time but of And-time.

The continuous vision, And-times, is my answer to that violent messianism. We are not seeking a sharp conclusion, a final end, a Jewish apocalypse of absolutes—but rather to remain, for a moment, in the liminal, enduring space that delights in the almost, the little, the delicate— where otherness is no threat to selfhood.

We are committed to the doubt that keeps us holy. In this mode of being, which longs for continuity, for union, for the suspension of endings— our work of repair becomes, in itself, the anticipation of redemption.

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