TBT Blog

My son, Milo, is obsessed with basketball. He’s only four years old, but believe me when I tell you that he has been living and breathing this sport since he first started walking and talking. He’s actually pretty good, but that came directly from him. A love of basketball (or sports in general) did not come from his parents, and no, we are not helicopter parents trying to force a skill in the hopes of a college scholarship. He just loves the game. 

As Milo will be quick to point out, I don’t know much about how to play basketball. He sometimes asks me to take specific shots, and then he promptly explains to me how I got it wrong. But I don’t care. 

There’s a difference between doing things right and doing them well. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not I play basketball “right.” I care that I’m bonding with my son, that we are having fun and learning together. To me, that is time well spent.

This week’s Torah portion, Emor, lays the groundwork for Jewish holy days like Shabbat, Passover, and Sukkot. We get a few base rules for the holidays, like not working on Shabbat and eating matzah on Passover, but it’s a short briefing that Moses receives from God. The 39 categories of work prohibited on Shabbat? Not listed in the Torah. 

As a rabbi (even a reform one), I get a lot of questions about the minutiae of Jewish law, especially when it comes to holidays. People want to do Judaism “right.” I appreciate that desire, but I’m more interested in doing Judaism well than doing it right. Parshat Emor is refreshingly vague, reminding us that so many of the laws and customs that we think of as “from Sinai,” aren’t actually from Sinai at all. Most of the traditions we associate with holidays and Jewish life developed over time by rabbis and communities around the world who took innovations and standardized them. 

This past Shabbat, we enjoyed our first congregational retreat at beautiful URJ Camp Kalsman. I had the pleasure of planning and leading the retreat with the talented musician Dan Nichols. On Saturday morning, we prayed together. It certainly wasn’t “right” - there were no prayer books, and there was no Torah service. We spent the entire time focused on only five prayers in the initial morning blessings section of the service. We all sat around a long table that was covered with craft paper and splayed with a variety of art supplies. We prayed with our hands, expressing ourselves through art. We weren’t concerned with doing it right; we were committed to doing it well. For me, doing Shabbat well is about leaning into sacred time and getting out of our daily routine. Doing Shabbat well is about creating space to express gratitude for what is and imagining a better world for the future. It is about recognizing our limits and creating space for rest and rejuvenation. Our artful prayer experience created space for all of that and more.

We take Jewish law and customs for granted, assuming that when God gave us the instruction at Sinai to celebrate Shabbat and refrain from work that God wanted us to perform rituals in a specific way. But what if God cares not about what we do but how we do it? Perhaps the particulars of what Shabbat looks like in practice are not in the Torah for a reason. I don’t want to live in a world where everything is prescribed, and I don’t think God wants that for us, either. If there is “one right way” to do something, it excludes the possibility of diversity and creativity in our world. I love that doing something well results in different practices for different people.

As Shavuot approaches our holiday celebrating revelation at Sinai, let’s let go of our notions about doing Judaism “right” and take time to reflect on what doing Judaism well might look like for each of us individually and as a holy community.