Bless you!

May 29, 2026/13 Sivan 5786/Shabbat Naso

Hevre/Friends,

Whenever we have new guests at our Shabbat table, a question inevitably arises about the unusual shape of our family kiddush cup. (Cue the eye-rolling from our children, who have heard this story more times than they care to count.)

A typical kiddush cup is cylindrical, requiring your fingers to curl around it as you lift and pass it for each person to sip. Ours — pictured below — is shaped more like a saucer, or a classic kippah, and must be held aloft on two open palms.

On a family trip to Israel when the kids were young, we visited the studio of a friend who works as a Judaica silversmith. On a shelf in his workshop sat an object that looked exactly like what is now our kiddush cup. Puzzled, we asked what it was. He told us that an Iranian Jewish woman had come in a few weeks earlier carrying it, asking him to repair some worn spots on its base. Even he, a Judaica specialist, had needed to ask her what it was.

She explained: this cup had been in her family for over five generations. It was shaped this way because of a beloved teaching — that if you wish to share blessing with others, you must do so not only with an open heart, but with open hands. Your whole being must embody the gesture of generosity. If your fingers are curled around the cup as you pass it, your heart may be open, but your hands tell a different story: closed in the shape not of giving, but of taking. To carry this cup on open palms is to bring your body into alignment with your soul.

He was smitten. So were we. We asked him on the spot to make one for us, and we have never used another cup at our Shabbat and holiday table since.

I love sharing this story — but why am I especially glad to share it today?

This week's Torah portion, Naso, is the longest in the entire Torah (my d'var Torah, mercifully, will not be). It weaves together many threads: the counting of the Levite clans who carried the Mishkan through the wilderness; the Nazirite who embraced an added measure of religious discipline; the gifts brought by the tribal leaders to the sanctuary. And within it, we find the luminous Birkat Kohanim — the Priestly Blessing, offered by Aaron and his descendants to the people, and echoed still in the words with which parents bless their children at the Shabbat table and rabbis bless their students.

A striking feature of this ancient rite is that the kohanim were required to extend their hands and spread their fingers wide when blessing the nation — the origin, in fact, of the hand gesture later made famous by a certain Vulcan. This priestly posture of open heart and outstretched hands is the very image that inspired the kiddush cup now gracing our table, passed down to us — unknowingly — through an Iranian Jewish woman and her family's centuries of Shabbat.

But there is a deeper dimension to this gesture, one that came into sharp focus for me this week. I had the profound honor of chanting the Birkat Kohanim at two entirely different sacred moments: one at the Bat Mitzvah of a young woman stepping into her adult Jewish life, and one at the funeral of a beloved elder of our former community, Sha'ar, as she departed this world.

To bless someone with outstretched hands and open fingers is also an act of release — of letting go, so that the one being blessed may grow freely into whoever they are called to become. This is love at its most selfless: blessing not through holding on, but through opening wide. For a young person on the threshold of her life, there is no more fitting gesture.

And though it is not commonly done, offering this blessing at the close of a life carries its own aching beauty — releasing a beloved soul with grace, surrounding her final passage with blessing, love, and the assurance that she is, in every sense, held.

It is precisely in these liminal moments — in the open space between human hearts — that the Divine spirit moves most freely among us.

A Torah portion. A kiddush cup. A lifetime of learning what it means to bless.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini