The Space Between

October 16, 2026/5 Cheshvan 5787/Shabbat Noach

Hevre/Friends,

This week I travelled to Toronto on behalf of Limmud North America, whose Board of Directors I was recently invited to join. Limmud is a worldwide network of Jewish festivals and gatherings where Jews from across our wide landscape of ideas, beliefs, and practices come to learn with and from each other, and in doing so build Jewish communities that are more informed, more connected, and more resilient. As you'll see, Limmud's vision is very close to my own, which is why I was so proud to say yes.

I've staked both my rabbinate and my motherhood on a simple conviction: there are countless ways to live a meaningful, engaged, and responsible Jewish life. And just as there are many ways to live Jewishly, Torah itself comes in many forms. Sacred wisdom is everywhere, if we tune our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds to find it. At a Limmud festival, everyone's a student and everyone's a teacher. You might find yourself, alongside Jews whose lives look nothing like yours, digging into a page of Talmud, a family recipe, a Broadway tune, a painting, a campaign pitch, or even a mountainside boulder. You mine it for history and meaning, and for the questions it raises about what it means to be a Jew today.

On Tuesday night, close to 30 people gathered in a private home for a taste of that Limmud magic. We opened with a shot of bourbon and the story of the Jewish distillers who made some of Kentucky's finest spirits while hiding their Jewish identities from a hostile world. That story led us to a question many of us are living with right now: in a dangerous world, when do we wear our Judaism proudly, and when do we feel we need to be careful?

From there, we listened to one of Leonard Cohen's most haunting songs, "You Want It Darker," from the last album released in his lifetime. Cohen braids contemporary lyrics, biblical text, a pulsing beat, and classical hazzanut (cantorial singing) into a sound that carries an ancient Jewish tension: between standing up to the world's injustice and surrendering to it. We looked at an Israeli painting from 1947 that continues a centuries-old tradition of using art to wrestle with the Binding of Isaac. Here the story speaks to a generation asked to sacrifice its children in war for the promise of a secure Jewish future. A sacrifice that never seems to end. We breathed in the different fragrances communities use for besamim at havdalah, and talked about how climate has shaped, and will keep shaping, Jewish ritual. And yes, we also studied a midrash teaching that every child learns the entire Torah in the womb, only to forget it at birth. If that's true, then all learning isn't discovery but rediscovery. It isn't a first encounter with Torah, but a return.

This "flight of sources" gave everyone in the room a feel for Limmud's signature: learning that is creative, inclusive, and alive. I'm telling you about it partly to encourage you to find a Limmud festival in your own city (you really should!). But mostly I'm sharing it because our world is polarized and fractured, inside the Jewish community and beyond it. Limmud models the kind of peoplehood this week's portion, Noach, points us toward: a people whose unity is measured not by uniformity, but by its diversity.

The builders of the Tower of Babel set out to storm the heavens, to seize a godlike, outsized, corrupt power by enforcing "one language": one way of speaking, thinking, and living. God confounds their speech and scatters them. The lesson is that any vision that erases the presence and legitimacy of the other risks turning its own beliefs into an idol, or a tower. What looks like punishment becomes a blessing, if we learn from it.

Being part of the Jewish people means holding your own particular sense of who you are and where you're headed, while also belonging to the larger, shared Jewish story. That's hard. It brings conflict whenever our tolerance for difference is tested. But Jewish wisdom offers us so many models for navigating it. Hillel and Shammai taught us to value "arguments for the sake of heaven." The Talmud preserves minority opinions, honoring their merit even when we don't follow them. The 16th century Shulchan Aruch code of law records Sephardi and Ashkenazi practice side by side. In Jewish tradition, difference, even conflict, is a sign of a healthy collective: people argue because they care. And perhaps most provocatively, we don't pray for conflict to disappear. We pray for the strength to hold it with respect.

Rav Soloveitchik taught that kedushah, holiness, doesn't come from resolving our struggles. It comes from within the confrontation itself. Each of us is made of disparate, often conflicting pieces: values and dreams, beliefs and desires that pull against one another. I can be impatient and tolerant; passionate and understanding; fierce and tender. Our task isn't to sand down every piece until they all fit together seamlessly. It is to hold all of who we are in one embrace; a single, loving acceptance of our complexity.

Picture those jagged edges as they come close to one another. You can see the space between them. That space, says the Rav, is where the Shechinah, the Divine Presence, dwells. When we force the pieces of ourselves to fit snugly, we leave no room for anyone or anything else. But when we give the conflicts within and between us room to breathe, we make room for holiness.

This is the shalom we strive for: not peace as the absence of conflict, but peace born of wholeness, shleimut, that is personal, spiritual, and communal.

This is the Yerushalayim, the Yerushalem, we yearn for when we pray. It is not only the city of Jerusalem, but a state of being: within ourselves, within the Jewish people, within humanity, within our countries, and within the State of Israel. We pray for the ability to live with courage and confidence, embracing the manifold beauty and burdens of the human story, and carrying them in one loving, merciful, respectful, and dignified embrace.

I'll sign up for that.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini