There’s an old Chassidic tale of the great Rabbi Zusya. Laying on his deathbed, surrounded by students, he is shaking in fear. His students say, “Rabbi Zusya, you are the most righteous, most learned man of our day. You are the Moses of your generation. Why should you fear death?” Zusya responds, “In the World to Come, God will not ask me, ‘Why were you not more like Moses?’ God will ask me, ‘Why were you not more like Zusya?’”

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One of my favorite things I’ve learned from Rabbi Goldstein in my internship at Temple Beth Shalom thus far is the way he leads parents and other grown-ups in blessing their children. If you’ve ever come to family services or to Tot Shabbat, you’ve heard Rabbi Goldstein lead, “Y’simcha Elohim k’ephraim v’khimenashe,” and the parallel blessing for daughters, “Yismech Elohim k’sarah, rivkah, leah, v’rachel.” These are the traditional blessings that you’ll find in just about any siddur. What’s special though, is that he gives the Hebrew and then says, “May God make you like our ancestors Ephraim and Manasseh, like our ancestors Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel, or like the best you that you can be.”

May you be the best you that you can be.

In a similar vein, the contemporary liturgist Marcia Falk published an altogether new blessing for children in her preeminent 1996 work, The Book of Blessings. Drawing on the name of God revealed at the burning bush – Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh – she writes in the feminine, “Hayi asher tih’yi, vahayi berukhah ba’asher tih’yi – be who you will be, and may you be blessed in all you will be.” Falk also provides the masculine, “Heyeih asher tih’yeh, veheyeih barukh ba’asher tih’yeh,” but unlike the traditional blessings, the content and intention do not change between the masculine and feminine, only the grammatical gender.

Today, when we not only strive to uphold gender equality but also affirm the validity of identities beyond the binary, it’s odd that we still use two different blessings that say different things based on the child’s gender.

So you might ask, where do the traditional blessings even come from? In the case of the feminine blessing, I’ll tell you: I don’t know. Nobody does. It emerged simply as a feminine version of the masculine. The masculine, however, comes straight from Torah – Genesis 48:20.

We’ll read it in just a couple of weeks, but to summarize: Jacob, on his deathbed, blesses (and maybe sometimes kind of curses) each of his sons. He has Joseph bring Manasseh and Ephraim to him and basically adopts them as his own, saying they will be on the same level as Reuven and Simeon. He crosses his arms, his right on the younger Ephraim and his left on the elder Manasseh, and says, “Through you shall all Israel invoke blessings. They will say, ‘May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.’”

Why do we bless our children this way? Why not invoke Moses or David or one of our great heroes with epic stories of triumph and glory? Who even are these guys, Ephraim and Manasseh? We don’t talk about them very much. They don’t have fancy coats or wrestling matches with divine beings – they’re kind of boring.

There are many answers, but here’s one: It’s because they got along. We want our children, more than anything else, to love each other; to have a good sibling relationship. On a larger level, we want all the children of Israel to be like loving siblings – to be one Jewish people. And believe it or not, these are the first two brothers in Torah that actually had a good relationship from the start.

The first brothers are Cain and Abel – not exactly the model of a healthy fraternal relationship. Cain kills Abel – the world’s first murder. When God asks Cain where Abel is, he responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

We might recall Abraham’s sons, Isaac and Ishmael. No, there’s no murder here, but certainly some rivalry. We are told that Ishmael will be a wild man, with him against everyone and everyone against him. Sarah tells Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael after seeing Ishmael playing with, or perhaps, making fun of Isaac.

Isaac has two sons, Esau and Jacob. They, too, are rivals, even before birth, with Jacob ultimately stealing Esau’s birthright.

And that brings us to the sons of Jacob. This family dynamic is chaotic for a lot of reasons, crescendoing to the brother’s faking Joseph’s death and selling him into slavery.

It is not until this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Mikeitz, 41 chapters into the book of Genesis, when we finally get brothers who are not destined to fight one another: Joseph’s sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.

The first born is named Manasseh, a play on the verb nashani, meaning “caused me to forget,” implying that the joy of his new family eclipses the trauma of his childhood. The second is named Ephraim, from hiphrani, saying, “God has made me fertile in the land of my affliction.”

It is through his sons that Joseph is finally able to fully cast off the chains not only of his enslavement in Egypt, but from the scars of his youth. Finally, he is able to move past the trauma and flourish.

And yet, Ephraim and Manasseh become like sons to Jacob, each fully inheriting and taking on the mantle of B’nai Yisrael, becoming two of the twelve tribes.

It is incumbent upon each of us to pursue both of these seemingly disparate goals: to break with the harm of the past and grow into the future, and, at the same time, hold fast to our ancient, ancestral connections and identities. This is not a simple task, but a lifelong journey we each undertake. But we need not make the trek alone.

Not too far from here, just in DC, this very weekend, the Union for Reform Judaism is gathering for its first convention since the pandemic, celebrating 150 years of its mission to uphold Jewish identity and tradition, while still leading the charge into modernity.

I grew up in a Reform family. My grandmother, of blessed memory, was an editor of Moment magazine, and served for years on the URJ executive board, even chairing biennial. Her husband, my grandfather, of blessed memory, was a founding board member of the Rashi Reform Jewish day school, served in the first National UJA Young Leadership Cabinet (which led him to bring his family, including my mother, on the first ever family mission to Israel), consulted with Reform organizations across the country, and was active in Zionist and Refusnik advocacy work through the UJA and the local Jewish Federation. My parents met at age 14 in the youth group at Temple Israel in Boston. I grew up at Reform synagogues from preschool, attending URJ Eisner Camp for 6 summers, making my first trip to Israel with NFTY, was active in my Temple Youth Group, and went to every NFTY-Northeast event I could. And now, I am in my final year of Cantorial School at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform seminary of North America. Reform Judaism – not just the philosophy, but the institution – is who I am.

And yet, it was not until I was 17 when I actually had to define Reform Judaism. I was constantly in Jewish spaces, but they were consistently in a Reform bubble – camp, NFTY, temple, family. The summer going into my senior year of high school, I participated in a pluralistic Jewish pre-college program at Brandeis. Out of the 80 participants from around the world, I was one of two self-identified Reform Jews. And yes, I did already know the other one. The rest of the participants were mostly split between some kind of modern orthodoxy and secularism. The secular Jewish teens, especially those from Israel and eastern Europe, were confused by Reform Judaism. You can be religious without wearing tzittzit? Without a kippah? Without keeping kosher? But you go to shul, so you’re dati, you’re religious, right? The orthodox teens were equally confused. You don’t keep Halakhah, Jewish law? If everything is a choice, is nothing forbidden? So, you’re secular, right? They were all respectful, and genuinely curious, wanting to understand their fellow yid.

And I didn’t know how to respond. Even with my years of Reform education, I didn’t actually know what Reform Judaism was. I couldn’t answer all of the questions I was being asked – I actually texted one of the rabbis from my home synagogue at one point, “Quick: What do Reform Jews believe about moshiach – the messiah?” That summer forced me to come to terms with my identity not just as a Jew, but a Reform Jew. And, after all of the searching and questioning that came with it, I am better and more proud of my Reform identity because of it.

Reform Judaism is not about doing the bare minimum or doing whatever we feel like, as it has been flippantly described. Rather, it is about growth. It’s about holding tradition as sacred and recognizing, the world still turns; we need to turn with it. Torah, Talmud, and yes, even Halakhah, are core to who we are. They reflect the best wisdom of their generations and still, centuries and millennia later, have much to teach us. And there is wisdom beyond.

Not everything in Torah is applicable today. I’m not just talking about the sacrificial practices that are physically impossible to perform without the Temple, I mean certain ethics, social mores, that we as a human race have, thank God, moved past.

Reform Judaism recognizes that, in the interest of forgoing that which no longer aligns with our modern morals and sensibilities; to pursue justice for all; to enact tikkun haolam, the repair of the world; to keep Judaism accessible, resonant, and relevant, there is an extent to which we must leave certain beliefs aside. To flourish in new times and new contexts, we must learn new ideas, even if they come from outside our tradition. We must reconsider and rethink presuppositions. We must create new insights, new commentaries, new ideas for our contemporary world.

Reform Judaism often describes itself as Prophetic Judaism. This is not to say that we are prophets, literally hearing and enacting the will of God, but rather that we are following in the tradition of our biblical prophets, who absolutely had reverence for tradition, but shaped and molded it, even at times speaking against it, in response to changing times and tides.

Reform Judaism embodies the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh. Manasseh, who casts aside that which is harmful; Ephraim, who gives strength in new contexts. And, like Ephraim and Manasseh, even in our new and different and ever-adapting ways, we remain committed to Am Yisrael, the people of Israel; Torat Yisrael, the tradition of Israel; and Eretz Yisrael, the eternal homeland of our people.

Y’simnu Elohim k’ephraim v’khim’nashe – may God make us like Ephraim and Manasseh. May this community support one another as we make our individual Jewish journeys. May we eclipse the arcane and flourish in modernity. May we teach our children who we are and may they show us who we will become. And may this synagogue continue to be a strong and proud member of the Union for Reform Judaism.

From Kabbalat Shabbat 6/24/22 at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, NJ.

Music: Gabe Snyder
Lyrics: Isaiah 2:5

Mandolin: Matt Turk
Piano: Pedro D'aquino

Blessing following song by Rabbi Karen Perolman