It’s been harder than usual mustering the gusto – like a bucket drawn from a well but the water has turned to something else, it feels different on the hands on the body – to look towards a Jewish new year and the fall holiday season. I am often deep in research in July. But when Sam asked what theme was arriving this year, what books were on the table, I realized I was behind. I am making my way now. With each year there is more confidence in the skill sets we have cultivated, the pursuit of mastery in music, prayer, ceremony, the commitment to justice beyond tribe which so many of our Jewish brothers and sisters haven’t figured out. And so the need to bolster the show with themes and reading lists feels less prescient. I am reading Palestinian authors, ecological mythologists, Hannah Arendt (early skeptic of Zionism), maybe they have what to do with each other, maybe they do not. What is right will present itself, so long as the path is good, and I believe it is.

Last year I had a vision that did not manifest itself. It was a grab bag, a mystery bag of goodies, except the goodies were all of the symbols that Jews (probably others too) are afraid of, the pandora’s box of Jewish fear. I imagined sitting on the stage and pulling them out one at a time, and feeling their effects on our bodies – a swastika, a crucifix, symbols for the different peoples we’ve been taught to fear. I texted my teacher Irwin just a couple days ago – what’s the best book on Jewish fear? I realized all the antisemitism conversations were just cover for, we are afraid, generationally, our DNA is fearful, and we’re too scared to even say it, so we talk about something else instead. Irwin said, that’s an interesting question in itself. He didn’t have an answer. Maybe we haven’t written that book yet. I wonder why?

I wonder what’s on your mind and heart, what anxieties and fear and questions are swirling around you, maybe you are giving them time, maybe not. And if not, sit for three minutes and stick them in an email to me. It’s a communal activity. The heart too, a communal activity. Where is our heart sitting? What are its questions, in the face of what goes on all around us, whether we look upon it or not?

— Rabbi Zachi Asher, Curtains of Fear, The Epichorus, Temenos, 2025