Rabbi Weitzman's Weekly Shabbat Message: 11.13.26

Dear Congregation Beth Emeth,

This Shabbat we read Parashat Toldot. In it, Isaac does something easy to pass over. After Abraham dies, the Philistines fill in the wells his father dug. Isaac goes back and digs them again. The Torah tells us that “he called them by the names his father had called them” (Genesis 26:18).

Isaac doesn’t stop there. His servants dig new wells, and the first two bring only conflict. He calls them Esek and Sitnah, Contention and Enmity. Then he digs a third, and this time no one fights over it. He names it Rehovot and says, ki atah hirchiv Adonai lanu, “now God has made room for us, and we shall flourish in the land” (26:22).

Our commentators have long read this story as a story about inheritance. The sages teach that each of us has to do the work of digging. The water that reached our parents does not reach us on its own. In every generation we dig toward the “Source”. Sometimes we dig in the very place our parents and grandparents dug. Sometimes we dig in a new direction. The water we’re after has always been the same, though.

I’ve been thinking about Isaac a lot this fall, because Beth Emeth has been doing some digging of its own.

Over these past months, our board, our MVV Taskforce and many of you have worked hard to set out our mission, vision, and values. As that work nears completion, I’m struck by how much of it has been an act of recovery. We have not invented a new congregation. We have uncovered what has fed this community for generations, cleared away what had settled over it, and given it a name we can claim in our own voice.

We are also nearing the end of our cantorial search. Few things carry a tradition forward like the voice that leads us in prayer. Melodies are wells, too. Some we sing exactly as our grandparents did, and some we will learn together for the first time. All of them draw from the same deep place.

And this year we mark seventy years on Academy Road. We have literally been digging on the same ground for seven decades.

Isaac’s story reminds us that renewal and faithfulness don’t compete. The new wells only mattered because the old ones were open. Rehovot came after Esek and Sitnah, after the hard and sometimes contentious work of finding our way. I believe we are close to Rehovot, a place where God has made room for all of us.

Shabbat shalom,