Parashat Nasso
shared virtually at Kol Tzedek synagogue, spring 2026
It has been more difficult than usual for me to pull on the thread that I want to offer you for this dvar, this thing of Torah. My overwhelm in these times is palpable and I can find myself wandering from room to room (in my head, in my house, on my screens) having forgotten what I was there for, or like a dog with zoomies with a lot of energy but no clear place to direct it. lost between email accounts, half dressed, picking up my phone to call in a prescription and then there’s a spreadsheet but I need to go grab my wallet from downstairs and what even was that open tab for again, but also, damn I gotta put that laundry away too and am I hungry? On and on like that…
Being a person on earth right now, being a parent on earth is a lot. French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin coined the term “polycrisis” 30 some years ago. Some of you might hear me say polycrisis and think I mean something related to my partnerships or my partners’ dates or whatever…though that definitely happens, I mean the other kind of polycrisis — the one where systemic entanglement of crises is the core challenge. Late stage capitalism, the rise in fascism and authoritarianism here and across the globe, genocide and the reckoning of colonial processes of domination and extraction, climate catastrophe. I am scared, overwhelmed and I feel so small in the face of it.
There is a part of me these days that feels beyond shut down, beyond hopeless. Everywhere where I look, there’s some other tragedy that overwhelms my systems. Even discerning HOW to write something Jewish for you all, I found myself in deep confusion about which parsha to talk about, checking and rechecking which one we were reading without remembering to write it down. Once I started to learn the parsha of the week, Nasso, I found it weird and overwhelming too!
The longest parsha in the Torah, Parshat Nasso is named, as are all parshiot, for the opener. In this case, that’s instructions to take a census. Highlights include:
a headcount of the Israelites, their duties in the desert and who’s in and out of the camp
the sotah and how the Torah wants to deal with “wayward women” suspected of having an affair. If you don’t already know this story it is worth a deeper dive, but just to say that this is a fascinating and terrifying patriarchal attempt at determining a woman’s “righteousness.”
Also, there’s instruction about the nazir, a kind of holy devotee to God who refrains from all grape products and hair cutting as an act of consecration. In tomorrow’s haftorah we meet Sampson, the most famous Nazir in Jewish tradition.
We also get the instructions for the “priestly benediction” which many of us might recognize from shul, from R’ALF’s weekly email today, from your childhood shabbes table, from Fiddler on the Roof or from the way Lenoard Nimoy, made these classic finger shapes into the Vulcan greeting: “live long and prosper.”
AND, in case all of that wasn’t enough, there’s also an accounting of the offerings from each of the 12 tribes in consecration of the new altar.
The parsha ends with the image of Moshe going into the tabernacle to talk to God who’s hanging out between the wings of the kruvim in the altar. This is an image that I will never get over and actually have a lot of envy about. God’s just hanging out there and Moses can go and have a chat?
Parashat Nasso is really into purity, rightness, in group/out group, counting, who and what counts and delineations like that. But I’m more interested these days in finding aliveness and humanity in all the places I can, with the mess and the sense that life can be about more than numbers of clicks and likes or widgets sold.
Zionism is one of the ways I’ve seen Jews double down on ingroup/outgroup as well as notions of purity and impurity. I am bereft that so many Jews feel it is reasonable to be in a state of so-called "righteous" violence, enacting apartheid and genocide, believing that domination and militarism will keep us safe. I’m heartbrokenly committed to finding new ways of defining Jewish life beyond Zionism.
Some of you know that I’ve been leading groups for Jewish anti-Zionists. Our themes are often about finding a political and moral center internally and guided by our Jewish ethics, separate from dominant Jewish narratives in support of Zionism. The more clarity we have about our own ethical commitment that Never Again means Never Again for ANYONE, the more conflict we often face with our families, institutions that felt like home, even our own memories: of songs, places we frollicked, simple treats we enjoyed with people we love.
Therapist, organizer and writer Prentis Hemphill’s reflections are one of my lifelines in these difficult times. They offered a little mini-episode of their podcast Becoming the People recently and spoke about wanting to build a movement that can grow, where curiosity, empathy and risk taking in service to connection makes new possibilities. I struggle here regularly. When I see an Israeli flag or a watermelon keychain I know who I *think* my people are and where I currently feel comfortable. I don’t like it, but it is true to my experience and I don’t think I’m alone in wondering if we can trust each other any longer, in many dimensions, but certainly in Jewish community. Finding curiosity, empathy and risk-taking lives in conflict with the sense that we simply can’t speak to each other, our voices stuck in our throats.
For all of the problems of this parsha, Rabbi Mó reminded me that “our oldest and most enduring piece of liturgy” comes from Parshat Nasso. In fact, it is one of few rituals that directly survives from the priestly cult and the Tabernacle in the wilderness. God calls the priests into service as conduits for God’s own blessing into the community. This happens through Birkat Kohanim, or the Priestly Blessing, which we still recite today in order to bless one another in community.
Side note. I’m bat Levi, a daughter in the lineage of the Levi tribe. We don’t have a ton of cultural memory about which tribes we’re from anymore but the lineage descended from Aaron makes up the Levi and Cohen priestly caste. One of the sweetest gifts of being a descendant of that ancient and bizarre social hierarchy is that in some communities, I have gotten to wash the hands of the descendants of my distant cousins, the Cohanim, before they perform this Priestly Blessing ritual, channeling blessing from God directly into our communities. It is hard to convey how awkward it has felt to move quietly into kitchens or waterfountains of all the makeshift shuls “traditional egalitarian” Jews make their temporary ritual homes and splash a tiny bit of water on the hands of barefoot near-strangers wearing shabbes khakis. But it is so precious to me to try to figure out (again, awkwardly) how to embody a tradition that has lost a lot of our physical ways in the shadow of a long history of repression, genocide and assimilation.
Just like the wings of the cruvim in the tabernacle, the priests’ outstretched hands are a place where God can settle through and between. Rabbi Mó also reminded me that as we are a mamlekhet kohanim, a nation of priests, we can all step into the role of priests and serve as conduits for God’s blessing, contemporary shabbes khakis very optional.
I have felt myself to be a conduit most clearly in my life while The Source of Life tore through me (and I do mean TORE) as I birthed my children.
I have seen the work of genius surgeons, channeling The Source of All Creation, building a wholly (holy) new phallus from the flesh of a thigh for a trans beloved.
I have seen people negotiate conflict in new ways, managing to hold more and more and more nuance and compassion and hurt and kindness, and I know that that is another place where Av HaRachamim, the Father of Womb-Compassion births us into blessing.
It is so very hard to figure out how to continue to come back to a place of seeing the blessing, channeling that blessing through us or even being the blessing. But tonight, let me try to serve a turn, as a conduit, and to offer all of us the sacred words. My hope is, we can all touch into it from time to time: trying to find the treasures, the curiosity, the beauty and ferocity within the destruction and devastation. May the simplicity of these ancient words help us find our direction, together, in service to The Source of All; and to spill over onto anyone in need of a shabbes blessing.
May God bless us, and keep us;
May God’s face shine upon us, and be gracious to us;
May God lift up God’s face to us, and give us wholeness
and peace.