I had an interesting conversation the other day with a Jewish woman living in New York City. She detailed the consuming and challenging nature of observing Passover this year, only to emerge a week later into the intensity of Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah). She made the point that to be actively, consciously Jewish in 2025 is to be “living on the edge.”
What she meant is that no matter what your level of observance, to be a Jew living in these times is to deal with trauma—past, present and future. It means celebrating Passover while 59 hostages, living and dead, are still being held in the tunnels of Gaza as world opinion turns against Israel. It means marking the murders of the Shoah in a post-Oct. 7 world where global antisemitism has reached new heights.
Living on the edge means retaining the deeply Jewish understanding that the past, present and future are deeply intertwined.
These words were in my head as I saw extraordinary footage of former Israeli hostage Eliya Cohen, who recently returned to the public bomb shelter from where he was shot and kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Held for 505 days in Gaza before being released on March 4, Cohen recited the Shema in the shelter and video of his prayer has since gone viral.
The spiritual bravery that it took for this former hostage to stand in the very place of his worst trauma is not only impressive. It is instructive.
The sight of this gaunt young man wrapped in tefillin reciting the central creed of the Jewish people is an astonishing testament to the power of defiance. Though Cohen had also participated in the Birkat Cohanim (“Priestly Blessing”) at Israel’s Western Wall, the Kotel, it was his visit to the place of his deepest trauma that has stayed with me.
His return is foreshadowed by this week’s Torah portion, Shemini, in the book of Leviticus (Vayikra).
The book of Leviticus deals largely with ritual practice and Jewish law. Shemini opens with a detailed narrative about the sacrificial rituals being presided over by Aaron and his sons, the founding priests of Israel. There are meticulous details about the sin offering and burnt offering, such as what portion of the animal is to be offered, where blood is to be sprinkled and how the fire is intended to burn. These sacrificial rites, which ended with the destruction of the holy Temple in 70 C.E., are the antecedents to contemporary prayer.
Twenty-three verses into the Torah portion, we read an interesting detail: “Moses and Aaron then went inside the Tent of Meeting. When they came out, they blessed the people; and the Presence of God appeared to all the people.” (Leviticus 9:23)
The 12th-century commentator Rashi is puzzled by the participation of Moses and his connection to the presence of God. Why is Moses involved in an activity that should require only Aaron, who is the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest? And what does Moses’ presence have to do with the presence of God?
Rashi does a deep dive into Aaron’s psychology, intuiting that Aaron is approaching the daunting task of approaching the Almighty on the heels of his participation in the debacle of the Golden Calf. Rashi senses that Aaron is suffering a crisis of worthiness, stemming from that trauma, and he feels himself to be spiritually unworthy to approach the altar. He feels that he alone cannot conjure the Shechinah, the indwelling of God. And he does what psychologically healthy people do: He asks for help.
Aaron teaches us a valuable lesson about seeking help in times of crisis, and he creates a community of two—him and his brother Moses—who go together into the Tent of Meeting. This twosome is successful because we are told that the presence of God came to dwell among the people. Aaron, Moses and God working together to bless the Jewish people holds the deceptively simple narrative that is the key to resilience in the face of trauma. It illustrates what Jews have done for millennia: create community, build bonds and form peoplehood.
Rashi’s millennium-old wisdom can be seen in the actions of Eliya Cohen, or any of the brave returned hostages or survivors of the Shoah who choose to return to the place of their deepest trauma—whether it be a kibbutz in the Gaza Envelope, the Nova music festival grounds, Auschwitz, or the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw or anywhere where they were arrested and deported for the crime of being a Jew. This time, Eliya came back to the place of his kidnapping not as a victim of a terrible crime but rather as an empowered Jew with his tefillin and prayers.
In Israel, some of the returned hostages of Oct. 7 have met with Shoah survivors: Together, they form the most powerful duo since Moses and Aaron. A community of two capable of conjuring the presence of God.
As we approach the first Shabbat after Passover, which falls following the second Yom Hashoah after Oct. 7, I return to the words of the Jewish woman from New York that we are living on the edge. She told me of a childhood friend, a self-proclaimed “assimilated Jew,” who asked shyly if she could attend synagogue services with her. She spoke of her astonishment at learning the lesson that Jews throughout history have understood: We will be identified as Jews by our haters, so we might as well live authentic lives on our own terms.
I have pondered her insight repeatedly and find that it has sparked a question: On the edge of … what? And from the deepest recesses within me, an answer arises, paradoxical, given the troubled nature of the world today and yet as timeless as the Torah itself, which has a habit of serving as a Divine lesson book for life.
Though all indications seem otherwise, I believe that we are living on the edge of redemption.