Ta Shma

For many of us, confronting death raises urgent questions of faith, doubt, and the meaning and purpose of our lives. Yet we live in a culture that avoids talking about death, let alone the existential challenges it raises. Physician and ethicist Lydia Dugdale, author of The Lost Art of Dying, joins Rabbi Shai Held to draw on ancient and contemporary wisdom about mortality and meaning. Recorded in Fall 2025. This conversation is part of the Faith WithHeld series, generously sponsored by the Schiller family.

Want the full Q&A? Catch the video version here: https://youtu.be/i1ktCH7ISoE

The Book of Leviticus, and Parashat BeHukkotai that brings it to a close, makes a clear and recurring claim: reality is not an act of fate, but the outcome of human choice and behavior. 

According to a midrashic tradition, the counting of the Omer (that may have seemed to be nothing but a calendrical counting of the days from Pesah to Shavuot) expresses the anticipation of the Israelites for the giving of the Torah.  The biblical commandment, however, appears in an agricultural context.

In Parashat Emor, we encounter the story of the blasphemer. This blasphemer undermines, degrades, and treats with levity the very foundation of the religious system—the root of faith and the bedrock of the world.  Yet various midrashim, in their characteristic fashion, are not satisfied with a dry, factual account.  

When the unthinkable happens, what remains of faith? Journalist Sarah Wildman, who lost her young daughter, joins Rabbi Shai Held in a searching conversation about grief, love, and the struggle to go on. They will probe how mourning collides with meaning-making, and how faith might fracture, endure, or be remade in the wake of devastating loss. Recorded in Fall 2025. 
This conversation is part of the Faith WithHeld series, generously sponsored by the Schiller family.

Want the full Q&A? Catch the video version here: https://youtu.be/YNZb_AkS7Ec

Drawing close is no simple matter.  At times, it can be difficult—even dangerous.  And yet, to come near is also wondrous: it can nurture, enrich, and expand life.  The possibility of a misstep is always near—but so too are countless opportunities.  The line between one kind of closeness and another is often fine.  It depends on sensitivity, harmony, the insistence on not including elements foreign to the relationship, and attentiveness to the nature of the invitation.

Dedicated in loving memory of my nephew, Yishai Elyakim Urbach, who fell in Gaza one year ago, a few weeks after setting out to build his own home.

Tehillim 127:1 "Unless God builds the house, those who build it labor in vain." 

Human beings cannot truly build alone.  What we build by ourselves, the psalmist suggests, cannot ultimately endure.

And yet one of the most beloved songs sung in Israel on Yom Ha’Atzma’ut insists: “I built a house in the Land of Israel.”  Human initiative—human courage, labor, and creativity—stands at the heart of the Zionist ethos.  Even in religious communities where the day is marked by the recitation of Hallel, a prayer of gratitude to God, the name of the day itself—Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Independence Day—centers the human story.  

Chapter 12 of the Book of Vayikra deals with the sacrifice of the woman who has given birth.

When we think of the Holocaust, we can only be silent.

We are incapacitated emotionally, morally, theologically.  At times it seems that the countless museums and memorials, the ceremonies and journeys, the songs and the prayers, are but a desperate attempt to break free from the paralysis that grips us in its shadow.

The Torah, too, knows such a moment when children are consumed by fire, and their surviving family is left with nothing but silence.  

The opening scene of Parashat Shemini is both brief and dramatic.  It depicts the final day of the dedication of the mishkan (tabernacle)—the very day on which Nadav and Avihu die.