Nolan Lebovitz: Embrace the Chaos

Affirming the Edgy, Creative, Crazy Side of Being Jewish

David H.—A year after the horrors of 10/7 and the tidal wave of antisemitism that followed, it’s an understandable instinct to withdraw into ourselves, to look for safety and stability in our lives. In this essay, however, Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz suggests we do the opposite—to instead embrace the chaotic, creative, and optimistic core of Judaism. In dark times, it’s important to be reminded of who we really are.

Nolan Lebovitz is senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Los Angeles, California, an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities, and author of the forthcoming book The Case for Dual Loyalty: Healing the Divided American Jewish Soul (Wicked Son, 2024).

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

Embrace the Chaos

Affirming the Edgy, Creative, Crazy Side of Being Jewish

Nolan Lebovitz

In June of 2022, my wife and kids and I left our home in Los Angeles and headed to Israel for a family vacation. On the way, we stopped in New York for a few days. We visited the Tenement Museum, took a tour of the Eldridge Street synagogue, saw a Yankee game, attended a Broadway show, and then we all headed to the airport for a ten-hour flight to Israel on El Al.

We arrived at JFK a little early, and my wife took the kids to buy some snacks for the long flight. I decided to stretch my legs and walk up and back down the long hall of Terminal 4. As I came back to our gate, I heard the familiar airport-announcement chime over the loudspeaker.

Ding, ding, ding… and then, “Aloha everyone.”

I turned to my left, and directly across from our gate was that of an American Airlines flight to Honolulu. At the microphone was a most pleasant-looking young woman wearing a flowery lei.

“Aloha, we’re about to depart on our journey to Hawaii, the island of Oahu.”

I looked at the New York crowd at that gate and I could taste the recipe of excitement and relaxation. They were headed to Hawaii. Some were already dressed in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. All of their shoulders had loosened.

The woman with the lei continued, “Please form a single file line and we’ll begin our boarding process soon. Mahalo!”

There on my left, I watched New Yorkers float with a sense of calm and serenity to form a single-file line and patiently wait to board this jetliner to their island paradise.

Then, I heard the chimes again over the loudspeaker. Ding, ding, ding…

A deep, gravelly voice began, “Eeehh….”

Even in the inaudible vocality, I could feel Israel getting closer. “Gvirotai v’rabotai, welcome to El Al….”

Without waiting for the end of the announcement, Jewish families of all kinds—New York Haredim, Los Angeles Ashkenazim, New Jersey Syrians, Israeli Mizrahim, some with three children, some with ten, all took five or six steps forward toward the gate and began to crowd the security officers as if we’d never even heard of a line before.

I glanced back at the tranquil boarding of the flight to Hawaii, and then I gazed upon the chaos of my people. Hawaii or Israel? Granted, I already had a ticket, but seeing these two groups, with which did I really want to spend the next ten hours?

Here, before us all, was the choice between two very different kinds of journeys. On the left was a choice of calm and comfort and relaxation, a journey to paradise; and on the right was a life that is active and challenging and familial and chaotic. In looking at those two scenes, I realized that we all stand at that fork in the road often, forced to choose between different kinds of journeys, different kinds of lives. At that moment it hit me that part of my job as a rabbi today is advocating for Jews to choose the journey on the right.

***

I really do love Hawaii. As a matter of fact, outside of Israel, if you asked my kids where I’d choose to be, I have no doubt they’d say the Aulani Disney Resort in Hawaii. After reading a draft of this essay, my wife made me promise that we would visit Hawaii again. This isn’t a disparaging talk about Hawaii or Cancun or any of the other places we go on vacation. Please, don’t email me and justify your next vacation to Club Med. I get it.

We face a more profound dilemma than where we vacation. The choice before us all is whether we reach for comfort and relaxation, or whether we reach for meaning. Why do we take our families to Israel? To craft our identity. To reconnect with purpose. To rediscover meaning. A journey to Israel is as much a journey inward as a journey abroad.

If meaning is the end goal we desire, then an acceptance of chaos is the cost to get there. Judaism encourages us, actually demands of us, a degree of vulnerability to chaos to feed our spiritual growth, for wisdom, for purpose.

The Torah seems to go out of its way to explain to us that the entire process of Creation unfolded out of a sense of chaos:

When God began to create the heaven and earth—the earth was an unformed void (tohu vavohu)—a chaotic mess—with darkness over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God swept over the water (Genesis 1:1–2).

Chaos and messiness have always manifested as the precursor to creation and progress and meaning. It’s a step that most of us don’t enjoy. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides commented that our sages believed that tohu vavohu meant mourning and crying. Our sages clearly cast a negative light on chaos.

We don’t like feeling uninformed, unaware, or unsure. We enjoy feeling like experts, aware, and in control.

We control every aspect of our lives and steer our experience toward comfort. We control the way we listen to music, consume entertainment, and receive our news so that we’re not presented with an unknown or challenged by an adversarial opinion. We have engineered our lives to feel comfortable at every moment. How many remote controls do you have in your living room? Some of us even have a universal remote that does everything but control the universe.

If it’s true that we prefer comfort and control as human beings, then it’s true for Jews as well, except even more so. We value education and accomplishment so much that whenever I address my congregation, I know I’m speaking to doctors of every field, attorneys of every kind of specialization, educators dedicated to various abilities, and financial experts of every strategy. We are a people whose expertise extends to everything.

On Rosh Hashanah, we recite the liturgy, hayom harat olam—today the world was born, or perhaps more precisely, today the world was pregnant with possibility. In a synagogue, we come together at the beginning of the Jewish year to acknowledge that life is fragile. We confront profound truths, and some of them make us uncomfortable. We contemplate God and prayer, family and fertility, individuality and community. On Yom Kippur, we face absolute fragility in contemplating life and death. It’s challenging and uncomfortable, and absolutely necessary.

Synagogues around the world all claim to be welcoming and want to make you comfortable. But comfort is actually not what brings us to shul. We go because we’re looking for meaning.

It’s in the synagogue that we chant our people’s language, even though most American Jews don’t understand Hebrew. It’s in the synagogue that we speak of God more in a single High Holiday service than most of us do during the rest of the year. It’s in the synagogue where we are reminded that time moves faster than we’d like, and we know it because we look around the sanctuary and see all of those who are no longer physically present. None of that is comfortable. All of it is meaningful.

In 2010, Brené Brown delivered a TEDx talk called “The Power of Vulnerability.” Brown is a scholar who studies courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She’s the author of five number-one New York Times bestsellers. Her lecture has been viewed online by more than 58 million people. Brown explained that her research studied people who didn’t feel worthy of love or belonging versus people who did feel worthy of relationship. She found that everyone who felt worthy of connection possessed two shared qualities: courage and vulnerability. As she explained:

They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn’t talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating…. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say “I love you” first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They’re willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

Living comfortably is not our only goal in life. We all aspire to live a life of meaning. We acquire meaning through relationships, learning, and personal growth. To achieve relationships and personal growth, vulnerability is a necessary component. To face vulnerability, we need courage. To face life’s challenges, we need courage. What does Jewish courage look like in the face of vulnerability?

In the biblical Book of Kings, society proves overwhelming for the prophet Elijah, and he runs away from the Northern Kingdom of Israel down through the Negev wilderness, to a mountain called Horev, otherwise known as Sinai. He enters a cave, the most secluded place imaginable. And it’s there that Elijah utters the words, “I am alone.” And God answers him with the single word, tzeh—“Come out” (I Kings 19:10–11).

God tells Elijah: Come out and face the world. Come out and stand vulnerable. And it’s there that Elijah faces a mighty wind, and then he faces an earthquake, and then finally a fire. And after the fire, Elijah famously hears the “still, small voice”—the soft, delicate voice of divinity, of courage, of conviction, of purpose.

This is the reason why we believe that Elijah visits a child at a circumcision, or why he visits us on Passover before a renewed sense of freedom, or why we sing of Elijah at Ha before we encounter the challenges of each new week. We need to be reminded of that voice to go out into the world with courage, conviction, and purpose.

This is the voice of inspiration that spoke to Jacob when he laid down his head to sleep on the rock. It was the voice of destiny that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. All Jews have stood vulnerable at one time or another, and this is the voice that speaks to us all.

***

After several years of pandemic and political strife, we are all emerging out of degrees of chaos. Especially now, in this restart, in this renewal, it is imperative for the Jewish community to come together and recognize that sometimes we do not have all the answers. We must accept the chaos together, and our vulnerability before it.

In 1980, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, who served at the same pulpit in Los Angeles that today I have the honor of serving, delivered a Yom Kippur sermon titled “Accepting Our Vulnerability.” Rabbi Schulweis declared that “Rosh Hashanah is not Yom Kippur…. Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of strength. Yom Kippur is the commemoration of weakness. Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of independence. Yom Kippur is the commemoration of dependence. If we split them, then we have a half-truth. And there is nothing more deceitful than a half-truth.”

Since Rabbi Schulweis spoke those words forty-three years ago, the world has changed, but fundamentally, we have remained the same. Constantly now, the world presents us with half-truths. Therefore, what we need now more than ever is not only to acknowledge our vulnerability but to practice our courage. In this case, courage is not stubbornness. Courage means an openness to vulnerability and a willingness to change the way we live. We have to have courage to bring others close. We have to have courage to learn new ways forward.

If we ever hope to bridge our fractured society, it’s by approaching our brothers and sisters across the aisle, not with certainty, but with courageous openness. If we ever hope to heal family strife, it’s not going to be through stubborn will and a need for control, but with courageous compassion and a vulnerability to chaos. If we ever hope to create a relationship with God, it’s not going to begin through ego, but through humility.

A miracle occurs on Rosh Hashanah, and it’s not the creation of the world. Jews from every corner, every walk of life, every stream of ritual observance, come together to hear the shofar blast. The miracle is that for the briefest of moments, Jews stand silent and listen. The blast of a ram’s horn brings awe and deference to a people that doesn’t stand in a line. It forces us, once a year, to divest ourselves of our certainties, to confront our vulnerability, and to look directly at the tohu vavohu that rages below.

Our worship has changed, our location has changed, our language has changed, our dress has changed, but the blast of the shofar is the same sound that we heard at Mount Sinai during God’s Revelation. It’s the exact same sound that we heard the year before that, and that our grandparents heard, and their grandparents before them. The shofar represents the sound of the eternal.

Never once have I ever regretted plunging into the challenge of an El Al fight. That chaos that we bring on one another, that’s all of the generations of tumult and vulnerability of our people trapped into a giant metal cylinder flying at 35,000 feet. When I land in Tel Aviv and take my first steps in the small section of the Mediterranean Sea that belongs to our people, Israel teaches me how to walk with courage and pride in a place that is soaked in vulnerability.

To stand at the gate and turn right is to admit that I belong with all of them. Through the chaos, the bickering, and the kvetching, we all stand vulnerable together. Let’s celebrate that. We are a large dysfunctional, complicated, ancient family that has, over time, mastered the art of creation out of chaos. Let’s decide to turn right into chaos more often. Let’s resolve to summon our collective courage. Let’s endeavor to join our spiritual journey forward the only way we know how—together.