Dear Friends,

I flew to Tel Aviv a few days ago, and am grateful to be back here in the land that my friends call Israel, Palestine, and various combinations of the two. Though this is a short trip, I have already seen old friends who are family, visited places I love, and listened to people’s experiences. On this trip, I carried the CBST community with me in a new way. Since October of 2023, CBST has included a special Prayer for the Return of the Hostages and for Peace in every service—a prayer that has shifted and changed as the situation changed over the past two years. We are now in a new phase for our prayers since all of the living hostages in Gaza have been released; it was time to retire the most recent version of that prayer.

But like everything we do at CBST, we wanted to mark this transition ritually. So after Cooperberg-Rittmaster Rabbinical Intern Alana Krivo-Kaufman read this prayer on the bimah last Shabbat, she folded it up, and handed it to me. I flew here with the prayer in my pocket and was able to travel directly from the airport to the Western Wall, the repository for Jewish hopes and prayers for so many generations. I prayed the prayer and inserted the paper into the Kotel.

The next day, on the way from Jerusalem to Hebron, traffic came to a halt because of a car-ramming and stabbing that killed and injured people near the Etziyon intersection in the West Bank; families are mourning, and here in the West Bank, freedom to travel has been limited more than usual.

In barely two or three days here so far, I have had the opportunity to choose a beautiful new tallit for a colleague, to eat tasty homemade meals and treats, to cheer on a Palestinian student who is acing both intensive chemistry and English in high school, and to have conversations about midrash on the book of Genesis. Like at home, the profound and the mundane are intertwined, and there is much bitter in the sweet and sweet in the bitter.

When I return next week to New York, I will bring back as many of the hopes and longings I hear from my Israeli and Palestinian friends as I can, to share with all of you. There is great potential for a beautiful shared future here. Even amidst the violence, there are so many people making every effort to live their best lives and, thankfully, leaders tirelessly trying to build that future.

Despite all of the people denying each others’ rights, safety, and very existence through occupation, through acts of terror, I continue to believe that another kind of future is coming because it must. It must come for the sakes of all our bodies and all our souls, and we all can have a role in helping to make it happen.

I send you my best regards from this land of holy potential.

Warmly,

Jason Gary Klein

Senior Rabbi