Rabbi’s Message: April 28, 2026
Lately, I have been thinking about wisdom. Not just how do we accumulate time and experiences, but what are the systems of thought that can lead from the stacking of time and experiences into relevant, usable wisdom that we can live by? Fortunately, this week’s Torah portion has a suggestion.
In Parashat Emor, the Torah offers us a map of sacred time: the festivals that shape the Jewish year. But what if this calendar is not only about when we gather, but about how we grow wise?
After all, not all growth naturally leads to wisdom. We can accumulate experiences, even insights, without becoming more grounded, more compassionate, or even more clear. Wisdom asks something more of us. It asks that we live through our experiences in a way that transforms us. The Torah’s cycle of holidays, I want to suggest, is not only a ritual calendar: it is a wisdom cycle. A path that teaches us how to grow, season by season, year by year.
We begin with Passover, the moment of awareness. Wisdom always begins here: with the willingness to see. Something in our lives feels constricted, misaligned, or incomplete, and we allow ourselves to notice it. This is no small thing. To wake up — to say this does not need to be this way — is the first movement toward wisdom.
Then comes the quiet work of the Omer, those in-between days where nothing dramatic seems to happen, and yet everything is happening. Here we reflect, we refine, we practice. In the wilderness of this space, we begin to experiment and to stretch the parts of ourselves that we constricted before. Wisdom grows in these spaces of attention. It is cultivated through small, repeated acts of noticing and choosing. We are not yet ready to declare who we are becoming—but we are preparing the ground.
At Shavuot, we arrive at commitment. Wisdom requires a “yes.” Not a perfect one, not a permanent one — but a real one. We choose a path, a value, a way of living. We receive Torah not as information, but as orientation. Wisdom begins to take root when we align our actions with what we know to be true.
With Rosh Hashanah, we are invited into envisioning. Having lived with our commitments, we ask again: Who am I becoming? Not in abstraction, but in the texture of our lived days. Wisdom expands when we can imagine a self that is more spacious, more generous, more healed, more whole — and begin to lean toward it.
That vision leads us to Yom Kippur, the sacred work of repair. Because if we are honest, we will find the places where we have fallen short — where our lives have not yet caught up to our intentions. Wisdom is not the absence of error. It is the capacity to respond to error with clarity and humility, with vulnerability and courage. It is the willingness to take responsibility and begin again.
And then, Sukkot, the harvest. Here we step into a life that is both fragile and full. We gather what we have learned — not as perfection, but as experience integrated into who we are. Wisdom ripens when we can say: This is what I have learned. This is who I am, for now. And we allow ourselves to dwell, even briefly, in that knowing.
And then—the cycle begins again. Not because we are stuck. Not because we have failed. But because wisdom is not a magical destination at the end of a singular journey. It is a practice.
Each year, we return to awareness with new eyes. We prepare with greater depth. We commit with more intention. We envision more honestly. We repair more compassionately. We harvest more humbly. The calendar of Emor teaches us that time itself can be a guide — if we are willing to move through it consciously.
