Sermon: Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei
Rabbi Lauren’s Sermon on March 13, 2026 at Temple Bat Yam
Not a sound overly dramatic, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Job lately.
In the book of Job God, and a heavenly force known as the opposer debate about the nature of human beings. Then, in order to test their theory, they pick a human being and experiment on him. That human being is Job. Job loses everything in this experiment. His wife and children are treated like sacks of grain that one can exchange for another without thought or consideration. In the end, when Job asks why any of this happened, God tells Job that the universe is a mystery to human beings like him. The only choice that Job has is to choose to see his blessings and feel gratitude or to choose to see his curses and, I’m quoting the Bible here, die.
The whole thing is frankly shocking. And I never thought God looked particularly good coming out of this story. So it was always a conundrum to me why it was included in our Bible, the holiest of our texts. The seeming capriciousness of the universe in this narrative can be totally galling. I had always looked at it from a theological perspective, trying to analyze why this kind of laissez-faire theology might be included amongst all of the otherwise interesting and often appealing options within our Bible.
Recently though, I started to switch to a pastoral lens when reading this text.
So many of us end up experiencing a portion of Job’s lot. Loss without meaning, tragedy without purpose, trauma without rhyme or reason. It is not necessarily a reflection of how bad or good we are. These experiences might be utterly out of our control; nonetheless they can still cause us deep, emotional or even physical damage or loss. Yet, as Rabbi Harry Kushner stated simply, sometimes bad things happen to good people. The best that we can do is try to figure out how we can, like Job, still find the capacity to recognize even the smallest blessings in these moments.
In this week’s Torah portion, the Israelites finish building their traveling holy space, the Mishkan. The air first fills with smoke and a cloud descends on their beautiful communal, artistic creation. This mysterious cloud inhabits the center of their camp and their newly blessed space until it turns into a pillar of fire by night. It must’ve been terrifying to be an Israelite at that moment. The deep unknowing of what might come, all while living in an unprotected wilderness. The horror of realizing that you need to come to peace with the presence of these raw, destructive forces placed the heart of your community. The terror of uncertainty — from forces without and now within — must have been overwhelming.
How do we develop distress tolerance or endurance in the face of this kind of existential discomfort? How do human beings learn to endure moments like these — moments when the cloud descends and the future becomes unknowable?
One of the first steps in building distress tolerance is simply learning to name what we feel.
Neuroscientists have discovered that when we put emotions into words—when we say I am afraid, or I am angry, or I am grieving—the brain actually begins to calm itself. The part of the brain that sounds the alarm quiets, and the part that helps us think clearly is able to start to come back online.¹ In other words, naming our feelings does not make us weaker. It makes us more capable of living with them.
But the work does not stop there. Once we name an emotion, we can ask it a question:
What are you here to teach me?
Fear might be telling us that something we love is at risk. Grief might be reminding us how deeply we are capable of loving and how much things around us are in flux or changing. Jealousy points us towards what we did not even know that we wanted.
As we navigate this modern world, the full rainbow of our emotions are not enemies. They are messengers.
And yet the Mussar tradition reminds us that emotions must also be well-placed and well-sized. Not every fear deserves to rule us. Not every anger deserves to guide our actions. The spiritual work is to listen to our feelings without letting them become our masters. And this, I think, is what both Job and the Israelites are teaching us.
Job cannot explain his suffering. The Israelites cannot control the cloud and fire that suddenly appear in the center of their camp. Both face a terrifying truth: the universe contains forces beyond their understanding.
And yet neither story ends in despair.
Job eventually says:
“The light of God still shines upon my tent.”
(Job 29:3)
And the Israelites learn to move their tents when the cloud moves and to rest when the cloud rests. They do not eliminate uncertainty. They learn how to live with it. They acknowledge the fear. They tolerate the mystery. And slowly, within that uncertainty, they begin to notice something else: Blessing.
The cloud that first looks terrifying becomes guidance. The wilderness that first looks empty becomes a place where a people learn who they are. Job learns how to repair and heal, even in the face of unimaginable uncertainty within the world. Perhaps that is the real spiritual work of moments like these:
Not pretending we are unafraid.
But learning to say:
Yes, I feel fear.
Yes, I feel grief.
Yes, I feel uncertainty.
And then asking:
What might this moment still have to teach me?
Because even in the wilderness, even under a cloud we do not fully understand, the possibility of blessing remains.
Footnotes
Matthew D. Lieberman et al., “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 421–428.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2015).
Susan David, Emotional Agility (New York: Avery, 2016).
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim (The Path of the Just), trans. Rabbi Shraga Silverstein (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1966).
