A tool for connection

D’var Torah from November 21, 2025

Parshat Toldot

Part 1: You guys

I’ve started doing more one on one meetings with community shabbat members and it’s been so amazing. I feel like I am getting to learn about the most wonderful, passionate people and I don’t think that I’m biased at all.

I want to tell you some things I’ve noticed:

You are kind

You are generous

You are activated

You are depleted

You are confused

You are healing

You are hurting

You are loving

You are deserving

Part 2: Distilling the question

The more I distill it, I find that the question at the center of Community Shabbat is the following:

How can, even and especially in this moment of rupture, how can Jewish life help us heal?

Part 3: Loneliness

Recently I came across an author who laid out 3 kinds of loneliness

Romantic Loneliness

Friendship Loneliness

and

Community Loneliness

The point the author was making was that you can have community and partnership but still feel lonely without friendship. Or you can have partnership and friendship, and still feel lonely without community.

Humans cannot survive off just one kind of connection. We need to feel connected at every layer.

We need to feel connection with the earth, with the animals, with the self, with the other, with community, the collective, and with the transcendent.

It’s helpful to break it down like this for me. To recognize that a deficit of meaningful connection at any layer affects the whole.

At this moment, it strikes me that we are struggling with every layer.

But here is the secret: Traditional ways of living are designed to reconstitute connection at every layer.

Part 4: A tool

I want to tell you about a tool that has the remarkable ability not only to strengthen connection connection in each of these levels

But also the ability to weave between all levels of connection to create something whole.

Part 5: Blessings

It’s called a blessing.

In hebrew: bracha

You may be familiar with blessings - it’s often one of the first jewish things we learn, “Baruch Ata Hashem” is a phrase lots of my non-Jewish friends love to show me they know.

But upon taking a closer look, blessings are actually quite complex.

Part 6: The first blessing (person to person)

In this week’s torah portion, we are presented with the immense power of the blessing.

Up until now, in our holy book God is the only one who gets to bless. God blesses the people, for example in Bereishit, that we should “be fruitful and multiply”.

But then, all of a sudden, in Parshat Toldot, we start to bless each other. Human to human.

Isaac is on his death bed and he calls for his son Esau, to give him a final blessing:

“May God give you

Of the dew of heaven and the fat of the earth,

Abundance of new grain and wine.

Let peoples serve you,

And nations bow to you;

Be master over your brothers,

And let your mother’s sons bow to you.

Cursed be they who curse you,

Blessed be they who bless you.”

A beautiful blessing for a soon-to-be patriarch. But there’s been a huge mistake.

Isaac has been tricked by Rachel, his wife, to bless Jacob, not Esau. The shepherd, not the hunter.

Thus, it is Jacob, technically the younger twin, who becomes the dominant patriarch. Jacob, who becomes our main character.

Thus, we learn: Take blessings seriously. Blessings change the course of history.

Part 7: Who does blessings?

So we know that blessings are something God does for us.

And now we know we can do them for each other (but we have to be careful).

Strangely, blessings are also something we do for God, when we say the myriad of blessings we are obligated to say upon waking up, eating, going to the bathroom, seeing a rainbow etc.

For example, the blessing over challah which we will say in just a few minutes, “Blessed are You, Hashem our God, Who has brought bread forth from the earth.”

A strange and somewhat bold idea: that humans can not only use this tool for each other but we can use it for God.

Part 8: The root

We still need a definition for this strange thing: a bracha.

In Hebrew, every word has a root: a three letter core that can help us understand what it as the center of the meaning

For bracha the root is Bet Raish Chaf.

In the bible, this root most often means to bless or praise.

But sometimes it means “to increase”.

And the word “berech” means knee, often connoting falling to one’s knees

A fascinating balance:

A word that at once means increasing and kneeling.

Part 9: An image for blessing

Rebbe Shenur Zalman, who founded the Chabad movement in the 1700s, wrote that blessed (barukh), is from the usage, "one who bends a vine" (Mishna Kilayim 7:1); הַמַּבְרִיךְ אֶת הַגֶּפֶן בָּאָרֶץ “such that they bend down the head of the branch into the ground, and another vine grows from there”.

What he’s saying is that the motion of the blessing is that of bending a branch of a vine into a ground so that it can grow roots and grow out from this new place.

A beautiful combination of the meanings of kneeling and increasing.

Part 10: Closing

The blessing can travel laterally and vertically.

It can go between people. Or it can come down from God. Or go up to God.

The blessing deepens connections within layers and cuts across layers.

The blessing is about sinking back into the earth and rising up into the sky.

The blessing creates a wonderful web of connection between earth, self, friend, lover, community, the collective, and God.

Where none of these things are separate. Partnership is a piece of community, self is connected to God, the lover and the earth are one.

-

My blessing for us

Is that we know our feelings of lostness and depletion are true and real.

And that we can access the tools that can transform loneliness into connection.

Thank God we don’t have to figure this thing out without our tradition.

Without each other.

And without blessings.

Shabbat shalom.