CBE President’s Column July – August 2026
Fellow Congregants,
We have just come through Shavuot, the festival commemorating a moment when all of us stood at Mt. Sinai and said na’aseh v’nishma — we will do and we will hear. A season of acceptance and willingness to take on the responsibility of covenant.
And then the summer comes. The Jewish calendar turns, almost cruelly, toward its harshest memorials: The seventeenth of Tammuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, and the ninth of Av, when both the First and Second Temple fell — and so many other cruel events in our history are attached to that painful day. We move within a few short weeks from receiving the covenant to mourning what we did with it (more on that in a few paragraphs).
I have been thinking about a verse that sits, fittingly, in this in-between season. In the Parshat Beha’alotcha, a Torah portion we read shortly after Shavuot, the Children of Israel begin to complain. Almost impossibly, they weep for the food of Egypt (Numbers 11:5):
זָכַרְנוּ אֶת־הַדָּגָה אֲשֶׁר־נאכַל בְּמִצְרַיִם חִנָּם אֵת הַקִּשְׁאִים וְאֵת הָאֲבַטִּים וְאֶת־הֶחָצִיר וְאֶת־הַבְּצָלִים וְאֶת־הַשְׁוּמִים
“We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” It is a strange and specific lament. They are free people now, fed daily by manna from heaven, yet they are crying over onions.
Rashi (France; 11th century) refuses to read this as a complaint about food. The fish, he notes, was never truly “free” — slaves are not given free meals. Chinam, “for free,” he teaches, means free of commandments. What the people are really mourning is not the menu of Egypt but the moral weightlessness of slavery. In Egypt, they had no obligations. No covenant pressed on them. The garlic is a cover story. The real longing is to be unburdened — to go back to a life that asks nothing of us.
This is the failure that haunts the Jewish people, and it is worth naming plainly: our downfall has never been a lack of miracles. We have had manna. We have had Sinai. We have had every reason to rise. What undoes us, again and again, is the human heart’s quiet wish to be let off the hook.
Sforno (Italy; 15th–16th century) sharpens the point. He comments that these complainers were slaves. They remember the fish and the garlic; they have somehow forgotten the bricks, the whips, the drowned children. Memory, he explains, is not honest. It edits. It preserves the flavor and discards the suffering. This is how nostalgia becomes a trap: it sells us a past that never existed, and asks us to trade away a demanding present for a comfortable lie.
We need not look as far back as Egypt to catch ourselves doing it. Right now, in the thick of summer, we complain about the heat — the humidity, the long glaring afternoons — and we have already forgotten how bitterly we detested the cold in Connecticut this past winter, one of the harshest in memory. A few months ago we longed for exactly the warmth we now grumble about. We are creatures of now, forever discarding then. We focus on the discomfort in front of us and edit out the discomfort behind us — and in doing so we are, in the smallest and most ordinary way, the very image of our ancestors weeping for garlic.
We should sit with how directly this speaks to the upcoming summer fasts. The seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av are not, at their core, about Babylonians or Roman destruction. The Rabbis of the Talmud insist on this: The walls fell because of human conduct inside them — baseless hatred, moral collapse, the refusal to help one another. The enemy at the gate was always a symptom. The failure was ours. We were not conquered so much as we let go.
And here the Kotzker Rebbe (Poland; 18th–19th century), in his severe and clarifying way (which is to say, his normal way), offers the deepest diagnosis. The sin of the complainers was not heresy. They did not deny God; they had just seen the sea split. Their failure was something smaller and far more dangerous; smallness itself. They could stand at the foot of the mountain of revelation, and a short while later still find their hearts occupied by garlic. The Kotzker would have us understand that the great spiritual catastrophes do not usually arrive as grand acts of rebellion. They arrive as a slow shrinking of vision — a people capable of Sinai settling for onions.
That is the thread that runs from Shavuot to Tisha b’Av. We accept the covenant in the spring, full of resolve. And then, by summer, we discover how heavy it is to keep, how tempting it is to set it down, how easily we mistake the burden of obligation for an injustice done to us. The fast days are not God’s punishment so much as our own reckoning — a yearly accounting of all the times we chose the smaller life.
But there is, of course, a chance to change – a chance for redemption. We are not condemned to be the generation that wept for Egypt. The same calendar that walks us down into mourning carries us, after Tisha b’Av, back up toward Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the possibility of repair.
And in that spirit, I want to close with an invitation that looks forward rather than back. Even now, in the heat of the summer, our professional staff and many of our lay leaders are already hard at work thinking about the High Holidays — the season of return that gives all of this its purpose. It is, in its way, the antidote to garlic and onions: a deliberate act of remembering rightly, of carrying the covenant forward rather than setting it down. If you would like to join in that planning, or to participate in the season ahead in any capacity, we would be grateful and glad to have you. Please reach out. The work of building a community that remembers the mountain is work that belongs to all of us.
The covenant we accepted at Sinai is still ours to carry. The question the summer puts to us is simply this: when the obligation grows heavy, as it always does — will we remember the garlic, or will we remember the mountain? Let’s keep working to choose the mountain.
B’Shalom,
David
