London, Monday 4 May 2026 / 17 Iyyar 5786
The current situation is fraught with crisis. How do we hold steady?
That question has been with me for quite some time, in our community and in conversations across the wider Jewish world. The pressures are familiar to most of us by now: a heightened sense of threat in our own country, the strain that this places on communities and on those who lead them, the long shadow cast by events further away, and the slower internal exhaustion that has settled in alongside it all.
Crises have a shape, a direction. There is the shock of the beginning, when adrenaline kicks in, and there is, eventually, an end, or at least a turning. Between them lies what I have come to think of as the long middle. The first response is over. The pressures have not lifted. Nobody knows how long it will last. The horizon, which once felt visible in years, feels best measured in days and months. Acute moments produce books and speeches. The long middle produces fatigue and a set of questions about how to keep going.
The closing chapters of Leviticus, which we are reading in these weeks of Iyar, give us a Torah for exactly this, a Torah for the long walking. This middle is where weariness becomes real, where hard decisions are still being made, and where the temptation runs in two directions: hardening into defensiveness or dissolving into despair. Leviticus offers us a meaningful gift. It teaches us how to walk when we do not know how the story ends.
The last parashiyot of Leviticus, read through this lens, teach us something at once modest and demanding: a set of disciplines for the middle itself. How to continue when tired. How to count time when the future is uncertain. How to guard our speech under pressure. How to keep loving both neighbour and stranger when the circle wants to tighten. How to make hard decisions while remaining human. How to walk when we cannot yet see the road ahead. These are practices for ordinary days, the kind we can pick up when our day starts.
Acharei Mot opens with the death of Aaron’s sons still fresh in the air and the high priest preparing to enter the holy place for the Yom Kippur service. The Torah asks Aaron to enter while his grief is still acute. He shows a resilience that includes the willingness to feel tired, to feel the loss, and yet to continue.
This matters in a moment when our communities, our leaders, and many of us as individuals are running on accumulated fatigue. Steadiness in this season includes the honest acceptance of exhaustion as part of the work. The roller coaster of emotions is what this time feels like from the inside; the feeling itself is part of how we walk. Aaron continued the service. We continue the service.
Tazria and Metzora describe an affliction that does not heal in a single day. The afflicted person is examined, isolated for seven days, examined again, perhaps isolated for another seven, then declared clean, then re-enters the camp gradually, with offerings and washing and patience. The Torah builds slowness into its very structure.
When the future feels too uncertain to plan in years, planning in days and months becomes the discipline the tradition has always known. The metzora, the one afflicted by a skin disease, teaches us to count by sevens, to expect waiting between examinations, and to trust a process whose end we cannot see from inside the seven days. A smaller future is also a more honest one. The horizon shrinks, but the ground beneath our feet remains.
The same parashah carries one of the rabbis’ sharpest teachings. In the Talmud (Arakhin 15b), Resh Lakish reads the very word metzora as a contraction of motzi shem ra, ‘one who brings out a bad name’. The skin affliction, in the rabbinic imagination, mirrors a corruption of speech.
מְצֹרָע ← מוֹצִיא שֵׁם רָע
The rabbis distinguished three forms of damaging speech. Lashon ha-ra is true negative speech that nonetheless harms its subject. Motzi shem ra is the false report, slander proper. Rekhilut is the carrying of one neighbour’s words to another. The same Talmudic page weighs lashon ha-ra against the three major transgressions: idolatry, sexual immorality, and bloodshed.
This sounds severe until we consider the conditions under which the rabbis lived and the conditions under which we are now living. Under pressure, communities are tempted into the corrosive words. We speak of one another with less care. We carry a half-rumour to a third party because it relieves something in us. We assume the worst of those who disagree with us, and we say so. The metzora teaches that this is its own kind of disease and that it spreads.
Sh’mirat ha-lashon, the guarding of the tongue, is one of the smallest and most demanding ways to hold steady. It governs the leader as much as the led. It allows for honest disagreement; the same tradition asks us to rebuke a neighbour openly when there is something to rebuke (Leviticus 19:17). What it refuses is the easier corruption: speaking ill where there is no purpose, carrying tales, giving someone a bad name when we are tired and aggrieved and the tongue is the easiest weapon to hand. In a fraught moment, this discipline is a load-bearing wall. Without it, the camp empties itself before any external force ever arrives.
Kedoshim places two commandments within almost the same paragraph. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18) and, sixteen verses later, ‘The stranger who dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Leviticus 19:34). The Torah refuses to choose between care for our own and care for those who are not.
In a moment when British Jews feel less safe, the temptation is to draw the circle tighter. The Torah does the opposite. It calls us into deeper relation with those around us, including those who share our exposure to other forms of hatred. Interfaith partnership and dialogue belong to the chapter that defines holiness. They are part of how we hold steady, especially now. The Jewish people have rarely been secure when standing alone, and we have rarely been more faithful to our calling than when our particular care for our own has flowed naturally into a wider care for our neighbours.
Near the close of Emor, a man blasphemes in the camp, and a community in crisis must make a judgment about one of its own. Moses has no script; he turns to God and asks. The Torah preserves the difficulty of the moment: the hesitation, the consultation, the weight of the decision (Leviticus 24:10–14).
Communities under pressure often face decisions they would rather not have to face. Leaders carry these alongside other people who carry them. The Torah holds the decisions in their full difficulty and asks that they be made with an unhardened heart. Hard choices and humanity sit in the same chapter, and the guarding of the tongue governs how we speak about each other through these decisions, including when we disagree about them strongly. The work is to make the decision and remain a person; to lead and remain a neighbour.
What I have been learning these past weeks, as a rabbi and as a person, is that steadiness is rebuilt rather than maintained. It is rebuilt in the morning, often before the day’s first email. Leadership in this season carries questions that have no clean answer, and it carries them alongside the people we serve, who are carrying their own. The work has been to make the calls when they need to be made, and to keep the heart from hardening in the making. I do not always succeed. Fortunately, our tradition is generous with people who do not always succeed.
Leviticus closes with words I find I keep returning to: Im bechukotai telechu, ‘If you walk in My statutes’ (Leviticus 26:3). The blessing comes from walking, one foot after the other. When the future is too uncertain to plan, the practice remains. Walking is the smallest available unit of the future, and it is the unit Leviticus closes on.
It is worth remembering that the closing chapters of Leviticus have twice been carried by communities without a Temple. They reached their final form among the exilic editors who shaped them after the destruction of the First Temple. They became part of the synagogue cycle of Torah reading after the destruction of the Second, when rabbinic Judaism made the public reading of these very chapters, with their elaborate sacrificial detail, one of the ways the people kept the memory of the sanctuary alive. The form held when the system failed, twice over. The text was carried forward by the patience of generations who refused to let it fall. We are in that lineage. Jewish history has known troubled moments before, and our liturgy and calendar and practice were built, in significant part, by people holding steady through them. This moment is older than we are, and the question it raises is older still. This leaves us with one essential question: when the road ahead has shortened to days and months, what is the next step that is ours to walk?
