Sep

19

2025

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): Aly Halpert’s song Ayeka opens with the following words in Hebrew:

what have you done?

the voice of your brother’s blood

cries out to me from the ground

where are you

where is your brother

where are you? Ayeka?

In English, she continues:

from the ground I

hear them calling

your brothers’ blood

what can grow here

what have we done?

The words are drawn directly from Genesis 4:8-12, when Cain kills his brother Abel—the first instance of murder in the Torah. The song, a meditation on Israel’s genocidal devastation in Gaza and across the Middle East, invites us to sit with the horrors, and with our own complicity in them.

I learned the song this summer with Aly at Let My People Sing!, a cultural project that is reclaiming and transmitting diasporic Jewish communal singing traditions. Singing these ancient words, over and over, thinking of all the blood crying out to us from the ground, asking over and over, “where are you my people, what have we done?” cracked something open in me—a new round of tears, anger, grief, an antidote to numbness and alienation.

We are entering the high holiday season as the genocide escalates and worsens. For those looking for Jewish voices of moral clarity, connected with our ancient traditions, I invite you to take five minutes with Halpert’s song. Ask yourself: Where are you? Where are we? What can we do? Perhaps even invite her to teach the song in your community.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Dreams is the final episode of Dag Johan Haugerud’s brilliant Oslo Trilogy, Love-Sex-Dreams. In its original form, the trilogy was differently ordered (Sex-Dreams-Love), and the change results in some subtle shifts in the overall effect, but does nothing to undermine the unquestionable brilliance of these films. Though each film stands alone quite well, I can’t recommend enough watching the whole trilogy—an extraordinary cinematic accomplishment.

Haugerud is a novelist, and Dreams is the most novelistic of the three films. Johanne, the main character, is a teenager who develops an infatuation with her female French teacher. It becomes all-consuming, obliterating all of her other outside interests, and she takes to visiting the teacher, Johanna, in her sublet flat in a section of Oslo previously unknown to the adolescent. It’s clear that the teacher both senses her student’s feelings and feels something in return. In the film’s telling, it doesn’t seem anything happens between them, however strong their sentiments. But Johanne, the granddaughter of a writer and a child very much in love with literature, writes a confessional novel in order to make it all clear to herself. Then she shows the manuscript to her grandmother, who, after discussing it with Johanne and her mother, sends it to her publisher, who publishes it with great enthusiasm.

But the discussions of what is in the book don’t match what we have seen. From what we learn of the novel, it’s clear that at least in her imagination, Johanne went further than we have been led to believe. Or is it that we’ve been shown a story that doesn’t match reality? Is it Haugerud who’s an unreliable narrator, or is it Johanne? Much of the story is told in voiceover, which Haugerud didn’t use in any of the other films in the cycle. As a result, almost the entire film takes place in Johanne’s head. When it doesn’t, it’s a matter of other people discussing what goes on in her head.

As in the other two films, Oslo itself is not just a backdrop, but a character. The shift in the city—from Love’s social democratic focus, represented by the concentration on City Hall and its progressive architecture and friezes, through the city under reconstruction in Sex, to the modernist money-centered city of the Barcode District in Dreams, where Johanna lives and which Johanne admits to not knowing—provides a mini-history of Oslo urbanism.

Dreams is a woman’s film, and this, as Haugerud told me over the course of a series of interviews, was always his intention. Only one male character really has anything to say: Johanne’s therapist Bjorn, who appeared also in Love and was mentioned in Sex. Here, what he has to say to his patient is dismissed by her completely. Three female generations of the same family—the pressures, doubts, and desires they face—are the motor of the film.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): Austin Butler is easy on the eyes. That’s really what drew me to the baseball-themed action flick Caught Stealing—that, and the fact that my baseball-obsessed girlfriend was leaving for a couple weeks, and we wanted to watch something fun rather than our typical diet of sprawling foreign films where very little happens. Caught Stealing was fun, and, shockingly, good.

The broad strokes of the plot encompass variations on the common theme of action movies. Hank (Butler), our all-American country-boy protagonist who frequently calls home to his single mom, finds himself thrust into New York’s underbelly of crime due to his mere proximity to a mohawked Brit punk neighbor. We learn of his tragic backstory (a star baseball player in high school, he almost played “real ball” before his career was cut short by a tragic drunk-driving accident which injured his knee and took his friend’s life); we root against the villains who cross the moral threshold by harming a cat (the cold-blooded execution of Hank’s almost-girlfriend wasn’t enough to establish their evilness, apparently); we watch some exceptionally well-shot chase scenes and fight scenes through the gritty streets and bars of 1990s New York (complete with anti-Giuliani graffiti).

What makes Caught Stealing stand out, though, is its revelry in excess. It is properly campy, and, for all his possible shortcomings, director Darren Aronofsky is very good at camp. The baseball theming is absurdly, superbly executed, with Hank wielding baseball bats where a gun would be more appropriate, performing ridiculous sliding techniques during chase scenes, diverting his pursuers to Shea Stadium and siccing a crowd of Mets fans on them for wearing his stolen Giants hat, and punctuating every single call to his mother––including one which comprises the movie’s emotional climax––with “Go Giants!” The catchphrase morphs into a sort of comedic––but earnest––prayer; baseball morphs into a kind of kitsch epic myth, the exploits of its starring heroes dominating the gritty reality of Hank’s life.

The spirit of excess extends to the movie’s gritty crime circles as well. Aronofsky does not content himself with one shadowy criminal circle; the villains range from Russian (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) to Puerto Rican (Bad Bunny) to Hasidic (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) to the aforementioned British neighbor (Matt Smith) to an NYPD detective (Regina King), each hailing from their own syndicates, each having formerly coexisted in an uneasy, too-convoluted-to-follow alliance forged by the great equalizer: money.

There’s an allegorical reading to be had from the fact that, unlike in most crime movies, the gratuitous violence doesn’t start from someone reneging from a deal––instead, a large sum of money doesn’t get distributed only because one of the villains has an honest-to-god family emergency. Ultimately, that doesn’t matter; as soon as there’s a suspicion that the money won’t be paid out, the capitalism-forged multi-ethnic coalition crumbles instantly, and the bodies start piling up as everyone involved becomes a target for their would-be conspirators.

Aronofsky’s obsession with effluvia plays well with this theme. The world of Caught Stealing is filled with blood, vomit, and shit––never touching the money itself, but strewn about on the path to it. Hank is baptized into the world of criminal greed through an encounter with the Russians, which leaves him squirming in a pool of his own blood, and his proper indoctrination into the plot comes from finding a key stashed in a cat’s litterbox. Only through a katabasis of abjection is Hank able to acquire the money himself and find a happy ending.

The most haunting moment of the movie comes from a scene with Lipa and Shmully Drucker, two Hasidic mobsters, who have just committed acts of violence on a jaw-dropping scale––Hank, despite his trauma and over his objections, is their getaway driver, since it’s Shabbos (and they already have enough to answer to Hashem for). The two brothers decide out of the goodness of their heart to give Hank some money and let him leave with his life––after all, Hashem’s love is infinite, and their Bubbe was fond of Hank anyway. During these negotiations, someone asks Hank for a light, handing him the lighter lifted off of his executed almost-girlfriend. Uneasily, they explain to him that it simply had to be done to show him they were serious. “It’s a broken world,” they lament of their own brutal murder.

Caught Stealing is undeniably pulpy, but the ensuing shot of Hank wrapping the car around a steel pillar––stunningly aesthetic in itself, especially rich for mirroring an earlier scene of his traumatic crash––encapsulates the film’s darker and more beautiful aspect, sitting in delightful tension with its frenetic action movie campiness.

This week’s parshah focuses on the reach of human responsibility. The Torah makes clear that we are all accountable under the covenant, but the exact scope of that responsibility is left elusive. This uncertainty plays out in interpretations of a cryptic verse in our parshah: After warning the Israelites that they will be exiled if they violate the covenant, the Torah teaches that “hidden things are for YHWH our God; but revealed things are for us and for our descendants forever to do all the words of this Torah.”

The Rabbinic tradition records at least three explanations of what these hidden and revealed things are and in what way we might understand them as belonging to God or to “us.” The Yom Kippur liturgy interprets the hidden things as referring to harm each of us committed unknowingly and about which we remain unaware. Just after the confession of enumerated sins, the liturgy has us add a more general note to account for transgressions “that are revealed to us” as well as “those that are not revealed to us.” We recite: “Those revealed to us we have already said before You and admitted them to You. And those that are not revealed to us are revealed and known to You, according to the spoken word, ‘Hidden things are for YHWH our God; but revealed things are for us and for our descendants forever.’” In this reading, the verse serves to soften the terror of the warnings of doom if we violate the covenant, relieving our guilt and culpability for harm we’ve done that we don’t know about. According to the early midrashic work Sifrei Bemidbar the hidden things are obligations not perceivable in the Torah, which God has not yet shown us. Further intimacy with and knowledge of God will eventually grant us deeper human awareness and understanding of what it means to be responsible; in the meantime, we are on the hook only for what has already been revealed. Like the previous interpretation, this one reads the verse as diluting the threats of brutal punishment preceding it.

While both of these interpretations address the individual, limiting the personal scope of liability, the third and most prominent Rabbinic interpretation, in the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin, understands the verse to address the body politic as a whole. This reading affirms that the community bears collective responsibility for the sins of its members in a case when the public knows about the misdeeds, but exonerates the community as a whole for individual transgressions that have been hidden from the public. This may be the most literarily compelling of the three readings, because the immediately preceding context shows extreme concern with just that question. The 12 curses ritually announced two chapters earlier in the covenant inauguration ceremony are, as Rashbam explains, directed toward those transgressing in private, the domain in which the judicial community is least empowered to intervene and in which the harm-doer is most likely to believe that they can get away with it. Just ten verses before our verse, the Torah describes such a character, imagining them delusionally announcing, “I’ll remain at peace, though acting with willful obstinance,” while bringing ruin on everyone.

Collective responsibility for the sin of an individual is, on the face of it, a scandalous proposition. Reacting to a threat in the Vayikra curses that after years of sin the people will suffer for both their own and their ancestors’ sins, the Midrash Sifra objects, “But hasn’t the Omnipresent One promised Israel not to punish parents via their children nor children via their parents? As is said [in a different Biblical verse]: ‘Parents shall not be put to death on account of children and children shall not be put to death on account of parents’!” The midrash resolves the contradiction by arguing that this intergenerational liability applies only “when they hold onto the deeds of their ancestors generation after generation.” In other words, people should never be held accountable for someone else’s harm if they did not participate. Similarly, another midrash in the Sifra unpacks a different curse, that “they shall stumble, one person by their kin,” to mean that one person will stumble through another person’s sin, and concludes that the overarching principle derived from this clause is that “all of Israel are liable for each other.” Both times this teaching is recorded in the Talmud, it includes the caveat that every Jew is responsible for the sins of any other Jew—but only in cases when “they had the ability to protest, but did not.” Harm done secretly in our midst, like much of the harm perpetrated by powerful people against those subordinate to them, goes on unprotested, which might raise anxiety that our whole society is responsible. On the face of it, our verse reassures us that it is unjust to hold us all accountable for crimes we don’t know about; had we known about them, maybe we would have protested.

There is an anomaly in our verse, though, that casts doubt about that reassurance. Our verse is written in the Torah with dots above its letters, one of ten verses in the Torah that must be written in this way, likely indicating scribal uncertainty regarding whether the words in question are even the ones meant to be written. Each of the possible interpretations of our verse therefore must account for what added uncertainty the dots are meant to refer to. According to the Talmud in this last reading, the dots indicate that the shape of public accountability was not static, but increased when the people crossed into the Land of Israel and were sworn to the covenant: National sovereignty entails more accountability. Within this reading, though, there is a profound dispute as to the scope of collective responsibility. Rabbi Yehudah explains that the verse as it appears applied before entering the land, but afterward, the Israelites became accountable even for hidden sins of individuals. As Rashi explains, the 11 dots written above the letters in our verse correspond to the 11 Hebrew letters comprising “for YHWH our God.” Though they were moved to another clause due to the impropriety of marking God’s name for erasure, they indicate that once the community has sovereignty, God no longer spares it from accountability for hidden transgressions. The dots tell us that the verse reads, “the hidden things and the revealed things are for us and for our descendants forever.” Rabbi Nechemia found Rabbi Yehudah’s explanation shocking: How could God punish us for hidden sins? Instead, he argues, before crossing into the land, the people were not collectively accountable for any individual transgression, no matter how public. Only when they crossed into the land were they communally on the hook for the public actions of individual members, though never for private, hidden harms done by individuals.

Rabbi Nechemia would seem to have the stronger case: How can the public be culpable for what individuals do in private? There are some textual problems with his position, though. For one thing, in the Book of Joshua, shortly after the inauguration of the covenant, one individual, ‘Akhan, steals proscribed wealth and hides it away. In response, God thunders that “Israel has sinned! They have broken the covenant by which I bound them. They have taken of the proscribed and put it in their vessels; they have stolen; they have broken faith!” It seems that God does hold the collective accountable for the hidden sin of an individual. Second, Rabbi Nechemiah doesn’t have a compelling reading of why the dots are situated where they are and how the verse should be read upon emendation. Third, the public recitation of the curses at the inauguration of the covenant in last week’s parshah highlights that private sins are of utmost public concern. Why pronounce curses against private sinners in the ceremony of pledging the community to the covenant if the people aren’t to be accountable for those private sinners?

In a probing essay on our verse and its interpretations, which thoroughly informed this dvar Torah, Devora Steinmetz suggests a few theories for the legal proposition that the whole community is answerable for transgressions about which they know nothing. Perhaps the community is accountable because “something in the communal structure or culture” enabled the private sin. Alternatively, even if the community did not enable the harm in any way, accountability is inseparable from impact: “Their fate is intertwined.”

We are not liable for the harm done by others when we object; we are liable when we do not object. But the case of not knowing about harm is also a case in which we did not object. Why didn’t we know about it? Was it, maybe, more convenient not to know? Was there some communal will in not knowing? The feminist movement has shown that it is the private sphere where the worst harm often is inflicted on the least protected citizens. As Catherine MacKinnon put it, “for women the measure of the intimacy has been the measure of the oppression. This is why feminism has had to explode the private.” Let this be the year in which all our communities embrace radical responsibility and create cultures of care that leave no hidden corners of neglect for harm to fester while we putter along not knowing.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.