From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Several months ago my wife Shira shared that she was concerned that I was not getting enough protein or fiber in my diet. Her concerns were valid. I am basically a vegetarian, so I am a bit protein-challenged. And I had no idea what fiber is, or how to get enough of it. So Shira connected me to a new AI best friend: ChatGPT’s Nutrition Tracking Assistant. Every day I would log everything I ate, everything I drank, and all my daily exercise, and this omniscient source of knowledge would tell me all I needed to know—and would suggest helpful tweaks for how to get more protein and fiber. It was all going just fine. I was logging every day, ChatGPT was responding with helpful suggestions, and I was eating healthier. Then we went on a family vacation withour adult children and our granddaughter, who was sixteen months old at the time. One night we volunteered to put our granddaughter to bed so that our adult children could go out together for dinner. By the time we had finished the evening ritual—feeding her, bathing her, changing her, giving her one last bottle, and finally getting her to sleep—we were completely wiped out. We had no idea how we had once apparently had the energy to raise our own children. And we were far too tired to cook or eat dinner ourselves. So I did the next best thing. I had my two favorite foods: scotch and potato chips. Then I went straight to sleep. The next morning I had to log what I had eaten, and for a moment I faced a moral dilemma. Should I lie to ChatGPT? Should I report that I had eaten four ounces of cooked salmon, one cup of roasted broccoli, and one cup of blueberries for dessert? I was tempted. But then I remembered: garbage in, garbage out. So I told the brutal truth. I had two scotches and two bowls of potato chips, and then I went to sleep. I was surprised by what happened next. I had kind of been expecting a reprimand. After all, there is not all that much protein or fiber in scotch and potato chips—even in two helpings of scotch and potato chips. But to my surprise, ChatGPT could not have been more lovely, more gentle, more understanding. I will never forget what she wrote in response. She said that I had had a “human evening.” I am not sure what other kind of evening I could have had. But I will take it. This was a human evening. Chat GPT added: There was nothing to recover from. Nothing to apologize for. Just begin logging the new day. ChatGPT’s kind response left me with a question not about nutrition but about love. When we think someone we care about is on the wrong track, what does love demand from us? Should we love our neighbor the way my ChatGPT loved me? Should we be as positive, as gentle, as affirming, and as reluctant to offer critique?

Usually, in the Jewish calendar and in the Jewish canon, redemption comes top down. In the Exodus story, God brings about redemption with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with ten plagues and signs and wonders. In the creation of the State of Israel that we marked with Yom Haatzmaut this week, the Israel Defense Forces brings about the creation and the continued existence of the Jewish state. Tomorrow morning we are going to examine an odd redemption story. Redemption comes not from God, kings, prophets, leaders, or armies, but from four lepers whose names we do not even know. The story, from 2 Kings 7, takes place during war. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was attacked by Aram, that had laid siege to it. There was no food. People were starving. It was as grim as grim could be. In that dark time, four lepers, who are outside the gates of the city, who are not welcome in the city, who have no prospects, bring salvation to Israel. We will do a close textual read of an odd redemption story for what it teaches us about us now.

What does Jewish history—its incredible heaviness (Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron) and its incredible inspiration (Yom Ha’atzmaut)—ask of me? Does the passage of time affect the answer to that question? We are 81 years from the Holocaust. We are in the midst of yet another war with Iran and its proxies. What is our current responsibility to the Shoah and to the State of Israel? If we choose to disengage from all this heaviness, if we choose to not make Jewish history our problem, if we choose just to live our lives in Greater Boston, send out kids to school, do our jobs, come home, call it a day, that choice is tempting. That choice is understandable. What is the cost of that choice? To grapple with these hard questions during this season of the three Yoms, we will examine two Talmudic stories from Ta’anit 23A. The first is the story of Choni who sees a man planting carob trees and asks how long it will take for the carob to be ready to eat? 70 years. Will you still be here in 70 years? No. But I inherited a world that had carob trees that had been planted by my ancestors, and I want to leave a world that has carob trees for my descendants. The second, on the heels of the first, has Choni waking up from a deep sleep of 70 years. When he wakes up, he goes to his old haunts, his home, his shul, his study hall, and no one recognizes him. He cries out: “I am Choni.” But he is invisible. Unseen. Unrecognized. Everybody he knew is dead. Nobody alive knows him. He dies of a broken heart, prompting the climactic rabbinic teaching: oh chavrutah oh mitutah. Give me community or give me death. So many questions:

From the very moment the downed airman landed in Iran after ejecting from his plane, he knew the clock was ticking. He knew that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would be hunting for him. He knew that local tribes might find him first. He knew that if he were caught by the enemy, it would dramatically complicate an already complicated war. He was concussed. He was injured. And he was trained for just this moment. As has been widely reported, he somehow summoned the strength to climb a steep, treacherous mountain and to hide himself in rugged terrain, knowing something else as well: that the US Army would leave no stone unturned in order to find him. And thank God, they did. His rescue was breathtaking. It put the lives of other elite soldiers at risk. It required extraordinary planning and coordination deep in enemy territory. It involved airpower, helicopters,and equipment costing millions of dollars—some of which was damaged or destroyed in the effort. All of it was done in service of one overarching purpose: leave no soldier behind. Abandon no one. As I followed this story of rescue and redemption, I could only think of a teaching I once heard on Andy Stanley’s leadership podcast which was entitled “The Catch with Purpose.” Andy noted thatwe all want purpose. But purpose comes with what he called a “catch.” Purpose exacts real costs. The things we care most about, the causes to which we give our heart and soul, make demands upon us. We lose sleep. We sweat out the details. And caring so much and giving so much are precisely what give our lives meaning.

What do you want to be known for? That is a question only you can answer. What are you known for? That is a question you cannot answer. That is a question that can only be answered by other people. The difference between what we want to be known for, and what we are known for, is the work we are called upon to do to become ever better versions of ourselves. That is the Torah of a thought leader named Jeff Henderson in a recent Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. In other words, there are times when other people’s opinions about us matter. In fact, after the sin of the golden calf, when God threatens to destroy the Hebrew slaves and to create a new people, Moses argues that God should not destroy the people of Israel and start over again: Let not the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that He delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.” Exodus 32: 12. Why should God care what the Egyptians think? The Egyptians were slave-owners. The Egyptians were oppressors. What kind of moral compass could they have had? The classic rabbinic answer, embodied by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, is that God’s reputation matters. Having chosen to intervene in history by freeing the slaves from Egypt by dint of signs and wonders and plagues, the meaning of this narrative in the world at large does matter. What people say does matter. But are there limits to whose views about us matter? In the Andy Stanley podcast, Jeff Henderson invites us to think about the groups whom we are for, and whose opinions about us therefore matter. The work we need to do can sometimes only emerge by asking others what they think of us—unsettling but true.

Please enjoy this special Shabbat morning sermon with Amy Schectman, CEO of 2Life Communities. Amy teaches us about optimal aging and the liberation that is possible when we orient ourselves around living in and building community. About Amy Schectman Amy has served as the CEO of 2Life Communities for over a decade where she successfully launched an aggressive expansion campaign to fill gaps in the senior housing affordability marketplace, managed the creation of a quasi-endowment to support agency innovation, and has more than doubled the number of communities built and supported by 2Life. She brings over 30 years’ experience in housing and economic development policy, government, and nonprofit sectors.

On the Shabbat of Chol Hamoed Pesach (April 4), we encounter a curious reading: Shir Hashirim, Song of Songs. If you have never really studied it, you might think, “Oh, that is the Bible’s famous love story. On the festival of Passover, a springtime of renewal, we read about love. How lovely.” You would think that only if you haven't read the book. If you read Shira Hashirim, it is not a happily ever after love story. To the contrary, it is a story of lovers who seek but do not find, who knock on the door only to find an empty bedroom, who yearn but whose yearning is not fulfilled. It is taken by rabbinic Judaism to be an allegory for the love relationship of God and Israel—anything but a simple love story. Yearning unfulfilled. And we chant it during the holiday when we celebrate God taking us out of Egypt through miraculous signs and wonders. Complexity. In Talmud we are going to examine two broken love stories: Shir Hashirim, and a story in Allegra Goodman’s brilliant book This Is Not About Us entitled Deal Breaker. Both are stories of broken love. What do broken love stories teach us about love? What do broken love stories teach us about us?

Do you rememberthe classic Lay’s potato chip ad—you can’t eat just one? That line came back to me on our recent flight to San Francisco, because once I picked up a new novel, I simply could not put it down. The book, Good People, by Patmeena Sabit, tells the story of Afghan immigrants who come to America after the Soviet‑Afghan war. At the center is one family: Rahmat and Maryam Sharaf and their four children, struggling in a cramped one‑bedroom apartment. Fellow immigrants tell Rahmat to accept low‑wage work—work at Walmart 40 hours a week 12 dollars an hour for the rest of your life—and hope the next generation does better. He refuses. After many failures, years of seven‑day weeks, and very little sleep, he builds a successful business, sells it, and reinvests, moving his family from poverty to a multimillion‑dollar home in Virginia. But the heart ofthe story is their daughter, Zorah—beloved and gifted. At 18, she dies in a single‑car accident after her car slides into a canal. Was it an accident? Was it a crime? We never know. What actually happened remains a mystery. The novel is told only through brief observations from others—neighbors, friends, journalists. We hear about the family. We never hear from the family. And each observer reveals far more about themselves than about the Sharafs—and there is a lot of negative energy. The religiously observant complain that the Sharafs weren’t observant enough. Those nostalgic for Afghanistan complain that they were too American. Some parents critique the Sharafs for being too lenient. Some teenagers critique the Sharafs for being too strict. Threaded through it all is something harsher: schadenfreude—a perverse pleasure in someone else’s pain. People carrying their own disappointments and losses look at this family and judge them. Many characters have hard lives—economic pressures, cultural dislocation, broken dreams. Their hardship makes them hard. Understandable. Human. But hard.

Allegra Goodman recently published a collection of short stories called This is Not About Us. The irony is that the book is very much about us. She describes the Rubinstein family of Greater Boston. The kids went to Maimonides. Much of the action takes place in Brookline. There are stories of day-to-day life in Boston, and in Jewish Boston, that will feel deeply familiar. I felt I was reading about us. One of those stories, Redemption Song, is about how a family does Passover together where they have very different approaches to the holiday. The patriarch, Irving, was a Holocaust survivor and ran a stern, joyless Maxwell House seder that scarred his young sons, Dan and Steven. When they grow up, both living in Brookline, they have very different approaches to the seders. There are vegans and pot roast lovers. There are Maxwell House adherents—just read what is in the Haggadah—and innovative voices that put oranges, bananas, and other objects on the seder table to represent various oppressed peoples. There are family members who don’t believe in instrumental music, and others who love to sing and play guitar. There are people who love deep conversation about deep topics, and others who just want to get on with it. The title of the story comes from the last song that Bob Marley composed, Redemption Song, while facing his own mortality, contending with advanced cancer. His song tackles this question: how we can achieve freedom from the forces that constrain us? How do we achieve redemption? Allegra Goodman’s story ends with the younger generation singing this song. Please read the story. Please listen to the song. What do the story and the song teach us about how we can achieve our Redemption Song at our upcoming seders and in the world at this hard time?

For the last two weeks, I have been wearing this tallit. At Kiddush, both weeks, I have discovered that our congregation is very generous when it comes to offering feedback. People had opinions about the tallit which they shared promptly and candidly.Comments like: “What’s with that new tallit? What is it? It doesn’t really look like a tallit. Is it a shawl? Is it a scarf? Is it a new shawl, scarf type of tallit?”Or: “Rabbi, it doesn’t sit right on you. It’s lopsided.”Or a very generous offer of help: “Rabbi, can I give you a signal that your tallit is off, and that way, mid-sermon, you can make an adjustment?”Or: “The tallit must be a war tallit. That’s it. It’s dark. It’s blue. This is a war footing tallit which you are wearing to show solidarity with the IDF and our American troops in combat.”So first of all, thank you. Thank you for noticing and offering your feedback. The truth is, the tallit is not new. It is an old tallit renewed. Many years ago, my in laws were on vacation in Hawaii. My father in love saw this fabric, it was a white fabric with bright blue stars. It was not a tallit. He just imagined that it could be. So he bought the fabric and took it back to Minneapolis, where he was a rabbi. He gave the fabric to a local tallit-maker and asked her to make it into a tallit. He used it as a specialty tallit, wearing it only on Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, because it was fun, it was different, it was Hawaii, it was celebratory, it captured festival energy.When my father in love retired in 2004, he gave this tallit to me. I loved it so much, because it reminded me of him, that I wore it every Shabbat, every holiday, including the High Holidays. It was the one and only tallit I ever wore. Every Yom Kippur Shira and I would walk home and she would say: “My father’s starry Hawaii tallit is not the right energy for Yom Kippur.” But I wore it anyway. At last the tallit got so tattered, torn and frayed beyond repair that I reluctantly concluded it was time to let it go. But Shira had heard of a local woman who is a tallit wizard. Shira gave this tallit wizard the tattered tallit and asked: Is there anything you can do with this? She worked on it for several weeks, and this is the result.The new tallit is different from the old tallit. It is not as big. It is a different color scheme. It is blue and blue instead of white and blue. But the core of the old is still in the new. It still has the bright stars that first captured my father in love’s attention. And it is still a gift from my father in love, a generational and emotional connection.The truth is that all of us are on the verge of our own moment making something new out of something old; making something that is ours out of something that we inherited from our parents and grandparents.

One of the hardest things in the world is to come up with something new to say about a subject that has been amply covered by other writers. A new biography of Abraham Lincoln, a new history of the Civil War, a new take on the New Deal—is a new insight even possible on topics that have been written about so extensively? In that spirit, can there be a new Haggada that comes up with a new take that no one else has ever seen before in thousands of years of Haggadot? Apparently, the answer is yes. Last week Danny Gordis referred his readers to a new Haggada that just came out from Israel, entitled Echoes of Egypt: A Haggada, written by Joshua Berman, a professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, who did his undergrad at Princeton, spent eight years at Yeshivat Har Ezion outside of Jerusalem, and got his PhD in Bible at Bar-Ilan. This Haggada is a revelation. Small wonder that Danny Gordis highlighted it. I have been studying Haggadot my adult life, and in reading Joshua Berman’s work, I learned things that I never knew before—basic things, important things, that once you read them seem indispensable to understanding Passover. Egyptian artwork adorns every page of this Haggadah. Professor Berman shows that both the Torah and the Haggada take Egyptian themes, rituals, artwork, cultural motifs, appropriate them, and turn them on their head in order to express core Jewish values. There is a constant dance between the Egyptian reality and the Hebrew/Jewish appropriation of that reality. As just one example: a leading motif in ancient Egypt was the Pharoah’s strong hand and outstretched arm ready to whack enslaved people. The Torah and the Haggada apply this iconic Egyptian language of strong hand and outstretched arm to God as God liberates an enslaved people. Egyptian reality. Hebrew language. Jewish values. All invite us to ask ourselves: how will this year’s seders be different from any other seders now that we know we cannot understand the Exodus until we more deeply understand Egypt.

Cantor Elias Rosemberg and Temple Emanuel member Evan Falchuk discuss Evan's his family roots in Venezuela and the current political situation.

If you have ever had back surgery, you know what a shlepped-out ordeal it can be. You have back pain. You go to your doctor who wants to try a conservative treatment plan. Pain medication. Then you try heat. Then you try cold. Put your legs up in bed on a stack of pillows. Lie this way, lie that way. Then comes physical therapy. All those appointments. All those exercises. Still have the pain. Then you try the shots. At last, you do surgery. Then comes the recovery. And then therapy. PT. OT. And then please God, at long last you feel hopefully better. Now, what is worse than back surgery? Answer: a second back surgery. You went through all this rigmarole, all the steps, and then you enjoyed a reprieve from pain. And then, again. One of the hardest words in the world is again. There is the pain of getting laid off--and the pain of getting laid off again. The pain of fighting addiction, of falling off the wagon--and the pain of falling off the wagon again. The pain of losing a loved one--and the pain of losing a loved one, again. Most of us will experience the pain of again in our personal lives. And the pain of again is what makes this such a fraught moment on the world stage. For Israel, it’s not just that sirens are sounding, missiles are falling, buildings are being crushed, routines are shattered and nights of sleep are disrupted. It is that all this happened in June, and it’s now happening again. Sirens sounding again, missiles falling again, buildings crushed again, routines shattered again, no sleep again. How do we think about the problem of again?

What text can best take in the challenge of American Jews at this moment who love America, who love Israel, and who face the daily torrent of news about the war? The text that comes up for me is Homer’s classic The Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his crew must navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. Both fierce and fearsome monsters are lethal. On the one hand, we have Scylla, a war against a genocidal enemy whose mottos are “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”; which had a tower in Tehran promising the end of Israel by 2040 based on the then Supreme Leader’s promise in 2015 “The Zionist regime will not survive the next 25 years.” Small wonder that 93% of Israeli Jews, even though they bear the cost of the war directly, even though their buildings are destroyed and their schedules shattered and their nights of sleep are ruined, they still support the war because the Islamic Republic has made destroying Israel its highest priority, more important than providing food, education, water, electricity and opportunity to its own people. On the other hand, we have Charybdis, the heartbreaking costs in blood and treasure and tremendous uncertainty of this war. After multiple days of war, and after the Supreme Commander was assassinated, the new leader is the son of the Supreme Commander. Is this progress? How will this end? And in the meantime, there is a growing narrative that Israel pushed America into this war, and real concern that an unpopular war that turns into a quagmire will inflame antisemitism and antizionism even more. So what do we do when navigating Scylla and Charybdis? In class we are going to examine Matza and Manna two foods that are more than foods. Two foods that embody truths for biblical Israel, for Israel today, and for the Jewish people navigating a tumultuous time without great choices.

If you have ever been married, or if you have ever walked an adult child down the aisle, think back to the energy, the electricity, the excitement of the wedding day. All that love in one sacred place. Pure magic. There was a young, bright, beautiful Israeli couple looking forward to their wedding day. The bride and the groom were getting married in the backyard of the bride’s parents. Joyful and magical. Except for two small details. The date of their wedding was Thursday, June 12, 2025. The couple was getting married that night. Israel’s war with Iran, what would become known as the 12-day war, would begin at dawn on Friday, June 13. And the groom is a fighter pilot for the IDF. He flies F16s. The groom knew the war was coming imminently. He knew that he would be flying an F16 into Iran. He was scheduled to be the first pilot of the first F16 into Iran. Which would have required him to be at the base at the time he was to be under the chuppah. So he asked the IDF if he could be the second pilot into Iran. The IDF said yes. That allowed him to stand under the chuppah with his bride. Before the chuppah, he had borrowed his grandmother’s car. It was an hour’s drive from where he would spend his wedding night to his army base. The car was packed and ready to go. The bride and groom got married. On their wedding night, a loud and scary siren reverberated throughout Israel that was the nation’s signal that war with Iran was at hand; and that was the groom’s signal that his wedding was over, it was time to take his grandmother’s car to the base, to get into an F16, and to fly into Iran. Within mere hours of smashing the glass under their chuppah and kissing his bride, the newly minted husband was in the F16 flying into Iran. During the 12-day war, he would fly an F16 into Iran, and back to Israel, day after day. Roll the film forward. The couple, now newlyweds, moved to Cambridge. She is now a first-year business school student at Sloane, MIT’s business school. And liking it. He is working for an Israeli start-up. And liking it. They are together, happy, happy. And then January, and the build up to the war with Iran, again. To be an Israeli fighter pilot, one needs to fly their F16 at least once a week. He was no longer certified to be a pilot, because it had been several months since he had last flown. He could have stayed in Cambridge. He could have stayed with his still newlywed wife. But he knew that if he did not fly the F16 into Iran, someone else would have to do it. He felt a duty to his country. He felt a duty to his people. He felt a duty to his fellow fighter pilots. So, again, he leaves his new bride, in mid-January he goes back to Israel, he gets back in his F16s, he gets recredentialed as a seasoned and qualified fighter pilot, and he has been flying mission after mission into Iran this past week. Meanwhile, she is living by herself, again, in Cambridge. Interrupted wedding night. Interrupted newlywed year. It just is.Why am I telling you all this? When the war broke out, I had thought that American Jews, certainly the ones I know and love at Temple Emanuel, would be uniformly and unambivalently in support of this war. Of course war is hell. Of course we prefer peace. Of course we pray for peace. Of course war unleashes unpredictable and uncontrollable outcomes, so many of which are destructive. And yet, the Islamic Republic of Iran is, and has always been since its very inception, openly and unapologetically genocidal. Its motto “Death to America” is genocidal. Its motto “Death to Israel” is genocidal. What it did in Argentina in the 90s, killing innocent Jews twice, is genocidal. What it did through its proxy Hamas on October 7 is genocidal. The clock in Tehran promising the end of Israel by the year 2040 is genocidal. Given all this, I had expected uncomplicated support of American Jews for this war. Boy, was I wrong.

Rabbi Elan Babchuck serves as the Executive Vice President at Clal (National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership) and the Founding Executive Director of Glean Network, which partners with Columbia Business School. He has published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Religion News Service, writes a column for The Wisdom Daily, contributed to Meaning Making – 8 Values That Drive America’s Newest Generations (2020, St. Mary’s Press) and is the co-author of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire (2023, Fortress Press). His newest book about Shabbat, Sacred Time, is coming out in 2027. He also serves as a Founding Partner of Starts With Us, a movement to counteract toxic polarization in America, and is a founding Research Advisory Board Member of Springtide Research Institute.

What do we do with what we remember? How does what we remember cause us to act? This question comes from two places. It is Shabbat Zachor, the special Shabbat before Purim when we remember Amalek that hated us, that tried to kill us, and that inspired commands to never forget that hate, and to respond in kind. And it is the week of the US Men’s Hockey Team’s first Olympic gold in 46 years. Poignantly, the team’s victory picture included the #13 jersey of their teammate, and hockey super star, Johnny Gaudreau, who was killed along with his brother Matthew in August, 2024 while they were riding bikes by a drunk driver at the wedding weekend of their sister. The team also featured Goudreau’s young children in the photo. All of us move through life carrying all sorts of memories. Painful memories that evoke hurt, loss, indignation, grievance. Joyful memories that evoke triumph, accomplishment, blessing. We carry the memories of people whom we have loved and lost who were always there for us. And the memories of people who disappointed and wounded us. What do we do with all those memories? There is a special mitzvah in Jewish tradition to remember: zachor. There is a special Shabbat, tomorrow, to focus on remembering. Remembering is the easy part. Where the rubber hits the road: what do we do with what we remember?

The Torah offers more than one account of what was revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. This week’s reading, Terumah, suggests that the Ten Commandments were not the focus of revelation. What are the implications for us of the different portrayals of Moses’ experience? About Rabbi Peretz Rodman Rabbi Rodman is a Jerusalem-based writer, translator, and editor. A native Bostonian, he has studied and taught at Brandeis University, Hebrew College, and the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University.

There is a depressing news story that won’t go away. There are fresh chapters every week. The story goes something like this: People who were preeminent in their field—law, business, finance, real estate, professional sports, entertainment, higher education, medicine, health and wellness, spiritual counseling, politics, government—were emailing with a registered sex offender. What is that? So many people. So many different fields. So preeminent. So polished. So terribly off. If our Torah is to speak to our world, in a way that helps us understand our world and live a better life, we need to get to the bottom of this conundrum. Our weekly Torah portion speaks to this dilemma with a simple question: Are we the same person on the inside as we project to the outside world? What are some practical strategies for being the same person on the inside and out?

Even before she stepped into her ski boots to compete in Cortina, Lindsey Vonn’s story was profound. To be a top contender at the age of 41, after six years of retirement, after a partial knee replacement and countless serious injuries, is remarkable in and of itself. But Vonn wasn’t just competing 24 years after her first Olympic games, and she wasn’t just competing on a body which had recovered from countless serious injuries. Just days before the Olympics, Vonn ruptured her ACL racing in Switzerland. Where most athletes would have taken a year to recover, Vonn was planning to ski nearly 100 mph down a notoriously difficult cliff face in the hopes of winning another Olympic gold. The New York Times story about her leading up to the race was titled, “Linsey Vonn is Skiing on One Good Knee, but It’s a Helluva Knee.” There was so much excitement for her race. As her teammate, Mikaeila Shiffrin put it, “her tenacity and grit, and what she’s showing up with this Olympics and staying true to her own values, that’s just straight up beautiful.” When Lindsey crashed, all that positive energy shifted. There were nasty comments all over the internet and social media. People said she had no business skiing on a ruptured ACL. That of course she wiped out. How irresponsible. The blow back was so intense that her teammates and coach, even the president of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, all began making public statements to defend her. It was a fascinating turn-around. Before Vonn crashed into the gate, there was no critique of her choice, simply admiration. Everyone was talking about how amazing it would be if she could win. But when she caught the gate and crashed, suddenly there was so much blame, so much anger and resentment directed towards her. As if she were wrong to dream. As if the only thing that mattered was winning. As if losing with an injury was somehow embarrassing. We have to talk about that turn-around, about that shift. Because that move, to applaud effort as long as it’s successful, to criticize risk-taking when it doesn’t turn out, that instinct is so tempting and so dangerous. How often do we hold back because we are too afraid of failing? How often do we foreclose the possibility of joy because we are too afraid to take a risk?