Parashat Naso
SERMON Parashat Naso May 29, 2026 14 Sivan 5786
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, VT
ONE ACT OF KINDNESS
I’ve started reading Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s memoir about losing her son Hersh, When We See You Again. Hersh was kidnapped on October 7 at the Nova Music Festival. Having lost his arm , he was held hostage in the tunnels of Gaza for 328 days when he was executed.
Most of you know who she is, and have probably seen her speak at the Democratic Convention or be interviewed by Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, or heard her on Dan Senor’s podcast Call Me Back. She is always so calm, deliberate and reflective when she speaks, when I would be anything but that. The book is devastating and deeply honest and painfully moving. In fact, I’ve had to read it one chapter at a time because I get so emotional while reading it that I have to give myself a few days before diving back in, but the emotion I find I have to contend with most while reading is rage.
Which is why I was so struck by a short video I saw of her on social media talking about the comfort she had found recently while reading about some of the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov is the founder of Hassidism, and she was reading his commentary on Psalm 90, a psalm read at Jewish funerals that includes the famous line “Teach us to number our days that we may obtain a heart of wisdom.” This is how Rachel explains it:
The Baal Shem Tov was asked, “why do souls come to this earth?” Like why are we here? What’s the point? And he said every soul is put here because for one time, one day that soul is going to do one act of kindness for someone. Now that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do kindness all your life and you don’t have to try to improve and you don’t have to try to live a life of meaning and aim and purpose and growth, but it means there really is an intricate plan for exactly for you to do one thing one day for one person. Now it might be that I did my thing when I was six and I realized that maybe someone has to do their nice thing for me when I’m 86, so I have to stay here because we are all part of this synergy of interwovenness and I really think that that idea is so profound.
To be honest, I don’t always have faith in this idea of an intricate plan for everyone – the verdicts out on that one for me – but what hit me in what she said was how important it can be to be the person that someone else is able to perform a kindness for.
It can be so difficult to accept help, to accept comfort, to ask for help. It is so easy to feel like a burden, to feel needy, that we forget how meaningful it is for us when we are able to do an act of kindness for someone who really needs it.
Most of us have been the recipients of that sort of help.
Maybe someone says just the right thing when we need to hear it.
Or maybe the know what we need when we don’t even know it.
Or maybe they help us out with money when we have none.
Or maybe they simply take that one extra stressful thing off our plate that makes everything else seem more manageable.
We forget that kindness is reciprocal: it helps the giver as much if not more than it helps the recipient.
One of the best ways to overcome a sense of emptiness, of feeling lost during turbulent time, or even pushing back against despair is to simply help others.
So to go through life as the Baal Shem suggests, knowing that our purpose is to do one specific act of kindness for one specific person at one time, but we don’t know, and won’t know who, what or when, it is such a different approach to life than our self-focused achievement-focused culture offers us.
And when you add Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s teaching, that we are also here on this earth to be that person that someone else helps just when we need it, and we might not ever know, it creates this beautiful give and take of g’milut chasadim, acts of love and kindness. It’s almost like a form of breathing or symbiosis - we breathe in oxygen, and breathe out carbon dioxide, while the green things around us breathe in that carbon dioxide and breathe out nitrogen. It is an ecology of kindness.
There is also something humane and humble in this view of purpose. We just have to be kind and attentive to others. I mean, in Reform Judaism we often focus on our purpose being tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Did you ever stop to think about that - repair the world. That’s a high bar! It’s almost a set-up for failure. It’s a touch grandiose, and it can have the unintended impact of minimizing the value and the world-redeeming power of simple acts of giving and receiving kindness.
Acts of kindness help us feel connected. It weaves us together. It reminds us that we are all human beings, not the enemy or the problem. We live in a time when social media and algorithms make a profit off sowing hatred and division, and so these simple acts of chesed have a special importance today.
The world might event depend on it. As Shimon the Righteous said, “The world depends on three things: on study of Torah, on Service, and on Acts of Kindness.” Al shelosha Devarim haolam omed: al haTorah, v’al haAvodah, v’al Gmilut Chasadim.
Shabbat Shalom.
