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Leslie Wexner helped shape these Jewish leaders. Now they want a reckoning over his Epstein ties.
(JTA) — This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
For three decades, Debbie Findling led with it.
The Wexner Heritage Program appeared on her CV, LinkedIn page and professional biography. Her participation in it was part of her Jewish identity, a marker of belonging to an elite network of leaders chosen to carry forward the values of the American Jewish community and a useful credential in her work as an adviser to Bay Area Jewish philanthropies.
But over the last several years, the ties between the program’s sponsor, billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came into focus for Findling. The two men had a close relationship for years. Wexner was instrumental in Epstein’s rise to wealth and prominence, while Epstein managed Wexner’s finances and later served as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation.
Wexner has denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, including those against minors, and has testified that he severed financial and legal ties with Epstein in 2007.
Still, Findling’s pride has soured into something closer to shame.
“I’ve lost something that I was really proud of — it was taken away from me,” Findling said, describing a sense that something “sinister” has corrupted such a positive experience. “I feel like the rug got pulled out from under me.”
Now Findling, 62, is leading what may be the largest organized accountability effort to emerge so far in the Jewish community’s reckoning with Wexner’s ties to Epstein. She’s doing so in partnership with Jan Reicher, 61, also a Bay Area Wexner Heritage alum, as well as a longtime community leader and the immediate past president of Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area.
The two women have circulated a public letter to the foundation signed by 80 Wexner alumni so far, including 50 from the Bay Area, urging the organization to take meaningful action to support survivors of sexual violence and trafficking.
They also launched in May what they call Tikkun Funds — directing donations to three nonprofits that support survivors of sexual violence or trafficking — and asked fellow alumni to contribute $36,000 each. More than $356,000 has been pledged so far. A parallel effort, the ASHRU Fund, is being run by alumni of a separate Wexner fellowship for professionals at Jewish communal organizations.
The Wexner Foundation has not responded substantively to the letter’s demands and declined to comment for this story. The foundation held meetings with alumni after the revelations of Wexner’s deep ties with Epstein first emerged in 2019.
Part of what makes the campaign remarkable is that open conversations about Wexner’s legacy amid the Epstein scandal have been rare. Alumni discussed the implications of the revelations in their immediate aftermath, in group chats and on social media. A number of alumni have made donations to groups, including for survivors of sex trafficking.
The Bay Area initiative appears to be the broadest and most robust so far.
Evan Segal, a Wexner Heritage participant in the Bay Area who left the program after its first year for a job in the Obama administration, said the discomfort stems from how many people in Jewish communal life are close to the issue.
“If you want to know why the Jewish philanthropic world has been crickets, it’s because many of the big names that people have respected for years are tied — some more directly, some indirectly — to this scandal,” said Segal, who didn’t qualify to sign the open letter because he isn’t an alum.
The silence, he suggested, is also about what the Wexner name has come to mean.
“For years, the Wexner name has been put in a pantheon of mensch-y philanthropists. People carry it on their resumes as a badge of honor,” he said. “Now it is 180 degrees of that.”
Findling and Reicher’s campaign is not aimed at dismantling the Wexner Foundation, the two women said, nor at repudiating the education they received and the community they formed.
Instead, they describe it as an attempt to apply the very values the program instilled in them.
“I feel like I am acting in the leadership capacity that Wexner taught me, which is to stand up for those who are less fortunate, to stand up for survivors, to stand up for truth,” Findling said.
For decades, the Wexner name occupied a singular place in organized Jewish life. The retail magnate behind the rise of Victoria’s Secret and other major brands, such as The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works, became one of the most influential funders of Jewish leadership development in North America and Israel. His name was pervasive in his home city of Columbus, Ohio, where a Jewish nursing home still bears his name, as does the Jewish student center at Ohio State University. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum named a learning center for Wexner.
Beginning in the 1980s, the Wexner Foundation built a constellation of fellowships and leadership programs for Jewish clergy, professionals, philanthropists and lay leaders. Thousands of participants moved through those programs and into prominent positions across Jewish institutions and wider society.
Among the most visible of them was the Wexner Heritage Program, which combined Jewish learning, leadership development and community building. The program, which is offered for free, has attracted almost 2,500 participants across 35 North American cities.
The San Francisco hub, which launched in the late 1990s, became one of its strongest. When the Wexner Foundation began seeking local matching grants, the San Francisco Jewish community set a “stellar example of commitment by creating an endowment,” according to the foundation. The Jewish Federation Bay Area’s efforts ensured there would be a new cohort every few years. Today, the Bay Area is among the regions with the most alumni.
Among the 10 Wexner Heritage participants interviewed for this story, all described the experience as monumental. Or as Ellen Kahn, a member of Findling’s 1997-1999 cohort, put it, “absolutely life changing.”
“Leslie Wexner, in my view, was this bigger-than-life man who created something that was so extraordinary,” Kahn said.
Alumni describe the far-reaching impact of their two-year Wexner program: It inspired them to serve on nonprofit boards, engage in philanthropy and build both friendships and community networks.
Reicher, who joined the program in 2003 after helping found San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay, described the Wexner Heritage Program as formative.
“For me, the biggest thing really was the cohort that we created,” she said. Her group still studies together, supports one another’s institutions and gathers socially.
It took until this January for Reicher to “wake up” about the implications of Wexner’s relationship with Epstein. She was reading court testimony from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the most outspoken and prominent survivors of abuse by Epstein and his enablers. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, had testified that she was trafficked to Wexner multiple times, a charge he has denied.
Wexner has not been charged with any crime in connection with the allegations.
“Oh my God,” Reicher kept repeating aloud to herself, growing more disgusted and horrified with what she was reading in the testimony. She phoned Findling and said, “We’ve got to do something.”
For Reicher, the decision to act has been bound up with her own experience as a rape survivor. She said she came “within inches of losing my life” at 18 but ultimately did not press charges after her father urged her against it.
“That person that I was at 18 didn’t stand up for herself,” she said. “So now I have this other layer as a survivor that I need to stick up for other survivors, even if it causes me harm, even if it causes me trauma.”
The accountability campaign was launched amid intensifying scrutiny of Wexner, whose name appears 1,746 times in the publicly released Epstein files on the U.S. Justice Department website.
In February, Wexner sat for a five-hour filmed deposition before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, where he denied any knowledge that Epstein was a sexual predator or committed sexual crimes.
The accusations that Epstein raped, abused and trafficked girls and young women across many years are extensive. He was convicted of sex crimes with minors in 2008. Eleven years later, he was charged with sex trafficking of minors but died by suicide before trial.
“I was conned by the world Olympic, all-time con artist,” Wexner testified during the Feb. 18 deposition, which was made public.
Around the same time, the Wexner Foundation announced it would hold a series of private listening sessions over Zoom for alumni who had concerns about Wexner’s ties to Epstein. “Together with my colleagues, we want to listen, to take in your thinking aspiring to move forward even if along a different path,” foundation president Elka Abrahamson wrote in an email to alumni first reported by Jewish Currents.
Neither Reicher nor Findling attended a listening session, believing the events would be counterproductive and that no change would result.
“Listening is an essential component of responsible leadership,” they wrote in the open letter. “But listening is not enough. When sworn testimony and public records raise serious moral and ethical questions, silence risks complicity. Our community needs more than private reflection — it needs visible ethical conviction and action from the Wexner Foundation.”
Some Jewish leaders have emerged since February to defend Wexner, albeit with qualifications.
Wexner deserves the Jewish community’s continued admiration based on the principal of “hakarat hatov,” recognition of good even among those who are flawed, David J. Butler, a lawyer who is member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, wrote in an opinion for the small chain of Jewish newspapers last month.
Jewish ethics “asks people to live within tension. To condemn wrongdoing without erasing merit. To acknowledge failure without pretending that flawed individuals never contributed profound good to the world around them,” Butler wrote.
When Findling and Reicher brought their appeal to fellow alumni in late February, they found a community divided. While dozens signed quickly, the response did not grow beyond an initial burst of support, and the vast majority of alumni have not joined the effort.
For Marci Dollinger, 61, an elementary school teacher at Brandeis Marin Jewish Day School in San Rafael and a board member of several local Jewish organizations, the decision to sign the letter was obvious. It’s a matter of “not being silent when serious concerns arise,” she said. But she added that many alumni she knows were reluctant to sign.
“Even some in my cohort [declined to sign], and it was upsetting because to me it just seemed like why would you be on the wrong side of this? But they have their reasons,” Dollinger said.
Few of those reluctant to sign were willing to go on the record.
Howard Steiermann, 67, of San Francisco said he didn’t want to sign it initially because he doesn’t feel that the program’s name is tainted.
“I’m not sure that my feeling toward the program or the man has changed,” said Steiermann, who added that he has read through the allegations. “For me, I can’t tell you why, it doesn’t tarnish my memory or appreciation for the program that I went through.”
But he ultimately added his name out of a sense of allyship.
“I do believe in innocence until proven guilty,” said Steiermann, who was ordained as a rabbi in 2015, more than a decade after his Wexner graduation. “That said, I think our culture has had such a horrible track record of not listening to women around abuse.”
He added that he wanted to be an ally to what “too many people see as a woman’s issue.”
While Steiermann ultimately signed, his reluctance reflects a wider pattern among some male alumni.
Wayne Feinstein, who said he signed it with no hesitation, noticed that pattern.
Feinstein, 74, served as executive vice president of the Jewish Federation Bay Area from 1991 to 2000 and grew up attending the same Columbus, Ohio, synagogue as Wexner.
“To me, it was an ethical question, plain and simple,” he said.
Feinstein, one of only about two dozen men out of 80 signatories, was disappointed to learn that many male Wexner alumni had refused. They were “reluctant or fearful,” he said, to condemn a businessman in the Jewish community where they themselves worked.
He spent an hour on the phone trying to convince a male friend who kept pushing back. The friend said, “There’s no proof that Leslie Wexner did any of this.” Feinstein replied to him:
“That’s not a reason not to do this.”
Findling and Reicher said they’re not working toward persuading the many holdouts.
“I want to activate the people who signed, who are with me, into meaningful repair,” Findling said.
Their call to action encouraged gifts of $36,000, the amount the program spent on each Wexner Heritage participant, offering alumni their choice of three vetted nonprofits: World Without Exploitation, a national organization supporting Epstein survivors through advocacy, legislative action and public awareness; the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, the national umbrella organization that has been a leader in supporting sexual violence survivors of Oct. 7, 2023; and Shalom Bayit, a prominent Jewish voice on gender-based violence prevention and response based in the Bay Area.
Tricia Gibbs, 67, a Wexner Heritage alum and co-founder of the San Francisco Free Clinic, donated to all three nonprofits and signed the letter — her first time signing anything like it.
“In a way we’d be doing more harm to the program by not standing up, because we wouldn’t show that we learned anything,” she said. “There’s a deeply rooted ethic in Torah that tells us to protect the vulnerable.”
When they began writing the letter, Reicher worried about the impact on the Jewish community. Calling upon fellow alumni meant acknowledging painful truths. “Does this hurt the Jews more?” she asked herself.
A major source of consternation for the Jewish community has been that Epstein, Wexner and a number of other men connected to the scandal — though far from a majority — have been Jews and have had meaningful ties to Jewish institutions.
“It’s incongruous with how we were all raised,” Kahn said.
Naomi Tucker, co-founder and executive director of Shalom Bayit, hears it often.
“We have the exact same rates of violence against women in the Jewish community as everywhere else,” she said. “We would like to think we are better or different. But unfortunately these things happen everywhere.”
One in four Jewish women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, Tucker noted, and one in three will face sexual assault or harassment — all consistent with national figures for all women.
Many alumni continue to reckon with what the program means to them.
“Do I wish the Wexner name no longer was attached to the foundation? Yes,” Kahn said.
That may come to pass.
On May 21, the foundation announced that all Wexner leadership programs will spin off into an independent nonprofit on Jan. 1, 2027, under a new name yet to be released. Wexner and his wife are contributing $40 million to launch the new organization.
The post Leslie Wexner helped shape these Jewish leaders. Now they want a reckoning over his Epstein ties. appeared first on The Forward.
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‘I made a mistake’: Abdul El-Sayed apologizes to Michigan Jews for past comments about synagogue attack
(JTA) — LANSING — Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed apologized for his past comments regarding the March attack on Temple Israel in suburban Detroit during a meeting with the state Democratic party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday.
The Democratic nominee told the room that his remarks following the attempted targeting of the West Bloomfield synagogue preschool, in which he had said, in part, “Hurt people hurt people,” were intended to provide “context.”
Reflecting on them, he said on Saturday, “I made a mistake.”
“If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry. It was not what I intended to do,” El-Sayed continued. Referencing the first of two statements he had made about the attack, he added, “We issued a statement, of course, condemning it, and that just should have been it, full stop.”
El-Sayed’s initial Temple Israel comments, which many Jews interpreted as justifying the attack, have alienated Jewish voters in the state. After an initial statement condemning the attack, El-Sayed then followed up with one referencing Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker had lost family in an Israel airstrike.
On Saturday, El-Sayed, a former county health director, insisted that his push for “context” to the attack was broadly appropriate, but not at that moment, explaining that such “conversations” could happen “in the fullness of time.”
“Sometimes you can’t really see context in the moment of acuity or pain,” he said. “The intention for me was not to trample that pain. It was not to discount it. It was not at all to justify any sort of domestic terrorism. That’s wrong, full stop.”
El-Sayed’s apology, which was in response to a question posed to him by a Jewish Democrat in attendance, came amid a new round of outreach efforts he has been making with Jewish voters since he won Michigan’s Democratic senate primary earlier this month. He also plans to attend a Sunday Jewish caucus gathering honoring state Attorney General Dana Nessel with congressional nominee Jeremy Moss in attendance, both of whom the candidate has publicly been at ideological odds with over Jewish issues.
In recent days El-Sayed has also minimized some of his harsh critiques of Israel in his stump speeches and issued a statement distancing himself from onetime campaign ally Hasan Piker, the left-wing anti-Israel streamer.
His nomination acceptance speech later that day made only one, oblique, reference to American support for Israel: “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you, and your kids, and your schools, instead of being dropped in the form of a bomb on somebody else, and their kids, and their school.”
But skepticism was still palpable among the 30 or so Jewish Democrats in the room, a crowd that included one delegate who said his daughter and grandson had been inside Temple Israel when it was attacked.
“Our safety as Jews in America relies on, I think, what’s said by public figures, and how they present themselves in public, and how they advocate for Jews in public,” he said just prior to El-Sayed’s apology.
Not all of El-Sayed’s answers pleased the room. Fielding another question about whether he would support the longstanding Democratic platform of a two-state solution in the Middle East if elected senator, the candidate pivoted.
“It’s incoherent to start with a solution and say, ‘Figure out how to work here,’” El-Sayed said. “To me, it’s about starting with a process and saying, ‘How do we dignify equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinian people and Jewish Israelis alike?’”
He added, as he has in other interviews, that he was open to the possibility of a two-state solution “if that’s what a free Palestinian and free Jewish Israeli people decide.” But, he qualified, “Our country, under the guise of a two-state solution, has been aiding, arming, and abetting a government that wants to foreclose on the possibility of a second state.”
That didn’t sit well with some in attendance, even as El-Sayed’s apology for his other comments was broadly appreciated.
“I really liked him apologizing for misspeaking. We’ve all made comments that we regret later on,” Rebecca Kasen, a Lansing-area Michigan Jewish Democrat in attendance, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I was less comfortable with what he said about not supporting a two-state solution.”
Overall, Kasen said, her opinion of El-Sayed had improved after the Jewish caucus meeting as a result of his apology.
“I was probably a more reluctant voter for him” beforehand, she said. That had changed: “Instead of just going to vote now, I am going to be enthusiastically voting for him.”
As the senate race is shaping up to be the potential tipping point to decide control of the chamber in a crucial midterm year seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump, the views of the state’s Jewish Democrats regarding their party have been placed under a microscope for more reasons than just El-Sayed. That has led some longtime Jewish Democratic voters to defect to the Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, and also led to some awkward moments at the convention.
In one example, Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit, the party’s progressive Jewish nominee for state attorney general, addressed the Jewish caucus by declaring, “We’re going to win and keep the attorney general’s office in the hands of a Michigan Jewish Democrat.” Conspicuously absent from the day’s events was Nessel, the Jewish Democrat currently holding the seat.
Prior to the Saturday convention, Nessel, the state’s highest ranking Jewish official, had announced she would not be attending for fear she would be targeted by antisemitic harassment. Earlier this week, in a podcast interview with The Atlantic, Nessel had reiterated her issues with El-Sayed’s comments about Temple Israel and expressed hope he would walk them back soon.
Nessel’s son Zach Nessel, secretary of the state Jewish Democratic caucus, told the caucus that his mother’s absence stemmed from “agitators” who had targeted her at the party endorsement convention in the spring. Attendance at Saturday’s event was less than one-third of what the Jewish caucus had drawn at the spring convention, organizers said.
Zach Nessel criticized the state Democratic Party for failing to take prompt action to remove the agitators from the earlier convention. He told JTA that Jews in the party “have a right to be concerned.”
“I think the Democratic Party needs to put more work into addressing their concerns,” Zach Nessel said. “But I think that can’t happen without showing up.”
Moss, the Michigan state senator who has recently been at the center of another El-Sayed-related controversy, was spotted at the convention on Saturday but did not attend the Jewish caucus events.
One ally of El-Sayed’s who also addressed the caucus is University of Michigan Board of Regents nominee Amir Makled. He is an attorney for members of the school’s pro-Palestinian encampment movement who had pushed out a Jewish pro-Israel incumbent at the previous convention. During his own address to Jewish delegates, Makled did not mention his history of social media posts including retweeting far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and sharing praise for Hezbollah leaders.
Makled’s speech later that day at the nominating convention alluded to his work with the encampments as he declared that Michigan “will never have a university where students are punished simply because their speech makes the powerful uncomfortable.”
In-between candidate meet-and-greets, Jewish caucus members shared their anxieties about their closely scrutinized role in the midterm elections. They were gravely concerned about protecting democracy and election security from Republican threats, and felt that flipping the Senate was crucial.
Yet it was hard, they said, to get much of the Jewish community onboard this time, given the positions of El-Sayed and some other members of the Democratic slate. Michigan is home to an estimated 100,000 Jews, and the senate race is currently polling in a dead heat, making their votes potentially pivotal.
“How do we unify our community to put the country first?” one attendee asked the group. “I have a hard time doing that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘I made a mistake’: Abdul El-Sayed apologizes to Michigan Jews for past comments about synagogue attack appeared first on The Forward.
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The woodcutter and the water carrier in the Torah portion, Nitzavim
לעילוי נשמת מײַן באָבע מנוחה וויטקא ע״ה לזרוב, לכבֿוד איר יאָרצײַט, ט״ו אלול
איינער פֿון די שטאַרקסטע קעגנער מיט וועמען אַ מענטש דאַרף זיך אויסקעמפֿן איז…זיך אַליין.
די סיבה איז פּשוט: די געדאַנקען און געפֿילן וואָס אַ מענטש קען צום בעסטן, זענען זײַנע אייגענע. און ווײַל דאָס זענען זײַנע פּערזענלעכע געדאַנקען און נײגונגען, איז מען נאַטירלעך גענייגט זיי צו געבן אַ גרויסע חשיבות. אויב איך פֿאַרשטיי אַזוי, אָדער איך פֿיל אַזוי, איז דאָס שוין לכאורה אַ גענוג גוטע סיבה צו טאָן אַלץ וואָס איך קען כּדי אויסצופֿירן מײַנע געדאַנקען און באַפֿרידיקן מײַן ווילן.
אָבער זייער אָפֿט טרעפֿט דווקא דאָס פאַרקערטע. דער מענטש וואָס שטעלט אויס זײַן לעבן בלויז לויט דעם וואָס אים דאַכט זיך ריכטיק אָדער באַקוועם, קען צום סוף שאַפֿן געלעגנהייטן וואָס גייען ווײַט העכער פֿון זײַנע באַגרענעצטע און פֿאַרבײַגייענדיקע פּערזענלעכע געפֿילן.
מיט אַנדערע ווערטער, באַקוועמלעכקייט און צוגעוווינטקייט קענען זײַן די גרעסטע שׂונאים פֿונעם מענטשן, אַנשטאָט זײַנע מיטהעלפֿער.
אין דער סדרה פֿון דער וואָך, נצבים־וילך, ווענדט זיך משה רבינו צום ייִדישן פֿאָלק אַזוי:
„אַתֶּם נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם כֻּלְּכֶם לִפְנֵי ה׳ אֱלֹקֵיכֶם… מֵחֹטֵב עֵצֶיךָ עַד שֹׁאֵב מֵימֶיךָ“ — איר שטייט הײַנט אַלע פֿאַר דעם אייבערשטן, אײַער ג־ט… פֿון דײַנע האָלצהעקערס ביז דײַנע וואַסער־שעפּערס (וואַסער־טרעגערס).
דער גרינדער פֿון חב״ד, רבי שניאור זלמן, באַקאַנט ווי דער אַלטער רבי, דערקלערט אַז דאָס האָלצהאַקן און וואַסער־שעפּן האָבן, אויסער זייער פּשוטן באַטײַט, אויך אַן אינערלעכן טײַטש אין דער פּערזענלעכער עבֿודה פֿונעם מענטש.
דער אויסדרוק „עֵצֶיךָ“, דײַן האָלץ, קען מען אויך פֿאַרשטיין ווי „עצותיך“, דײַנע אייגענע עצות, געדאַנקען און חשבונות.
דאָס „וואַסער“ איז מרמז אויף דעם יסוד המים פֿונעם נפֿש הבהמית — דער מקור און טרײַבקראַפֿט פֿון קערפּערלעכע תּענוגים.
די לערנונג, זאָגט רבי שניאור זלמן, איז אַז אַ מענטש דאַרף „אויסהאַקן“ די אייגענע חשבונות און „אויסשעפּן“ די תּאוות וואָס צילן בעיקר אויף פּערזענלעכע קערפּערלעכע הנאות.
ערשט ווען אַ מענטש קען נייטראַליזירן אָט די צוויי כּוחות און זיך נישט לאָזן פֿירן פֿון זיי, קען ער צום בעסטן מקיים זײַן זײַן שליחות אין לעבן — אָן דעם שוחד פֿון פּערזענלעכער באַקוועמלעכקייט. שוחד פֿאַרבלענדט דאָך די אויגן און לאָזט ניט זען קלאָר און אָביעקטיוו. דאָס זעלבע טרעפֿט מיט באַקוועמלעכקייט. עס לאָזט ניט טראַכן אָביעקטיוו.
מען וואָלט אָבער געקענט מיינען אַז אַזאַ דיסציפּלין איז שייך בלויז צום תּורה־לערנען, צו מענטשן וואָס פֿירן אַ רוחניותדיק לעבן, אָדער בלויז ווען אַ מענטש וויל מצליח זײַן אין זײַן אייגענער גײַסטיקער זוכעניש.
וואָס איז אָבער מיט מסחר, פּרנסה אָדער אַ פּראָפֿעסיע — מיט די לכאורה „נישט־רעליגיעזע“ געביטן פֿון לעבן? דאָרט מעג מען דען נישט טאָן וואָס מען אַליין האַלט פֿאַר ריכטיק און וואָס גיט פּערזענלעכע צופֿרידנקייט?
דער ליובאַוויטשער רבי — זכותו יגן עלינו — ווײַזט אָן אַז דער ענטפֿער אויף דער פֿראַגע ליגט שוין אינעם פּירוש רש״י אויפֿן פסוק.
ווער זענען געווען די דאָזיקע האָלצהעקערס און וואַסער־שעפּערס?
רש״י דערקלערט אַז זיי זענען געווען כּנענים וואָס זענען געקומען צו משה רבינו ע״ה מיט דער כּוונה זיך מגייר צו זײַן, און משה האָט זיי באַשטימט צו דינען ווי האָלצהעקערס און וואַסער־שעפּערס.
דער רבי ווײַזט אן אַז דאָס וואָרט „כּנעני“ מיינט אויך אַ סוחר.
דער רמז איז, אַז נישט בלויז ווען עס רעדט זיך וועגן הימלישע און רוחניותדיקע ענינים — „רעליגיעזע“ באַשעפֿטיקונגען — דאַרף מען זיך באַפֿרײַען פֿון פּערזענלעכע אינטערעסן, צי שׂכלדיקע צי פֿילעוודיקע.
אויך אין מסחר, אין אַלע ענינים וואָס האָבן צו טאָן מיט גשמיות און מאַטעריע, דאַרפֿן די „האָלצהעקערס“ און „וואַסער־שעפּערס“ גיין צו דער אַרבעט.
מען דאַרף זיך העכערן איבער די אייגענע חשבונות און תּאוות, און זיך אָפּגעבן מיט די גשמיותדיקע טעטיקייטן מיט דער כּוונה, אַז דורך זיי זאָל מען אַרײַנברענגען הייליקייט און ג-טליכקייט אין דער וועלט — דורך דעם ליכט פֿון דער תּורה און דער נפֿש האלוקית.
עס זענען דא מענטשן וואָס קענען דאָס באַטראַכטן ווי אַ באַגרענעצונג: „מען לאָזט מיר נישט טאָן וואָס איך וויל.“
מען קען דאָס אָבער באַטראַכטן גאָר אַנדערש — ווי אַן אויסערגעוויינטלעכע געלעגנהייט:
„שטענדיק — אַפֿילו אין די מערסטע וועלטלעכע און לכאורה נישטיקע טעטיקייטן — האָב איך די מעגלעכקייט צו דערגרייכן עפּעס וואָס האָט אַן אומענדלעכע און אייביקע ווערט.“
דעריבער איז די געצײַג פֿון דער וואָך:
אויב דו פֿילסט זיך שלעכט ווײַל עס דאַכט זיך דיר אַז אַ גרויסער טייל פֿון דײַן לעבן האָט נישט קיין באַזונדערן זין אָדער ווערט, געדענק אַז עס ליגט אין דײַנע הענט צו באַשליסן אין וועלכער ריכטונג דו וועסט גיין.
דו קענסט צייכענען דײַן וועג לויט דײַנע פּערזענלעכע געדאַנקען און געפֿילן, וואָס קומען און גייען און לאָזן נישט קיין אייביקע שפּור.
אָדער דו קענסט זיך באַפֿרײַען פֿון זייער הערשאַפֿט און זיך אָפּגעבן מיט עפּעס וואָס איז אַ טייל פֿון אַ ציל וואָס איז אומענדלעך גרעסער — און אומענדלעך מער ווערטפֿול.
The post The woodcutter and the water carrier in the Torah portion, Nitzavim appeared first on The Forward.
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Vance, who’s drawn ire of Jewish conservatives, will speak at Republican Jewish confab
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance, who has drawn the ire of a number of Jewish conservatives, will speak at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit in Las Vegas on Monday, the RJC confirmed.
“The Republican Jewish Coalition is proud to welcome Vice President JD Vance to our National Leadership Summit in Las Vegas,” said an RJC spokesperson. “JD Vance is a friend, who is coming back after first joining us in 2022 as a candidate for the US Senate.”
Vance’s appearance comes as a number of Jewish Republicans and major GOP donors have indicated that they would rather support Marco Rubio for the presidential nomination in 2028 than Vance, who is seen as Donald Trump’s likeliest successor. Some of those donors will be in the room on Monday at the Venetian Resort, which is owned by the billionaire Adelson family — a major backer of Trump and various Jewish and Israeli causes.
The vice president has lost the confidence of the pro-Israel crowd with his reprimanding of Israeli officials, indulgence of anti-Israel conspiracy theories and silence on Tucker Carlson, the prominent pundit who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. Multiple donors told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during last year’s confab that they would not support Vance in 2028.
Carlson, meanwhile, was a major focus of the discussion at the RJC’s 2025 summit, where signs reading “Tucker is not MAGA” were handed out to attendees. His son, Buckley Carlson, is a former Vance staffer.
An agenda sent by the RJC lists Vance as a speaker during a Monday evening session that will be closed to press. A spokesperson confirmed that Vance will be speaking in a “fireside chat.”
A number of high-profile Republican candidates are also expected to speak at the RJC confab, which is being held on Sunday and Monday, a few months ahead of the midterm elections. Speakers include U.S. Senate candidates Mike Collins, the Georgia congressman who is challenging Jewish Democrat Jon Ossoff, and former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is running against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
Collins has faced accusations of antisemitism and having ties to the far right. He has said that some of his statements were misunderstood, and has defended himself by citing his support for Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Vance, who’s drawn ire of Jewish conservatives, will speak at Republican Jewish confab appeared first on The Forward.
