Drash – Tetzavah

Lesley Sachs

Chair IMPJ

LESLEY SACHS
Chair
IMPJ Executive Board

Drash – Tetzavah

Good morning.

If you opened the Torah this week and thought, “This feels less like a story and more like a spreadsheet,” you are not alone.

Parashat Tetzaveh is heavy on instructions: oil, lamps, fabrics, stones, stitches, measurements. It is the kind of parasha that makes you wonder if God ever considered hiring a graphic designer.

And yet Tetzaveh appears right after the dramatic crescendo of Sinai. Revelation, thunder, covenant… and then: please label your wicks correctly.

Which I think is the Torah’s way of telling us something honest: Judaism is not sustained by peak experiences. Judaism is sustained by what happens the morning after.

The parasha opens with a command that is both simple and demanding:

“Bring clear oil of beaten olives… to kindle lamps regularly”—ner tamid, the continual or perpetual light.

And it’s not just “oil.” The Torah specifies: pure oil, beaten oil—oil produced with care, not rushed, not “whatever we have around.” Traditional commentators note that “beaten” oil refers to the highest quality extracted gently so it burns cleanly.

So already the Torah is giving us a spiritual metaphor that is annoyingly practical:

If you want a clean flame, you don’t start at the flame. You start at the olive.

If you want a moral society, you start with the systems that keep dignity alive—quietly, tamid.

Now here is a detail many people miss: the priests do not supply the oil. The community does. Ibn Ezra, in his comment on this verse, notes that while leaders may have brought oil at times, the obligation of bringing oil for the light rests on the congregation.

The leaders tend the lamp.
But the people make the light possible.

In modern terms: spiritual leadership can “light,” but it cannot manufacture the fuel. The fuel is what communities bring resources, trust, volunteer hours, moral courage, and, sometimes, the strength to keep showing up when you would very much like to do anything else.

And that takes me to what this parasha has felt like in Israel since October 7th.

Because October 7th produced moments of extraordinary courage and solidarity. Those moments were real. They were sacred. They were also like all peak moments impossible to live on forever.

The real test came afterwards, when the news cycle moved on but the trauma didn’t.

That is when our Reform Movement in Israel IMPJ found itself living inside Parashat Tetzaveh.

Not in the dramatic moments, but rather in the tamid.

Our 54 communities from the Galilee to the Negev did not wait for instructions. They became places where people could land.

They opened doors to evacuated families.
They supported families of hostages emotionally and spiritually.
They became logistical hubs for food, childcare, and trauma-informed care.
They held Jewish–Arab shared spaces together when public discourse collapsed.

Because someone had to bring the oil.

And here comes a small confession tamid is exhausting.

Emergency response can feel almost… clean. You know what to do: you run, you lift, you carry. Adrenaline can disguise fear. Even grief can be carried on momentum.

But sustained responsibility is different. It looks like waking up, making phone calls, calculating budgets, filling out forms, showing up at funerals, showing up at hospitals, showing up to a community meeting when you would prefer to hide under a blanket and scroll pictures of koalas.

The parasha spends a lot of time on priestly garments—what they wear, how they wear it, what it symbolizes. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote about Tetzaveh that the priesthood is about a particular religious mindset—one that takes the sacred seriously, including its disciplines.

But the deeper point is not fashion. It’s accountability.

Because if you put “holy” on a person, or a system, and then remove boundaries—holiness becomes dangerous.

And we have seen this in Israel when Torah language is used to justify humiliation, exclusion, and racism.

This is where IRAC—the Israel Religious Action Center, the legal and public-policy arm of our Reform Movement has been living in the “ner tamid” space: the unending work of defending human dignity through law, advocacy, and community organizing.

Let me make this concrete.

IRAC’s Racism Crisis Center handled 418 inquiries in 2024 a record-level figure.
That number represents people who had the courage to say: something happened to me, and it is not okay.

And it’s not just about helping individuals; it’s about protecting the moral boundary lines of society.

In IRAC’s 2024 reporting, you can see examples of what “tending the lamp” looks like in practice:

Holding racists accountable—including legal action and ongoing monitoring related to racist incitement by public figures and groups.
A Budget Watchdog initiative, monitoring and challenging disproportionate allocation of public resources to narrow sectoral interests—because budgets are values with receipts.
Work to advance equal recognition and status for Reform Judaism in municipal arenas, supporting communities in their engagement with local authorities.
Concrete action to protect women from exclusion and discrimination in public transportation, including awareness and hotline-type empowerment efforts.
Protection of LGBTQ equality, including legal action to ensure events could proceed and rights are defended.

All these are what Tetzaveh sounds like when it becomes modern life: detail work, persistence work, system work.

Rabbi Sacks put it this way: Judaism’s distinctive challenge is an “ethics of responsibility”—the idea that God invites human beings to become partners in the work of creation.

That is a very beautiful idea—until you remember that partnership is a lot of meetings.

(And if you’ve ever served on a board, you know: the true test of faith is whether you believe the meeting will end on time.)

But partnership is the point which brings me back to the oil.

The oil is brought by the people it is the community  which fuels the sacred.

That is why I can mention the UIA Progressive Appeal here without turning this into a fundraising talk because I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about theology.

The UIA Progressive Appeal is one of the ways Australian Progressive Jews participate in the Torah’s model: shared responsibility for keeping the light burning, sustaining a shared moral infrastructure.

Because the light of Progressive Judaism in Israel does not burn on Israeli oil alone. It never has.

Tetzaveh teaches us that if  a lamp is meant to burn tamid it needs a community, you and us that thinks tamid.

“Because we are responsible for one another.”

Arvut hadadit.

And I want to say something else, especially here in Australia: we also hear you.

We hear the rise in antisemitism you are facing. We hear the tension of having to explain Israel, defend Jews, and still hold onto moral clarity. That is also exhausting. That is also tamid.

And here again Rabbi Sacks helps. He drew a distinction between optimism and hope: optimism is the belief that things will get better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better.“

I have optimism but I live on hope, because hope is not passive.

Hope is what happens when you continue to show up, every day, It fights. It builds. It wins lawsuits.

Hope is what happens when you keep the lamp burning especially when it would be easier to let it flicker.

And hope is also You.

Your continued support is a powerful reminder that Israel and Progressive Jewish communities around the world stand together as one family.  As the UIA Progressive Appeal begins next month, we hope you will walk this path with us and help with the oil.Thank you for believing in Israel and in our shared responsibility to shape the society our Torah calls us to build

Shabbat shalom