And so, you know, the reality of the world is there's these shards and fragments and you get your hand, you reach in there, you're going to cut your hand, but how else are you going to put it together unless you try to reach in there? So I guess the question is how do you navigate that in your own rabbinate, in your own life, the brokenness, the wholeness, the messiness, trying to reach moral perfection in the process?

I have a question.

It's a very deep and two-fold question.

The first part of the question, as I understand it, is are we willing to compromise the ideal for the sake of the real? Are we willing to sometimes walk through routes that are not ideal or perfect in the pursuit of ennobling ideas? And I think that politics in its better versions is precisely that.

I also think that the idea of tzedek tzedek tir dof can be construed as individual justice and collective justice.

There have been many great thinkers and many people that are enamored with humanity as an abstract idea and are concerned about ideas of justice.

say, under communism, but when it came to actual human beings, flesh and blood, three-dimensional, next to me, in need, on the street, they were oblivious to human suffering.

Does it feel to you, and I guess maybe this might be going into the mystical world a little bit more, I mean, is that all just serendipity and accidental, or does it feel, are there moments in your life when you feel like, oh no, that chain of events was not accidental at all, and not serendipitous or chaos, but actually designed?

With that, I will invite Rabbi Dr. Tal Sessler to come and teach us this afternoon.

Thank you, Rabbi Cantor Chorney.

Yeah, so they asked me for a source sheet, but I don't really do that.

I have a very idiosyncratic way of teaching Torah.

I draw from my first training in philosophy.

with Torah and nowadays also some psychological elements.

So I'm going to start and say that before I became a rabbi, I did some work in philosophy.

several.