Reaching for the Moon

I want to name the dissonance of this moment: looking back on the week gone by, we have witnessed some of the highest heights of human achievement and yearning, side by side with the crassest depths of human behavior. The tone of our public life has felt especially coarse; language from the highest levels of leadership  has not only failed to uplift,  but has actively degraded.  Where a president of the United States can casually threaten to “wipe out” an entire civilization, as though the destruction of millions of lives were a matter of bravado;  where on Easter Sunday, a day meant to gesture toward faith and renewal, what emerges instead is anger, profanity, and a profound smallness of spirit.

And I’ll be honest: there is a part of me that wants to stay right there. To let that be the Torah of this week. Because words matter and leadership matters.Because the normalization of cruelty and dehumanization  is not something we can afford to ignore.And still—I find myself making a different choice. Not because those realities don’t deserve our attention or because we should soften our outrage. But because Torah asks something more of us 

than simply mirroring the world at its worst.

Torah asks us to be a countervoice.

To insist that degradation is not the only language available to us. To hold up a vision of humanity that is larger, more generous, more expansive than what we are being shown. To remind ourselves—and each other, of who we are capable of being.

And so tonight, I want to turn our attention—

not away from what is broken,  but toward something else that is also true.A different kind of human story unfolding  at the very same time. One that expands us rather than diminishes us. One that lifts our eyes instead of narrowing them.A story written not in anger, but in awe. The story of reaching for the moon. There is something quietly breathtaking about the fact  that, in this very week, human beings reached for the moon. Not conquering it or planting flags as declarations of dominance,but returning—

after a long absence—with a different kind of intention. And this time, they were not silent. 

They were narrating awe in real time.

Watching the Artemis mission to the moon 

over this last week has been a masterclass in narrating the experience of awe.

I am reminded of something the late 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: 

“The meaning of awe is to realize 

that life takes place under wide horizons, 

enfolding things and events 

that are immensely greater than our capacity to grasp.”

Looking back at Earth, one astronaut reflected on how fragile  and unified it all seems from that distance—how the same thin layer of atmosphere 

holds every single one of us.  Another message spoke of carrying not just technology, but hope; of bringing with them the aspirations of everyone  watching from below. 

And in one disarmingly simple moment, 

they looked back at our planet and said, 

“Trust us—you look amazing.”

It’s almost impossible to hear that and not think:  this is what it sounds like when human beings remember how to see.

The choice of the name Artemis feels, itself, like Torah: a deliberate turning from Apollo, whose name carried the first men to the moon, to his twin sister, the moon’s goddess, insisting that this next chapter will not be told the same way.That matters, not just as a milestone—but as a reorientation. Because who gets to stand in a place of wonder shapes the story we tell about what that wonder means. And even before that moment arrives, the presence of women in this mission—scientists, engineers, astronauts—

quietly reshapes the narrative. 

The moon is no longer only a site of conquest; 

it becomes, in some sense, 

a site of relationship, of reflection—

of widening the horizon.

And then there is a smaller, more intimate story.

The story of Reid Wiseman invites us to consider what we bring with us when we leave the ground- 

what love, what memory, what grief travels even into orbit.

And then, in a moment of raw humanity, 

his traveling companion—fellow astronaut Jeremy Hansen gave voice to that truth:

"We lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll. The spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie… It’s a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it Carroll."

In the vastness of space- in the cold, airless, ancient surface of the moon, they are thinking about love. 

About memory.  About the person who shaped his life, whose absence he carries with him even there.

And suddenly, the mission is not only about distance and scale. It is about devotion, and love for humanity. It is about the human need to remember, to honor, to inscribe the names of those we love onto the world—

even onto worlds we can barely reach.

It is, in its own way, deeply Jewish.

To stand on the moon and want to say: 

she was here, too—that is Torah.

And Torah, after all, begins in darkness.

וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם

“Darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Before there is clarity, there is vastness.

Before there is language, there is encounter.

One astronaut, witnessing the cosmos from that distance, could only say: “This continues to be unreal.”

Not unreal because it isn’t real, but because it exceeds our categories for understanding.

That is awe.

Our tradition teaches that we mark time by the moon.That we go outside each month, look up, and bless its renewal.

Not because the moon is constant, but because it isn’t. Because it waxes and wanes. Because it teaches us that diminishment  is not the end of the story.

There is a midrash that relates that when God created the world,  God made the two great lights—

the greater for the day and the lesser for the night—

male and female, twin spheres in the sky.

The male sphere said, “I should dominate. Let me be greater.” 

And God, seeing the seeds of rivalry, said, 

“Sun, you shall be larger and more powerful.”

The sun basked.

“But,” God continued, “great power carries destruction. You will parch the earth, burn the skin, blind the eye.  No one will gaze at you.”

And the sun’s rays grew stronger.

“Your sister, the moon, will be smaller—

but she will comfort all who look upon her. 

She will stir poets and lovers, guide the tides, mark time.  She will be ever-changing, ever-admired. 

Each month, she will be blessed.”

The sun tried to speak, but could not.

“Yes, you shall rule,” God said, “but you will be feared. 

Your sister will carry My sweetness, My light made gentle.”

And God set them in the heavens—

and the world lifted its eyes to the moon.

And so, we too lift our eyes to the moon.

We let ourselves look up:

To notice what has been diminished.

To restore what we can.

To bring light back into places that have grown dim.

Maybe that is part of what this moment is.

Not fixing the moon—

but repairing something in ourselves.

The part that has grown accustomed to smallness.

The part that has forgotten how to look up.

The part that believes that cruelty is the only language left.

Those four astronauts gave us the gift of both awe and perspective this past week.

Because from the distance of the moon, what do they see?

Not borders, or divisions or the rhetoric that fills our news cycles.

Just one fragile, luminous world.

And from that vantage point, their message back to us is disarmingly simple:

You are connected.

You are beautiful.

You are worth carrying hope for.

So perhaps the Torah of Artemis is this:

That when we reach far enough outward,

we recover something essential within ourselves.

That awe is not an escape from reality—

it is a corrective to it.

That even in a week marked by language that diminishes human life,

we can choose to speak a different language.

One of wonder, memory and dignity.

The blessing for the renewal of the moon each month (Kiddush Levana) reads: 

Baruch Atah Adonai mi’chadesh Chodashim.

Blessed is the One who renews all things.

Even the moon.

Even our capacity to see it.