Posted on June 12, 2026 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
Dear friends,
This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Sh’lach, is famous for many reasons, including the paragraph at the conclusion of the Torah portion enjoining us to wear garments with fringes on their corners–a paragraph that has become part of our liturgy as the third paragraph of the ‘V’ahavta.’ We are enjoined in this paragraph to include a thread of ‘tekhelet’ in our fringes, an enigmatic blue dye sourced from a shellfish species found in the region at that time. While the original tekhelet color has largely become impossible to find, approximations are still commonly found in tallitot today. The color ‘techelet’ itself is replete with symbolism, and is a representative of internal contradictions and the notion of liminality–in-between-ness–in Jewish culture. Historian Gadi Sagiv, in his wonderful book Jewish Blues, traces the color through Jewish history. He writes:
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan wrote in his discussion of meditating on tekhelet, “blue is always a color associated with vision and prophecy.” But that very same mystical context also presents blue as Knesset Yisrael, the gathering of Israel, constituting blue as a color with shared significance for all Jews… Tekhelet has been the subject of obscure characterizations as a unification of all colors, the source of all colors, and also as a “noncolor…” Blue is thus everywhere and nowhere. It is the color of a people dispersed among the nations but in a permanent state of exile and homelessness. This people has a commandment in which a thread of blue miraculously represents all other commandments; but for centuries, it could not fulfill that commandment because of the absence of the tekhelet dye. It is a color represented by a forgotten mollusk, waiting to be given to the righteous in the World to Come… (Jewish Blues, pp. 169-170)
This time of year is a ‘tekhelet moment’ for many Jewish communities. As the fiscal year is turning over, so too is the makeup of congregational leadership, clergy and lay. Synagogues, like ours did last year (thanks again, by the way), will welcome new clergy to their communities, install new board members and officers, and turn the page toward preparing for the coming of the year 5787. The ending of this year and the beginning of the next marks the formal end of what one could call a three-year liminal phase of TBE’s rabbinic transition–the final year of R. Gluck’s tenure, R. Katz’s interim year, and my first as our new rabbi. Liminal moments are often scary and full of change, but like the royal blue of the tekhelet thread, often point toward a redemptive future.
This Shabbat is a ‘tekhelet Shabbat.’ We recently thanked a few immediate past board members for their service, and this Shabbat our congregation will install its newly elected representatives and leaders. I could not be more grateful for the work of our lay leadership, nor more proud of all we have accomplished together in this first year. With each passing month, as I slowly cease to be the “new” rabbi, I know you will join our lay leadership and me in striving not to lose the momentum we have built over this past year. Lots is changing for all of us, but the core of who we are will only grow stronger, its foundations planted only deeper as we seek out the TBE of the World to Come.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Noah Diamondstein