Buchdahl continues to reflect on her life and work during the pandemic. Following George Floyd’s murder in summer 2020, Buchdahl decided to share her own story of racial exclusion within Jewish spaces. During the early 1990s, Yale’s Chabad members—who regularly asked students if they were Jewish—never once approached her in four years on campus. As a child, she had worn a Chai necklace to preempt skepticism, only to find that it multiplied the questioning. She had believed the Jewish community was evolving—until a congregant named Robert emailed to report that Central made him feel like an outsider nearly every week. He said that he was followed by security upon arrival and repeatedly asked about his presence and his Jewishness. The email convinced Buchdahl that she must address race within her own community before speaking to the national conversation.

Her Yom Kippur sermon argued that framing Judaism as a race originated with oppressors—the biblical Pharaoh, the Spanish Inquisition, and Nazi pseudoscience—and that Jews have always been an erev rav, a diverse mixed multitude. She called for reimagining Jewish peoplehood as a covenantal family, not a bloodline, citing the demographic reality that Jews of Color represent 12% to 15% of American Jews. She closed the sermon with a hopeful anecdote: A young Chabad boy on the Upper West Side spontaneously asked if she was Jewish—a small miracle of inclusion. The sermon went viral, drawing hundreds of responses from Jews of color who said it captured their own experience. Buchdahl was equally struck by Ashkenazi Jews who reported feeling like strangers for reasons including sexuality, lack of faith, finances, or childlessness.

The closing d’var Torah section draws on medieval commentators Rashi and Ibn Ezra, who describe the mixed multitude that left Egypt with the Israelites as including converts and even Egyptians, supporting Buchdahl’s argument that the Jewish people were a diverse ethnic patchwork from their very origin.

Buchdahl recounts more challenging experiences she has faced since becoming Central’s rabbi. On a Saturday in January 2022, while calling her parents on Shabbat, Buchdahl received a voicemail on her phone that was partially transcribed, reporting that a gunman claimed to have bombs. The message was from Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker of Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, reporting that an armed man holding four people hostage was demanding to speak with Buchdahl.

When Buchdahl called back, she learned that the gunman—a 44-year-old British citizen originally from Pakistan—had researched her extensively, referencing her synagogue’s size and a photograph of her with President Obama. He repeatedly boasted of loving death more than life and threatened to bomb the synagogue and elsewhere in New York. He then demanded that Buchdahl use her influence to free Dr. Aafia Siddiqui—a convicted terrorist he called his sister—from a federal prison 20 minutes away, within one hour. While Buchdahl was on the phone, Jacob dialed 911 on a second phone. Buchdahl lied, promising to act, while knowing that the demand was impossible to fulfill. She learned that Siddiqui, known to prosecutors as “Lady Al-Qaeda,” wasn’t the gunman’s sister; when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contacted Siddiqui during the standoff, Siddiqui refused to speak with the gunman.

When the gunman called a second time, Buchdahl tried to buy more time by understating her own influence. He dismissed this, insisting that every Jew had influence, and then hung up. Feeling simultaneously responsible and powerless, Buchdahl kept her Shabbat lunch plans as a small act of defiance. At 3:30 pm, eight FBI and New York Police Department officers arrived, debriefed her, and ordered her not to answer the gunman again. At roughly 10:30 pm, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on Twitter that the hostages were free and that the gunman was dead. She later learned that Rabbi Cytron-Walker ended the standoff by throwing a chair at the gunman and ordering the hostages to run.

The experience intensified Buchdahl’s fear about rising antisemitism and the safety of clergy and their congregations. She then details a sermon she delivered on January 21, 2022, in which she moved from gratitude for the hostages’ survival to her own unresolved anxiety about the future, drawing on Jethro’s advice to Moses that he can’t lead alone and concluding that the Jewish people are enduring as captives of hope.

Buchdahl recounts other forms of violence she has encountered. She learned of the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, while visiting her son’s college for family weekend. The attack fell on Simchat Torah, the day when Jews worldwide transition from the Torah’s final book into the formless void of Genesis’s pre-creation, a parallel she found devastating and symbolic.

Buchdahl was shocked by the rhetoric that framed the October 7 attackers as freedom fighters, by university presidents who couldn’t name the perpetrators or their victims clearly, and by her own interfaith leadership group in New York, which ultimately failed to issue any statement condemning the attack. President Biden’s unequivocal condemnation of Hamas moved her to tears because she hadn’t realized how urgently she needed to hear it.

Unable to console her congregation while still reeling herself, Buchdahl joined a UJA-Federation clergy mission to Israel. Ben-Gurion Airport and her Jerusalem hotel were nearly empty; hotels across the country had been repurposed to house over 200,000 displaced Israelis. At the Dead Sea, survivors from Kibbutz Be’eri—108 of whose members were massacred—had transformed a hotel lobby into a memorial. Amid the grief, Buchdahl witnessed a vast network of volunteers sustaining evacuees across the country. She attended the funeral of Lavi Lipshitz, one of the first soldiers killed in Gaza, and then visited the home of Doron Perez, whose son Daniel was taken hostage and whose other wounded son Yonatan declined a military exemption and returned to his unit.

Back in New York, Buchdahl connected the Torah portion Chayei Sarah and its reference to Be’er L’Chai Roi (“The Well of the Vision of Life”) to the similarly named Kibbutz Be’eri. She met a hostage family whose young daughter was named Be’eri and learned that five Israeli newborns received the name in the weeks after October 7.Throughout the following year, Buchdahl privately wrestled with the war’s moral complexity. A wise congregant asked what God would want; she answered that it was to work toward peace.

In a closing d’var Torah section on dimah (“tears”), Buchdahl draws on the biblical Joseph, whose weeping opens the path to reconciliation with his brothers, and on Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh was murdered after 328 days in Hamas captivity. Goldberg-Polin’s poem about the shared salt of all mothers’ tears gives Buchdahl permission to grieve Palestinian suffering alongside Israeli loss, and Psalm 126’s image of sowing seeds in tears to reap a future harvest anchors a fragile, deliberate hope.

Buchdahl reflects on the year following October 7. She found these months in New York increasingly difficult—city life was defined by torn hostage posters, relentless demands that she defend Israeli military policy, and academic boycotts of Israeli scholars. She surprised herself by asking Jacob to look into German citizenship for their family as a contingency, an idea that struck him as alarmist but that Israelis, she noted, found entirely reasonable.

Against this backdrop, Buchdahl received an invitation to deliver the keynote address at the inauguration of the first Israel Education Research Center at Seoul National University, Korea’s most prestigious public university. Originally planned for November 2023, the event was postponed to June 2024 and relocated off campus due to fear of protests—yet it proceeded. Buchdahl traveled to Seoul for her first trip to Korea in her role as a rabbi.

In preparing her address, Buchdahl identified unexpected parallels between Israel and Korea: Both established modern states in 1948, both face hostile neighbors requiring mandatory military service, and both invested in education and research and development. Her talk, titled “From the Chosun Dynasty to the Chosen People,” explored her dual identity and the gift of experiencing both cultures as a simultaneous insider and outsider; it also contrasted Korea’s hierarchical deference with Israel’s blunt informality and contrasted contemplative solo practice with the noisy, dialogic Jewish learning model of hevruta (a collaborative learning method). She closed by singing a mash-up of “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and the Korean folk song “Arirang,” drawing the audience to its feet.

In the closing d’var Torah section, Buchdahl reframes the concept of Am Segula (“the Chosen People”), arguing that Jews were chosen for service—specifically, to carry the memory of being a stranger. From Abraham’s departure from his homeland to Ruth’s conversion to Moses naming his son Gershom (“a stranger there”), the Jewish master narrative is rooted in otherness. Jews are commanded in every generation to remember and protect the stranger because, Buchdahl argues, that’s what they were chosen to be.

Buchdahl traces her gradual reconnection with her Korean heritage. In August 2024, she traveled to Korea with her mother, Sulja, and her daughter, Rose, for Sulja’s 80th birthday. In Seoul, the three posed before the statue of 15th-century King Sejong—their ancestor. They then traveled to Taegu to visit family, including Restaurant Emo, whose two overflowing refrigerators suggested abundance born of having lived through wartime scarcity.

The centerpiece of the trip was a three-day meditation retreat at Donghwasa Temple, established in 493 CE, where Sulja once studied for six months as a young woman and where the family had picnicked during Buchdahl’s early childhood. Five women from three generations of her family attended together. A Korean Buddhist master led sessions by repeatedly asking “What is this?” and refusing to provide answers (316), pushing students to look deeper; Buchdahl noticed a parallel between this methodology and Judaism’s insistence on grappling with questions over receiving settled answers.

The teacher asked Buchdahl to explain Judaism to the group. She told the story of Abraham—the first Jew—who leaves his homeland at God’s command and finds belonging by welcoming strangers into his home. As she spoke, she saw her mother’s tears and understood that she was also narrating Sulja’s story. On the final morning, the teacher asked Buchdahl to sing a prayer. She chose “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which Tablet Magazine once called the greatest Jewish song—the purest expression of a wandering people’s longing for home. Her aunt wept, saying that she felt their parents’ presence and believed they now understood why Sulja had to leave.

The pilgrimage concluded at the family’s ancestral burial plot in her mother’s village of HyunPoong, where her grandparents and two uncles, Yi JaeYung and Yi InYung, were buried. After her aunt and mother addressed the dead, Buchdahl spoke to her grandmother, telling her about becoming the first Korean American rabbi. She and Rose then recited the Kaddish, a Jewish memorial prayer in Aramaic, for their Korean ancestor.

In the closing d’var Torah section on pardes (“orchard”), Buchdahl recounts her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in November 2018 in Tacoma. The next morning, they unveiled a family orchard of 18 trees—18 being the numerical value of the Hebrew letters for Chai, “life.” Each family member claimed a tree; Buchdahl and Jacob selected the paired kiwi trees, which couldn’t fruit without each other. The rabbis used pardes as a four-level acronym for textual interpretation—Pshat (“plain meaning”), Remez (“allegory”), Drash (“comparative reading”), and Sod (“hidden meaning”)—and Buchdahl applies each layer to the orchard. The Sod refers to how her parents gave her roots in multiple traditions so that she could grow in any direction. The Garden of Eden itself, she argues, reveals that all of humanity had to be exiled from a first home in order to gain wisdom and cultivate their own. Years later, Sulja mailed Buchdahl the first harvest from the orchard, which she called a taste of paradise.