Thank you Dr. Alon Chen for that generous introduction. Receiving this award from the Weizmann Institute is one of the greatest honors of my life and I am humbled to be associated with this institution which embodies the highest pursuit of knowledge, innovation and healing.

This award is especially moving for me – and to explain why, for a moment I would like to take us back to the days before October 7. It was Rosh Hashanah 2023, and after 8 months of judicial reform protests and what nearly verged on a civil war in Israel, I urged my community that new year to engage. To feel obligated to Jewish peoplehood.

I shared a story that comes from the Talmud about conjoined twins, born with heads on a single body. The rabbis were most concerned if the conjoined twins needed to wrap 2 sets of tefillin or if one would suffice. Love that rabbinic mindset. In other words – was this 1 or 2 people? They referred back to the wisdom of King Solomon when he encountered conjoined twins petitioning him for a double inheritance. King Solomon devised an ingenious test: Pour hot water on one of the heads...and if the other head also screams, then you may have 2 heads, but they share ONE soul.

When I gave that sermon in September, as our Israeli brothers and sisters were crying out, I don’t know that I convinced many American Jews of their responsibility to engage. But 20 days later, October 7, as they witnessed the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, we felt this pain in our kishkes. In ways that surprised even ourselves. It was a most terrible time for the Jewish people, but it was also a moment that world Jewry was reminded: we are Am Echad. We are one people. Sharing one beating heart.

I love that strange story of the conjoined twins from the Talmud. Maybe because the experience of feeling that you have 2 heads on one body, is familiar to me. I was born in Seoul, to a Korean Buddhist mother and an American Jewish father. One body –but I wore two cultural inheritances on my face. Which made me unsure if I could fully inhabit either one. I came to America, which promised full citizenship, but I was always a hyphenated Korean- American. Or Jewish-American.

At 5, I immigrated to a tiny Jewish outpost in Tacoma Washington, where my father’s family had settled 3 generations prior. At Temple Beth El, I had yichus, which made it easier that my family didn’t look like anyone else’s in the Jewish community.

Being so far from East Coast Jewish life and from Israel – my first interaction with Israelis came by my uncle Jack Warnick, who served on the Tacoma city council and made Kiryat Motzkin a sister city of Tacoma in 1979 – the year his son Todd made aliyah. What a coincidence. My family hosted Israeli scouts and musicians from Kiryat Motzkin each year. My first trip to Israel at age 16, was on the prompting of Jack’s wife Lilly who encouraged me to apply for the Bronfman youth fellowship. I did - and that trip changed my life and made me want to be a rabbi. My uncle Jack and Aunt Lilly died in the last few years but Todd and his wife Minette – my Israeli family – are here tonight and they have always made me feel at home here.

From my first visit to Israel, I felt an intense feeling of homecoming That I cannot fully explain, but I know I’m in a room full of people who understand. But I also felt a deep sense that I was a stranger here. Not just because Israeli children in 1989 would yell after me Japonit! Or because the rabbanut, and most Israelis wouldn’t see me as as Jew because of my Korean mother, my Korean face. Or because so many Israelis think of Reformi as a curse word.

But I tried to hold the cognitive dissonance of feeling dismissed and disregarded here in Israel and also the most alive and whole as a Jew when I was here. One head said “You’re home here.” the other “You’re the ultimate stranger.”

As a mixed race child, as a product of interfaith marriage, I often felt the discomfort of holding 2 heads, arguing with each other, disagreeing, competing for attention.

But I have come to appreciate that old adage: 2 heads are better than one. Especially when we understand that all the tensions and debate have to be contained within a single heart.

It makes me appreciate the strength and the beauty of having our Jewish people live everywhere in the world, but concentrated in two centers of America and Israel, not always agreeing, But living with different experiences of sovereignty, security and vulnerability, speaking different languages, but ultimately sharing not only one body, one soul, but a common destiny.

The Weizmann institute has always struck me as its own kind of conjoined twin — one head devoted to a universal pursuit that belongs to no single nation, the other rooted, unmistakably, in a Jewish state. Two heads, one soul: knowledge that reaches the whole world, powered by a heart that beats for one people's survival.

Receiving this award from the most prestigious scientific institution in the State of Israel is a homecoming I could never have imagined—for the girl who once felt she could never truly call Israel home. Tonight, in this room, with my Israeli cousins and Israeli friends who are like family to me, I am reminded that no matter how far apart our heads might feel, we are Am Echad. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this highest honor.