Resources

This, to me, is the Torah: It is liberation. It is the release that comes from being seen, truly seen, in our whole, struggling, imperfect selves.

A briefing with Breaking the Silence about the current reality in Israel, the plan for Gaza, and the mass devastation in Gaza from a lens of understanding of the military and the work needed to build a just future.

The entire people is holy, each of them. God is with their pain and their needs. As narrow as our focus can be when we are in acute moments of pain, in struggling with what to say and when to say it as a leader, I see that there are times to push, times to be silent, and times to support.

Even if you are feeling a lack of empathy for an “other,” God does not make that distinction. God wants to be in relationship with both of you. May this profound teaching inspire us to resist the dehumanization of any group of human beings.

What if the Torah is saying that if ever there was a time for us to act like members of a nation of priests, that moment is NOW?!

This “regulated world” is only idyllic if you are the monitor and punisher of “deviation,” not the monitored and punished. For [the monitored and punished,] the longing instead is for a world that affirms the dignity of all people.

We can start the process of being our authentic selves and accepting others as they want to be seen before we fully understand what or why that might be.

We live in a privileged society. The Torah teaches that God judges us on how we meet our societal responsibility to provide for the most vulnerable people within our society. While we enjoy the blessings [of our privilege], we fail to meet the responsibility.

The devastating consequences of excluding “the other” reverberate through history and are particularly relevant in our current climate of nativism and xenophobia, where human beings are being exiled for their words, and the very term “inclusion” is being banished.

Holiness is not about attaining some kind of moral and spiritual perfection, but rather cultivating the ability to see and respond to the opportunities to live up to our highest ideals, to build that quality of readiness to meet each moment as it comes.