In this d'var Torah for Behar-Bechukotai, Rabbi Sally Priesand draws connections between the Liberty Bell and other symbols and ensuring liberty in civic life.
My Torah for this week urges each of us to walk into the unknown. Let our written lines, mixed in with the words of others--ancient and contemporary--make a path, embodied.
According to the Netziv, the brit is meant as a healing salve. God knows the ways committing acts of violence may leave a permanent scar on those who commit them. Perhaps God is speaking from experience.
As our ancestor Abraham experienced, our most liminal moments also often coincide with moments calling for meaning-making and the rituals that bring us spiritually home. Yet few who flee by forced circumstances arrive with the means that Abraham had to purchase the dignity of sacred space and time.
Like Jacob’s dream, our justice work must be grounded in this world, absorbing the pain of everyday injustice with our hearts open to those suffering. And yet, our work must remain aspirational, reaching for the sky and not settling for anything less than our basic demands of human dignity and human rights.
I imagine the Israelites showing the same expression of confusion and disbelief as those families who realize that they have just lost their homes and that their lives have just been upended: not knowing to whom to turn and where to go because of a system that is not built to support them. At least in the story of the Exodus, God has other plans.