Sanctuary Cities: No Walk in the Dog Park

Commentary on Parshat Masei (Numbers 33:1 – 36:13) When I take my dog to the dog park, he loves to run from picnic table to picnic table and dive underneath them, seeking shade and safety. The picnic tables are a safe zone, a refuge, a sanctuary. Between 1980 and 1991, nearly one million Central Americans fled...
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Private Prisons, God’s People

A number of years ago my husband’s nephew suggested that we invest some funds with him in high-risk high-yield bonds. We did. After earning a good return, I asked my husband what his nephew had done with our money. He answered that his nephew, among other ventures, had invested in for-profit prisons. I was horrified....
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To Transform Our Economic System, We Need to Challenge Inheritance

Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, the daughters of Zelophehad, recognize and name another crisis, which is that the inheritance laws are set so that families with only daughters are unable to inherit land and instead their families lose their access to land. The five women respond powerfully to the crisis of their father’s death, and a structural shortcoming, with an eye towards intergenerational shifts rather than short-term reform.
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Rabbi Karen Bender and HUC student Samantha Thal

Sukkot: Sukkot and the Human Right of Dwelling Safely

Perhaps Sukkot is the festival of understanding our journey, for journeys have no concrete and steel foundations, only earth and sandy feet. And the yearning that should come out of this collective memory must be a passionate commitment to end homelessness everywhere, physical, spiritual, or national.
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Power and Transformation

The intersection of Parshat Miketz and Hanukah invites us to reflect on two different ways in which transformational impact can be effected, and the importance of understanding the nuances of each. We see two drastically different models of power and change in these stories.  In Miketz, Joseph—an Israelite foreigner in Egypt who, by happenstance, is granted an...
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Your Joy Is Your Sorrow Unmasked

A week ago Sunday, marked by the new moon of the Jewish month of Adar, I spent the day at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia, bearing witness to the desecration of 539 gravestones. Joining with Muslim, Quaker and Christian neighbors, people of faith and conscience, our hands in the earth restoring headstones, as...
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Shemini: Strange Pitfalls and Big-Picture Solutions

Those of us of a certain age remember the heady days of the 1960s, when we hoped to create a new world of peace and love. Fast forward half a century to the last election. How did the love generation devolve into today’s isolation, rage, and powerlessness? What went wrong? This week’s parashah, with its...
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A Message That Will Be Heard

A D’var Torah for Parshat VaEra by Rabbi Dr. Oren Z. Steinitz “Just as it is a mitzvah for a person to deliver a message that will be heard, so is it a mitzvah for a person not to deliver a message that will not be heard.” (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot, 65b). This statement, attributed to...
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