Parashat Bamidbar: The Imperative to Provide Refuge

My father’s family were refugees from Vienna, who fled just before World War II broke out, but not before my grandfather had been deported to Dachau. He remained incarcerated there from November 13, 1938, until January 19, 1939. He knew he had to leave Austria with his family. But leaving wasn’t easy. First, it meant...
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The Weeping Mother Speaks: On Tisha B’Av, Remembering the Pain of Separation

Tisha B’Av reminds us: You know what this awful pain feels like. First, every year, we are supposed to practice feeling the excruciating dissonance between the way things are and the way they should be. We have to feel the deep outrage and pain of the crying mother. But we must also be Rachel, weeping not only for her children, but naming the more compassionate way of being that we know, that we remember is possible.
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When the Entire Community Is Guilty

...as we learn from Leviticus, for communal sin there can be expiation. The process begins not with bringing a bull to the sanctuary, but with a commitment to learn history, and a commitment to ensure that history is learned by others.
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Sacred Noncompliance (Parshat Ki Tisa)

Commentary on Parshat Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11 – 34:35) The Golden Calf is one of the most spiritually disturbing incidents in the narrative of the Israelites’ journey through the desert. While Moses is away on the mountain with God, the Israelite camp dissolves into a chaos of mistrust and idol worship under the care of...
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Yom Yerushalayim Obscures The Reality of Modern Jerusalem

A d’var Torah for Yom Yerushalayim by Daniel Seidemann. Jerusalem Day, Yom Yerushalayim, which is this coming Friday, was created by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, the Rabbanut, in the wake of the 1967 war, and subsequently enshrined as a national holiday under law. A religious commemoration of the “reunification” of Jerusalem when Hallel is said,...
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Join the T’ruah Book Club

Join the T’ruah network in reading a timely book about human rights, learning related Jewish texts, and participating in an interactive webinar with the author. You can read together with your existing book club, with members of your synagogue or other institution, with a friend, or on your own. Or let us know if you...
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Meet our 2024 Gala Honorees

Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award From the arts, to the United Nations, to Human Rights Watch, Marina Kaufman has dedicated her life to human rights for all people. In 1978, she became involved with an organization called the University for Peace in Costa Rica, where she was one of the “producers” of a benefit concert...
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Free Speech: The Gray Area

On Thursday, January 11 at 4pm ET, T’ruah invites you to begin to disentangle your thoughts on "Free Speech: The Gray Area" with T'ruah's Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America.
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A Commitment to Justice Means Remembering Our Tribes

But whether or not the Sinai wilderness was ever ownerless as the midrash suggests, in North America, the so-called wildernesses never have been. Those places — and indeed every square mile of North America — have always been, and continue to be, the home of specific tribes of Indigenous peoples.
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