Resources
Lech Lecha: A Wide Open Tent
If the tent, our home, is truly open on all sides, there is an understanding that each person is continuing onward on a different journey. Our Torah is blessing us to be just as supportive in saying goodbye as we are in saying hello.
VOTING AND DEMOCRACY: One Possible Halakhic Approach
Rabbi David Polsky reflects on what Jewish tradition has to say about voting and democratic practice.
Bereshit: The Boundless Breadth of Dreams
No creation is possible without first stepping back and creating room for the infinite breadth of everything it could be.
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Responsibility, Guilt, Teshuva
Sources and guiding questions to help inspire and support Jewish clergy as they bring the ethical teachings of our tradition to their communities this High Holiday season.
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Matot-Masei: Community Just Might Be the Only Thing That Saves Us
When you understand yourself to be part of a community, you’ll show up, you’ll fight for your neighbor, and you won’t let concerns for your own welfare be at odds with doing so.
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A DIZZYING INVERSION AND AN URGENT PAUSE: Reading Trachtenberg in the 21st Century
The second half of a debate across time between author Ben Lorber and Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg about American Jews’ strategies to resist antisemitism.
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Excerpt from “STOP FASCISM: Preserve Democracy” (1937)
The first half of a debate across time between author Ben Lorber and Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg about American Jews’ strategies to resist antisemitism.
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Acharei Mot – Kedoshim: What Does It Mean to Be Holy?
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.
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Pekudei: Learning From, Not Erasing, Our Broken Tablets
The administration is tearing apart the historical narrative of the United States, denying the verifiable truth that more people have been left out of the American dream than included in it, that brutality had a role in building this country, and that we have inherited both the gloriousness of the nation’s founding ideas and the shame of our failure to live up to them.
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CONTRASTING TRUTHS: The Aspirations and Limitations of American Democracy
Sofi Hersher Andorsky and Aaron Dorfman make the case for Jewish investment in liberal democracy.
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CONFRONTING THE MORAL CROSSROADS: Chile’s Jews from Dictatorship to Democracy
Author and journalist Maxine Lowy guides us through the story of how Chilean Jews and non-Jews endured when democracy was shattered, and how, over 17 years, Chileans fought successfully to restore it.
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Noach: Opportunities for Healthy Reboots Are Built into the Universe
Just as human choices brought about the flood and built the Tower of Babel, our choices in the election will determine where we go from here. And though the possibility of the bet-lamed of destruction is surely out there, so too is its opposite, lamed-bet — heart. In all of the anxiety, we can bring love to bear on the choices before us.
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