Resources

Repair is not a prerequisite for empathy, nor does holding another’s pain discount our own.

I yearn for a day when I can tell the story of Middle Eastern hospitality without reference to pain, struggle, occupation, and violence. When we can eat in one another’s homes, sharing hummus and rice and stories and friendship.

This divine capacity for imagination allows us to see beyond ourselves… understanding the grandeur of Hashem's world. To focus only on our own pain and suffering or to refuse to imagine the other worlds that are possible… misses the basic nature that Hashem made us to possess.

Use these clergy resources to help your community make a narrative shift: expanding beyond rightful condemnation of settler violence to seeing and working against the violence of the occupation and settlement projects as a whole.

“Standing at the border of the Promised Land, God declares that [Moses’ deeply human chronicle of the Exodus] belongs within the eternal text of Torah. The messy, contingent experience of history is revealed to have been Torah all along."

Now is the time we need to reach into the abundant depths of justice… We can not tend to everything at once, but we can each do something.

Darkness, in Bo, was not merely the absence of light, but the collapse of moral vision — the inability to see the person beside you. The Israelites, by contrast, … were able to preserve connection within their homes. Connection is also light.

Jacob’s words remind us that life’s most sacred moments call us to speak truth and to recognize our deep ties with one another. Even when relationships are fraught, even when pain tempts us to turn away, we are bound together.

In this moment, when our communities carry fear, grief, and uncertainty, the identity of wrestling feels especially urgent. Wrestling is a powerful metaphor for faith. It means to hold on — even when understanding feels out of reach.

Adar is a month that invites us into an ancient, collective experience. It calls us to cultivate joy, even when we do not feel it naturally. Our ancestors knew there would be Adars when joy was hard to find, yet they committed themselves to honor the spirit of the month, to dare to seek joy even in the hardest times.