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I believe one reason we dispose of people who have done harm (or are accused of doing harm) is to avoid looking at ourselves and our own baser natures.

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.

'On Rosh Hashanah, it is written and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed: How many will die and how many will be born? Who will live and who will die?' This is one of the most beloved and troubling of Rosh Hashanah prayers. But such is the power of great poetry.

God, according to the Torah, created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. This doesn’t mean that the world was perfect at the end of the sixth day of creation. Rather, God models the necessity of taking just one day to experience the world as it is, while acknowledging our own limitations in perfecting it.

What is the Torah inscribed on our lands and in our hearts? What Torah do we bring with us into a new land?

The connection between Sukkot and immigration is incredibly rich.

You may be familiar with the notion about the wounded healer, popularized by the author Henri Nouwen in his book by that name. He asserts: “When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed...

T'ruah invites Massachusetts clergy to use this toolkit as a way to connect the decarceration of women and girls in the Commonwealth with Shabbat Hazon.

It is not enough to mourn. Mourning must be accompanied by actions that end the harm being done. 

We find in our tradition that God dwells not in the destruction, but in the moment right before rebuilding.