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While we don’t make the same mistakes each year, the mistakes we make come from similar places. Repentance is a way of approaching the struggles at the core of our being, rather than just feeling guilt for discrete acts of harm.

God hears the cries and responds to the tears of Jews and non-Jews alike. God even responds to the tears of characters elsewhere disparaged as evil.

We are strangers to others, and others are strangers to 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.

As we deal with a scourge of baseless hatred in our world today, what would it look like to use curiosity as one of the tools in our spiritual toolbox?

Recognizing who we truly are is our best resistance against tyranny. Knowing what lies in front of us, cognitive dissonance-and-all, we proudly wave the flag of Israel in May, the rainbow flag in June, the Stars and Stripes in July, because we recognize the promise of the miraculous ideas these banners represent.

The entire people is holy, each of them. God is with their pain and their needs. As narrow as our focus can be when we are in acute moments of pain, in struggling with what to say and when to say it as a leader, I see that there are times to push, times to be silent, and times to support.

Even if you are feeling a lack of empathy for an “other,” God does not make that distinction. God wants to be in relationship with both of you. May this profound teaching inspire us to resist the dehumanization of any group of human beings.

What if the Torah is saying that if ever there was a time for us to act like members of a nation of priests, that moment is NOW?!

The devastating consequences of excluding “the other” reverberate through history and are particularly relevant in our current climate of nativism and xenophobia, where human beings are being exiled for their words, and the very term “inclusion” is being banished.