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Only from an open and spacious heart can I experience a connection to what is holy. When I am focused on what I want and need, or when I am filled up with my own sense of righteousness, then what I have created within is actually a Golden Calf instead of my own small sanctuary.

Mishpatim teaches that formal justice must be free of influence from bribes or wealth status, and that even the stranger deserves protection. In my home state of Montana, regressive laws recently passed in our 2023 state legislature have revoked rights and freedoms from Montana residents under the guise of “protection” and “freedom of speech."

Despite his reservations, [Moses] is able to see that God’s presence illuminates even the most unassuming, seemingly dark and thorny places. May we, with all our insecurities, do the same.

Since the attacks on October 7, T'ruah has offered public webinars for prayer and mourning, to engage with the moral challenges of the war, and to hear from staff who traveled to the region.

"More and more I begin to believe that we are as defined by those calls for help we do not answer than as by those calls that we do."

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?