Shabbat Hazon is approaching, and T’ruah’s MA Cluster is extending an invite to Massachusetts clergy to use our Reimagining Communities Sermon and Study Toolkit to engage your communities. Through grappling with themes of teshuvah and restorative justice, our toolkit connects Shabbat Hazon to MA T’ruah’s local organizing work on the #NoNewWomensPrison campaign.
On Shabbat Hazon (happening on July 22), from the final and hardest of the three prophetic rebukes of unethical behavior that precede Tisha b’Av, we will dare to envision a better world. We will lament historical Jewish and human conditions of exile, of families scattered and houses destroyed. Guided by the words of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 1:1-27) as our haftarah for the day, we will commit to turning away from unjust and oppressive exercises of power over one another.
Reimagining Communities is the work of making Isaiah’s words real for our Massachusetts community. Incarcerating women and girls denies the power of teshuvah and puts substantial roadblocks — emotional, physical, and financial — in the way of the work of teshuvah. Incarceration divides and scatters families. Incarceration destroys the functioning of homes. Reimagining Communities calls our elected officials, legislators, and state administration to invest in measures that help communities thrive and decrease the factors that lead to incarceration in the first place. To build up community health and capacity, rather than to jail and harm individuals, is deeply Jewish work. It is all of our work. It is T’ruah’s work.
On this Shabbat Hazon, support your community to envision a world made whole by the decarceration of women and girls. Through divrei Torah, personal reflection and testimony, text study, and more, we can face incarceration, and our part in it, in all its stark injustice. Together, we can direct our steps and our efforts to building up healthy homes and paths — not prison walls.