Migrants and Refugees

T'ruah's haggadah helps transform the seder into a conversation about immigration, racism, workers' rights, and forced labor.

The Mishkan was not just a compound our ancestors built; it is a state of mind that we can inhabit.

If America is to be the land of the free, a melting pot of diversity and equality, it too must clear the stones from the proverbial roads and build up pathways for immigrants, especially refugees and asylum-seekers.

I have just returned from the borderlands, where the conjoined cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez meet.

I can imagine a situation where Noah’s gut instinct was to just follow God, but I cannot fathom how he just sat there as the rain started to fall and didn’t do anything to try to save anyone. 

The work of pursuing justice, healing this world, feels at moments like a desert without a clear destination. The journey is hard and long, but when in the desert, when in the midst of suffering, when in despair, we are commanded not to lose hope.

...as we learn from Leviticus, for communal sin there can be expiation. The process begins not with bringing a bull to the sanctuary, but with a commitment to learn history, and a commitment to ensure that history is learned by others.

This drawing-near is ultimately what leads to Joseph’s emotions overwhelming him; breaking from silence into sobbing, he orders the room cleared and then reveals himself to his brothers. Our drawing-near is also what engaged our emotions and drew us from silence into speech.

As our ancestor Abraham experienced, our most liminal moments also often coincide with moments calling for meaning-making and the rituals that bring us spiritually home. Yet few who flee by forced circumstances arrive with the means that Abraham had to purchase the dignity of sacred space and time.

That’s how I found myself chanting and marching, yelling to children that they were not forgotten, that they were loved – while holding the hand of my youngest son, whom I love so much it hurts. Having a child is like letting your heart walk around outside of your body.