Social Justice: Leadership and Philosophy

This, to me, is the Torah: It is liberation. It is the release that comes from being seen, truly seen, in our whole, struggling, imperfect selves.

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.

Holiness is not about attaining some kind of moral and spiritual perfection, but rather cultivating the ability to see and respond to the opportunities to live up to our highest ideals, to build that quality of readiness to meet each moment as it comes.

Freedom is never an end, nor is independence, nor is sovereignty. They are modes of existing in this world that allow us the ability to choose how we act. Are we free of Pharaoh only to set up new Pharaohs of our own? Have we achieved independence and sovereignty only to deny it to others? Have we been released from Egypt to serve ourselves?

Passover is centrally about the possibility that in a moment, things can radically change. Yet, simultaneously, radical change cannot magically stay with us. No event lasts without an intention to integrate its lessons.

May we hear and take seriously others’ observations of us that we have erred, and may we admit our errors, when we realize them. May our leaders take seriously their obligation to examine their own actions, and to admit and take responsibility for their unwitting mistakes.

The administration is tearing apart the historical narrative of the United States, denying the verifiable truth that more people have been left out of the American dream than included in it, that brutality had a role in building this country, and that we have inherited both the gloriousness of the nation’s founding ideas and the shame of our failure to live up to them.