Social Justice: Leadership and Philosophy

In this week's commentary on Devarim, Rabbi Francine Roston reflects on the need to understand and process trauma before moving forward.

“Standing at the border of the Promised Land, God declares that [Moses’ deeply human chronicle of the Exodus] belongs within the eternal text of Torah. The messy, contingent experience of history is revealed to have been Torah all along."

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.

Each of us contains a Divine spark of holiness, but if our thoughts and actions aren’t directed toward holiness and channeled toward a redemptive vision, toward something larger than ourselves, then our sparks don’t connect and align.

Hashem does not desire a polished or fictional version of ourselves — an image untouched by failure… The joy of confession is knowing that we deserve to be loved for who we are, not who we are able to present ourselves as.

As we celebrate receiving the Torah amidst the brokenness of a world struggling with rising authoritarianism and rife with human rights abuses, each of us committed to the work of repairing that world is called to think through how these pieces of our lives fit together.

Now is the time we need to reach into the abundant depths of justice… We can not tend to everything at once, but we can each do something.

All of Torah is within us... The options that we can individually access may be different than our neighbor’s, but no less vital to the project of bringing justice and healing to this world.

We must be able to identify when something “like” a plague has affected us, but also to recognize when there are limits to our own perspective.

Torah does not ask us to confuse legality with righteousness. It challenges us to investigate whether our laws serve the most vulnerable, honor human dignity, and reflect the divine spark that exists within every human being.