Social Justice: Leadership and Philosophy

Theologically speaking, to be human is to be sacred. Full stop. During human engagement, when we remain mindful of the sanctity of the other person, we bring acknowledgment of our shared holiness and further elevate the other and ourselves.

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.

Today, we still struggle to recognize the gray within our heroes as well as within our ideological opponents. We jump to point out the hypocrisy, unethical behavior, and dearth of compassion in our enemies, while doing everything possible to underplay that of our allies — and, of course, ourselves.

What feels so hard in this moment is that I don’t know what the right course of action is. One of the problems I see in the world’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack is a preponderance of either Chesed or Gevurah thinking.

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.

We find that we have to learn from our ancestors with a dual dose of humility and chutzpah: both to learn from their wisdom, and also to transcend their limitations.

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.

Looking back can be terrifying. We are further protected by being a part of the covenantal community, thus we can look back safely, unflinchingly, to the very real horrors that have shaped our communities and our lives.

What is the Torah inscribed on our lands and in our hearts? What Torah do we bring with us into a new land?

God entrusts us, flawed mortal beings as we are, with the responsibility to figure it out and take care of each other.