This work is our calling, and it doesn’t pause for a pandemic. Instead, we find creative ways to engage and mobilize our communities at a distance.
Friday’s sunset could be no different than Thursday’s, a time marker notching off another day or another week, but Shabbat requires us to mark a more substantial difference, Regularity is key to keep track of our lives between other Jewish times and when days blur into each other.
Even as structure and routine begin to crumble, ritual observances don’t stop for the virus. As did many generations of Jews before us, we must adapt ritual to this unprecedented way of life, and Shabbat services, a mainstay for nursing home residents, necessitated creative adaptation.
The urgency of this moment is clear. Launching the We Are Done Dying Campaign in early May, the NAACP declared, “The health and safety of our people are at an unparalleled risk.”
Every voice matters, and every vote should, too – but in many places across the U.S., restrictive laws and practices disproportionately keep People of Color from voting. As someone who is too young to vote, I am motivated to ensure that everyone who is eligible to exercise this right does so.
This week, I tell a friend I’d love to chat but actually I have to run Yom Kippur services are starting soon and I’ve got to repent for my sins before the gates are closed. She laughs. “Well, you’re gay, so you’ve definitely got a lot of repenting to do.”
This June marks 60 years since my rabbinical ordination, but those six decades have not diminished my appreciation of the rabbinic mentors who symbolically escorted me to rabbinical school and upon whose shoulders I stand to this day.
Racism is a form of idolatry, of self-worship that is immoral and is fundamentally against humanity and democracy. What we do in the Poor People's Campaign is to help people make the connection between interlocking injustices that threaten everybody’s security.
And at this moment, in the midst of the pandemic, we are witnessing a time of reckoning for the racial divide that has torn our society apart for so long. What does it mean to bring a baby into a world in desperate need of r’fuah sh’leimah, the full healing of body, heart, and soul?
