Jewish Relationships Initiative

Category: Tikkun Olam

  • Shabbat Shalom

    As we welcome Shabbat and read from Ki Tetzei, the musical connector is Lecha Dodi.  Based on a verse from Isaiah, we are told “Dont be ashamed” despite the trials of the week, welcome the comfort of Shabbat.

    David Sasso brings Lecha Dodi to us with Bluegrass.  Using this genre is a metaphor about reaching out to others and creating relationships wherever they may be.

    Shabbat Shalom

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.

  • The Kippah on My Head Is Not a Target on My Back

    Should I take off my kippah?

    I first asked myself that question years ago, before a trip to Hungary. Viktor Orbán was reaching for power by invoking an old script, the anti-Semitic tropes his country knows too well, and I did not want to become a small, portable target for whatever that script might awaken in a stranger. I was not traveling alone. My wife would be beside me, and the fear was not only for me. If my kippah made me a target, it made her one too.

    I brought the question to my friend and teacher, Rabbi Brad, a man with a cooler, wiser head than mine. He didn’t answer it. He asked me to ask a different question. For many people I would meet, he said, I might be the first Jew they had ever stood beside in the flesh. Perhaps, he suggested, the kippah wasn’t a liability to manage. Perhaps I was being handed an assignment, an unlikely diplomat to a community that might be more curious than cruel.

    I took his advice, and it opened doors I could not have imagined from the outside. Jews who had spent decades in hiding found me because I was visibly, unmistakably one of them, and that visibility told them it was safe to speak. I heard survival stories that had never been spoken aloud before that day. None of it would have reached me if I had made myself smaller, safer, and harder to see.

    This is not just a piece of personal history. It’s an argument for a claim I still believe: the kippah was never a challenge thrown at the world. It was a door held open.

    I did not expect to be asking the same question again, this time about New York City, in 2026. Yet here I am.

    Here are the people I encounter on an ordinary day here. The cab driver who gets me to the airport. The man behind the bodega counter who knows my order before I say it. The woman at the pushcart serving food from a country I couldn’t find on a map, standing beside another cart from a country nowhere near it. The subway platform at rush hour, where I can stand for four stops and watch a whole world get on and off around me, no two people from the same place, all of them going somewhere.

    New York was never the melting pot we were taught to sing about, where everyone’s edges dissolved into sameness. It is a stew, every ingredient still itself, still recognizable, simmering together anyway. It is a city built, whatever its failures, on the idea that a person gets to wear who they are without flinching, on that platform, behind that counter, and everywhere between.

    I won’t pretend the danger people are naming is imaginary. There is an angry rabble here too, and a hateful mob, and, worse, the lone wolf who needs no crowd at all to do harm. And I won’t pretend that taking off the kippah wouldn’t make me a slightly harder target to find. It would. Hiding works, a little, the way hiding always works. But safety was never the only question worth asking, and it cannot be the only one we let ourselves ask. Playing it smart is real; each of us has to make our own honest reckoning about when a threat is truly a threat, and I won’t tell another Jew what their reckoning should be.

    However, a life organized entirely around that reckoning isn’t a life. It’s a retreat dressed up as caution. We need a north star that isn’t fear. Something better. Something that still believes the man at the bodega counter, the driver, the woman at the pushcart, might be capable of curiosity instead of contempt—because most days, they are.

    I learned this from my rabbi and friend, standing at a doorway to Hungary, years before I understood what he had truly given me: the kippah on my head was never a target on my back. It was always, and continues to be, an invitation. I won’t let anyone—not history, not a headline, not a lone wolf’s shadow—convince me to fold it up and put it away.

  • What Happens to the Stragglers? Parsha Ki Tetzei

    Why does a portion overflowing with civil law stop, in the middle of everything else, to tell you how to build your roof?

    When you build a new house, Torah says, put a ma’akeh, a guardrail, on the roof, so no one falls. It sits in Ki Teitzei almost an afterthought among dozens of other laws: return the lost ox, pay the worker before sundown, leave the gleanings for the poor. But ma’akeh is the right word for the whole portion. Every law here is a guardrail, a protection for those who could fall or be pushed.

    We build guardrails because we don’t fully trust each other, and a society honest about that protects people exactly where power tends to slip: the wife accused without evidence, the son a father wants to disown, the worker whose wages could vanish if no one were watching. Ki Teitzei is guardrail after guardrail, each one placed where someone could fall.

    Madison wrote the same instinct into the Constitution: if men were angels, no government would be necessary, and since they are not, government must be given enough power to govern and then be obliged to control itself. Checks and balances in our government are guardrails by another name, built because we know what power does when no one is watching or nothing is stopping it.

    What they were built to keep out has a name: Amalek. Torah tells us exactly what he did. He attacked from the rear, cutting down the stragglers, the elderly, and the exhausted, too weak to keep pace after Egypt. The Hebrew for it is zanav, to tail. And Torah adds one line about why: he did not fear God. Fearing God, in this text, means knowing something stands above you, that your own strength is never the final word. Amalek feared nothing greater than himself, and a man who fears nothing greater than himself decides soon enough that the weak exist for his convenience.

    Hubert Humphrey put it plainly, dedicating a federal building: the moral test of government is how it treats those at the dawn of life, the children; those at the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped. Society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. Those are exactly Amalek’s targets.

    I recognize that fault line right now, and it does not belong to another country. Those same guardrails, due process, the courts, a Congress willing to check power rather than defer to it, get treated as obstacles rather than as boundaries. Immigration raids treat frightened, exhausted people the way Amalek treated the stragglers, as targets of opportunity rather than as human beings owed protection. Settlers in the West Bank, claiming to act in the name of my own tradition, terrorize Palestinian families with brutality that has everything to do with Amalek’s logic and nothing to do with Torah. When the government looks away from these or blesses them outright, I no longer consider them legitimate by the standards of our tradition.

    Ki Teitzei commands us to erase Amalek’s memory precisely because that instinct never fully leaves: the appetite for treating a guardrail as an inconvenience rather than a covenant. What do we do when the stragglers being picked off are visible right now, on the news, at the border, in cities, villages, and olive groves? It is one of Moshe’s final charges to his people before he dies: make sure we are never mistaken for Amalek, or for the government, or for the neighbor who lets him operate unchecked.

    I have no program to offer, no plan for how a rabbi in Philadelphia moves the world’s cruelty. But I know what my tradition asks of me before I know what to do about it: let the stragglers, wherever they are this week, be people I am responsible for, not a category I have learned to tolerate.

    What would it cost you to do the same?

  • Shabbat Shalom

    Re’eh-See.  This Shabbat we read the parsha asking us to see what’s going on, to choose the blessing instead of the curse.

    Playing for Change shares this cover of Marvin Gaye’s classic, What’s Going On.

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.

    May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.

    Shabbat Shalom

  • Masei – What do we owe the person who broke something they never meant to break?

    Masei spends its final chapters on legal architecture, tribal borders, and inheritance rules. But it also includes the law of the arei miklat, the cities of refuge, built for the person who kills b’shogeg by accident. The neighbor whose axe head flew off the handle. The driver who looked down for just one second.

    The Hebrew is doing something specific. Miklat shares a root with klitah, meaning absorption. It’s the word Israel still uses to describe how it takes in immigrants. An ulpan klitah is an absorption center. A city of refuge isn’t a jail cell or a technicality that lets someone off the hook. It’s a place built to take a person in, fully, the way a body absorbs what it’s given.

    But the text refuses to keep this simple. The one who fled must remain there, not for a fixed sentence, but until the death of the sitting High Priest, a mortality with no connection to what he did. Step outside the walls before that day, and the victim’s own kinsman, the go’el ha-dam, may kill him without guilt. There is no release date. No parole board, no moment when remorse itself triggers freedom. The clock belongs to no one in the story. Not the guilty. Not the grieving. Not even the community that built the walls.

    I think about this law when I’m sitting with people who never swung an axe. The hardest conversations I have as a chaplain are with those left behind after someone they loved has taken their own life. The question always comes, in some form. Why couldn’t I have stopped them? What could I have done differently? The law in Masei is written for the hand that acted. But the ache it names reaches beyond the letter of the text. It reaches the parent who didn’t call back, the spouse who went to sleep instead of staying up, the friend who sensed something was wrong and said nothing. No court can rule on that kind of guilt, because there was no crime. It is its own kind of b’shogeg, harm without intent, and it deserves its own klitah, its own absorption. There is only the unbearable arithmetic of what might have been different, run again and again, with no verdict ever arriving.

    We want closure on a schedule, closure being a word that means to shut something. We want five stages of grief with a finish line, a program that promises healing by a set week, and a story the culture is ready to call resolved. Masei suggests some ruptures don’t run on anyone’s calendar. What I have seen console the otherwise inconsolable is not an answer, because there isn’t one. It is something closer to what the city of refuge offered before anyone had ruled on guilt or innocence, before any judgment was handed down. A sacred space of empathy and love. Built to absorb a person exactly as they are, guilt and all, for exactly as long as it takes. No release date there either.

    So the harder question isn’t who needs a city of refuge right now. It’s whether we can build one, not to explain away the guilt, but to hold it and stay standing at the gate for as long as someone needs us there.

  • Shabbat Shalom

    We welcome Shabbat and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

    It is a time of sacred celebration and rededication to the ideals upon wbich this nation was founded.  Let us thank God for our blessings and continue the work on behalf of us all. I share Ray Charles’ version of America the Beautiful

    Shabbat Shalom

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.

    May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.

     

  • What’s Going on?

     

    As we welcome Shabbat and read Parsha Korach, Marvin Gaye’s What’s going on is an unorthodox way to sing it in. “Korach used the language of justice to serve his own ambition. This Shabbat, Marvin Gaye asks us to look honestly at our own motives — and our world’s.”

    Shabbat Shalom

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵיm תֵבֶל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.

    May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.

  • Juneteenth: The Proclamation Is Not the Liberation

    Freedom cannot be bestowed.

    That is what Juneteenth teaches, if we read it honestly. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers rode into Galveston, Texas, and told enslaved people they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier. The news had been deliberately withheld.

    People who were legally free had been kept in chains.

    I sit with that as a Jew. Not because our stories are the same. They are not, and I want to be clear about that. The deliberate withholding of freedom from people already legally free, followed by a century of Jim Crow, redlining, and state-sanctioned terror, is a specific history that is not ours to claim. But we know something about living in a country that promises equality and delivers something else. Jewish Americans were excluded from universities, neighborhoods, and professions long after the law said otherwise. We built our freedom here. We fought for it, organized for it, generation after generation. Not the same distance. But enough of the same road to understand what it means when a proclamation is not liberation.

    Freedom declared is not freedom achieved.

    That distance has a name in Hebrew. The true condition of liberty, not the absence of chains but belonging, nesting, and being at home, is called dror. It appears in Leviticus 25:10 as the heart of the Jubilee: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” u’k’ratem dror ba’aretz l’khol yoshveha. The phrase is engraved on the Liberty Bell here in Philadelphia.

    Dror shares its root with the swift, darting bird that cannot be caged. In Psalm 84, the dror finds her nest. Freedom is not merely an unlocked door. It is the ability to build a home.

    You cannot nest in a relationship built on hierarchy.

    The Black-Jewish coalition built some of the most significant civil rights work this country has ever seen. And it is fracturing. I cannot name all the reasons from where I stand, but I can name some of them honestly. The tensions over Israel and Gaza have pulled progressive coalitions apart in ways that have left Jewish Americans isolated in spaces they once helped build. There have been moments in the racial justice movement when antisemitism surfaced and was not adequately confronted. And Jewish organizations have sometimes retreated into self-protection at precisely the moments when showing up for Black Americans would have cost something. All of this has accumulated. The distance between us is not an accident.

    I have been part of that accumulation. Not out of malice, but out of a posture I want to name and examine: tzedakah without brit. Tzedakah is not charity. It is justice, a moral and ethical obligation owed to every human being by virtue of their dignity. Yet even justice, at its most rigorous, assumes someone who owes and someone who is owed. Brit, covenant, is different. In brit, there is no creditor and no debtor. There are only partners, each bound to the other by what they have promised, each carrying something the other cannot generate alone. The Jewish community has often brought tzedakah to the Black community when what the relationship required was brit. I have shown up as a donor when I needed to show up as someone who needed this too. The hand extended downward, however sincerely, is not the same as hands clasped across.

    During last year’s Super Bowl, an ad ran that I have not been able to stop thinking about. A Jewish boy, clearly frightened, walked down a school hallway. He found an epithet written on a Post-it note inside his locker. His Black friend appeared beside him and (paraphrasing) said: “Don’t worry about this. I have your back.”

    What moves me about that image is not who is scared and who is confident. It is that they are there together. The Black friend did not calculate whether the Jewish boy had earned his solidarity. The Jewish boy did not weigh whether he deserved it. One person was vulnerable. The other showed up. That is not tzedakah. That is brit.

    And it runs in both directions. Fannie Lou Hamer, testifying before the 1964 Democratic credentials committee with the FBI listening and her life on the line, taught a room full of Jewish liberals what courage is, something they could not have learned on their own. The civil rights movement and the fight against antisemitism are not parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. They are the same road. Both communities have been told by the powerful that their humanity is conditional. Both communities carry traditions of survival, resistance, and a stubborn insistence on dignity. When Black and Jewish Americans stand together, it is not because one is helping the other. It is because the work of building a just world belongs to both, and neither can finish it alone.

    The Jubilee was not tzedakah. It was brit. The landowner returned what the system had accumulated on his behalf. The landless person was not a charity case. He was a covenant partner whose rights had been deferred. That is what made the Jubilee holy: not that someone gave, but that the relationship was restored.

    Restoration, not generosity. Two covenant partners, each asking the other: what do you need that only I can provide?

    That question requires something specific. It requires the willingness to be seen as the one who needs, not only as the one who provides. It requires showing up without the guarantee of reciprocity, because the covenant is the point, not the return. It requires trusting that the other person’s struggle is not separate from yours.

    Juneteenth poses a specific question to the Jewish community. Not what we are permitted to do. Not what would make us feel righteous. What does this day demand of us toward our Black neighbors in this city, right now?

    Two people walking the same hallway, watching each other’s backs. That is what covenant looks like. I don’t think Juneteenth asks us to admire that image. It demands that we become it.

  • Shabbat Shalom

    Bridge over Troubled Water is a to prepare for Shabbat Naso.

    Naso gives us the Priestly Blessing — the oldest words in continuous Jewish use. Simon & Garfunkel found the same melody three thousand years later.

    Our prayer for peace

    עוֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא יַעֲשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל וְעַל כָּל יוֺשְׁבֵי תֵבֶל, וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן

    Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei tevel v’imru amen.

    May the One who makes peace in the high places, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel, and all humankind, and let us say: Amen.

  • Commanded to Let Go: What Shemitah Teaches About Sinai, Suffering and Starting Over

    BEHAR – BECHUKOTAI  •  5786

    Parashat Behar opens with a striking geographical framing: “Vayedaber Adonai el Moshe b’Har Sinai” — God spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai. The Midrash famously asks why specify Sinai here? Because Shemitah — the sabbatical year — is Sinai’s teaching made tangible. Revelation wasn’t a one-time delivery of words. It was a rhythm embedded into the land itself.

    Every seven years, the fields lie fallow. Debts are released. Slaves go free. What has accumulated — wealth, obligation, bondage — is released back toward equality. Then, after seven cycles of seven, comes Yovel: the Jubilee. Land returns. The slate is wiped clean. Not as punishment, but as design. Not as weakness, but as wisdom.

    This is not agricultural policy. It is a theology of impermanence.

    Some of us know this not as theory but as lived reality. A robbery, a fire, a hurricane, a financial collapse that arrived without fault. An impossible debt that grew heavier no matter how faithfully it was carried. For those who have used bankruptcy not to escape responsibility but to find the only available path forward — Torah sees you. Shemitah exists precisely because the Midrash understood that sometimes circumstances overwhelm even the most honorable person and that a society without a release valve ultimately crushes both the debtor and the community.

    Bechukotai asks: what happens when we refuse? The curses are not divine wrath — they are a portrait of a world that never lets go. A land driven to exhaustion. A community that abandons its most vulnerable rather than absorbing their loss together. This is what we build when we mistake accumulation for security and holding on for strength.

    Obedience, then, isn’t submission to arbitrary decree. It is the discipline of release, trusting that we and others can survive the pause and that starting again is not shameful.

    We must look around to see who in our community is carrying an unbearable weight right now. The Torah didn’t leave the reset to individual conscience; it built it into communal law because community is precisely where it must happen. This Shabbat, consider what it means to be someone else’s Shemitah. Be the one who says: your debt to me is released. Begin again. We will begin again together.