Chukat | T'ruah

Yom Kippur: Atoning for Our Patterns

While we don’t make the same mistakes each year, the mistakes we make come from similar places. Repentance is a way of approaching the struggles at the core of our being, rather than just feeling guilt for discrete acts of harm.

Responsibility, Guilt, Teshuva

Sources and guiding questions to help inspire and support Jewish clergy as they bring the ethical teachings of our tradition to their communities this High Holiday season.

Ladino socialist publication La Bos del Pueblo. Credit: New York Public Library.

A MULTI-ROOTED MOVEMENT: Sephardic Activists and Horizontal Alliances in the Early 20th Century

New scholarly work on how Jews of past generations advanced groundbreaking multiracial coalition work, and what the tensions they faced — including racism within the Jewish community — say about conditions today.

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Chukat: Moses, the Rock, and Me

by Rabbi Jenna Shaw

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.

Chukat: Leading and Listening

by Maetal Gerson

Facing the climate change disaster means facing one another with respect and sincere empathy. Only then can we manage the amount of work it will take to fix that in which each of us has a stake.

Chukat-Balak: Seeing Ourselves Through the Eyes of Others

by Rabbi Beth Janus

I like to imagine that Balaam’s words changed us and shook us out of our complaining so that we could see ourselves in a fresh way.

“And the community was without water….”

by Rabbi Miriyam Glazer

Our Torah depicts what can happen to us in a world without water... Moses striking the rock to yield water is a vivid metaphor for the water-related violence that is breaking out all over our world — particularly in the Middle East, as well as in South Asia and Africa.

Juneteenth: Freedom as an Ongoing Struggle

by Kelly Whitehead

Rabbinical Student and T'ruah board member Kelly Whitehead on Juneteenth and collective memory.

Purell, Red Heifers, and Why Not Being Racist Isn’t Enough

by Lila Corwin Berman

And at some point, I looked down at my hands and my children’s hands, spotless from washing, no dirt under our nails, and I thought about the historical chain of racist violence and state-sanctioned brutality that our hands grasped. Our social system makes certainty of our cleanliness an impossibility. Quite the opposite: we are all unclean, no matter how much we may have washed.