Torah is Nothing if it’s Not Ours (Shavuot Poem)

Historically, Jews have been accused of controlling politics, the banks and the media. I haven’t read yet that they control the weather, but that wouldn’t be any more bizarre than the other charges.

Once a society begins treating Jewish fear and/or pain as inherently dishonest, Jewish trauma as inherently political, or Jewish victimhood as uniquely undeserving of empathy, it creates a moral exception around Jews.

When we fall short — as individuals, as a people, whether everyday Jews or the Prime Minister himself — we must have the courage to face it honestly, call it what it is, and do better.

As America’s 250th birthday approaches, the history of Christian Zionism in early America highlights the importance of today’s ecumenical allyship.

The problem is not Jewish joy itself. The problem is the growing belief that Jewish joy can replace the difficult work of protecting the conditions that make Jewish flourishing possible in the first place.

Nothing about the Jewish story—with its revolutionary insistence that there is one God, its history of relentless suffering, its triumphant return to the land it was expelled from millennia ago—is normal, and we shouldn’t try claiming it is.