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Remarks at 'ICE Out for Good' protest, 1/12/26

1/12/2026

I've protested at this ICE facility six times now. And it's never been this cold before. And also, there's never been this many people here before. So good job, all of you for coming out here in this cold. You're here because your outraged. I'm outraged too. I woke up mad. I was so outraged that I knew I couldn't speak off the top of my head and keep calm like my holy sister, Miracle, did when she spoke just now, so I wrote out my remarks. But Miracle noted that we woke up to a synagogue in Mississippi being firebombed. All their torahs, their holy books, were burned. And we know from historical experience that where books are burned, people are burned.

The murder of Renee Nicole Good and the ongoing lawless behavior of this illegitimate government agency called ICE enrages us because it offends us on nearly every conceivable level. It offends as Americans and as humans. It offends our morality and our compassion and our sense of justice. It denigrates and profanes everything we come to understand.

As Americans, we hold the belief that our nation was built by generations of immigrants that came before us, from England and Germany, Italy and Ireland, China and Mexico, and every country on the planet. Tempest tossed, these generations of immigrants looked to America and found that lady liberty lifts her lamp beside a golden door. But today, folks seeking asylum are chased in the streets by thugs. Families applying for final visa status are arrested in courthouses and in schools, in universities, and even in church. Sanctuaries literally cannot even offer sanctuary to these criminals.

As people of justice we are enraged that they do these acts while violating any and every law conceivable. They show no warrants. They racially profile anyone with brown skin. They show no badges. They hide their faces like cowards. They swear and curse and threaten.

As people of compassion we are horrified by their inhumanity. Folks arrested by ICE disappear into ICE detention centers at Northeast Ohio and Moshannon. They are overcrowded and mistreated. They are denied access to lawyers and family visits. Chaplains are even denied access to these gulags. So pervasive is the loneliness and deprivation that God cannot even get in. And when the expedited and extralegal incarceration is done, they get sent to CECOT in El Salvador. ICE not only allows cruelty – it revels in being cruel, following in the fascist authoritarian tradition of the gulag or the gestapo.

As people of faith, we are offended that they treat God’s creatures with such disrespect. My holy book tells me that God created everyone in the Divine image and that as a result, every human being you encounter, black brown or white, documented or undocumented, is a version of God Godself, and should be treated accordingly, with love and compassion.

We pray that our actions here today, of speaking out and witnessing, and of speaking truth to power ; and demanding justice against lawlessness ; will help turn the tide in dismantling and abolishing ICE, a rogue out of control agency running wild. We pray that the killing of Renee Nicole Good will be prosecuted and her murderer face a judge and jury for his crimes. We hope that her death will not be in vain, and that in her name, justice be done for all immigrant people in this country who want nothing more than to dwell under their vine and fig tree, with none to make them afraid. In our sacred books we learn

How long shall the wicked, O LORD / how long shall the wicked exult / shall they utter insolent speech / shall all evildoers vaunt themselves?
They crush Your people, O LORD /
they afflict Your very own /
they kill the widow and the stranger/
they murder the fatherless,

But we also learn
that justice shall abide in the wilderness
And righteousness shall dwell on the farm land.
For the work of justice shall be peace,
And the effect of righteousness, calm and confidence forever.

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A nation that rules by force is a nation in moral and spiritual exile

1/12/2026

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Dvar Torah Shemot 5786

There are weeks when clergy have to be acrobats and contortionists to get the parsha to line up with current events that we feel the need to discuss. There are other weeks when the cycle of Jewish text selections conspicuously aligns with what is happening in the world around us. This week was, unfortunately, the latter.

Parshat Shemot opens with the story of how a free people under a good Pharaoh came to become slaves under a bad Pharaoh. And it is also the foundational narrative of the man who would come to lead the people to freedom, Moses. His origin story is that he was raised in Pharaoh’s palace, and in his first venturings out to see the nation he was a part of, he witnesses a taskmaster beating a slave. He kills the taskmaster and flees. Put another way, Moses comes to see with his own eyes the brutality of a fascistic state in which the fundamental definition of the state is violence, brutality, genocide, injustice infanticide, and slavery. The authority for governing is brute force. Submit or be killed. And Moses kills the taskmaster and flees Egypt for what he probably thinks is forever. This is an act of the ultimate rejection of Pharaoh’s might makes right ideology. Moses, in leaving, is in effect saying ‘I want no part of this society.’

What we saw this week in Minnesota with the killing of Renee Nicole Good was the wanton and unrestrained display of violence, brutality, and injustice by the state. The justification that might actually does make right. This past week a senior administration official was quoted as saying the following, “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

You tell me how that is any different from what Pharaoh says in the parsha this week to his taskmasters when the Israelites ask for one day off to celebrate a festival to God. The Torah says in Exodus 5 “That same day Pharaoh charged the taskmasters and foremen of the people, saying ‘You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making bricks as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But impose upon them the same quota of bricks as they have been making heretofore; do not reduce it, for they are shirkers. Let heavier work be laid upon the men; let them keep at it and not pay attention to deceitful promises.” In both quotes, those that rule state that they derive their power not from the consent of the governed, but rather from violence or the threat of violence to anyone that would stand in their way. And by the way, that principle of rule by the threat of force isn’t just appropriate in regards to this weeks news story about ICE, but also in regards to Venezuela and Greenland, which were also in the news this week.

The Passover story and the book of the Torah we begin this week focuses on two grand ideas: slavery - or avdut, and Exodus, or yitziat mitzrayim. The rabbinic tradition of the Talmud, and the medieval period, and of the Hassidim of the 18th and 19th, is overwhelming concerned with a completely different core Jewish idea that originates in Parshat Shemot. And that idea is called galut, or galus. (I’m gonna use the two terms interchangeably because I believe in honoring both the modern Israeli pronunciation and the traditional ashke-normative pronunciation. I also want to just be able to get up at the bimah and occasionally use a word like ashke-normative.) Galus has come up from time to time in my teachings and divrei torah here, but always as an aside. But from where we are right now, and what is on my mind this past year in America, it seems very appropriate to look at this weeks parsha through the lens of one idea, and that is that Parshat Shemot is where the Torah tells us we begin our experience of galus.

What is galus? Well, literally, it means exile. If Israel is the land promised to Sarah and Abraham, Rebekah and Isaac, Rachel and Leah … and Jacob; then exile is being outside of the land without the ability to get back in. But, for a people of God who exist in spiritual state as well as a physical state, galus cannot simply be a physical location, or maybe it is davka not a physical state. A simple question illustrates this: is a Jew living in Tel Aviv that defrauds his business partners, cheats his workers, acts with malice and violence to his loved ones, slanders his neighbor, violates the sabbath and consumes bacon cheeseburgers <quote> redeemed <unquote>? The tradition generally regards this person as deeply in galut - a state of personal spiritual exile.

Multiple hassidic scholars over the years that I have learned happen upon their understanding of this spiritual state of Galut in this weeks parsha. They say it like this: the Israelites go down to Egypt, and everything is fine, and then they forget God, and they become oppressed, and they don’t even know how to cry out.
And then in Exodus 2:23 and 24, after 400 years of slavery, they cry out, and in verse 25 it says
וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיֵּדַע אֱלֹהִים׃
God looked upon the Israelites, and - either the translation here is ‘God knew Israel’ or ‘Israel knew God.’ And that means that exile - galus - wasn’t the physical state of being in Egypt but rather the spiritual state of living without God. Yeah the Jews were in Galut because they were in Egypt, but they were REALLY in galut because they did not know God. THAT’S the real galut.

The rabbis of the Talmud had that same idea a little bit earlier. They come to ask a question regarding God’s Divine presence after the destruction of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple, of course, creates not one but two Jewish exiles; the first to Babylonia; and the second time into the world at large for the next 2000 years. The question they ask is: where does God dwell if the holy of holies, the resting place of the divine presence called the shechinah, is destroyed? The Talmud answers in Berachot 8a: Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Ami said in the name of Ulla: Since the day the Temple, where the Divine Presence rested in this world, was destroyed, the Holy One, Blessed be God, has only one place in the world – only the four cubits where the study of halakha is undertaken.

In other words, when Jews are physically exiled, then God is physically exiled. But when a Jew communes with God spiritually, they both transcend the state of exile, through either study or observance, or both. It is worth noting something very interesting here. The Talmud does NOT say ‘the only way for the Divine Presence to return is for Jews to move to Israel’. It transforms the concept of exile from physical to spiritual.

Moreover, the fact of galus creates a theological problem that the rabbis need to solve. If God is behind everything and particularly the grand movements of the people Israel throughout history, then why would God permit the Jews to be in exile? Why not just let the Jews dwell in the land eternally? Aren’t we the chosen people? There are many potential answers, but one that the Zohar and Kabbalah and the hasidic rebbe Rabbi Yehuda Lieb Alter of Ger gives us is uniquely moving to me: that God scattered the nitzutzot of shvirat hakelim - God spread Divine radiance which is a remnant of the creation of the universe - in galut. And the Jew’s holy task in the world is to find the scatter shards of Divine light and return them to God. And we do that, of course, by doing mitzvot. These Divine shards of light - were specifically placed in galus.

In Rabbi Yehuda Lieb’s words “The Torah says in the final parsha in Genesis that God said ‘and I Myself will also bring you back’, And what that means is that exile exists in order that we should redeem the holy sparks which were in Egypt - Mitzrayim.

In other words, the purpose of galus is that God created it so that humans could go on a Divine scavenger hunt. We must do the mitzvot and find the lost shards, and only then do we get out of galus and bring the redemption.

This movement of galut into a spiritual idea became so pervasive for a thousand years that it is in some part the basis for why the desire for the creation of a modern state of Israel was so controversial amongst Jews. In the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the Reform movement actively argued against a return to Israel in any form - believing that America was the new promised land and that Isaiah’s vision of a universalist truth of all being equal was the ultimate goal. In other words, Reform Jews simply denied they were in Galut, or rather, believed that the move towards a better world and future was not at all connected to a physical Jewish return to Israel.

The Orthodox had a few strong proponents of Zionism at the 1904 Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland and the subsequent conferences, but the majority held what Rashi and the Talmud and the later Kabbalists said: the return to Israel would occur when the Messiah comes and the Third Temple is built. Only a Davidic monarchy and a restored bais hamikdash would establish a return to Zion. The Religious Zionist effectively argued: let Hertzl and his nutty Labor Zionist pals from Poland try their idea at a return to the land and a democracy and maybe that will lead to a Davidic king and a third Temple. To this day, there is widespread disagreement across Orthodoxy as to whether the state of Israel is the path towards moshiach and redemption from galut, or a false start – whether modern Israel is a part of redemption or an impediment, or worse. There’s also a wide range of cart and horse, chicken and egg problems of whether you need the people in the land and then the messiah and then the temple or the temple comes first then the people then the messiah or what.

Conservative Judaism, always on brand, split the difference. It was the only movement to be fully Zionist from the outset, and it fully endorsed a democratic political state in the land of Abraham and Sarah. But – the language the movement adopted leaves the question of this modern state is unanswered. In the prayer for Israel that we said this morning, we did NOT call Israel our redemption - geulateinu. What did we call it? PAUSE – Reshit smichat geulateinu – the first flowering of our redemption. That means that the Israel we know might be the first steps towards a messiah and a temple. But it isn’t the end product. Additionally, when given the option to amend or edit the 19 blessings of the Amidah we say every weekday, the movement fought vociferously over whether we should desire a return to the fire offerings at the temple, and fought for a decade over whether we should amend the first blessing to include the names of the matriarchs. But it left in the paragraph requesting our return to Jerusalem, and our rebuilding Jerusalem, and it left in the paragraph about messianic redemption.

Modern Israel continues to present a great challenge to the idea of galut. If 80% of the country identifies as secular, but they live in the biblical land of Israel, eating cheeseburgers and not feeling connected to Judaism, are they in Zion, or in Galus? For the roughly 20% of Israelis that are religious or haredi, have they achieved spiritual geulah - redemption, but remain in physical galus until Israel becomes a monarchy or a pure theocracy? And if the kabbalists are right – that galut was created because God needs us to do the holy work or redeeming the sparks everywhere before the Messiah comes, then the only way we get back to Zion physically or spiritually is by raising up all the sparks and fulfilling every available commandment and repairing the world completely. By the way, a welcome back to Robert Gleiberman who just returned from Israel - both physically and spiritually, I’m sure.

America this week was in overdrive embodying all the characteristics of galut
- the oppression and subjugation that defines the human state of exile. The galut makes the argument for a state based in force and not morality. The Galut mentality is that of Pharoah – that if your army is big enough, no constitution, no international law, and no God can stop you from doing what you want.

Our task as human beings, in America and in Israel and for Jews everywhere, is to transcend galus, to rise above the physical manifestation of our world’s coarsest influences of subjugation and materialism and selfishness and oppression and violence, and to resist them. Nothing is above God, Torah, and morality.

Redemption comes from a faith that God and justice and morality supercede force and that we must be guided by those principles. But redemption only comes for us if we put in the work; if we seek out the injustice and immorality in galut and repair it and redeem the sparks. Shabbat Shalom.

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Combatting Antisemitism, and why we're doing it all wrong

1/5/2026

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Vayiggash 5786 - Jewish Joy

When I was a kid, and all the way into my twenties, we would gather at my grandmother’s house on the Saturday night on which Hanukkah fell for latkes and brisket and presents as a family - my mom and sisters, my uncles, and their kids. And we would of course light the hanukkah candles. But at some point, I think when I was maybe 14 or 15, it was like the 3rd night, and my grandmother seemed unimpressed with the number of candles on the hanukkiah, and so she yelled out ‘light em all!’ Which is already a funny thing to say until you add in the fact that she had kind of a high voice, and an accent from growing up in a village in Poland so it sounded like ‘light em all!’ And of course, because she was matriarch of the family, and because it was fun, we indeed lit them all.

And this was really her whole philosophy of life. Maximize joy. Laugh easily. Surround yourself with family. Maybe it’s because she was my grandmother - the elder of our tribe - that we always looked to her as something of a guide to life. Her wisdom and approach to doing things always seemed to carry more weight than anybody elses. It could also be that as a Holocaust survivor, we all understood that we lacked the kind of profound life experience to fully grasp what was truly important in the world. Or maybe it was just that she seemed to have a life that was fulfilled and contented that her example and her advice carried more weight than most other people.

We live today, in 2025, in a post-post-modern era in which I think much of American society doesn’t seem to who it is or where things are going. You certainly can’t get a sense of moral direction from the speeches of major politicians anymore, or their actions. Between instagram and tik tok and the president recently renaming a venerable American institution after himself among other egregious acts, we’ve normalized narcissism and selfishness. American historians used to call the 1980s the ‘me’ generation, but I think the 80’s have got nothing on the 20’s.

Judaism, too, is in a bit of crisis, and has been for quite some time. The dominant narrative of the American Jewish community, particularly if you read it through the lens of the way the news covers us, is antisemitism. Last year when universities were battlegrounds for students protesting the war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, there were some ugly moments and some ugly slogans. And we spent an inordinate amount of time locked in a discussion of the definition of the thin line between antisemitism and antizionism. About two years ago we had Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, create a foundation called ‘Stop Jewish Hate’ and spend $10 million to run a super bowl ad announcing that they shouldn’t be antisemitic. And with it came a foundation that spent $60 million dollars in 2024 on, among other things, little blue square pins to send out all over the world to make people become aware of antisemitism. And a few months ago, many of my colleagues joined together on a joint letter to condemn the vituperative and divisive language that New York presidential candidate Zohran Mamdani has used in condemning Israel. If you just read the newspapers or listen to NPR, this is Judaism in the 2020s.

To be clear, Zohran Mamdani has said some dumb things, and public figures get held to account for the things that they say - that’s the way it works. And all of things I mentioned above cannot be removed from the context in which they exist, and that context is a bitter, bloody war in Gaza that we will spend the next decades trying to make sense of. And with that war came a rise in antisemitic acts that was very troubling. And here in Pittsburgh we have good reason to be vigilant towards hatred of Jews.

But, overall, there is a significant rise in an effort to refocus the bulk of discussion, time, and money on something called ‘combatting antisemitism’.

And all of it – ALL OF IT – has made me profoundly uncomfortable.

Simply put, I think we’re doing it wrong - or maybe more accurately, the elites and those with the resources in Jewish community are doing it wrong. The Jewish community has either accidentally or intentionally absorbed the me-me-me instagram generation’s obsessive narcissism to center the narrative about themselves, and feels the need to tell the world that the narrative they’ve formed about us is wrong.

Superbowl ads against antisemitism? Why is anyone spending money on that? Why spend money on telling people what they should think? And what kind of message is it to say to most Americans ‘hey, I know some of you folks out in rural Nebraska have never met a Jew and you don’t know anything about and you don’t really know much about Jews - but here’s the main thing you need to know about us - don’t hate us.’ If you gave me $10 million dollars, I’d send every kid in Pittsburgh to Jewish day school or EKC. I’d make Hebrew school almost free. I’d pay an army of Jewish kids to stand in front of giant eagle every week handing out shabbat candles and asking Jews to put on tefillin. I’d underwrite the cost of Pittsburgh’s Intro to Judaism class to make it more affordable and larger.

In other words, instead of painting an ‘oh woe is me’ narrative of the Jewish community, the Jewish community should invest the bulk of its time and energy not on combatting antisemitism, but instead on three key words: promoting Jewish Joy. Promoting Jewish Joy. The best way to change the narrative about the Jewish people is for us to focus and invest heavily on doing what we do best, which is living meaningful, joyful, rich Jewish lives. Invest in community! Promote how much fun we’re having flipping latkes and baking challah! Talk about how calming and inspiring and refreshing going to synagogue and recharging and recentering our selves on shabbat after a busy chaotic week engaged in the clatter of the marketplace and the stress of our working lives! My PR branding narrative for the world is to redouble our efforts to convince everybody on earth ‘hey, these are nice people that like singing and dancing and praying, and every december we make candy canes and they make very oil hash browns, and that’s ok with me’.

Why did we need a blue square pin when a little mogen david necklace was there all along? In other words, you can’t change the perception of who we are in the gentile world by telling everybody ‘no, no, you’ve got the wrong idea about us.’ You have to change the narrative - and you do that by showing who we are, day after day, every day, with joy.
By the way, this is on some level about as preaching to the choir a dvar torah as I could give. I know you all here agree with me, because you’re here! You are the shock troops in the war for Jewish joy. You are all combatting antisemitism the right way. You think this place matters, and our prayer and song and community and family matters. And everyone you interact with every day sees that about you and thinks ‘huh, David or Shoshanna or Rich or Aviva is a really nice person, and they make really good Jewish hash browns. Why would anyone hate them?’ I am convinced that if we have more Jews we have, living with more joy and purpose, and if the rest of the world sees that as our dominant virtue in the world, in addition to being generous and believing in helping our neighbors and making the world a better place through mitzvot, we could eliminate antisemitism in my lifetime. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe. I don’t think so though.

It’s not like we haven’t already seen expensive campaigns from the Jewish community to fix what ails us before. In the 90s there was something of a panic over Jewish intermarriage rates, and a survey revealed that the three greatest determinants of raising a Jewish family were three things - attending a Jewish summer camp, attending a Jewish day school, and going on a trip to Israel. So billionaire Michael Steinhardt and the North American Jewish Federations and the Israeli government funded a program to bring Jewish young people to Israel, which they called Birthright. Maybe it was effective? Maybe not? I would surmise that for some people it was effective and for others it wasn’t, partially it was built off of a two-week moonshot idea - go to Israel for two weeks, and you’ll decide to spend the rest of your life being more Jewish.

The concept of cultivating Jewish Joy - by the way, not my idea, it’s in the zeitgeist right now among Jewish millennials and non profits around reinventing our PR and our mission - the concept of Jewish joy is taking the kernel of the idea from Birthright and saying ‘ok, that was a good start, but it needs to be sustained and habituated in zillion different ways and different events.’ Birthright was almost a revolutionary idea in Jewish history. But maybe it becomes the spark that begins a permanent revolution in Jewish Joy that really does change things for the better.

Four weeks ago, we met Joseph, a brash, obnoxious, narcissistic young man who thought he was smarter than his brothers. His father gave him a coat of many colors and he showed it off to everyone - me-me-me . His brothers hated him for being so self-absorbed, and I think for most of us when we read that narrative back in Vayeshev, we are torn, as we think ‘Joseph’s brothers were wrong for what they did, but Joseph is also an annoying little twerp.’ And thus, we feel conflicted. We just don’t love this guy.

In this week’s parsha, Joseph’s big reveal to his brothers of who he is begins with these words ‘I am your brother Joseph. Is my father well?’ We see Joseph has matured. It’s not all about him - his first act is to ask after the welfare of someone else, his father. He reconciles with his brothers. He cares for them generously. He recommits to family. And that term he uses - is my father well? The hebrew is od avi chai. We borrow that phrase and tweak it a little when we sing perhaps the central song in the modern era sung as an expression of Jewish Joy - Am Yisrael Chai - for which the second part is ‘od avinu chai’ - we the Jewish people go on with life - we are busy with the business of living joyfully as our central act of resistance against those who wished for our downfall. We’re still here, lighting our candles and making our hashbrowns and living with joy. And this for me is the secret for Jewish surviving and thriving - that we lived with Jewish joy for 4000 years, and we need to lean into Jewish Joy for the next 4000 years. Shabbat shalom.

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Remarks at 'ICE Out for Good' protest, 1/12/26

A nation that rules by force is a nation in moral and spiritual exile

Combatting Antisemitism, and why we're doing it all wrong

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