This week I spoke at two vigils.

The first was outside the North Carolina Legislative Building. Faith leaders and advocates gathered to speak out against the proposed reopening of the Rivers ICE Detention Facility. We spoke about immigrants, detention, families, and the moral cost of building more places to detain and imprison human beings. Together, we honored the memory of 60 people who died in ICE detention or during ICE operations.

The second vigil honored farmworkers who died from heat stress while harvesting the food we eat every day.

On the surface, these events seemed very different.

One was about immigrants. The other was about people who died while working in unbearable conditions.

But both reveal systems that harm some of the most vulnerable people in our society. And both depend, at least in part, on us not seeing.

As I prepared for both events, I found myself returning to this week’s Torah portion, the words of the prophets, and the rhythm of the Jewish calendar.

In Deuteronomy, Moses spends his final days urging the Israelites to remember what it was like to be oppressed, to be strangers, to know what it feels like to be powerless. That memory is supposed to shape the kind of people we become.

This week also brings Shabbat Nachamu—the Shabbat of Comfort. Isaiah begins with the words, “Comfort, comfort My people.”

When I hear the word comfort, I think about sitting with someone after they’ve received devastating news. I think about bringing food. I think about giving someone a hug.

But Isaiah doesn’t stop there.

He goes on to say, “Prepare the way.”

To me, that sounds like a call to remove the obstacles that keep people from living with dignity. Comfort isn’t only about lightening someone’s burden. It’s about changing the conditions that created the burden in the first place.

At the first vigil, I found myself saying that behind every detention bed is a person. Behind every deportation order is a family. Every policy reflects a choice about who we are becoming.

At the farmworker vigil, I ended up saying something I hadn’t planned to say quite so strongly: “The dead do not need our comfort. They need our truth.”

Those weren’t really two different messages.

Both vigils were asking the same question:

What happens when we stop recognizing the humanity of other people?

At the farmworker vigil, I listened as one family shared their story.

A man spent one day working in extreme heat. The next morning, he returned to the fields. He collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where he fell into a coma. When he finally woke up, he had suffered severe brain damage.

Instead of receiving the care and support he needed, he was fired. So were his father and brother. The family was then deported to Mexico because his work visa no longer allowed them to remain in the United States. Rather than receiving the medical care he still needed, he was sent away.

Stories like that remind me that every policy, every workplace decision, and every act of neglect lands in the life of an actual person.

Whether we are talking about people harmed by our immigration detention and deportation system or workers reduced to labor units instead of human beings, Judaism pushes me in the opposite direction.

It asks me to see the person first.

The opening chapter of Genesis teaches that every human being is created in the image of God.

That’s easy to say.

It’s harder when the conversation turns to immigration policy, labor practices, budgets, or politics.

Maybe that’s exactly why the Torah keeps reminding us.

Some people wonder why a rabbi shows up at vigils like these. They assume these issues have little to do with Judaism.

I show up because Torah belongs wherever grief is present.

I show up because I believe these ancient words still have something to say about the world we’re living in today.

And I show up because my faith has been shaped as much by what I refuse to ignore as by what I believe.

These two vigils won’t, by themselves, change public policy.

But I know silence changes us.

I don’t want to become the kind of person who accepts human suffering as normal.

I believe people of faith are called to remember, to bear witness, and to tell the truth.

Perhaps that’s where comfort begins.

Vigil Opposing the Reopening of the Rivers ICE Detention Facility

The Vigil to stop the reopening for the ICE Detention facility was featured on ABC 11 with a short clip from my speech.

Vigil Honoring Farmworkers Lost to Heat Stress

My words from the Farm Workers Vigil and some photos

I’ve been thinking about the rhythm of the Jewish calendar lately. Every year around Tisha B’Av, I find myself reflecting a little more deeply. Part of that is personal. My mother died on Tisha B’Av in 2020, and every year this season draws me back.

One of the things I love about Judaism is that even the calendar has an emotional arc. We don’t simply remember history. We rehearse it every year.

As I was looking ahead to this season, I found myself thinking about the names we give certain Shabbatot. Shabbat Chazon. Shabbat Nachamu. Shabbat Shuvah. They’re names I’ve known for years. I’ve talked about them, taught them, and lived through them. But this summer I found myself wondering what story they tell when you put them together.

The answer, I think, is that the Jewish calendar tells a story of what it means to be human.

The Three Weeks

In the three weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av, we read a series of prophetic haftarot filled with warnings about injustice, corruption, and what happens when a society abandons its values. These readings come primarily from Jeremiah and Isaiah.

The last of the three is Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat immediately before Tisha B’Av. Its name comes from the opening word of that week’s haftarah, Isaiah’s chazon—his vision. The chapter opens with God, through Isaiah, cataloging Judah’s failures: empty rituals, corrupt leaders, a people going through the motions of faith while ignoring justice. The tradition deliberately places these readings together. We don’t get to mourn the Temple’s destruction without first sitting with why it happened. Chazon means vision, but this is a hard vision. It asks us to look honestly at what a community becomes when it loses its way, right before we grieve what that loss cost us.

Then Everything Changes

After Tisha B’Av, the tone shifts dramatically. The very first words of the next week’s haftarah are Nachamu, nachamu ami—”Comfort, comfort My people” (Isaiah 40:1). That is why this Shabbat is called Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Comfort.

But here’s what has always struck me. We don’t receive just one week of comfort. We receive seven. Healing, the tradition seems to suggest, takes longer than grieving.

The seven Shabbatot between Tisha B’Av and Rosh Hashanah are called the Shiva D’Nechemta, the Seven Shabbatot of Consolation. Week after week, Isaiah reminds us that loss is not the end of the story, that hope can return, and that broken communities can be restored.

Think about that for a moment. Judaism gives us three weeks to prepare for destruction — but seven weeks to practice healing.

Comfort Before Change

Only after those seven weeks do we arrive at Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Its name comes from the opening words of Hosea, Shuvah Yisrael—”Return, O Israel.” This is the Sabbath of return, repentance, and renewal.

I don’t think the order is accidental. The Jewish calendar doesn’t rush us from grief into self-improvement. It doesn’t demand that we immediately “move on” or become better people.

Instead, it offers comfort first. Only after we have been reminded that we are loved, that we are still in relationship, and that hope is possible are we invited to do the hard work of teshuvah—of returning.

That feels like deep wisdom.

I’ve been thinking about how often our culture reverses that order. We expect people to change before they’ve had a chance to heal. We tell ourselves to be productive before we’ve grieved. We mistake criticism for growth.

The Jewish calendar imagines another way. It says: Tell the truth about what has been lost. Sit with the grief. Listen for words of comfort. Then, when your heart is ready, begin again.

Maybe that’s why these Shabbatot have names at all. They serve as reminders that our spiritual lives have seasons, and that healing has its own sacred pace.

My mother died on Tisha B’Av. We didn’t always know how to love each other well. Part of what I grieve is the loss of possibilities. Six years later, I still mark that day in the dark.

But every year the Shabbat of Comfort comes anyway, right on schedule, whether I’m ready or not.

Maybe that’s the point. Comfort doesn’t wait for us to be finished grieving. It just keeps showing up, year after year, until we’re finally able to receive it.

Psalm 121

In this week’s Torah portion, Tazria–Metzora, we read about tzara’at—a condition the rabbis link to harmful speech.

The response is striking.

The person is sent outside the camp.

Not because words are small,

but because they are not.

Words shape trust.

Words shape community.

Words can fracture something that took years to build.

And Torah takes that seriously.

But the story doesn’t end there.

There is a path back.

There is accountability.

There is reflection.

There is a process of return.

That part matters too.

Because the goal is not exile.

The goal is repair.

And leadership sometimes lives in that tension—

holding the line on what harms the community,

while still believing in the possibility of return.

Not every word is harmless.

Not every silence is neutral.

What we say—and what we allow—

creates the kind of community we live in.

Someone asked me a question this week and I’ve been marinating on it.

Does God do teshuva?

I get it, the world feels like a shit show right now. Our society feels like it’s unraveling. Rights being stripped. Democratic norms breaking down. Fascism moving in. The ongoing tragedy of Gaza and the Palestinian people. Deep concerns for Israelis. A war now in Iran.

Like I said, a shit show.

When things fall apart this fast, the questions we ask of God change. Sometimes we stop asking and start blaming God for what is wrong with the world. Which might be exactly why someone asked me this.

Teshuva is usually translated as repentance, but the Hebrew is closer to return. You turned away from what you know to be right, from the people you love, from your own best self. Teshuva is the turning back, back toward right action, back toward the people you’ve harmed, back toward who you’re meant to be.

And there’s a strange detail hiding in the Torah scroll this week, a single letter written smaller than all the others, that suggests maybe the answer is yes. But we’ll get there.

The short answer the tradition might give is: maybe. The texts leave room for it.

Take the Torah itself. In Genesis 6:6, before the flood, the text says vayinachem, usually translated as “God regretted” making humanity.

That’s not the full definition of teshuva. But for God, something changed. God turned.

The Talmud pushes this further. In Berakhot 7a, the rabbis ask a strange question: What does God pray?

Rav Zutra bar Tovia said: God says, May My mercy overcome My anger. May I treat My children with compassion, beyond the letter of the law.

A God who prays is a God who recognizes a gap between where things are and where they should be. And that gap is exactly where teshuva lives.

The midrash goes even further. In Lamentations Rabbah, God weeps over the destruction of the Temple:

“Woe is Me for My house! My children, where are they? My priests, where are they? My beloved, where are they?”

God is not making an observation or judgment. God is grieving.

Abraham Joshua Heschel called this divine pathos, the belief that God is genuinely affected by what happens to us. A God who can be affected can, in principle, also be accountable, in the way any relationship demands response when harm is done.

And that brings us to this week’s Torah portion, the beginning of Vayikra.

Open a Torah scroll and look carefully at the very first word: Vayikra, “And God called.”

The final letter, the alef, is written smaller than all the others. It’s a tiny, shrunken thing you might miss if you weren’t looking. Later commentators explain that Moses, in his humility, didn’t want the word written in a way that suggested God called to him directly; he wanted it to look like a happenstance encounter. God insisted on the full word, and the small alef was their compromise.

But there is another way to read that shrunken letter. Maybe the small alef doesn’t belong to Moses. Maybe it belongs to God.

In the very act of calling out, God makes space. God diminishes just enough for a relationship to exist, the Creator of the universe contracting so there is room for a human being on the other side of the conversation. That posture, the willingness to become small enough to stay in relationship, sits at the very heart of teshuva.

And Vayikra as a whole is built on that same logic.

The book is full of instructions about offerings, but the Hebrew word for offering, korban, comes from karov, to draw near. You don’t draw near unless something has already been broken.

The entire sacrificial system is built around rupture and repair. What do you do when you fail? What does the community do when it fails? What does the priest do when he fails? What do rabbis and Jewish institutions do when they fail?

No one stands outside the need for repair.

And that raises a deeper question.

Why design an entire system for human failure unless you already know failure will come?

Maybe the sacrificial system is God’s way of acknowledging something fundamental about covenant: that relationships break, and that return must always remain possible.

Post-Shoah thinkers pushed this question to its edge. Elie Wiesel wrote a play that put God on trial, called witnesses, made the case, and still remained in relationship with the God he was accusing. That tension, accusation and covenant held together, is itself a kind of teshuva.

I come out of the Reconstructionist tradition, which pushes this question further. If we understand God not as a supernatural being in the sky but as the power that makes for salvation, the underlying force in the universe that trends toward growth and healing, then the question changes.

In this light, teshuva isn’t just something God does. God is the process of teshuva itself.

The possibility of repair is built into existence itself. No matter how far we drift, the structure of reality itself is pulling us back toward home.

Maybe teshuva isn’t just something we do.

Maybe it’s something the universe makes possible.

So does God do teshuva?

I’m not sure the tradition answers that question directly.

But the small alef at the beginning of Vayikra suggests something important: even God understands the necessity of becoming small enough to remain in relationship.

In a moment when so many leaders seem incapable of that kind of smallness, the Torah begins its most detailed book of law with a tiny letter.

And maybe that is where teshuva begins.