The stark contrast in media coverage and social concern reveals the deep and isolated silos which humanity can and chooses to abide within, magnifying the complex avenues of empathy and sympathy while examining the enactment of independent agencies to ensure certain spaces and structures are protected or resurrected.
Holy Week for Christians represents a dramatic movement from pain to hope. We deeply feel and lament the pain Jesus Christ endured for us, but we also feel our personal pain and the world’s pain. Then we rejoice as that pain gives way to the eternal hope that is always available to us through the resurrection—a hope that is not just for ourselves but for the world. We say “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” with a joy that surpasses understanding.
“A teacher once told me it would be better if I didn’t tell people I’m gay,” said Jed McDonald, a Pasadena City College student and former youth in foster care.
“I think she meant it as helpful advice because she wasn’t a mean teacher, but it didn’t feel that way,” McDonald said.
What is at stake in the conversation regarding the decline in religious life is not just the future of our faith institutions but the future of humanity. We are living through a time just as Dr. King described, where reactionary forces seek to double down on the failing status quo through the rhetoric of scarcity, isolation, and walls. In response, a prophetic faith kindles the imagination of humanity helping us to create new pathways to respond to the challenges of our time that are rooted in not in fear, but in possibility and the values of justice and peace.
Good Friday and Easter Sunday are not just moments of remembering events of 2,000 years ago but a celebration of an ongoing reality. Examples of resurrection come in unlikely places. Recently, I found one in a 2013 study of brain scans or people recovering from severe addictions.
What lingers most after seeing Diane, a wise, sad, and beautiful film, and the best reason to go to the movies this week, is the roads. The title character, anchored in an immersive performance by Mary Kay Place, is always driving - from her house to the extended family who josh and complain and hold each other up, from there to the apartment where her son is failing to hide his problems, from there to the deathbed of a dear friend with whom she has a complicated history, from there to the church soup kitchen where she serves.
It was Wednesday, March 27th. I was one of 20 rabbis and cantors, assembled by T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), to witness and report on the border. A few hours earlier, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan (now ICE’s acting director) had held a press conference at the same spot.
There have always been demagogues. Those who win power and popularity by arousing the prejudices of the people. Demagoguery was not invented by Donald Trump or Hitler. I’ll bet even Pharaoh in the book of Exodus didn’t invent the concept, but he perfected it. He never knew Joseph, the son of Jacob. He didn’t personally benefit from Joseph’s leadership and wisdom. Joseph, a Hebrew man brought to Egypt as a victim of human trafficking, but who with God’s favor rose to become the most powerful man in Egypt — he was the man whose interpretations of dreams saved everyone from famine.
In June 2018, the Trump administration issued a “zero tolerance” policy in an effort to deter migrants, a majority from Central America, from entering the U.S. The policy resulted in the separation of nearly 2,800 immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border in a little over a month.