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We gather here at the close of our celebrations of the centenary of the World Union for Progressive Judaism with one hundred years behind us and the horizon still ahead.

Much of our first century was, necessarily, a century of institution-building. Across continents and languages, Progressive Jews built communities, movements, rabbinic seminaries, youth movements, schools, charities, advocacy organisations and global networks.

That work was not administrative. It was sacred. Without those builders, we would not be gathered in this room. Without their courage, there would be no “we” capable of speaking about the future.

It would be tempting to focus this keynote address on the important work of the EUPJ, which I have the privilege of chairing. But this historic moment, I believe calls for more.

Because I want to suggest that the next hundred years will ask something different of us. Not because institutions no longer matter — of course, they do — but because they can house a movement without by themselves making it move. For that, we need ideas: ideas deep enough to teach, brave enough to challenge, generous enough to gather, and compelling enough to travel.

So, at the risk of oversimplifying history, I would summarise the first hundred years of the World Union as asking: can Progressive Judaism build institutions strong enough to hold us?

And I want to suggest that the question for the next hundred years must be: can Progressive Judaism build ideas strong enough to carry us?

Not idea-building as an afterthought to institutional survival, but idea-building as its prerequisite. For Progressive Judaism may endure even where particular institutions change, merge, weaken or disappear. But it cannot endure if we lose the ideas that make it spiritually compelling, morally serious and Jewishly alive.

Among the many builders we could honour this morning, I want to name just one: Lily Montagu. Not because she was the only one, but because she understood, with extraordinary clarity, that institutions become possible only when someone first dares to articulate a need.

Lily Montagu was instrumental in the founding of the World Union for Progressive Judaism and the Jewish Religious Union, which became Liberal Judaism and is now part of the Movement for Progressive Judaism.

But she also built institutions that responded directly to the needs of individuals. At the West Central Jewish Girls’ Club, working-class Jewish girls could develop themselves socially, intellectually and spiritually. Even the timing of prayer was reshaped around their lives: Shabbat morning services held at three o’clock in the afternoon so that young women working in the hotels of the West End could attend.

That is Progressive Judaism at its best: not changing Judaism because we are casual about it; but changing the doorway so that those who need Torah can enter.

And yet, before Lily Montagu built institutions, she built ideas. In 1899, in her essay “Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day”, she wrote with a sharpness that continues to inspire. She understood that Judaism could not be renewed by respectability, nostalgia, or maintenance.

Jews, she wrote, needed “energy to examine their religious needs and courage to formulate them.”[1] Without that courage, they would fail “to restore to Judaism its life and the endless possibilities inherent in life.”[2]

The question before us is whether our Judaism can live with enough truth, depth, courage and beauty that future generations will want to build with it, argue with it, pray with it, inherit it and transform it.

So, as we leave this conference, I want to ask: What will it take for Progressive Judaism to travel into its second century with purpose?

Rabbi John Rayner, of blessed memory, once preached in this very sanctuary a sermon with the wonderfully concise title: “Have Torah, Will Travel.”[3]

And in it, he suggested that anyone undertaking a journey needs five things: discontent, preparation, an efficient vehicle, perseverance and a destination.

So let us ask what it would mean for Progressive Judaism, standing at the edge of its second century as a global movement, to say with humility and resolve: have Torah, will travel.

Our journey begins with discontent. Not the familiar Jewish discontent of committee meetings that go on too long and minutes that are never quite accurate, but something deeper: the sacred discontent that recognises the gap between what is and what could yet be.

The discontent of Abraham, who left the familiar because he heard a call towards blessing; of the daughters of Zelophehad, who demanded their rightful inheritance; of the prophets, who loved Israel too much to confuse worship with righteousness.

Progressive Judaism was born from that kind of discontent: not contempt for tradition, but the conviction that tradition itself asks us to tell the truth. If the next hundred years are to be a century of idea-building, we will need to recover that holy unease. We will need to be discontent with any version of Judaism that is warm but thin, proud of its values but unsure how to transmit them, open to the world but uncertain of its own Jewish voice.

Above all, we will need to be discontent with any version of Progressive Judaism so anxious about survival that survival itself becomes the mission. We do not exist merely to keep our institutions alive. We build institutions because Judaism has something to say about justice, holiness, responsibility, God, Israel, humanity, and the possibility that the world can be otherwise.

Sacred discontent may begin the journey, but it cannot sustain it by itself. Anger can expose what is broken. Longing can reveal what is missing. But neither anger nor longing is enough to build a future. For that, we need preparation.

One of the dangers for Progressive Judaism in the next century is not that we will be too progressive. We must embrace the bold and creative spirit of the prophets, the rabbis, and the many women whose innovations were ignored or accredited to men. We must be courageous enough to be willing to wash our dirty linen in public.

But we must be careful not to speak eloquently about values without knowing the texts that formed them; not to invoke tradition without having wrestled with it; not to claim intellectual honesty without doing the intellectual work; not to ask our children to choose Judaism without giving them a Judaism rich enough to choose.

Preparation means taking our own Judaism seriously enough to learn it.

It means knowing enough Torah to know that our tradition has never spoken in only one voice. It means knowing enough Hebrew to hear the layers beneath the translation. It means knowing enough history to understand how much courage renewal has required in every generation and to pay attention to the voices that were forgotten or marginalised.

And preparation also means moral and spiritual formation. We will need leaders who can hold complexity without collapsing into vagueness, who can speak about Israel with love and honesty, who can respond to antisemitism without allowing fear to become our only Jewish language, who can build communities of genuine welcome without mistaking welcome for the absence of expectation.

This is why our seminaries matter. This is why youth movements matter. This is why cheder, adult learning, serious prayer, courageous preaching, pastoral depth and interfaith work. Not because they are programmes to be maintained, but because they are the provisions we pack for the road.

The Mishnah (Pirkei Avot 5:22) teaches: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” Not glance at it. Not admire it from a distance. Turn it. Return to it. Question it. Let it question us. For a movement that wishes to travel into the future must know what it carries.

But preparation still needs a vehicle.

My teacher, British-born Israeli Rabbi Michael Marmur, suggests that Progressive Jews might think of ourselves as akin to the Masoretes, those extraordinary guardians of the biblical text who added vowels and cantillation marks to the consonants of the Torah.

The image is powerful because the Masoretes did not invent the Torah. But they knew that without vowels, the consonants could be read in more than one way. So they added vowels. Not to replace the consonants, but to help them speak.

That indeed is one of the great tasks of Progressive Judaism. We inherit the consonants of Jewish tradition: Torah and Talmud, prayer and practice, Shabbat and festival, covenant and commandment, memory and hope.

We do not invent them, and we do not own them. But we are responsible for helping them speak in our generation.

Our task is to add vowels: to ask how ancient words can become audible again; how inherited practices can become pathways to holiness rather than monuments to nostalgia; how prayer can be spoken with integrity; how Jewish law can be engaged with seriousness without being treated as immune from moral scrutiny; how feminism, queer experience, ecological responsibility, disability justice, interfaith encounter, the advent of AI, Israel and diaspora, grief and joy, all become part of the living vocalisation of Torah.

And perhaps this is where the next century’s idea-building becomes most urgent. In one hundred years, I hope the person standing here in my place will look back and celebrate the Progressive Jewish hermeneutics we have developed: ways of reading tradition that are neither defensive nor dismissive; rooted in love of Torah, the Jewish people, the human being created in the image of God, and truth itself; historically conscious, morally serious, spiritually humble and communally responsible.

The efficient vehicle we need is not novelty for its own sake, nor the reflex to modernise every difficulty away. It is the disciplined, loving, sometimes painful work of giving voice to the tradition we have received, with scholarship, prayer, lived experience, debate, and the courage to say that fidelity to Torah sometimes means hearing in it possibilities that earlier generations could not yet hear.

For consonants alone are not enough. A movement that wishes to travel needs a Torah that can be voiced. And a movement that wishes to build ideas needs to know how to read.

This brings us to maybe the least glamorous of Rayner’s five requirements for a journey: perseverance.

Progressive Judaism enters its second century in a world marked by rising antisemitism, political extremism, climate crisis, loneliness, religious exhaustion, and deep fractures within Jewish life itself. We live in a time when Israel, which should be a source of pride, attachment, creativity and hope, is also a place of anguish, moral struggle and profound disagreement. We live in a time when many Jews feel exposed in the public square, and when many of our communities are tired from carrying too much for too long.

In such a moment, the temptation is to simplify: to become only particular, because the world feels dangerous; or to become only universal, because particularity feels too costly. To harden our language until no one can enter it; or to soften our language until it no longer says anything at all. To define Judaism only as the answer to antisemitism; or to speak about the world so broadly that our Judaism becomes merely decorative.

Perseverance means refusing these false choices. It means remaining Progressive when certainty is seductive. Remaining Jewish when assimilation feels easier. Remaining morally serious when slogans would be more convenient. Remaining committed to Israel without surrendering the prophetic responsibility to speak honestly about power, justice and human dignity.

Remaining open to the world without losing the particular Jewish practices, memories and obligations that make our openness more than sentiment.

Progressive Judaism understands that there is no short cut to the messianic age. Redemption is not something we can await passively, nor something we can force violently into being. It is the long, patient, demanding work of human beings responding to God’s call by doing what lies within our power to make the world more just, more compassionate and more whole.

That is the kind of perseverance Progressive Judaism will need.

And yet, not every destination is worthy of the road. If our destination is only survival, growth, or the fact that Progressive Judaism still exists in another hundred years, then we have mistaken endurance for purpose.

Rabbi Rayner taught that Judaism only fulfils its purpose when it helps form people capable of responsibility: responsibility for one another, for the Jewish people, and ultimately for humanity itself. Jewish community, in this understanding, is a training ground for moral and spiritual responsibility.

That must be our destination: not survival alone, but significance; not continuity alone, but covenantal responsibility; not simply a movement that lasts, but a movement that helps human beings become more truthful, more compassionate, more courageous, more able to carry blessing into the world.

That would be a destination worthy of the journey.

And so we return to the title of this conference: Darkeinu — One story, many journeys.

That title feels truer to me now than it did when we began planning this gathering. Progressive Judaism has been one story because across all our many journeys, we have carried a shared conviction:

that Judaism is alive; that Torah can still speak; that inherited tradition and moral courage belong in conversation; that religious life must be honest enough for the world as it is and brave enough for the world as it could yet become.

For the institutions we have inherited, we give thanks. For the ideas we must now build, we accept responsibility.

In a hundred years, may those who gather in our place be able to say that we did not merely maintain what we inherited. May they say that we imagined bravely, learned deeply, interpreted faithfully, argued honestly, built generously, and travelled with purpose.

May they say that, in our time, at the threshold of the second century, Progressive Judaism found again the courage to be alive.

Have Torah, will travel. Nesi’ah Tovah.

[1] Lily Montagu, “Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan 1899), p. 216.

[2] Lily Montagu, “Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan 1899), p. 216.

[3] John D. Rayner, “Have Torah, will Travel” Sermon of 11 April 1970 in A Jewish Understanding of the World, Oxford: Berghahn Books (1998,) p. 5.

The fish laugh. “If we are afraid in the water, the very place that gives us life, how much more so on dry land, where we would surely die.”

Rabbi Akiva’s message is clear: we do not abandon the place of our vulnerability, even when it is frightening. Because it is also the place of our life.

I thought about this story often in recent weeks, following the Israel trip of The Ark Synagogue at the end of February, at the end of which ten of our congregants found themselves suddenly living through the outbreak of war with Iran. It was a text we had studied together with Rabbi Naomi Efrat, who has been opening her home in Pardes Hannah as a pop-up synagogue since October 7th, inviting all who look for it into a Judaism of questioning, openness and spiritual courage.

For many Progressive Jews in the UK, our relationship with Israel has become strained, even painful. Members of our community speak openly of heartbreak, of feeling alienated by a government whose policies on democracy, pluralism and human rights sit deeply uneasily with our values.

One participant in our trip described arriving in Israel unsure whether she was coming “to say goodbye… or to find hope in the dark.”

That tension was present throughout our journey.

We met extraordinary Israelis working for a different vision of their country: educators at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, building shared society across religious lines; Orly Erez-Likhovski, Director of the Israel Religious Action Center, leading legal battles for civil rights; and Rabbi Yael Vurgan, serving traumatised communities near the Gaza border while holding a commitment to peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.

It was an inspirational and yet at times uncomfortable trip. We saw the memorials to the atrocities of 7th October and stood at the Gaza border seeing the destruction that the war had left on both sides of the border. We witnessed grief and fear on all sides and we listened to stories that will not leave us.

And then, just as the group was preparing to return home, the war with Iran erupted.

Ten members of our community were stranded in Israel for nine days, sheltering from missiles and drones. They slept in underground car parks, ran repeatedly for cover at the sound of sirens, and lived with the constant uncertainty that defines daily life for so many Israelis.

One participant described it simply: “By day and night a story of living above ground and then below.”

And yet, what stayed with me most was not only the fear, but the connection.

Two of our congregants were welcomed like family by the Leo Baeck Education Center, sleeping alongside soldiers, school staff and local residents on gym mats. Our Tel Aviv group welcomed a lone new immigrant into their makeshift shelter community. They walked along the beach between sirens, holding on to moments of normality, even joy. All ten joined Shabbat services on Zoom with our congregation back in London.

And when they finally returned home, they spoke not of wanting to distance themselves but of feeling more deeply bound to the people they had left behind.

One wrote, with striking honesty: “I had come to Israel to say ‘goodbye’, but I left by saying ‘hello’ again.”

This is the challenge and the calling for Progressive Jews at this moment.

It would be easy, even understandable, to step back. To say: the dissonance between our desire to express solidarity and the disregard for our Progressive Jewish values is too hard to bear. To disengage from a political reality that feels morally exhausting.

But the story of the fish and the fox reminds us: leaving the water is not a path to safety. It is a path to disappearance.

Israel is not only a state. It is a living centre of Jewish life, identity and peoplehood. And what happens there, especially in relation to religious pluralism, shapes the legitimacy of Progressive Judaism across the world.

If Progressive Jewish voices withdraw, others will not pause in our absence. They will shape the institutions, the definitions of Jewish identity, and the future of Israel without us.

Engagement does not mean endorsement. It does not require us to silence our critique or soften our moral clarity.

On the contrary, it demands that we bring our values—of justice, equality, and human dignity—into the heart of the conversation.

It means standing alongside those in Israel who are already doing this work, often at great personal cost. It means supporting organisations that defend democracy and pluralism. It means showing up in dialogue, in solidarity, and yes, in political frameworks where diaspora Jews still have a voice.

But perhaps most importantly, it means staying in relationship.

Judaism has never asked us to love uncritically. But it has always asked us to remain connected: to wrestle, to argue, to care enough not to walk away.

The past weeks have made that painfully clear.

Our congregants returned physically safe, for which we are profoundly grateful. But they also returned with something less easily named: a renewed sense that even in fear, even in disagreement, even in heartbreak, this relationship matters too much to abandon.

Like the fish in Rabbi Akiva’s story, we may feel exposed, uncertain, even afraid in the waters of Jewish life today.

But it is still the water that sustains us.

And our task, as Progressive Jews, is not to leave it but to help shape it into a place where more life can flourish.

This article was originally published on 25 March 2026 by The Movement for Progressive Judaism.

“A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar; it shall not go out.” (Leviticus 6:6)

Jewish tradition teaches us to pay special attention to the small details: the Torah does not simply describe the altar fire, it commands that it be kept burning at all times. Why the insistence that it not be reignited when needed, not rekindled after it fades, but maintained continuously? Why does this matter? Why must the fire never go out?

The verse offers no drama and no moment of spectacle; there is no emphasis on how the fire is first lit, no description of intensity or transformation, only the quiet insistence on what follows. The priests are instructed to tend the fire, to ensure its continuity over time, to sustain what already exists. The demand extends beyond a single act and becomes an ongoing responsibility.

This stands in tension with a common assumption about religious life. We tend to associate the sacred with moments of intensity—with revelation, inspiration, or emotional height—and to imagine that what matters are the peaks, the moments in which something is felt strongly or seen clearly. Yet this verse points elsewhere: what endures is the steady presence of the flame, the quiet refusal to let it disappear.

The philosopher Simone Weil, one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, wrote extensively about attention—not as a passing mental state, but as a disciplined and sustained orientation toward the world. For Weil, attention is a form of restraint: the ability to remain present without imposing oneself, to hold one’s focus without turning it into an assertion of control. As she writes:

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” (from Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, translated by Emma Craufurd, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952. Originally published as La Pesanteur et la Grace, Plon, Paris, 1947)

Such attention is neither dramatic nor visible. It does not announce itself, and it does not depend on moments of heightened awareness. It unfolds over time, requiring resistance to distraction and a willingness to remain with what is in front of us without reshaping it into something more immediate or more gratifying. To attend, in this sense, is to remain, to return, and to continue.

Read alongside this, the command of the perpetual fire takes on a different quality. The altar requires constancy: a fire that continues because it is cared for. It is sustained through daily, repeated acts—clearing the ashes, arranging the wood, maintaining what is already there. None of these actions stands out on its own; their significance lies in their continuity.

This is a discipline embodied in action rather than in feeling. The priests are charged with ensuring that the fire endures, with guarding against its fading, with taking responsibility for what has already been kindled. Without this quiet, repetitive work, the system would not collapse in a single dramatic failure; it would simply diminish over time.

Seen in this light, the altar fire becomes more than a ritual detail; it offers a model of religious life that resists the pull toward spectacle and intensity. What is required is sustained attention, a commitment that unfolds across time, expressed through consistency rather than heightened experience.

This is a demanding vision, one that leaves little room for self-display or recognition. There is no single moment of achievement attached to maintaining a fire that does not go out; there is only the ongoing responsibility to tend it. It calls for patience, repetition, and a willingness to engage in tasks whose importance emerges precisely through their persistence.

Tzav thus shifts the focus of Leviticus in a subtle but important way. If Vayikra begins with the call that initiates relationship, Tzav turns to what it takes to sustain it, moving from the moment of being addressed to the discipline of remaining attentive over time. The question is no longer how the connection is formed, but how it is maintained.

The answer lies in persistence, in returning again and again to the same task, in ensuring that what has been kindled does not fade through inattention.

“A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar; it shall not go out.”

Holiness, in this reading, is a matter of continuity.

“And God called to Moses, and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting…” (Leviticus 1:1).

It is striking, if one pays attention to the detail. The verse does not begin with speech, but with a call. Before anything is said, before instruction, before law, before the intricate system of offerings that will follow, there is first an act of calling. Why does the Torah choose to begin here? Why is it not enough simply to say that God spoke?

The sequence matters. Calling precedes speaking. Parashat Vayikra begins with relationship. Moses is not simply given information; he is first addressed. The emphasis is not only on what is commanded, but on the fact that there is someone summoned to hear it. Before law, there is address. Before obligation is articulated, it is initiated through a call.

This challenges a familiar assumption about the human condition. We tend to imagine ourselves as autonomous beings: we decide, we choose, we act. Responsibility, in this view, begins with intention. It is something we take on—or refuse. But the opening of Leviticus suggests a different starting point. It places the human being not as the originator of action, but as its respondent. Before we act, we are called. Before we choose, we find ourselves already addressed by a voice not our own.

To be called is to be placed in a position one did not create. It interrupts self-sufficiency. A call cannot be anticipated or controlled; it arrives from beyond the self and demands a response. In this sense, the Torah’s opening word unsettles the idea that religious life begins with human initiative. It begins instead with exposure—to a claim, to a demand, to a presence that precedes us.

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The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most influential ethical thinkers of the twentieth century, articulated this with particular clarity: the human self is not defined first by freedom, but by responsibility—by the experience of being addressed and called into obligation. We do not begin as sovereign actors who then choose to relate; we begin as beings already implicated, already claimed.

Read in this light, the opening of Leviticus becomes more than a stylistic detail. It offers a reorientation. The system of sacrifices that follows is often read as the core of the book, and for many modern readers, its greatest difficulty. The rituals appear distant, technical, even alien. Yet the Torah does not begin with the mechanics of offering. It begins with the condition that makes offering meaningful at all: that there is a call to which the human being responds.

This reframes the entire enterprise. The offerings are not the first movement of religious life; they are the second. They are not the human attempt to reach out toward God in the first instance, but a response to having already been addressed. The human being does not initiate nearness. Nearness has already been extended in the act of calling.

Seen this way, the language of korban—often translated as sacrifice, but rooted in the idea of drawing near—takes on a different quality. It is no longer a gesture of self-assertion, an attempt to bridge a distance through human effort alone. It becomes instead a structured response, a way of giving form to the relationship that the call has already established. The offering does not create the connection; it acknowledges it.

This shift matters. It moves the centre of gravity away from human control and toward responsiveness. Religious life is not built on the illusion that we stand outside the relationship and decide whether to enter it. It begins with the recognition that we are already inside it—already addressed, already obligated in ways we did not choose.

That recognition can be uncomfortable. To be called is to be interrupted. It limits the fantasy of complete autonomy. It suggests that our lives are not solely our own projects, to be shaped without remainder. There is something prior—a claim that precedes decision, a voice that does not wait for our consent.

And yet, the Torah does not describe what the call sounds like. It offers no detail about its content at this stage, only that it happens. The focus remains on the fact of being called, not on the clarity of what is heard. This, too, is telling. The essential question is not whether the call is fully understood, but whether it is answered.

Leviticus, often perceived as distant from contemporary sensibilities, thus begins with a recognisable human condition. To live is to find oneself addressed—by others, by circumstance, by demands that cannot be reduced to preference. The question that follows is not whether we will choose to be obligated, but how we will respond to the obligations that already claim us.

In this sense, the opening word, vayikra, does more than introduce a book. It sets a stance. It asks us to consider that holiness does not begin in what we decide to do, but in our willingness to answer.

“Everyone whose heart was moved and whose spirit was willing came and brought the Eternal’s offering for the work of the Tent of Meeting.”
(Exodus 35:21)

After the rupture of the Golden Calf, Parashat Vayakhel–Pekudei returns to the work of building. The covenant has been shaken. Moses has shattered the tablets. Trust between God and the people has been strained. Yet the Torah does not end the story with failure. Instead, it turns again to construction.

The Mishkan must still be built.

The language that describes this moment is striking. “Everyone whose heart was moved and whose spirit was willing came and brought the Eternal’s offering.” The sanctuary does not emerge from command alone. It emerges from participation. Men and women bring gold, fabric, skill, and labor. Artisans shape wood and metal. The people assemble a structure that none of them could have created alone.

Rebuilding becomes a collective act.

The Torah could have responded to the crisis of the Golden Calf with stricter authority or tighter control. Instead, it turns again to the community. The sanctuary is not imposed from above. It is constructed through shared responsibility. The work of repair belongs to everyone.

This emphasis carries a quiet moral claim: a broken community cannot be restored by leaders alone. Renewal requires participation.

Few figures of modern Jewish history embodied this principle more clearly than Simone Veil.

Born in 1927 in Nice, France, Veil was deported to Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. She survived the camps, but much of her family did not. After the war, she chose not to withdraw from public life but to dedicate herself to rebuilding democratic institutions in Europe.

Her work as a jurist, government minister, and later President of the European Parliament reflected a profound conviction: catastrophe must be answered with collective responsibility. The horrors of the twentieth century, she believed, demanded more than memory. They required the construction of political and moral structures capable of protecting human dignity.

In reflecting on the postwar project of European cooperation, Veil once wrote:

“L’Europe s’est construite pour que cela ne recommence jamais.”
(“Europe was built so that this would never happen again.”)

The sentence is simple but radical. Memory alone is not enough. To remember is to build differently.

Read alongside Parashat Vayakhel–Pekudei, Veil’s insight resonates deeply. The Mishkan is not merely a sacred object. It is the product of a people learning how to rebuild trust after failure. Every offering, every thread, every crafted beam represents a renewed willingness to participate in the covenant.

The Torah does not erase the Golden Calf. The memory of that rupture remains part of Israel’s story. But the parashah insists that failure need not be final. Communities can repair what has been broken — not by forgetting the past, but by acting together in the present.

The repeated refrain of these chapters — “as the Eternal commanded Moses” — underscores that the work is both disciplined and communal. Skilled artisans lead, but the people sustain the effort. Sacred space becomes the visible expression of shared responsibility.

For contemporary readers, this closing movement of Exodus offers a sober lesson. Moments of crisis may fracture trust and confidence. Yet rebuilding does not begin with perfection. It begins with participation. A community restores itself when individuals bring what they can — skill, labor, imagination, and commitment — toward a common structure.

Simone Veil understood that rebuilding after catastrophe requires patience and courage. Institutions that safeguard dignity do not arise spontaneously. They are crafted deliberately, sustained collectively, and defended continually.

Parashat Vayakhel–Pekudei reminds us that redemption is not only the moment of liberation from Egypt. It is the long work that follows: the patient construction of a community capable of carrying freedom together.

The sanctuary in the wilderness stood because many hands built it. The same remains true for every community that hopes to endure.

And yet, even when action is deemed necessary, its cost is borne by civilians. Families in Israel move between home and shelter. Communities across the region live under missile fire. Cilians in Iran face uncertainty and fear. Military force may remove a threat. It cannot, on its own, secure peace.

Moments like these test patience and judgment. They intensify the human desire for clarity, for decisive solutions, for something solid in the face of danger. It is precisely in such moments that the Torah’s story of waiting, anxiety, and manufactured certainty in Parashat Ki Tisa speaks with unsettling force.

“When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make us a god who shall go before us… for that man Moses, who brought us up from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.’”
(Exodus 32:1)

The crisis of Parashat Ki Tisa begins not with idolatry, but with delay.

Moses has ascended the mountain. The people wait. Time stretches. Uncertainty grows. The text does not describe rebellion at first; it describes anxiety. “We do not know what has happened to him,” they say. Leadership has vanished into cloud and fire. The covenant is still new. The future is unclear.

Waiting becomes intolerable.

The Golden Calf is often read as theological betrayal. Yet the Torah’s language suggests something more immediate and more human. The people demand something visible, something stable, something that will “go before us.” They do not reject redemption. But they cannot endure its uncertainty.

In this sense, the Calf is not only a false god. It is a substitute for patience.

Parashat Ki Tisa exposes a dangerous impulse: when authority is delayed, when the future is unclear, communities may create tangible symbols to quiet their fear. Certainty, even artificial certainty, can feel safer than trust.

Rosa Luxemburg understood the peril of such moments.

Born in 1871 in what is now Poland and active in Germany, Luxemburg became one of the most incisive political thinkers of her time. A revolutionary socialist, she argued passionately for economic justice and democratic participation. Yet she was also sharply critical of movements that sacrificed freedom for speed, or dissent for unity.

In her 1918 essay The Russian Revolution, she wrote words that remain among her most cited:

“Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden.”
(“Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently.”)

Luxemburg knew that political movements, especially in moments of upheaval, are tempted to silence complexity. Impatience can harden into authoritarianism. The longing for decisive action can erode the very freedoms it seeks to secure.

Her own life unfolded amid revolution and repression. Imprisoned repeatedly, she insisted that justice without liberty is hollow. Revolution, she warned, must resist the urge to eliminate dissent in the name of progress. The cost of enforced certainty is too high.

Read alongside Parashat Ki Tisa, her warning illuminates the people’s demand for the Calf. The Israelites are not seeking evil. They are seeking immediacy. Moses’ absence feels like abandonment. The cloud atop the mountain offers no clear direction. In that vacuum, they create something visible, manageable, and present.

The Torah does not excuse their action. The Calf fractures the covenant almost as soon as it is formed. Yet the narrative invites us to examine the emotional logic beneath it. Fear of absence, fear of delay, fear of uncertainty — these pressures distort judgment.

Luxemburg’s insistence that freedom must include dissent stands in quiet tension with the people’s cry for uniform direction. To demand a single visible authority that “goes before us” is to narrow the space for plurality. It is to replace trust with control.

Parashat Ki Tisa does not romanticize waiting. The people’s anxiety is understandable. But the parashah suggests that covenant cannot survive the manufacture of certainty. When we refuse to endure ambiguity, we risk reshaping our ideals into something unrecognizable.

Rosa Luxemburg’s life and thought caution that movements born from noble longing can falter when they suppress dissent or demand immediate resolution. Freedom requires endurance. It requires space for difference, even — perhaps especially — when the future feels fragile.

Parashat Ki Tisa begins with the words, “Moses delayed.” The people could not bear the delay. The question the parashah leaves with us is whether we can.

“You shall make sacred garments for Aaron your brother, for dignity and for splendor.”
(Exodus 28:2)

Unlike the thunder of Sinai or the drama of the parting sea, Parashat Tetzaveh turns our attention to fabric. The High Priest’s role is described not through speech or action, but through clothing. Linen, gold, turquoise, and crimson thread are arranged with meticulous care. The garments are to be made l’kavod ul’tifaret — for dignity and for splendor.

Holiness, in this parashah, is visible.

The priest does not enter the sanctuary in anonymity. He is adorned. He carries the names of the tribes on his breastplate. His identity is stitched into fabric, publicly displayed. The garments confer honor, but they also expose him to sight. Sacred authority is embodied and therefore vulnerable.

The pairing of kavod and tiferet is striking. Dignity suggests weight, seriousness, moral standing. Splendor suggests beauty, radiance, aesthetic force. The Torah does not separate the two. The priest’s authority depends on both. Holiness must be honorable, but it must also be seen.

Else Lasker-Schüler understood the tension between visibility and fragility.

Born in 1869 in Germany, Lasker-Schüler became one of the most distinctive voices of German Expressionism. She fashioned herself as poet, prophet, and mythic figure. In Berlin, she appeared in elaborate clothing, sometimes adopting the persona “Prince Jussuf of Thebes.” Her poetry and self-presentation blurred the boundaries between life and art, identity and performance.

In her poem “Mein blaues Klavier,” written in exile after fleeing Nazi Germany, she opens with a line at once whimsical and devastating:

“Ich habe zu Hause ein blaues Klavier
Und kenne doch keine Note.”

(“At home I have a blue piano
And yet I do not know a single note.”)

The image is luminous and estranged. A piano, symbol of cultivated culture, stands silent. Beauty remains, but its music is inaccessible. Splendor without security becomes precarious.

Lasker-Schüler’s life embodied this tension. Her self-fashioning was not mere ornament. It was an assertion of identity in a world increasingly hostile to Jewish presence. To appear in public as poet, Jew, and mythic figure was to claim dignity through visibility. But visibility carried risk. The very qualities that marked her as distinctive also made her vulnerable.

Read alongside Parashat Tetzaveh, her life illuminates the Torah’s insistence that holiness is worn. The High Priest’s garments elevate him, but they also render him unmistakable. He bears the names of the tribes over his heart; he cannot disappear into the crowd. The splendor that confers honor also makes him seen.

The Torah does not imagine sacred service as hidden. It requires presentation. The garments are described in detail because appearance matters. Dignity is not internal alone. It is expressed outwardly, through symbol and beauty.

Yet tiferet without protection can become exposure. Lasker-Schüler’s blue piano evokes precisely this fragility: beauty that persists even when its music is silenced. Her poetry preserves radiance in the midst of displacement, but it does not deny vulnerability.

For contemporary readers, Parashat Tetzaveh invites reflection on how Jewish identity is embodied and displayed. What does it mean to wear one’s commitments publicly? When does visibility confer dignity, and when does it invite danger? The parashah offers no simple answer. It binds dignity to splendor, honor to appearance, insisting that holiness is neither purely inward nor safely concealed.

Else Lasker-Schüler refused invisibility. Through poetry and persona, she clothed herself in language that asserted belonging even in exile. Her splendor was deliberate. Her dignity was claimed, not granted.

Parashat Tetzaveh teaches that sacred life is not only believed; it is worn. The question it leaves with us is whether we are prepared to carry our identities with both dignity and splendor — aware that what makes us radiant may also make us visible.

Last week’s reading brought us to Mount Sinai: thunder, fire, revelation—God speaking. As people of faith, we can recognise the power of that moment. After revelation, what should come next?

What comes next, according to the Torah, is case law. Not lofty theology, but disputes: injury, damages, labour, vulnerability, the limits of power. Mishpatim assumes that people will hurt one another, that systems will be unjust, that authority will be misused—and it does something striking. It does not pretend this will go away. It legislates for it.

That is the Torah’s first lesson about faithful dissent: faith does not eliminate conflict. Faith demands responsibility inside it.

Jewish tradition took that lesson very seriously. Over the centuries, Jewish teachers—known simply as the rabbis—read the Torah not as a closed book, but as a living one, as Rabbi Judith Rosen-Berry described so eloquently in her lecture. Their discussions were eventually collected in works such as the Talmud, a vast record of legal and ethical debate.

One of the most radical ideas in that tradition appears in a short passage from the Talmud (Bava Metzia 59a-b), which reinterprets a biblical phrase from the book of Deuteronomy 30:12: Lo bashamayim hi—“the Torah is not in heaven.” The way the Talmud uses this phrase turns God’s words into a startling human claim.

According to the rabbis, once the Torah is given, God should not intervene to resolve every disagreement or enforce every rule. The responsibility is handed over to human beings.

This does not mean that truth is relative or that anything goes. On the contrary, it means that faithfulness requires argument, judgment, and sometimes disagreement. The rabbis put God back in heaven, not to create absence, but to assert trust in human capacity. Justice should not descend from heaven ready-made. It must be worked out—carefully, imperfectly, and together.

The Torah does not leave this idea of faithful dissent in the realm of theory. Long before Sinai, it gives us a concrete human example.

In the book of Exodus, Pharaoh—the most powerful ruler of his time—commands two Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Puah, to kill the baby boys at birth. This is not a vague threat or an implicit pressure. It is a direct order, backed by absolute authority.

The Torah tells us that the midwives refuse. They do not challenge Pharaoh publicly. They do not mount a rebellion. They simply do not do what they are told.

And then the Torah gives a reason that should stop us short: “The midwives feared God.”

This is not fear as terror, and it is not obedience to power. It is fear as moral orientation. Shifra and Puah recognise that there is a limit to authority—even when that authority claims total control. They refuse to participate in violence justified by power, and the Torah names that refusal not as disloyalty, but as faith.

Their dissent is quiet and embodied. They act without certainty of protection or reward. And strikingly, they are spared. The Torah presents their refusal as life-preserving and covenantal. Before there is law, before there is Sinai, there is faithful dissent.

A contemporary Jewish theologian helps us name what is happening here.

Judith Plaskow, one of the founders of feminist Jewish theology, argues that revelation did not end at Sinai. In her words, every generation must “stand again at Sinai.” By this she does not mean repeating the past or reopening revelation at will. She means taking responsibility for what revelation demands now—especially where voices have been excluded or power has gone unchallenged.

Standing again at Sinai, in Plaskow’s sense, is not about adding new commandments. It is about recognising that the covenant remains incomplete unless human beings are willing to engage it honestly. Revelation continues not because God keeps speaking, but because human beings keep responding.

Read this way, Mishpatim is not a detour from Sinai but its fulfilment. The laws assume disagreement, injury, and abuse of power—not because the covenant has failed, but because it has been entrusted to human hands. To argue about justice, to limit power, to refuse violence even when it is authorised: this is what it means to stand again at Sinai.

The midwives understood this before there was law. Mishpatim gives it structure. Plaskow gives it language. Faithful dissent is not a threat to covenant; it is one of its forms.

This brings us back to why this conversation matters in a gathering like this one.

We do not share the same theology. We do not read the scriptures in the same way. And yet, across our traditions, we recognise a shared danger: when faith becomes a tool of power rather than a restraint on it.

The Torah’s insistence on mishpat—on judgment, argument, and responsibility—offers one response to that danger. It teaches that covenant does not require silence. It requires courage: the courage to limit power, to argue for justice, and to refuse violence even when it claims divine sanction.

This is not a uniquely Jewish struggle. Across our traditions, faithfulness is tested not when belief is easy, but when responsibility is costly. When obedience conflicts with conscience. When the fear of God demands resistance to the fear of authority.

Faithful dissent, then, is not agreement. It is discipline. A discipline of speaking and acting under God without claiming to speak for God. A discipline of disagreement that refuses both absolutism and apathy.

To stand again at Sinai, in this sense, is not to return to a mountain, but to accept a shared risk: that justice will not descend ready-made from heaven, and that we are accountable for how we pursue it together.

That is the work Mishpatim sets before us. Not harmony without struggle, but responsibility without retreat. Not certainty, but covenant lived honestly in the world we share.

Shabbat Shalom.

“The Eternal spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelites, that they take for Me a gift; from every person whose heart moves them, you shall take My offering.”
(Exodus 25:1–2)

Parashat Terumah opens with an invitation. The Torah frames the Mishkan as the product of voluntary contribution. “From every person whose heart moves them,” Moses is instructed, “you shall take My offering.” Sacred space begins with human participation.

This detail matters. The sanctuary is not imposed upon the people. It is assembled from their gifts. Gold, silver, fabric, skill, and intention are gathered together to create a dwelling place for the Divine. Holiness is not manufactured from above. It is constructed from what people bring.

Yet the language of contribution also raises a quieter question: who is permitted to give, and whose contribution is recognised as shaping sacred life?

The Torah’s description is expansive. “From every person whose heart moves them.” But Jewish history has often been less so. Women’s material contributions were indispensable. Their intellectual and theological contributions were far more frequently contested.

Sara Copia Sullam knew this tension intimately.

Born in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, Copia Sullam was a poet, intellectual, and host of a vibrant literary salon that drew Jewish and Christian scholars alike. She wrote in Italian and participated in the intellectual culture of her city with unusual visibility for a Jewish woman. Her learning was admired, but it was also scrutinised.

In 1621, she was publicly accused of denying the immortality of the soul — a charge that struck at the heart of both Jewish and Christian theology. The accusation was not merely doctrinal; it was disciplinary. A Jewish woman who entered theological debate had crossed an invisible boundary.

Copia Sullam responded not with retreat, but with print. In her Manifesto, she wrote plainly:

“La mia fede è quella dei miei padri.”
(“My faith is that of my fathers.”)

But she did more than defend herself. She explained why she had written at all:

“Se ho scritto, l’ho fatto per onore della verità e della mia legge.”
(“If I have written, I have done so for the honor of truth and of my law.”)

These are not ornamental statements. They are claims of belonging and contribution. Copia Sullam asserts her fidelity to Jewish tradition while insisting that her writing serves its dignity. She does not ask permission to think. She presents her thought as an offering.

Read alongside Parashat Terumah, her stance exposes what is at stake in determining whose offerings are accepted. The Mishkan is built from contributions offered freely. But contribution implies recognition. A gift that is refused does not shape the sanctuary. A voice that is dismissed does not shape the tradition.

The Torah describes artisans, donors, and skilled workers whose labor forms the physical space of holiness. Copia Sullam reminds us that intellectual labor, too, shapes sacred life. A tradition strengthened by revelation need not fear women’s thought; it is enlarged by it.

The politics of sacred space are rarely explicit. Exclusion often hides beneath custom or decorum. Copia Sullam’s experience reveals how quickly a woman’s theological engagement could be reframed as transgression. Her response reframed it instead as covenantal participation.

Parashat Terumah imagines a sanctuary built from what people are willing to bring. Later in the parashah, God declares, “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.” Divine presence is described not as distant, but as dwelling within a community shaped by collective offering. If sacred space is constructed from human contribution, then limiting who may contribute reshapes the sanctuary itself.

For contemporary readers, this parashah asks not only what we build, but who is permitted to build it. Whose intellect, creativity, and interpretation are welcomed as offerings? Whose participation is treated as decorative rather than foundational?

Sara Copia Sullam refused to allow her voice to be treated as excess material. She claimed her place within Jewish discourse with clarity and restraint. In doing so, she widened the space of the sanctuary.

Parashat Terumah teaches that holiness emerges from what a community is willing to bring. The question it leaves with us is whether we are prepared to recognise every sincere offering — including women’s thought — as essential to the structure we call sacred.

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to Me, I will surely hear their cry.” (Exodus 22:20–23)

After the thunder of Sinai, Parashat Mishpatim turns abruptly to law. Not lofty principles, not theology, but cases: injury, debt, labor, vulnerability. The Torah moves from revelation to regulation with deliberate speed, as if to insist that covenant means little unless it reshapes daily life.

At the heart of these laws stands a repeated demand: attend to those who are easily harmed—the stranger, the widow, the orphan appear, people whose voices are often ignored. What distinguishes these verses is not only the commandment itself, but God’s response to its violation. “When they cry out to Me,” God says, “I will surely hear their cry.” Justice, in Parashat Mishpatim, is measured by whether suffering is heard.

This focus marks a shift in moral authority. Law is not presented as neutral or self-justifying. It is judged by its attentiveness to vulnerability. Power is restrained not by force, but by responsibility toward those with the least protection.

This insistence on listening finds a powerful modern echo in the work of Bertha Pappenheim.*

Born in Vienna in 1859 and active primarily in Germany, Pappenheim was a social reformer, educator, and founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund. She devoted her life to addressing forms of suffering that were routinely hidden, particularly the trafficking and exploitation of Jewish women and girls. For Pappenheim, good intentions were never enough. Institutions that claimed to help could, if unexamined, deepen harm.

In a 1902 address on welfare work, she formulated this principle with striking clarity:

“Wohltätigkeit ohne Achtung der Persönlichkeit ist keine Hilfe.”
(“Charity without respect for the person is not help.”)

The sentence is uncompromising. Aid that ignores dignity does not merely fall short; it fails morally. Pappenheim understood that systems of assistance can reproduce the very hierarchies they seek to address if they do not listen to those they serve.

Her insistence on visibility was equally forceful. Writing within the Jüdischer Frauenbund, she argued that women’s suffering could no longer remain unseen:

“Die Leiden der Frauen dürfen nicht länger übersehen werden.”
(“The suffering of women must no longer be overlooked.”)

Here, Pappenheim claims moral authority by demanding recognition. Suffering that remains invisible cannot be addressed by law. Justice begins with attention.

Read alongside Parashat Mishpatim, Pappenheim’s work sharpens the Torah’s ethical demand. The laws concerning the stranger, the widow, and the orphan do not simply prohibit harm. They require a posture of listening. God’s role in this parashah is telling: God hears the cry that others ignore. Divine authority is aligned not with power, but with responsiveness.

Pappenheim took this principle into the public sphere. She challenged Jewish communities to examine their own institutions, to ask whether they truly protected the vulnerable or merely preserved respectability. Her work reframed women not as passive recipients of aid, but as moral agents whose experiences must shape communal responsibility.

This reframing matters. Parashat Mishpatim does not imagine justice as something handed down fully formed. It imagines justice as something tested continually by the lives it governs. Law that cannot hear the cry of those it affects has already failed.

For contemporary readers, this parashah resists any comfort in legalism alone. It asks whether our laws, policies, and institutions are structured to listen, or whether they silence those who do not fit easily into their categories. Pappenheim’s legacy insists that ethical responsibility begins not with authority, but with attention.

After Sinai, the Torah does not ask first what we believe. It asks whom we hear. Parashat Mishpatim reminds us that covenant is sustained not by power or piety, but by the willingness to let the voices of the vulnerable shape the law itself.

The question this parashah leaves with us is not whether we have laws, but whether our laws have learned to listen.

*Despite her important work as a feminist activist, outside Germany Bertha Pappenheim is generally only known by the pseudonym that Sigmund Freud gave her in the case study he published in Studies on Hysteria (1985): Anna O. Visitors to the Ark Synagogue can currently learn more about her connection to Slovakia as part of the exhibition about important Jewish women of Slovakia.

“Moses’ father-in-law said to him, ‘What you are doing is not right. You will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well… You cannot do it alone.’”
(Exodus 18:17–18)

Before revelation at Sinai, Parashat Yitro pauses the drama of Exodus to expose a danger that is easy to miss precisely because it sits beneath the surface. The people have left Egypt. The sea has split. The journey is underway. Nothing appears to be going wrong. And yet the Torah interrupts the story of redemption to ask a structural question: how is power exercised?

Moses sits alone, judging the people from morning until night. He is devoted, tireless, and acting with the best of intentions. The text offers no criticism of his motives. The problem lies elsewhere. Authority has become concentrated, unexamined, and unsustainable.

It is Yitro, an outsider, who names the danger. “What you are doing is not right,” he tells Moses. Not unjust, not corrupt, but not right. Leadership that exhausts both the leader and the people is morally flawed, even when it is well-intended. Yitro’s intervention is practical, but its implications are profound. Authority must be distributed.

The Torah’s placement of this episode is deliberate. Parashat Yitro insists that revelation cannot rest on charisma alone. Judgment must be shared, responsibility delegated, and power limited. Otherwise, even a divinely chosen leader becomes a bottleneck through which justice cannot flow.

This concern with authority that escapes scrutiny speaks powerfully to the political thinking of Hannah Arendt.

Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt lived through the rise of totalitarianism, exile, and the aftermath of the Holocaust. Her work sought to understand how systems collapse morally, often without overt cruelty. Again and again, she returned to the dangers of authority that demands obedience without judgment.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt argued that great evil can be committed not only by fanatics, but by ordinary individuals who fail to think critically about their actions. What troubled her was not monstrous intent, but moral abdication. When responsibility is ceded upward, wrongdoing can become bureaucratic.

Arendt did not oppose authority as such. She opposed its insulation from accountability. For her, responsibility could not be delegated away. Each individual remained answerable for judgment, even within hierarchical systems. Authority becomes dangerous not when it is visible, but when it no longer invites questioning.

Read through Arendt’s lens, Yitro’s advice takes on added weight. Moses is not tyrannical. He is conscientious. Yet the Torah insists that even conscientious authority must be restrained. No single person should carry the entire burden of judgment. When they do, both leader and community are diminished.

Before God speaks at Sinai, the Torah teaches that revelation requires preparation. Not spiritual readiness alone, but institutional wisdom. Authority must be distributed before law can be received.

Parashat Yitro thus presents a challenge to the contemporary reader: not whether leadership is necessary, but whether power has been given limits and accountability. It asks us to examine not only who leads, but how leadership is structured and constrained. Systems that rely too heavily on one voice, one decision-maker, or one moral authority place everyone at risk.

Parashat Yitro reminds us that covenant is not upheld by obedience alone. It is sustained by structures that demand responsibility, encourage judgment, and resist the quiet concentration of power.

The question this parashah leaves with us is not whether we value leadership, but whether we have built systems capable of holding it to account.

“Then the Eternal said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the Israelites, that they go forward.’”
(Exodus 14:15)

At the edge of the sea, Moses prays. The people panic. Egypt is behind them, the water before them, and escape seems impossible. It is a moment that invites desperation, supplication, and delay. Yet the Torah interrupts it sharply. God does not answer Moses’ prayer with reassurance or explanation. Instead, God cuts it short.

“Why do you cry out to Me?” God asks. “Tell the Israelites to go forward.”

Parashat Beshalach offers a theology that is both bracing and unsettling. Prayer, at this moment, is not enough. Faith is not expressed through waiting or pleading, but through movement. Only after the people step forward does the sea respond.

A midrash preserved in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael and later in the Talmud (Sotah 37a) imagines the scene in vivid detail. According to this tradition, the sea does not split when Moses raises his staff, but only when Nachshon ben Aminadav, leader of the tribe of Judah, walks into the water. He steps forward until the waves reach his neck. Only then does the sea part.

Whether read literally or symbolically, the midrash makes a decisive claim: redemption does not begin with certainty. It begins with commitment. Someone must move before the path exists.

This insistence on action under uncertainty finds a striking parallel in the life of Rita Levi-Montalcini.

Born in Turin in 1909, Levi-Montalcini trained as a physician and neuroscientist in an Italy increasingly hostile to Jews. In 1938, the Fascist racial laws barred her from academic positions and stripped Jewish scientists of their professional standing. For many, this marked the end of intellectual life. For Levi-Montalcini, it marked a turning point.

Unable to work in a university laboratory, she set up a small research space in her bedroom, using improvised equipment to continue her experiments on nerve cells. During the war years, while Italy was engulfed in violence and uncertainty, she persisted in research that appeared to have no future and no institutional support. The work she began there would eventually lead to her discovery of nerve growth factor, earning her the Nobel Prize decades later.

Levi-Montalcini did not know where her work would lead. She did not have permission, protection, or clarity. What she had was a conviction that inquiry itself mattered, even when conditions were hostile. In her autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection (1987), she reflected on those years not as heroic, but as formative. She repeatedly emphasised that progress comes not from ideal circumstances, but from the willingness to act within constraint.

Like Nachshon at the sea, Levi-Montalcini stepped forward without guarantees.

Parashat Beshalach resists a passive understanding of faith. God does not promise the Israelites that the sea will part if they wait patiently. God commands them to move. The miracle follows responsibility, not the other way around. The midrash underscores the risk involved: someone must be willing to enter the water first.

This is not recklessness. It is disciplined courage. Nachshon does not deny the danger of the sea. Levi-Montalcini does not deny the dangers of Fascist Italy or war-time Europe. What they refuse is paralysis. Action becomes the condition for transformation.

For contemporary readers, this parashah poses a difficult question. We often wait for clarity before acting, for certainty before committing ourselves. Parashat Beshalach suggests that clarity is sometimes the result, not the prerequisite, of movement. Prayer and reflection remain essential, but they do not replace responsibility.

Rita Levi-Montalcini’s life reminds us that meaningful work can begin in conditions that are far from ideal. Her story does not sanctify suffering, nor does it romanticise adversity. It demonstrates instead that integrity, persistence, and courage can generate new possibilities even when the horizon is blocked.

The sea parts only after the people step forward. Knowledge emerges only after inquiry is pursued. In both Torah and life, the path is often revealed through motion.

Parashat Beshalach teaches that redemption is not only something we wait for. It is something we participate in. The question it leaves with us is whether we are willing to take a step forward when the way ahead is still hidden, trusting that movement itself may open what prayer alone cannot.

“Then the Eternal said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh… that you may recount in the hearing of your child and your child’s child how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I performed My signs among them—so that you may know that I am the Eternal.’” (Exodus 10:1–2, adapted)

In Parashat Bo, the drama of redemption pauses for an unexpected command. Pharaoh has not yet relented. The plagues continue. Freedom is not secured. And yet God turns Moses’ attention away from the present struggle and toward the future act of telling. Before the sea is split, before the people are released, the Torah insists on narration.

This interruption is deliberate. The command to recount the story is not issued after deliverance, but in the midst of it. Memory is not framed as celebration or commemoration. It is framed as obligation. “You shall tell your child and your child’s child,” God says, while the outcome remains uncertain.

Parashat Bo thus reframes redemption itself. Freedom is not only something that happens; it is something that must be narrated while it is still unfolding. The Torah suggests that Jewish continuity depends not on waiting for resolution, but on the disciplined act of telling the story before it ends.

This insistence on early memory echoes powerfully in the writings of Glikl of Hameln.

Glikl bas Judah Leib of Hameln lived in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Central Europe, a world marked by war, economic instability, and repeated displacement. Widowed twice and the mother of twelve children, she navigated loss and uncertainty while maintaining a complex mercantile life. Her memoirs, written in Yiddish, were not intended for publication. They were written for her children.

At the opening of her memoir, Glikl explains her purpose with characteristic clarity. In Marvin Lowenthal’s widely used translation, The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, she writes:

“I write this book for my children, so that when I am no longer among them, they may know from where they came and what befell their mother.”

This is not a retrospective account written from safety. Glikl writes while grief is fresh and while economic and emotional stability remain fragile. Her memoir does not offer a finished story with a clear moral arc. Instead, it models the act of transmission itself. She tells what she knows so far, trusting that telling is part of survival.

Like the Torah in Parashat Bo, Glikl refuses to wait for certainty. She records loss, fear, and gratitude side by side. Divine providence appears in her writing, but never as proof that suffering has meaning. Faith, for Glikl, does not resolve the tension between trust and vulnerability. It lives within it.

The Torah’s command in Parashat Bo operates in much the same way. God does not say, “When you are free, you will tell this story.” God says, tell it now, while Pharaoh still resists and the future remains unclear. Memory is not the reward of redemption; it is one of its conditions.

This is a demanding theology. It asks the Israelites, and later generations, to narrate their experience without knowing how it will turn out. It insists that the act of telling itself shapes identity. Children are not only heirs to freedom; they are heirs to unfinished stories.

Glikl understood this intuitively. Her memoir does not shield her children from hardship. It inducts them into a tradition of honesty, endurance, and responsibility. By writing, she ensures that her children inherit not only her losses and hopes, but also her way of making meaning under pressure.

Seen through Glikl’s voice, Parashat Bo teaches that Jewish memory is not born from triumph alone. It is forged in the willingness to speak while events are still unfolding. To tell the story early is to affirm that experience matters even before it can be explained.

For contemporary readers, this parashah challenges a common assumption about faith and memory. We often imagine that meaning comes after resolution. The Torah suggests otherwise. It asks us to narrate our lives while they are still in motion, to pass on stories that are complex, unresolved, and honest.

Parashat Bo reminds us that redemption is not only about leaving Egypt. It is about ensuring that the story is told while the outcome is still unknown. Glikl of Hameln took up that task in her own time, writing not because she had answers, but because her children needed a story to carry forward.

The question Parashat Bo leaves with us is not only what we will remember, but when we choose to begin telling. Do we wait for clarity, or do we trust that the act of narration itself is part of how a people survives?

By Lea Mühlstein

“God spoke to Moses and said to him: ‘I am the Eternal. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by My name the Eternal I did not make Myself known to them. I also established My covenant with them… I have heard the groaning of the Israelites… I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.’”
(Exodus 6:2–6)

These powerful words echo through the language of the Haggadah, where they form the backbone of our ritual memory of redemption. But in Parashat Va’era, they are not retrospective. They are spoken before deliverance, when Pharaoh’s grip has tightened and the people can barely hear hope.

Parashat Va’era opens with divine speech at its most expansive. God speaks of covenant, memory, and redemption. Promises are reiterated, language deepened, and the future described in vivid terms. Yet nothing in the Israelites’ lived reality has improved. On the contrary, their situation has worsened. Pharaoh has increased their labor. Moses has failed publicly. The people are exhausted and demoralised.

The Torah is attentive to this dissonance. God speaks in the grammar of assurance, while the people remain trapped in the present tense of suffering. Parashat Va’era does not resolve this gap. It insists on it.

“I am the Eternal,” God declares, invoking a name associated not with power but with presence across time. The covenant, God insists, has not changed. What has changed is its immediacy. Redemption is promised, but not yet realised. Faith, in this moment, is not sustained by evidence.

A few verses later, the Torah names the consequence: “They did not listen to Moses, because of shortness of spirit and hard labor” (Exod. 6:9). The people are not accused of disbelief or rebellion. Their failure to hear is attributed to exhaustion. The text recognises that unrelenting suffering constricts the imagination. Covenant spoken into such a moment risks sounding abstract, even cruel.

This is the theological pressure point of Parashat Va’era. What does it mean to live covenantally when promises are reiterated, but reality deteriorates? What does faith require when hope feels premature?

One response emerges not in the wilderness, but in sixteenth-century Europe, in the life of Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi.

Born into a family of forcibly converted Jews in Portugal, Doña Gracia lived under the constant threat of the Inquisition. Public Jewish life was impossible. Jewish loyalty was punishable by imprisonment or death. Like the Israelites in Egypt, she inhabited a world in which oppression was entrenched and power appeared immovable.

After fleeing Portugal, she built an extraordinary network spanning Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara, and eventually the Ottoman Empire. Through commercial acumen and political negotiation, she amassed resources and influence. Yet her significance lies not in wealth itself, but in how she used it. Doña Gracia financed escape routes for conversos, ransomed prisoners of the Inquisition, and supported Jewish resettlement across the Mediterranean. As the historian Cecil Roth observed in The House of Nasi (1947), she acted as though Jewish restoration were inevitable, even when history offered little evidence that it would come.

Like the Israelites in Parashat Va’era, she lived between promise and fulfilment. The idea of Jewish freedom existed. Its realisation did not. She did not wait for persecution to end before acting. She worked within a world that remained hostile, building structures that assumed a future others could not yet see.

This is not optimism. It is orientation.

Parashat Va’era does not depict faith as confidence that circumstances will improve. God’s words do not immediately soften Pharaoh’s heart or lighten the people’s burden. Instead, the Torah frames covenant as something that precedes evidence. God does not promise immediate relief. God promises relationship, memory, and future obligation.

Doña Gracia’s life mirrors this posture. She did not live to see redemption. She lived as though covenant demanded action regardless. Her faith did not depend on signs. It took the form of preparation.

Seen through this lens, Parashat Va’era offers a sober theology of delay. Faith is not sustained by miracles alone. It is sustained by decisions made when miracles have not yet arrived. The Israelites are asked to hold God’s words even when they cannot hear them. Doña Gracia chose to act as if those words mattered, even when history seemed to contradict them.

For contemporary readers, this parashah resists easy consolation. It does not promise that reiterated assurances will quickly become reality. Instead, it trains us to ask a harder question: how do we live when the covenant is intact but its fulfilment is deferred?

Parashat Va’era suggests that faith, at such moments, is less about expectation than responsibility. It is the willingness to orient one’s actions toward a promised future without knowing when, or whether, it will arrive in one’s lifetime. The Torah does not deny the weight of despair. It simply refuses to let despair have the final word.

God speaks again in Parashat Va’era not because the people are ready, but because the covenant is. The challenge the parashah leaves with us is whether we are willing to live as if that covenant still binds us, even when the world has not yet changed.

“A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us.’ So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor.”
(Exodus 1:8–11)

The book of Exodus opens from the perspective of an outsider. Israel is not yet a speaking subject in its own story. We encounter the people through the gaze of a new Pharaoh, one who is defined by what he does not know. Joseph, the memory of relationship, contribution, and shared history, has no place in the frame the Torah presents. What remains is a population seen at a distance, counted, assessed, and judged.

Pharaoh’s words are striking in their restraint. He does not accuse the Israelites of rebellion or disloyalty. He offers no moral indictment. Instead, he identifies a demographic concern: “they are many.” The threat he names is not ideological but numerical. Israel appears first in Exodus not as a covenantal community, but as a collective presence to be managed.

From this vantage point, oppression begins with administration. Taskmasters are appointed. Labor is intensified. Control is framed as necessity. The Torah lingers over this early stage, before violence becomes explicit, when fear takes the form of policy and people are reduced to a problem of scale.

This moment is familiar in Jewish history. One of its clearest European expressions appears in the life of Licoricia of Winchester.

Licoricia lived in thirteenth-century England, where Jews occupied a narrow economic niche shaped by law and exclusion. Barred from most trades, they were permitted to lend money, a role essential to the crown and resented by the wider population. Widowed twice, Licoricia emerged as one of the most prominent Jewish financiers of her time, lending substantial sums to King Henry III and later Edward I. She conducted business on a scale unusual for any woman in medieval England, Jewish or Christian.

Her prominence, however, did not confer security. Jews lived under royal protection that could be withdrawn without warning. They were heavily taxed, publicly vilified, and excluded from civic belonging. Licoricia’s wealth made her visible to the crown and exposed her to popular hostility. In 1277, she was murdered in her home in Winchester. Her killers were never punished. Within a generation, England expelled its entire Jewish population.

Read alongside her story, the opening chapter of Exodus sharpens its claim. Pharaoh’s anxiety is not chaotic or impulsive. It emerges from a tension the Torah names with care: a society depends on a population it does not recognise as fully its own. The Israelites are pressed into harder labor because they are deeply embedded in Egypt’s economy. Their productivity does not allay fear; it intensifies it.

Exodus 1:12 captures this dynamic succinctly: “The more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread.” Growth itself becomes unsettling. Presence becomes a liability. In both Egypt and medieval England, contribution did not translate into belonging. It produced calculation.

Licoricia does not serve as a moral exemplar. She offers no strategy of resistance and no vision of redemption. Her life instead illuminates the space Exodus occupies before liberation enters the story, a world in which people are valued for what they provide and abandoned when that valuation turns sour.

The book of Exodus will move toward freedom and revelation. But it does not begin there. It begins with a gaze that reduces human beings to numbers, labor, and risk. The Torah insists that we notice this beginning. Before there are chains, there are assessments. Before violence, there is policy. Before oppression hardens into law, there is a language that speaks about people rather than to them.

This opening moment asks something demanding of the reader. It challenges us to pay attention to the ways power justifies itself as reasonable, even prudent. Pharaoh does not present himself as cruel. He presents himself as responsible. His fear is framed as foresight, his actions as management. Exodus refuses to let that logic pass without scrutiny.

Licoricia of Winchester reminds us how often Jewish history has unfolded in precisely this space. Long before expulsion or catastrophe, there is usually a period in which Jews are tolerated conditionally, valued for their contribution, counted carefully, and spoken of in terms of utility. The danger lies not only in open hatred, but in systems that measure human worth primarily by economic or social usefulness. Such systems can turn quickly and without warning.

For contemporary readers, the Torah’s opening chapters are therefore not only historical memory. They are ethical training. Exodus teaches us to recognise early signs of dehumanisation: when communities are discussed as problems to be managed, when memory of relationship is erased, and when belonging is made contingent on productivity or compliance. These are moments that demand attention long before injustice becomes visible as violence.

The Torah does not ask us to wait for chains to appear. It asks us to notice the gaze that makes chains possible. Redemption, when it comes, will require courage and divine partnership. Responsibility begins earlier, in how we see one another and in whether we are willing to challenge a world that reduces people to what they provide rather than who they are.

Exodus begins by teaching us how oppression starts. The question it leaves with us is whether we have learned to recognise it in time.

“Jacob called his sons and said: ‘Gather yourselves, that I may tell you what is to befall you in days to come. Assemble and listen…’” (Gen. 49:1–2)

At the end of Genesis, the narrative lens widens. After a book shaped by ruptures and reconciliations, Jacob’s final act in Parashat Vayechi is not to bless each son in isolation, but to summon them together. The double command, he’asfu (“gather yourselves”) and hikavtzu (“assemble”), signals a decisive shift. The future of the covenant will not be carried by solitary heroes. It will be shaped by a people who learn to stand side by side, even when their histories, temperaments, and destinies diverge.

Jacob’s words are not predictions in the modern sense. They are assignments. Each son receives a vision shaped by his character, strengths, and failings. Their futures are distinct, uneven, and imperfect. Yet the meaning of the moment lies not in the individuality of the blessings, but in their shared horizon. The sons must hear one another’s destinies to understand their own. Jacob offers them not a map, but a collective responsibility that can be met only together.

That scene resonates with the landscape of European Progressive Judaism today. Over the course of my commentaries on the book of Genesis, we travelled across a continent marked by diversity and interruption. Some regions endured devastation; others, hiddenness; others, suppression; and others, courageous renewal. None of these stories were identical, yet all described communities that rebuilt Jewish life from broken histories. Like Jacob’s sons in Parashat Vayechi, European Jewish communities emerged from different pasts but now face the same question: what comes next, and how do we build it together?

The German Swedish Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, who wrote out of the flames of European destruction during the Holocaust, captured the work of collective futurity with stark clarity. In one of her wartime poems, she writes: “We walk toward the future bearing the sore feet of the past.” It is an image of a people gathered from scattered paths, marked by wounds yet still moving. Sachs does not glorify suffering. She names its weight. Yet her vision is not resigned. For Sachs, walking toward the future is an act of moral choice, a commitment to life after catastrophe.

That commitment has defined Progressive Judaism in Europe for decades. Across the continent, communities rebuilt themselves not by erasing the past but by refusing to let it dictate the limits of possibility. Each community carried its own “sore feet”: the Holocaust, the silencing under communism, the legacies of state control or forced assimilation, the quiet trauma of hidden identities. Yet out of these histories emerged institutions, leaders, and congregations who insisted that Judaism could be renewed in ways that were open, ethical, and accessible.

Today we face a new Parashat Vayechi moment. Post-COVID Europe has produced an unexpected hunger for meaning. People who once stood at the margins are seeking community, study, and ritual. Rising antisemitism has led many to re-enter Jewish space not out of fear but out of a desire for rootedness and solidarity. At the same time, new populations are reshaping the European Progressive landscape. Israelis relocating to European cities bring spiritual expectation and cultural fluency. Emerging communities in places such as Georgia, Lithuania, and Cyprus draw together local Jews, returnees, and newcomers in creative ways.

These shifts do not erase the challenges: demographic fragility, political instability, and the continuing struggle for recognition in several countries. Yet in the logic of Parashat Vayechi, challenges are not grounds for despair. They are prompts for responsibility. Jacob does not idealise his sons. He names their limitations and their difficult futures. Yet he calls them together because the covenantal task is larger than any one of them. Their future depends on their willingness to gather, to listen, and to build.

The same is true for us. If European Progressive Judaism is to flourish, it will not be through harmonising every community into sameness. It will be through cultivating a collective vision spacious enough for difference. Each community carries a distinct inheritance, diverse voices bound by a shared commitment to a Judaism grounded in dignity, justice, and inclusion.

Nelly Sachs reminds us that walking toward the future requires honesty about the wounds we carry and courage to continue anyway. Parashat Vayechi teaches that blessing emerges when we assemble, not as a uniform people, but as a community willing to imagine a future together. The task ahead is not to perfect our communities but to gather them, to let their varied stories inform a shared purpose, and to build institutions generous enough to hold the next generation.

European Progressive Judaism continues to weave its many strands into a future shaped by integrity and hope. Its congregations, whether long established or newly emerging, offer places where Jewish life is rebuilt with care and imagination. For those who live in Europe and for those who encounter these communities only in passing, this landscape holds a quiet promise.

And so, just as the book of Genesis concludes with Jacob blessing his sons, I want to leave us with a final blessing: may all who cross the thresholds of Europe’s congregations, residents and visitors alike, find moments of connection and strength. And may these communities always be a source of blessing, offering renewal, dignity, and a shared sense of Jewish possibility.

Originally published at reformjudaism.org

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“Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ … ‘Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves for selling me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.’” (Gen. 45:3–5)

The turning point of Parashat Vayigash is not Joseph’s revelation but the interpretation he offers of his own suffering. Joseph does not deny the harm done to him. Instead, as Professor Naomi A. Steinberg highlights in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, he performs an act of interpretive courage: he reframes injury as responsibility. His words are neither resignation nor piety; they are a deliberate attempt to create relationship where rupture had reigned. Joseph models a kind of moral agency in which memory is not erased but placed in the service of life.

This capacity to hold pain without allowing it to harden into vengeance lies at the heart of the portion. Joseph’s statement — “God sent me before you to preserve life” — is not theological explanation but ethical reframing: a choice to turn trauma into a source of obligation.

A parallel act of ethical reframing took place in Europe in October 1943, when the Jews of Denmark faced imminent deportation. Having been protected for three years under the German occupation, Danish Jews learned of Nazi plans to arrest them on Rosh Hashanah. What followed is one of the rare moments in European history when an entire society acted with astonishing moral clarity. Fishermen, teachers, doctors, clergy, shopkeepers, neighbours — thousands of ordinary citizens — mobilised in days. They hid families in their homes, ferried them in fishing boats and rowboats across the Øresund strait, and refused to treat their Jewish compatriots as expendable.

The Danish rescue was not the work of heroes in the mythic sense but of a people unwilling to surrender their ethical bearings under occupation. Few stories better illustrate the insight of Czech-born Israeli writer Ruth Bondy, who captures a profound truth, likely inspired by a Camus quote from The Plague. Her words, translated from German, say: “It is not heroism we must seek, but human decency in times when decency is forbidden.” Bondy, who survived Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen, understood that the rarest human act in extremity is not sacrifice but steadfastness — the refusal to comply with cruelty when compliance seems safer.

Joseph’s brothers come before him in fear. By all conventional logic, he would have been justified in rejecting them. Denmark likewise faced a moment in which self-protection would have been the easiest course. Instead, Danes accepted risk to preserve life. It is a modern expression of the mindset adopted by Joseph in Genesis: to see oneself as being tasked with preserving life.

Nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark in 1943 — more than 7,500 people — reached safety across the narrow waters to Sweden. That crossing, however, was only the first movement in a larger arc. Sweden’s role in this story is no less significant, though often less emphasised. Sweden, maintaining wartime neutrality, made the conscious decision to accept the Danish refugees and to protect them. Swedish authorities provided medical care, work permits, housing, and legal status. The country also became a centre for humanitarian operations as the war drew to a close, most famously in the White Buses rescue led by Count Folke Bernadotte, which brought thousands of concentration camp prisoners — Jews among them — to safety on Swedish soil.

If Denmark represents the moment of action, Sweden represents the moment of repair: the space where wounds were tended, communities reassembled, and life preserved beyond the initial escape. In Joseph’s terms, Denmark is the decision to step forward; Sweden is the work of sustaining those who have crossed through catastrophe.

Ruth Bondy cautioned against selective memory — against reducing history to its horrors or its redemptions. “Memory must not be selective,” she wrote. “It must include the sparks of kindness alongside the abyss.” The rescue of Danish Jews and their reception in Sweden stand as such sparks: fragile, luminous, ethically uncomplicated in a time when most choices were shrouded in moral ambiguity.

These events do not invite triumphalism. They remind us instead that rescue is never abstract. It depends on individuals and institutions choosing to bear responsibility for those who are vulnerable. In Scandinavia today, small Progressive Jewish communities continue to gather in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and beyond — not as heirs to heroism, but as quiet bearers of a legacy in which human agency mattered more than ideology.

Parashat Vayigash offers a biblical model for such agency. Joseph does not claim that his suffering was good; he insists only that its meaning must be oriented toward life. Denmark and Sweden together enacted a version of this insight: confronted with cruelty, they chose to preserve life, to receive the displaced, and to shoulder the work of protection.

The parashah asks us to recognise that ethical responsibility often emerges in fractured times. Preservation of life is rarely dramatic; it is composed of decisions taken in kitchens, fishing harbours, border posts, and hospital wards. The moral power of the Danish and Swedish story lies precisely in its ordinariness — the quiet resolve to act when action mattered.

In every generation, we inherit this charge: to transform fracture into obligation, and to ensure that our choices tilt the world toward life.

Originally published at reformjudaism.org

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“Pharaoh said to his courtiers, ‘Could we find anyone like this, a man in whom is the spirit of God?’ Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘Since God has made all this known to you, there is none so discerning and wise as you. You shall be in charge of my palace…’” (Gen. 41:38–40)

Ruth Brin — a pioneering American Jewish poet whose work functions as a kind of modern midrash, reading biblical moments through lived experiences of the Jewish people —gives this moment its theological shape. In her poem on Joseph, published in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, she writes that:

“The nakedness of Joseph before the Pharaoh was a nakedness which both exposes and protects… the nakedness of the Jew in history… neither to escape nor embrace, but to accept, if it comes, as we have done in every age.”

Brin’s image is exacting. She does not describe humiliation, but a state of spiritual bareness in which nothing stands between the self and truth. In the biblical imagination, decisive encounters often come when a person stands without protection: Moses — who will only appear later in the book of Exodus — famously meets the divine after leaving behind the power and privilege of Pharaoh’s court, at a burning bush in the wilderness. Joseph, in his own generation, stands before Pharaoh with no identity but his insight. And Brin understands this not merely as Joseph’s moment, but as a recurring condition in Jewish existence: across history, Jews have repeatedly found themselves exposed in this way — neither fully protected nor entirely powerless, yet compelled to stand with clarity and courage in the space that remains.

Modern psychology offers a parallel language for what Brin describes, illuminating the inner strength that can arise in moments of exposure. Drawing on years of research into human resilience, Dr. Brené Brown describes vulnerability as “the birthplace of courage.” Her insight helps name the strength within moments of exposure, yet Brin points to something more historically particular: across Jewish history, clarity has often arisen not from safety but from living truthfully within conditions that cannot be controlled.

This dynamic — clarity gained in conditions of exposure — is not only biblical or psychological; it is woven throughout Jewish history. Jews arrived in Rome in the second century BCE, forming one of the oldest continuous communities of the Diaspora. Their endurance never depended on secure protection. Under empire and Church, their civic position shifted repeatedly, yet they produced a distinct Italian Jewish culture marked by intellectual curiosity, theological creativity, and deep rootedness.

The early modern ghettos of Venice, Rome, Florence, and elsewhere made this condition literal. Confinement was real, but so was the cultural vibrancy that developed within those walls. Italian Jews lived close to power while remaining outside its shelter. Their identity stayed sharp because it was never fully insulated.

Even emancipation did not resolve the precariousness of belonging. In 1938, Fascist Italy enacted racial laws, expelling Jews from schools, professions, and public life. Communities woven intimately into Italian culture were suddenly unprotected. Brin’s “nakedness” became legal reality. Yet in the aftermath of the Shoah and the war, Italian Jews rebuilt once more — clear-eyed and without illusion. As Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor and one of Italy’s most important post-war Jewish voices, wrote: “If understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary.” Renewal came not from forgetting, but from the sober knowledge of power’s instability and the refusal to confuse security with identity.

It is within this long story of endurance that the emergence of Italian Progressive Judaism must be understood. Rather than a foreign innovation, it is the latest expression of an Italian Jewish voice shaped by clarity within exposure. Lev Chadash in Milan, soon to celebrate 25 years, has created a Judaism that is egalitarian, intellectually serious, and spiritually warm — an expression of Jewish life that speaks confidently in a Catholic-majority society. The Federazione Italiana per l’Ebraismo Progressivo (FIEP) — the Italian equivalent of the URJ, approaching its 10th anniversary, brings coherence and recognition to communities in Milan, Rome, Florence, and other cities, offering a national structure grounded in openness and equality.

These communities do not claim the comfort of numbers or institutional dominance. They choose presence. Their voice is not defensive but articulate, contributing to Italian public discourse with ethical clarity. In this, they echo Joseph: standing without armour, grounded enough that truth can be heard.

Seen through Brin’s lens, their existence is neither triumphalist nor fragile. When a community stands without illusions of guaranteed power, what remains visible is what matters: purpose, learning, integrity, and a living connection to God.

Mikeitz leaves us with a demanding invitation: to ask what we might see — in ourselves, in God, in our communities — if we dared to stand as Joseph did, unguarded and truthful, allowing spiritual clarity to emerge.

This was originally published at reformjudaism.org.

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“So Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined; but the Eternal was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love.” (Gen. 39:20–21)

The Bible traces Joseph’s descent from privilege to captivity. In Parashat Vayeishev, he first appears as a dreamer and a favourite son — confident, even boastful, in his father’s love and in his own visions. His brothers’ resentment culminates in betrayal: they sell him into slavery and Joseph is carried down to Egypt. Stripped of family and status, he begins to grow into moral maturity. Serving in the house of Potiphar, an Egyptian official, he earns trust through diligence and restraint. But when Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him and he refuses, she falsely accuses him of assault. Joseph’s loyalty is misread as guilt, and he is cast into prison, his emerging faithfulness mistaken for wrongdoing.

Yet, as the 20^th century Israeli Bible scholar Nechama Leibowitz highlights in her Studies in Bereshit, the Torah shifts our gaze away from public disgrace to inward constancy. She observes: “In the six verses of chapter 39 describing Jospeh’s life as a slave in the Egyptian household, the name of God appears five times.” The Divine presence does not desert Joseph; rather, the Torah emphasizes ‘and the Eternal was with Joseph.’ For Leibowitz, success and failure are not measured by human standards: though Joseph was brought low, he was never abandoned. The Eternal was with him in Potiphar’s house and again in prison; wherever he went, God’s presence accompanied him. Faithfulness, she teaches, is not validated by recognition; it endures even when unseen. Holiness can go underground and still sustain life.

In Jewish history, few stories mirror that hidden faithfulness more poignantly than the fate of the Jews of Spain and Portugal. When Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, tens of thousands fled; others remained, forced to convert. Outwardly they became conversos or “New Christians”; inwardly many carried fragments of Jewish faith — a whispered blessing, a candle lit on Friday night, a family story passed in secret. Like Joseph in the darkness of Pharaoh’s prison, their faith survived beneath layers of concealment. Their collective story is also the story of individuals who held faith quietly, each in their own hidden way.

The Inquisition sought to expose what was hidden, convinced that outward conformity proved inward loyalty. Yet the opposite was often true: the Eternal was with those whom society misread. In Lisbon, Seville, and Toledo, the divine presence clung to them — unseen, unspoken, yet steadfast. A prayer recited under one’s breath or a mezuzah hidden inside a wall became the Iberian echo of the Torah’s words: “but the Eternal was with Joseph.”

Centuries later, when Iberian Jewry seemed long extinguished, descendants of those hidden families began to reclaim their ancestry. For centuries, public Jewish life remained impossible — not only after the Inquisition, but also under the 20th-century fascist regimes of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal and Francisco Franco in Spain, which maintained strict control over religion and public expression well into the post-war period. Only with the restoration of democracy in the 1970s did a new openness become possible. Around the Iberian Peninsula — in Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Rota — descendants of conversos have joined with Jews from South America, together renewing communities that are both locally rooted and globally connected. Across Spain and Portugal, Progressive congregations now give open form to what was once concealed. Their prayers, interweaving Hebrew with Spanish and Portuguese, are the public voices of ancestors who prayed in whispers.

This reawakening is not nostalgia; it is a quiet revelation of what endures. The feminist Jewish theologian Judith Plaskow teaches that revelation is a continuing conversation — each generation adding its voice to those once silenced. Yet revelation does not belong only to communities; it also unfolds in the heart of each person who keeps faith in silence. The descendants of the conversos, returning to Judaism on their own terms, expand that conversation, proving that covenantal life can be interrupted but not erased. The Eternal’s presence is never confined to public recognition; it abides even in secrecy.

Parashat Vayeishev thus speaks across centuries: holiness may go underground, but it never dies. Joseph’s faithfulness, unseen and misjudged, endures until it transforms his fate; Iberian Jewish faith, repressed and driven inward, has found its way back into the light. Both stories testify that the Eternal’s presence accompanies the hidden and the exiled — those whose truth cannot yet be spoken aloud.

Our task is to recognize them and to learn from them. In every age, moral courage and spiritual integrity are often invisible to the world’s eyes. The question Vayeishev leaves us with is not only how Joseph kept faith in prison, but how we too sustain conviction when it brings isolation. Faithfulness is not only tested in public struggle but in private perseverance. Like Joseph in the prison and the hidden Jews of Iberia, we are called to keep faith even when no one sees — trusting that integrity itself is a form of light.

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“Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. … He said, ‘Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’” (Genesis 32:25–29)

At night, by the ford of the Jabbok river, Jacob wrestles a nameless adversary until dawn. The text never clarifies who or what he struggles with—God, angel, brother, or self—but from this encounter he emerges wounded and renamed. Jacob becomes Israel, the one who wrestles and endures. In that moment, Jewish identity itself is born; not from triumph, but from struggle.

To be Israel is to live in tension between past and future, between belonging and difference, and between what others demand of us and what our conscience commands. Our covenant is forged not in serenity, but in wrestling.

Nowhere has that tension been more visible than in Poland, where Jewish life has long wrestled with visibility, legitimacy, and survival. In the early 19th century, Warsaw’s Jewish elite looked toward Berlin and Hamburg, inspired by the Reform Movement that sought to harmonize Jewish faith with European modernity. They debated modern architecture, civic engagement, and using the Polish language in prayer. In the 1850s, Rabbi Marcus Jastrow, who later wrote his “Talmudic Dictionary,” served in Warsaw while calling for moral and intellectual renewal within Judaism. He insisted that truth must be stronger than habit, for revelation continues through reason.

But the Polish context was unforgiving. Under Russian imperial rule, both the authorities and the traditional rabbinate resisted reform. The budding Polish Reformers were accused of abandoning Jewish authenticity for social acceptance. They wrestled not only with God and modernity, but their own people. The Reform Movement in Warsaw was never allowed to flourish fully. Unlike Jacob, the early Polish Reformers were not granted the gift of a new name and the accompanying blessing, despite their wrestling.

After the Shoah and four decades of communism, Jewish life in Poland seemed extinguished. Yet, like Jacob rising from the dust with a new name, Polish Jews began to reemerge. In the 1990s, a small group of Jews in Warsaw dared again to imagine a Judaism rooted in equality and pluralism. They founded Beit Warszawa, the first Reform congregation in post-Communist Poland.

Their struggle has been as real as Jacob’s. Poland’s government recognizes only the Orthodox Union of Jewish Religious Communities as the official representation of Jewish life, excluding Reform and Progressive congregations from public funding and institutional legitimacy. Yet Beit Warszawa persisted. Its rabbis trained local leaders, translated prayer books into Polish, and built a community that prays, studies, and celebrates with its own voice.

In this context, the words of Rosa Luxemburg—a Polish Jewish thinker who also wrestled with identity and power—speak across the generations: “Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.”

Her declaration captures the essence of the Progressive Jewish struggle in Poland. To build a pluralistic Judaism in a society that recognizes only one official form of Jewish life is to affirm precisely that freedom. Luxemburg’s vision of liberty as the right to dissent mirrors Jacob’s night-long wrestling. Both refuse to yield their identity to those who claim to define others.

Poland’s Progressive Jews have reclaimed a space long denied to them, embodying what the text of Parashat Vayishlach proclaims: identity is not inherited whole, but wrestled into being. Each new dawn requires courage to face the unknown, to be wounded and still walk forward.

For Progressive Jews everywhere, this Polish story raises a question that reaches beyond Warsaw. In our own communities—whether in Budapest, Berlin, Buenos Aires, or Boston—are we not also wrestling for the right to shape Judaism in our image? How do we renew our tradition without losing its depth? How do we remain faithful, yet free? To live as Reform Jews is to inhabit the name Israel: to struggle with God and with one another, to test inherited forms, and to keep the covenant alive by making space for freedom and dissent. Perhaps our blessing comes not from certainty, but from the willingness to stay in the struggle.

To be Israel is to struggle with God and humanity and endure. The Polish Progressive Movement, by insisting on dignity, pluralism, and renewal, stands in that lineage. Its members carry Jacob’s limp and his blessing: a faith tested, transformed, and alive.

In a land where Jewish modernity was once declared impossible, their very existence proclaims, “we have wrestled, and we are still here.”

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