Reflections for Moral Mondays CT/Fairfield County - 12/1/25

On Monday, December 1, 2025, I was once again honored to participate in our local Moral Mondays gathering outside the Stamford courthouse, the site of illegal and immoral immigration enforcement actions over the past year. Below are the reflections I shared:

Each week in my tradition we read a portion from the Torah, and last week brought us to one of the most powerful moments in the whole book of Genesis — a moment not about triumph or certainty but about fear. Jacob has fled his home after causing real harm. He’s not sure whether the danger behind him or the unknown ahead of him is more frightening. And he stops for the night in a place the text simply calls “a place” — no name, no markers, just the kind of nowhere you land in when you’re exhausted and unsure of who you are anymore.

And there, in that unnamed place, in the middle of a fear he has not yet begun to process, he dreams. He sees a ladder reaching from the earth into the heavens, and hears a voice — God’s voice — not erasing the danger, not excusing the past, not promising him comfort, but reminding him that even here, even now, he is not alone; that the ground he thought was empty is not empty; that his life is still bound to something larger than the panic inside him; that fear may be loud, but it is not ultimate.

And when he wakes, he says, “God was in this place — and I didn’t know.”

Which is another way of saying: my fear was telling the truth, but not the whole truth. There was something deeper beneath it that I hadn’t noticed yet.

I’ve been carrying that line with me this week because once again, our country has faced violence, this time involving an Afghan asylum seeker, and the response from those in power has followed an old, familiar script: immediate panic, immediate scapegoating, immediate calls to punish not the individual accused but an entire people. Before the family of the slain soldier could even catch their breath, the administration announced it would use her death as a pretext to shut down asylum applications and Afghan visas altogether — a sweeping, collective condemnation masquerading as policy.

And if this were the first time, we might chalk it up to flawed judgment or moral confusion.But it isn’t the first time.It is a distinctly American pattern.

We have spent generations placing Black and brown bodies in danger for our own benefit — and then abandoning them in their hour of need.Black soldiers fought in our wars and came home to segregation, to disenfranchisement, to violence.Vietnamese refugees fled a war we helped create and were treated with suspicion the moment they landed.Communities across Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East — places we have extracted from, militarized, destabilized, and exploited — have been met not with reparative responsibility but with closed doors and clenched fists when their desperation finally reached our borders.

And now Afghans — many of whom risked their lives alongside American troops, alongside journalists, alongside aid workers, because we promised them protection — are being told that the alleged actions of one man make all of them a threat.

This is exactly the pattern Dr. King named when he spoke of the “giant triplets” of racism, militarism, and materialism — three forces that twist together into a single knot, a knot that justifies endless wars abroad, indifference to suffering at home, and a politics built on fear and hierarchy and dehumanization. These triplets always show up together: when we invest in weapons instead of people; when we militarize our streets while defunding the mental-health systems that could prevent violence; when we treat the lives we use as expendable and the lives we fear as enemies; when we tell ourselves that some people are worthy of protection and others are worthy of cages.

Fear loves this arrangement — fear thrives on it — because fear can only survive if we forget our obligations to one another.

But Jacob’s dream interrupts that.

Not by pretending danger isn’t real, but by insisting that danger cannot be the whole story.

By showing that even in frightening places, the sacred is still present. Fear distorts our vision and distracts us from our purpose. Faith calls us to remember who we are and whose we are; what we stand for, and what we are striving towards.

And so we gather here, in front of this courthouse, because people come here not to be scapegoated but to be seen; not to be punished for someone else’s crime but to have their humanity recognized; not to be told that the fear of the moment is more important than their lives or their families or their dignity.

We gather here because we refuse the lie that security requires cruelty.

We gather here because we reject the idea that all immigrants — or all asylum seekers — must be treated as suspects.

We gather here because we understand that our safety is bound up together.

We gather here because Jacob’s dream calls us to transcend our fears in order to strive together for something sturdier, higher, and holier. 

We gather here because we know that while it is easier to descend into suspicion and scapegoating and silence, we choose a different path, an upward path – 

A path of shared humanity

A path of beloved community

A path of world repair and ultimate redemption –

This is the path we choose to take together – hand in hand, rung by rung, up, up, up, Jacob’s Ladder, upward – toward the great and glorious future God promises is possible.