Remarks for Moral Mondays CT/Fairfield County — 1-12-26

Friends,

We gather today carrying a weight that is hard to name but impossible to ignore — a weight that lives somewhere between grief and alarm, sorrow and moral clarity, the pain of a single life taken and the dread of what that loss reveals about the world we are being asked to inhabit.

Last week in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good — a 37-year-old mother of three — was shot and killed during an encounter with federal immigration enforcement agents. Based on what is publicly known at this point, the facts do not appear to have warranted the use of lethal force. And in the days since, the official response has made it harder, not easier, to trust that the truth will be fully and fairly discerned.

That matters. Not only because a life was taken, but because of what this moment exposes about power, accountability, and the moral direction of our society.

This week, in the Jewish tradition, we read Parashat Va-era, the chapters of the Exodus story focused on God sending Moses to confront Pharaoh — the embodiment of unchecked state power.

What is striking about this story is that God does not simply free the slaves. God sends Moses into the system of oppression — to the palace, to the seat of authority, to the locus of state power and callous cruelty — again and again. Not once. Not twice. But repeatedly. Patiently. Relentlessly.

Why?

Because the Exodus is not only a story about liberation. It is a story about what happens when power sees itself as self-justifying.

Each time Moses speaks, Pharaoh responds not with reflection but with escalation.

Each confrontation hardens him further. His heart becomes, in the Torah’s language, hardened — not as a punishment, but as the predictable result of authority that confuses dominance with legitimacy and control with justice.

That dynamic should feel uncomfortably familiar.

The Exodus teaches that when authority defines itself primarily by force, dissent becomes danger. When maintaining order becomes more important than protecting life, transparency becomes intolerable. And when obedience is treated as the condition for safety, violence becomes easier to justify — even inevitable.

The Torah does not present Pharaoh as a cartoon villain. It presents him as a ruler who believes himself righteous, who believes he is defending stability, who believes his interests are identical with the state’s interests — and who therefore cannot hear the cry of the vulnerable standing directly in front of him.

That is the moral warning at the heart of this story.And it is painfully relevant right now.

The killing of Renee Good did not occur in a vacuum. It comes amid an aggressive escalation of immigration enforcement that has brought militarized tactics into our cities — masked agents, war-like rhetoric, neighborhoods treated as hostile terrain, and immigrant communities living under constant threat.

In such a system, the message becomes unmistakable:

Your safety depends on compliance.Your rights are provisional. And resistance — even nonviolent resistance — is treated as provocation.

It is precisely here that the Torah speaks with urgency.

Because the Exodus insists that authority must be confronted when it loses its moral bearings. That confrontation is not chaos; it is a moral necessity. And when power cannot tolerate scrutiny or accountability, the problem is not the people who speak up — it is the system that has made itself beyond question.

As we approach Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this Torah truth echoes in King’s own words. Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, responding to clergy who urged patience and order, King warned:

The great stumbling block is not the extremist, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice.

King was not rejecting law. He was reminding us what law is for.

Across faith traditions, there is a shared moral truth here: law exists to serve life, not the other way around. Order that demands submission without accountability is not peace. And a society that treats dissent as grounds for lethal force is already unraveling its moral legitimacy.

The Torah is clear: liberation does not come from silence. It comes from truth-telling that refuses to be intimidated — from returning again and again to power and saying: this is not acceptable; this is not just; this cannot stand.

So we gather today not only in grief, but in resolve.

Resolve to refuse the lie that safety requires silence. Resolve to reject a world in which obedience is the price of survival. Resolve to stand with immigrants, with targeted communities, and with all who are being told — implicitly or explicitly — that their lives are conditional.

And we gather, finally, in prayer.

A prayer that power might be restrained before it hardens beyond repair. A prayer that law might once again be worthy of the trust it demands. A prayer that courage might rise faster than fear, and conscience louder than command.

A prayer for those who live under threat —one knock, one siren, one encounter away from catastrophe.

A prayer for those who wield authority —that they remember they are meant to be guardians of life, not masters of it.

And a prayer for us —that we not grow numb, that we not confuse order with justice, that we not mistake quiet for peace.

May the memory of Renee Nicole Good be a blessing. May her children and loved ones be surrounded by care and strength. And may we find the courage — again and again —to insist on a world where dignity is not negotiable, accountability is not optional, and no one is asked to surrender their humanity in order to survive.

Amen.