Remarks for Moral Mondays CT/Fairfield County — 1-5-26

This Tuesday evening through Wednesday marks the 53rd yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the anniversary of a spiritual, moral, and intellectual giant who understood how easily suffering can be normalized, and how to interrupt the machinery of indifference by insisting that we must not look away when people are suffering.

And following the brazen attack on Venezuela this past weekend, I found myself returning to an essay Rabbi Heschel wrote in the late 1960’s explaining his opposition to the Vietnam war. The essay is called “The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement,” and it deserves to be read in its entirety. But in short, Rabbi Heschel wrote that “War under all circumstances is a supreme atrocity and is justified only when there is a necessity to defend one’s own survival.” 

The war in Vietnam, he argued, failed that test — not because he supported the North Vietnamese regime; indeed, he recognized that government’s authoritarianism and was deeply uneasy with communist. Nevertheless, he insisted that opposing communism was not in itself a license for war; no ideological difference, strategic advantage, or material self-interest could justify inflicting untold suffering on countless human beings.

Rabbi Heschel was not writing as a partisan or a policy expert. He was writing as a refugee from European fascism — a man who escaped Nazi Germany while much of his family was murdered in the Holocaust. He knew what it meant to watch governments speak calmly while destroying lives at scale. He knew how violence becomes palatable when it is framed as necessity, how suffering is managed through abstractions, how moral responsibility gets diluted by claims that “this is just how the world works.”

Moreover, as a scholar of the biblical prophets, Rabbi Heschel insisted that their defining claim was that God is not neutral in the face of human suffering — and therefore human beings are forbidden from neutrality as well.

The prophets speak, he taught, with what he called divine pathos: the audacious idea that injustice wounds the heart of God, that exploitation and oppression, the suffering of the vulnerable at the hands of the powerful, are not merely immoral but cosmically intolerable. That prophetic seriousness shaped how Heschel looked at Vietnam, and that moral framework has not expired.

What we are witnessing right now in the Trump regime’s illegal and immoral assault on Venezuela is not an isolated policy failure. It is not an unfortunate miscalculation. It is part of a long and brutal tradition of American imperial power — one that repeatedly places the interests of capital, control, and dominance above human life and human dignity.

The only thing that is different in this moment is that the mask is off. The guise of America being a liberating force, an arsenal of democracy, has been shed. There is no longer even the pretense that this is about democracy or freedom or humanitarian concerns. But let us name the obscenity clearly: for decades — under Democratic and Republican administrations alike — the United States has destabilized governments across Latin America, imposed crushing sanctions, backed coups, supported dictators, extracted wealth, and then acted surprised when societies fracture and people flee.

And then — having helped create conditions of poverty, instability, and despair — we turn around and criminalize the very people trying to survive those conditions.

Venezuela already has one of the largest displaced populations in the world. Millions of people—families, children, elders — have fled hunger and violence made worse, sometimes decisively worse, by U.S. sanctions.

And yet this administration has effectively slammed shut the asylum and refugee system for Venezuelans and others from South and Central America — not to mention from the Caribbean, Africa, or anywhere else the regime considers to be a “shithole country” filled with people who are “human garbage”; really for anyone who is not a white South African.

That is not about borders.

That is not about law.

That is not about safety.

That is about whose lives are deemed expendable — and whose are not.

During the Vietnam War, Heschel wrote that while some may be guilty, all are responsible. He said, in essence: I may not have dropped the bombs — but I am complicit in the atrocities if I remain silent while my government does.

That moral logic has not expired. It is the height of hypocrisy to starve a nation and then criminalize the act of searching for bread. 

It is the height of hypocrisy to destabilize a country and then feign outrage when people flee.

It is the height of hypocrisy to speak the language of law and order while violating American law, international law, and the most basic dictates of human decency.

This week, Jews around the world begin reading the Book of Exodus — one of humanity’s foundational moral texts about power, fear, and resistance.

It begins with an empire that feels threatened, a ruler who exploits fear of the outsider, a system that depends on forced labor and dehumanization — and is reinforced through the complicity of ordinary people, sustained through silence and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the other.

It is therefore not surprising that the turning point of the story is not strategy or force, but acts of recognition, of witness, of refusing to look away:

Midwives behold the humanity of Hebrew women in labor and spare their babies. One of those babies, sent by his mother down the river in a basket, is spotted and saved by Pharaoh’s daughter. That child grows up to witness an Egyptian taskmaster’s brutality and intervenes. Then, as a fugitive, he glimpses a bush burning and stops long enough to notice that it is not consumed by the flames. And it is at that crescendo of consciousness and conscience that God appears. 

Across our traditions — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and beyond — we hear the same truth echoed in different languages: that God hears the cries of the oppressed and calls us to be partners in redemption.

That is why we are here. We are here to practice paying attention in an age that trains us to look away; to insist that the suffering of other human beings matters, even when it happens far from our own neighborhoods; to remember that a human life does not lose its value at a border, or a checkpoint, or a detention cell; to proclaim that human dignity is not negotiable.

The Exodus story teaches that liberation begins not with power, but with listening: With a cry that is heard, with suffering that is seen. With pain that is no longer denied.

And Rabbi Heschel reminded us that this is the sacred work God entrusts to human beings: to feel what others are taught to ignore, to resist the numbness that systems of domination depend on, to be, as he put it, “a voice for the plundered poor.”

So let us leave this place not only committed to protest, but committed to presence; not only ready to condemn injustice, but prepared to heal what has been broken; not only determined to resist cruelty, but resolved to embody compassion — in policy, in practice, and in public life.

May we have the strength to oppose every regime, foreign or domestic, that tramples human dignity; the wisdom to reject false choices between security and compassion; and the humility to remember that justice is not something we possess, but something we pursue together.

And when history looks back on this moment, may it be said of us that we did not grow accustomed to suffering, that we did not confuse might with right, that we remained faithful to the truth that human dignity is not negotiable.

Amen.