Remarks for Moral Mondays CT/Fairfield County -- 3-16-26

Photo credit: Rev. Joseph Rose

Last night, the filmmaker David Borenstein accepted an Oscar for his documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin, and in his acceptance speech he described what he saw working with footage of Russia's slide into authoritarianism: that you lose democracy not through one dramatic collapse but through "countless small, little acts of complicity — when we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don't say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it." Each act of looking away, each cold Monday when you do the math and decide the cost is too high. "But luckily," he said, "even a nobody is more powerful than you think."

For months, Jewish communities have known that federal security grants now come with new conditions — that to receive them, a congregation must cooperate with immigration enforcement and abandon programs that serve refugees and immigrants. It has been an outrage in slow motion. And then three days ago a gunman drove his truck through the front doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan and down a hallway before being stopped, and the children in that preschool made it home because that congregation had the resources to protect them — and suddenly the slow outrage and the breaking news are in the same sentence, and what has always been a trap is now impossible to ignore.

This season, which is the run up to the Passover holiday, asks us to remember: the trap is not new. The Book of Exodus opens with a Pharaoh who rises to power by rallying his people around fear of a growing immigrant population, using intimidation and subjugation and brutalization against a community he has cast as an existential threat. The ideology behind the grant conditions, behind the dehumanizing rhetoric about invasion and replacement, is as old as Pharaoh, and we know how that story ends. The deadliest antisemitic attack in American history was the 2018 massacre at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, and the shooter chose that congregation deliberately because it was affiliated with HIAS and preparing to celebrate Refugee Shabbat. What is being offered to Jewish communities right now is not protection. It is conscription into the very ideology that has targeted us. A rabbi in Philadelphia said what needs to be said: "Jewish safety requires inclusive democracy, and inclusive democracy requires Jewish safety." We must not accept as the price of our own safety the very conditions that imperil us all.

Authoritarians are skilled at making resistance feel impossible — that is part of the design. But the scholar Nechama Tec, in her work on resistance during the Holocaust, observed that resistance was rarely about toppling the regime. It was about non-cooperation. It was about saving lives. It was about refusing to let complicity become the water you swam in without noticing.

This week Jewish communities begin the book of Leviticus, which focuses on the arcane institution of sacrificial worship. The Hebrew word for sacrifice is korban, from the root meaning to draw near, because the whole point of the sacrificial system was not slaughter but rather proximity, showing up – bringing yourself to the threshold of the holy. The philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel understood that when the Temple fell and the sacrifices ended, something essential survived: "We do not sacrifice," he wrote. "We are the sacrifice." The great ancient sage Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, standing in the ruins of that Temple, told a student: do not grieve the loss of the sacrificial altar, for we have another equal way of approaching the sacred — deeds of love and kindness, for as the prophet Hosea taught, that is what God desired all along. What you lay down when you show up on a cold Monday — the comfort, the convenience, the easier path of looking away — that is the offering. This is what holiness looks like.

Passover asks us every year which side of history we intend to be on — whether we will stand with the forces of degradation or the forces of dignity. My friends, our being here today is a powerful answer to that question. I invite you to pray with me:

Source of all life, we came out in the rain again, and we think you noticed.

We carry into this hour a week of hard news — a synagogue attacked, an ideology as old as Pharaoh now writing the conditions of our security funding, families torn apart in our neighborhoods, the slow erosion of everything we were taught to protect. We see what is happening. We are naming it. And we are here anyway, because this is what faithfulness looks like when the conditions are worst.

Give us the wisdom to see the trap clearly, and the courage to refuse it.

Give us the persistence of water — which does not fight the obstacle but never stops moving, which outlasts the hardest rock not through force but through constancy.

Hold close those who cannot be here — those living one knock away from catastrophe, those already separated from the people they love, those grieving what has already been taken.

And remind us that this circle, this rain, this showing up — it is not a prelude to the work. It is the work, and we will keep doing it until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Amen.