Preserving Doubt

What happens when the man who once found refuge forgets the power of mercy? Drawing together Moses’ flight to Midian, the cities of refuge, and one of the Torah’s most difficult passages, we discover an enduring challenge to break the cycle of vengeance before it breaks us.

Watch the sermon that Reverend Senator Warnock delivered before this conversation here. Rabbi Sharon Brous in conversation with Raphael Warnock, Baptist pastor and senator from Georgia, discussing his book The Crooked Places Made Straight: Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America. Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America, he exhorts us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character. Senator Warnock argues that we suffer not from a paucity of resources but from a poverty of moral imagination.

In this week’s Torah reading we meet a character who is mentioned just once and then vanishes from the story. Who is he, and what does he teach us? And what does all of that have to do with being 13?