Careful Now, the Children are Watching

From the broken brotherhoods of Genesis to the final conversation between Moses and Aaron, the Torah asks what it truly means to become our brother’s keeper. Through a relationship shaped by speech, silence, conflict, and compassion, a vision emerges of how even fractured relationships can find redemption when truth remains bound to love.

Va’etchanan 5786 In this week’s parsha we read that Moses pleads with God, and the form of that word (va’etchanan) only shows up in one other place in the Torah – with Joseph. What do these two moments come to teach us about yearning for things we may never get? Why is it important that we articulate those desires anyway? *ASL Interpretation for this sermon is available on YouTube.

The book of Deuteronomy has begun, and our people are as numerous as the stars in the sky. But Moses cries out, “Eikhah!” The famous heart-broken “how” that foreshadows the tragedies of Tisha B’Av. What mournful message does Moses see in the stars? And what, instead, can we learn from the dust?

Rabbi Morris Panitz offers a prayer for our country in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo & Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, two men who lost their lives this week at the hands of ICE officers.