For the America Yet to Be

Shabbat Pinhas Sermon. Rabbi Sharon Brous

Sometimes it takes an earthquake to awaken us to the tremors that have always rumbled beneath the surface. It may have been Pinhas’s act of religious terrorism that awakened the daughters of Tzelophehad, beckoning them into history, just as the cries of mami and papa and images of children cruelly torn from their parents are waking up America. Criminalizing immigrants and asylum seekers, tearing families apart, dehumanizing incarcerated people– none of this is new, and it’s hardly un-American. But it’s naked, it’s unapologetic and it’s now. It’s beyond time for people of conscience to step in, step up and speak out.