Even though I went to bed early on Tuesday, before the election outcome was clear, I didn’t get much sleep. Try as I might — sleep meditations, visualizations, every trick I know—I couldn’t get my mind to stop spinning: so much uncertainty, so much at stake for so many of us. I just couldn’t settle down, and I tossed and turned all night.
I know many of you felt that way too.
When I finally got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and made some coffee, I checked the news. While I grappled with the results, shaken, my first instinct was to study Torah. I started reading the weekly Torah portion. Sitting there reading Parashat Lekh-Lekha in the early morning darkness, I felt as if the Torah was enveloping me in an embrace, like a warm blanket.
Not because it was comforting to read these stories — they are profoundly difficult stories that touch on the many issues that challenge and divide us: migration, being strangers and welcoming strangers, gender and sexuality, treatment of women, bodily autonomy, war, conflicts over land, the taking of captives and their rescue — but because I found comfort and support in remembering that the Torah is a home, a sanctuary for me. And that’s when my tears started to flow, thinking about the sometimes brutally painful ways many of us have struggled and continue to struggle to feel secure, to feel at home. For many of us, the election results have only sharpened that profound feeling of insecurity.
In this time when many of us are deeply shaken, I want you to know that IJS is here to be a place where you can feel secure, and where you can find comfort and belonging.
Whatever happens in the days and years to come, we are here for you to be a sanctuary of calm, welcome, acceptance, and love that you can turn to when you need to breathe deeply and connect with others in our divisive and in many ways broken world.
On Monday night, during one of our special IJS meditation sits for election week, I led a practice that included a selection of a favorite teaching from Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl’s Meor Einayim. It’s a text in which the rebbe says that every Jew has a root-soul that corresponds to a letter in the Torah. I take that to mean that each of us (and here I would extend his teaching to all human beings, not just Jews) has a spiritual home in the universe. I think that means that our avodah, our spiritual work, is ultimately about building a world in which every human being can experience that sense of belonging.
This is our commitment to you, now and always: Like Abraham and Sarah, who welcomed everyone under their tent and made them feel at home, we will be here for you as a sanctuary and spiritual haven in a turbulent world. It’s what we have sought to do for 25 years, and it is what we are committed to doing this week, next week, and into a redemptive future.
