Articles

As Jews and as a Jewish community, what are we willing to wrestle for? What interpretations and lessons will we choose to contribute to the world? What’s the Judaism we will shape for ourselves, each other, and our descendants?

In This D'var, Rabbi Nate DeGroot of the Shalom Center wrestles with the most troubling mitzvot, continuing the millennium-old tradition of wrestling with abhorrent texts.

With the calls to arms, the demands for ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and the blueprint for conquest, read at a time of ongoing genocide in Gaza and accelerating violence in the West Bank,it's not hard to see why these verses feel like they're speaking directly to the present. But a careful look at the tells a very different story than the one Zionism has trained generations of people to find here.

The 2026 Recharging Reform Judaism conference adopted a resolution to bar anti-Zionists from ordination at Hebrew Union College, positing Zionism as a defining criterion of Jewish authenticity. This proposal has a long historical context, through which the alignment of Reform Judaism with Zionism was less a democratic development than a forcibly instituted one, advanced over several decades by committees appointed from above and votes taken under limited deliberation. The anti-nationalist position now being derided was a cornerstone of many of the movement's own founders. We must recover an older strand of Reform thought, grounded in a universal ethics of solidarity and the mission to rebuild the world on foundations of social justice.

Jacob’s story shows that deception ends only when he allows himself to feel the full weight of pachad, the fear that brings truth into view. This week's Torah portion calls us to adopt that same moral discipline in a time when misinformation and state violence rely on our willingness to look away.

This essay argues that American Jews face a defining choice between a Judaism bound to nationalism and one rooted in ethical universalism and democratic freedom. Reclaiming Judaism’s tradition of debate and conscience, it calls for building diverse, democratic Jewish futures grounded in human dignity and collective liberation.

Today, it is our duty to reach back to the sources of our traditions to seek out who they were built for—a search for who we are today in line with the question of 'who have we been'?