Dear all,
This week I returned to the opening chapters of Genesis and reflected on the first three questions ever asked in the Torah:
- 鈥淲here are you?鈥澛犫�� God to Adam, hiding in the garden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge.
- 鈥淲here is your brother?鈥澛犫�� God to Cain, after Abel has been murdered.
- 鈥淎m I my brother鈥檚 keeper?鈥澛犫�� Cain鈥檚 chilling reply.
These are not questions about geography. They are questions about聽moral presence. About responsibility. About what it means to be human.
In this moment in time, we must ask ourselves those same questions.
Where are we when ICE agents terrorize civilians and families live in fear?
Where are we when our neighbors are endangered and our fellow human beings are treated as expendable?
Are we truly looking after one another when the Jewish community in Jackson, Mississippi is threatened, or when antisemitic graffiti appears on the walls of a synagogue in Pasadena?
Across the world in Iran, ordinary people continue to raise their voices in the face of deep hardship and repression, and many have paid a terrible price for seeking dignity, safety, and the freedom to be
It is tempting鈥攑erhaps even comforting鈥攖o ask,聽Where is God when terrible things happen?
But Torah insists on a more difficult question first:
Where is humanity?
And even more uncomfortably鈥攚here are聽we?
Because the first failure in Genesis is not disobedience.
It is hiding.
And the second is not murder alone, but the refusal to accept responsibility for another鈥檚 life.
The Torah鈥檚 opening questions echo across time, demanding an answer not from God, but from us.
What will our answers be?
With love and Shalom,
Rabbi Zachary R. Shapiro
