We don’t know exactly why these colors were assigned to these directions, but some scholars have speculated that the sun’s path might offer a clue. Since the sun travels across the southern sky, the south became linked with heat—and so with red. The north, being dimmer, was associated with shadow and cold, and so with black. The west—where the sun sets in a blaze of light—was seen as white. And the east, where the sun rises and the sky turns cool before dawn, became green or blue.

These colors aren’t used descriptively, but they aren’t arbitrary either. They reflect an older way of seeing—a symbolic compass, a world mapped by meaning, not pigment. Color didn’t describe the surface of things; it told you how to orient yourself.

And color still does that today—especially in Jewish tradition, especially this week.

The Black of Tisha be’Av

This ancient map of meaning isn’t just a curiosity. It still shapes how we live, feel, and remember. In Jewish time, too, the year has its own palette. And this week, we turn toward its darkest shade.

The Talmud teaches that one who insists on sinning should go to a place where they are not known, wear black clothing, and wrap themselves in black—so as not to profane God’s name in public (Mo‘ed Katan 17a). The text offers no reason for the black garments, but their symbolism is unmistakable. Black, in rabbinic culture, often marks sorrow, gravity, and separation. Here, it seems to strip the act of transgression of spectacle or pride—covering it instead in shadow and restraint.

Black is also the color of mourning. By the sixteenth century, wearing black had become the established Jewish custom of mourning, at least in Ashkenaz. The Rema—Rabbi Moses Isserles—mentions it directly in Even Ha’ezer 17:5, noting that a presumed widow may not eulogize her husband or “wear black” until his death is confirmed. He records it without explanation, as if to say: of course mourners wear black.

The verse in Lamentations says: Yashav badad veyidom—“She sits alone and silent.” I picture a black-clad mourner sitting low to the ground, turned inward. The image isn’t in the text, but it’s the one we’ve come to carry—grief made visible in shadow. We wear black when we are in pain, when a light has gone out. But perhaps black is also the color of honesty—because it marks the moments when we stop pretending. When we strip away performance and sit with what is. And this week—on Tisha be’Av, the 9th of Av—many choose to dress in black or dark colors, echoing the mourning of the day in what we wear.

The White of Yom Kippur

But not all fasts are draped in shadow. Some are wrapped in radiance. To understand the difference, we have to shift from the black of grief to the white of return. On Yom Kippur, we wear white—kittel, tallit, simple linen. We fast not because we are broken, but because we are striving. White is the color of aspiration. The Talmud in Yoma (35b) compares us to angels. We are barefoot, wrapped in white, shedding the trappings of the body. So we fast in black on Tisha be’Av, and we fast in white on Yom Kippur. Both days strip us bare—but one lays us low, and the other lifts us up.

The Fields Are White: Mishnah Ta’anit and the Daughters of Jerusalem

White isn’t only for the holiest day. It’s also the color of joy, of dignity, of shared humanity. That’s what the Mishnah teaches us in one of the most surprising passages in all of rabbinic literature. The last chapter of Mishnah Ta‘anit (4:8) describes a strange, beautiful scene:

“There were no days of joy for Israel like the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur. On these days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in white garments . . . and they would dance in the vineyards.”

The Mishnah insists that these garments were borrowed, so that no one would feel shame. Rich and poor alike in borrowed white. The women would call out to the young men, not with vanity, but with integrity. They said: “Lift your eyes and see whom you choose for yourself . . . but remember that charm is false, and beauty is fleeting; it is the woman who fears God who shall be praised.” Why white? Because it equalizes. Because it purifies. Because it returns us to something simple and shared.

Parashat Devarim and the Cry of Isaiah

Still, the joy of white doesn’t erase the moral weight we associate with darkness. The Torah portion we read this week and its prophetic counterpart both remind us how easy it is to cloak corruption in ritual and forget the ethical hue of our choices. Parashat Devarim opens the final book of the Torah, with Moses recounting the story of Israel’s wandering. But it doesn’t begin with history—it begins with a strange geography: “on the other side of the Jordan, in the wilderness, in the plain opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel and Lavan and Hazerot and Di-Zahav.” These names aren’t just places; they evoke failure, complaint, disobedience. Lavan (white) and Di-Zahav (enough gold) might hint at spiritual distortion—purity turned brittle, wealth turned idolatrous.

According to Sifrei Devarim 1:1, Lavan (white) alludes to the people’s rejection of the manna, described in Numbers as “white like coriander seed” (Num. 11:7). The people grew tired of it and longed for meat. “Di-Zahav” is interpreted by Rashi (on Deut. 1:1) based on Berakhot 32a as “too much gold,” referring to the Golden Calf, which the Israelites built from their excess wealth. According to the Talmud, Moses rebuked them for the spiritual dangers of material abundance. In each case, the name recalls a sin. But each sin carries a color too: white manna, pale skin, gold gleam. Even in failure, the landscape is stained with hue.

The haftarah that accompanies it is the opening chapter of Isaiah: “Alas, sinful nation . . . They have forsaken the Holy One of Israel.” (1:4) Isaiah is writing in the eighth century BCE. He looks at a prosperous society and sees corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice. The Temple is still standing, but the people have emptied it of meaning. They offer sacrifices while trampling the poor.

“When you lift your hands in prayer, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves pure . . . learn to do good, seek justice, protect the vulnerable.” (1:15-17)

Isaiah speaks in shades as well: light and darkness, red like crimson, white like snow. Not physical color, but moral hue. He demands that we see the world in color—not the color of robes or walls, but of action and consequence.

Color and Orientation: What Do We See?

We see the world through color. We associate blue with calm, red with urgency, green with safety. In ancient maps, color located you. In Jewish law, color signaled category: the “white field” was grain; the “black cloth” was mourning; the “white garment” was purification.

We still live inside these metaphors. We speak of “gray areas,” of “seeing red,” of “black and white thinking.” But Jewish tradition teaches that color is not only what we see—it’s how we judge.

Are we living in red—reactive, impulsive, angry? Are we stuck in black—disoriented, numb, mourning? Are we seeking white—clarity, honesty, peace? And how does color affect us spiritually?  Does the muted green of an institutional hallway deaden the soul? Does the sterile gray of a prison uniform flatten the spirit? Should bright color in hospitals and schools be seen not just as decoration, but as moral intervention? What would it mean to choose color with care—not just in paint, but in time, in ritual, in life?

Toward the White Sea

Tisha be’Av is black. But it points toward white. Isaiah promises: Though your sins be red like scarlet, they shall become white as snow.

White, in the end, is not perfection. It is repair. It is the field after the fire. The garment after the washing. The sea at the far horizon. The one the ancients called the White Sea—not because it was pale, but because it faced west, the place where the sun sets, and where hope is deferred but not extinguished.

May this fast bring clarity. May we mourn in black and reach for white. May we see color as Torah, as prophecy, and as the geography of the soul.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

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Many questions arise from this reference to the site of the Temple. Where was the Temple supposed to be built? How were the Israelites to know that God had chosen a specific location? Does the phrase refer to one centralized site of worship as opposed to many sites of worship? Is the number of cultic worship sites not at issue, but the selection by God of those sites? Can it be understood as suggesting that only a single site of worship must exist in any given time, but the location of that single site may change in different generations? Most importantly, however, we must ask: Why is the site of the Temple never identified explicitly?

It cannot be argued that vague place descriptions are characteristic of the book of Deuteronomy, for many locations in Deuteronomy are explained in great detail. For example, our parashah begins with the commandment to “give the blessing and the curse” upon entering the Land on two mountains. The locations of the mountains are then described in 11:30: “Both are on the other side of the Jordan, beyond the west road in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah, near Gilgal, by the terebinths of Moreh.” For a book that can obviously describe locations in painstaking detail, it is striking that the location of the Temple, a most important location, be left ambiguous.

The Rambam in his Guide for the Perplexed (3:45) suggests that Moshe did not identify the site distinctly so that other nations would not occupy it or fight for it, and also so that the 12 tribes would not fight over who received the inheritance of land that would house the Temple, as this would lead to divisions and discord among the nation. Sadly, the events of recent years highlight the profundity of these suggestions. So much fighting takes place surrounding the Temple Mount, both within the Jewish religion and across the religious divide. The unfortunate result is that a holy site is besmirched by hatred and violence. People will always find things to fight about, but to drag a holy site into the mire taints its holiness.

This week’s haftarah is the third in the set of seven haftarot in between Tishah Be’av and Rosh Hashanah, known as the shivata denehemta, the “Seven of Consolation.” These haftarot were not chosen due to their relationship to the weekly parashah; rather, for their relationship to the time period. After we remember the destruction of the two Temples on Tishah Be’av, these seven prophecies of consolation bring us comfort that God has promised to redeem us from exile. According to the Talmud (JT ; ), the Second Temple was destroyed due to sinat hinam. This phrase is generally translated as “baseless hatred,” but I prefer to translate it as “free-flowing hatred,” since who among us ever believes our hatred to be unjustified? Rather, “free-flowing hatred” expresses the inclination of people to put down or hate others with ease and no remorse.

I don’t propose that all Jews should unite themselves into one homogenous group. I don’t propose unity across Jewish factions. The Jews as a people were never truly united; our history encompasses many sects who opposed each other: Pharisees vs. Sadducees, Karaites vs. Rabbinites, Hassidim vs. Mitnagdim, and the plethora of denominations that exist today. Unity has never been our strong suit. However, I do believe that we should strive for a respectful disunity. Let us embrace each other’s differences but not fight against one another nor try to restrict each other’s religious expression based upon our own religious convictions. How much fighting could we reduce if we just let people be different from ourselves? If the Temples were destroyed due to sinat hinam, it stands to reason that future redemption can result from ahavat hinam, the inclination to respect and accept—and maybe even love—each other.

Perhaps the Rambam was correct that Deuteronomy chose to hide the future location of the Temple in order to extend a peace for a little while. In Tom Petty’s 1981 song “The Waiting,” the chorus begins and ends with the observation, “The waiting is the hardest part.” I’ve always respectfully disagreed with Mr. Petty on this point. I’ve always felt that not knowing is harder than waiting. Waiting for something that is guaranteed to happen is easier than waiting for an unknown outcome. In general, I always think it’s better to know information than to not know it, for with knowledge comes the opportunity for preparation. However, in thinking about the Temple and its hidden location as hamakom asher yivhar Hashem, I find myself reevaluating my position. Perhaps there is something to not knowing. Perhaps not knowing the specific site of the Temple allowed for a level of holiness that was no longer possible once the site’s location was revealed.

Withholding the location of the Temple site might have allowed for focusing on what the Temple truly represented to Deuteronomy, namely a rejection of pagan practices and a commitment to serving a transcendent God, without fighting over the physical location.

May we all strive for peace and merit to see holiness in the place that God will choose.

This commentary was originally published in 2017.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Eleh hadevarim, “these are the words”; the words that recount the life and journey of a people, their entrance into covenant at Sinai. But as the Hasidic teachers frequently remind us, the Torah is eternal, reverberating anew for each individual Jew in every generation. And so, the guiding theme of remembering also takes place in the mind and heart of each person.

We are part of a people and a community, and we are also individual selves, bound up in our personal relationships and in self-examination. This is how we may understand the strong themes of justice and love that are expressed in Deuteronomy—wise discernment and compassionate care for the other, the urgency of love in devotion. These ethical and theological imperatives flow directly from the exclamations of Parashat Devarim—the introspection, self-examination, and turn to memory.

Indeed, if Deuteronomy as a whole may be understood as an exhortation to justice and care of the vulnerable as a precondition for proper love of God, then so are we to understand the rabbinic choice to make Parashat Devarim also ShabbatḤazon—the latter name deriving from the opening word of the haftarah linked to this occasion, . This is a haftarah of harsh admonition and rebuke, an attempt by the prophet to awaken the urgency of repentance, the imperative of social justice in the form of care for the wronged and the vulnerable:

            “Cease to do evil;

            Learn to do good (limdu heitev).

            Devote yourselves to justice (dirshu mishpat);

            Aid the wronged.

            Uphold the rights of the orphan;

            Defend the cause of the widow . . .

            Be your sins like crimson,

            They can turn snow-white . . . ”

This is the essence of piety: not the external formalities of ritual performance alone, but animated by interpersonal acts of justice and compassion. “What need have I of all your sacrifices,” the prophet Isaiah says in the name of God.

            “Who asked that of you?

            Trample my courts no more;

            Bringing oblations is futile,

            Incense is offensive to Me . . .

            Though you pray at length,

            I will not listen.

            Your hands are stained with crime—

            Wash yourselves clean;

            Put your evil doings

            Away from My sight.”

Religious ritual and prayer without teshuvah (repentance) for moral transgressions, for evildoing and lack of care for the vulnerable, is useless and unwanted by God. Spiritual practice must be grounded in the moral imperative of compassion and care to achieve depth and authenticity.

Let it be in this spirit that we view the trajectory of time progressing toward the yamim noraim (High Holy Days), toward the aseret yemei teshuvah (Ten Days of Repentance). This time in which we find ourselves—the three weeks of collective mourning during the second half of the Hebrew month of Tammuz and the first part of Av—this is our reenactment of the brokenness that culminates in Tishah Be’Av (Ninth Day of Av), which commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and has also come to symbolize the many catastrophes that have befallen the Jewish people over more than two millennia.

I suggest that we understand the ruined House of God not just in its literal sense as the historical Beit Hamikdash, but as the sacred space of peace, balance, and kindness within each of us. Perhaps this is a figurative way to read the classical idea that the Temple was destroyed because of sin’at hinam—baseless hatred between people—a lack of compassion, kindness, and peace.

Read this way, the haftarah of Shabbat Ḥazon may remind us of the inner brokenness and the pain in others that is caused by our callousness and indifference to suffering. That is the deep wail of Eikhah (Lamentations) that we recite in reenacted despair on Tishah Be‘Av; a howl over the brokenness and ruin that has come about as a result of our actively destructive behavior and our apathy toward those in a state of vulnerability who need our intervention, our work of justice, compassion, and love.

The wail of lament and despair includes an introspective awareness of the ruined interior Temple of our hearts. Only through the breaking open of our hearts can we rediscover the compassion that is needed to work for the betterment of the wronged and the alleviation of suffering. 

Interpersonal justice is itself a prayer come to life. It prepares our hearts—once hardened, judgmental, and indifferent, arrogant and angry—to be softened into compassion and care, to lift up the broken remnants of the Temple, transforming them into moral piety. Only then will our hearts be truly opened to sincere prayer, only then will we even have the right to speak our prayers before the One who spoke and the world came into being.

Professor Fishbane’s recent books include The Art of Mystical Narrative (Oxford, 2018) and Embers of Pilgrimage: Poems (Panui, forthcoming this fall).

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

The themes of this Shabbat mirror the process of moving through grief, from the devastation characterized by Tishah Be’av to the comfort expressed by Shabbat Nahamu, and eventually to the renewal hoped for on Rosh Hashanah. When the Temple stood, its service had provided a mechanism to mark, engage, and move through life’s experiences, whether joyful or painful. Not only was the destruction of the Temple a calamity; it was also the destruction of the system for coping with calamities, the system for grieving and offering and receiving comfort. The Jewish people were at a loss for how to heal from this disaster and yet, somehow, they managed to do so. 

The early rabbinic text Avot De’Rabbi Natan shares a story of healing and resiliency in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple. The story begins, “Once, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai left Jerusalem, and Rabbi Joshua followed after him. Rabbi Joshua saw the Holy Temple destroyed, and he lamented: ‘Woe to us, for this is destroyed—the place where all of Israel’s sins are forgiven!^’�ĝ The Temple was the place where the people would bring sacrifices to mark significant moments in their lives and to experience spiritual transformation—including when they sinned and sought an intangible sense of forgiveness or atonement. This ritual was a way of spiritually cleansing themselves and starting afresh. Rabbi Joshua feared that without this ritual, they would feel a perpetual sense of guilt and shame and carry with them feelings of sadness and incompletion.

Rabban Yohanan replied, “My child, do not be distressed, for we have a form of atonement just like it. And what is it? Acts of kindness, as it says, ‘For I desire kindness, not a well-being offering’�ĝ (Psalm 89:3). Rather than feeling bereft, Rabban Yohanan expressed hope, vision, and purpose.

These two individuals had experienced the same loss but each had his own unique process of grieving. The text does not tell us Rabbi Joshua’s response to his teacher’s words. Was he comforted? Was he angered? Did he feel ignored or misunderstood? We know from other midrashim that Rabban Yohanan and his students, including Rabbi Joshua, established a yeshiva in Yavneh (BT Gittin 56b) and constructed a new form of Judaism that provided radically different ways to structure a meaningful life and to cope with existential crises, including coping with one’s own wrong-doing and regret. A lesson of this text is to make space for the multiplicity of conflicting responses to crisis. The hope of the text is that emotional and spiritual healing are possible.

The Torah reading of Shabbat Nahamu, Parashat Va’et-hannan, also points us toward a teaching about healing from brokenness when the system for coping itself breaks down. Twice our Torah portion refers to how the Ten Commandments were engraved on tablets (Deut. 4:12–13, 5:19). These tablets are the subject of a more in-depth narrative in other parts of the Torah: Moses descends the mountain with the tablets containing the Ten Commandments and sees the people worshipping a golden calf they have built in his absence. He is shocked and smashes the tablets. Eventually, God summons him back up the mountain and he receives a second set of tablets, which he delivers intact to the Israelites.

The Midrash teaches us that both sets of tablets, the broken and the whole, are holy and worthy of our attention and respect. Based on a verse in next week’s parashah (Deut. 10:2), Rabbi Yosef taught that “both the tablets and the fragments of the tablets were deposited in the Ark” (BT Bava Batra 14b; also see BT Berakhot 8b). The Israelites literally carry the two sets with them, recognizing that both were sources for guidance and inspiration in their lives. 

Imagining the whole tablets and the broken shards side by side in the Ark and thinking of them as metaphors for our spiritual lives, one can wonder what breaks a person’s sense of meaning, and how one might reconstruct it.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in a talk to chaplains at Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital in 1993, taught another midrash from Avot De’Rabbi Natan about the breaking of the tablets. According to the Midrash, Moses “looked and saw that the writing was flying off the tablets, and he said: ‘How can I give these tablets to Israel?’ For there is nothing on them! So instead, I will take ahold of them and smash them!”

In Kushner’s interpretation of this midrash, it is at this point that Moses could not carry the stones anymore, and they fell from his hands and shattered. The midrash, Kushner explained, is about how a sense of purpose in a person’s life is crucial for their resiliency: “When there is a purpose to what you are doing, you can do things which are too hard for you. When there is a sense of futility, when you’re not sure you’re doing any good, even a doable task becomes too hard. So one of the things we have to do to avoid burnout is to redefine success” (“Religious Resources for Healing,” The Caregiver Journal 10:3 [1993]).

Moses experienced moral distress. A concept originally developed within the nursing profession, moral distress occurs “when one knows the right thing to do, but institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action” (Andrew Jameton. Nursing Practice: The Ethical Issues [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984], 6). Moses’s distress was also vocational; what he had learned about how to lead people, what to teach them, and how to help better their lives no longer seemed true, or even possible. Indeed, according to the Midrash, when he saw the people dancing around the Golden Calf, he asked himself, “How can I give them these commandments?!” because he knew that they would initially be in violation of the commandment not to worship idols. Moses needed to break and replace not only the literal stones of the tablets, but also his own sense of purpose as a leader.

The Torah teaches that Moses ascended the mountain a second time. Whereas the first tablets were prepared before his arrival—in fact, created by God before the Creation of the world, according to the Midrash—the second tablets required Moses’s involvement in their creation. He carved the stones and wrote the words (Exod. 34:27–28).

In order to reconstruct a sense of purpose, Moses needed to be able and willing to start again and to conduct himself differently—just as Rabban Yohanan and Rabbi Joshua needed to imagine different ways of relating to God and one another. Shabbat Nahamu provides comfort in part by reminding us of the flexibility of the human spirit to experience real healing and transformation in new ways.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Destruction can teach us why freedom, justice, and human dignity are important—and fragile. And, that when freedom and justice are denied and dignity is threatened, we still retain certain powers over our own humanity.

That lesson has been brought home to me over and over again in my career, learning from the responses of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust. The assault on them was so horrific, so devastating, and so complete, it seems as if they had no agency. That, of course, is precisely what the Nazis wanted the Jews to think.

The Jews were faced with very few choices, and those they had have rightly been called “choice-less choices.” But choose they did, and those stories from survivors I have known have been a great inspiration to me.

Here’s how Lilly Malnik described her first two days in Auschwitz:

“You are told your name is a number. Forget your name. You don’t have a name anymore. And you’re hungry. And you have no clothes. And you’re freezing. And your family is taken away. At [16] I felt like I was 90. It was very hard for me to accept. Yet I got a hold of myself. I pushed all this behind me and I said: I have to live; I have to be strong.”

Vladka Meed was in the Warsaw Ghetto with her mother and younger brother. Although her mother suffered from disease and starvation, every week she managed to save two slices of bread to give to an old man in exchange for bar mitzvah lessons for her son. Of course, this was not to be. Vladka later said, “During the war, my mother taught me what it means to be human.”

Gerda Klein spoke about liberation:

“I lost my three best friends. My closest friend Ilse died the week before, Suse died on liberation morning and Liesel . . . a couple of days later. . . .  [P]eople think of [a concentration camp] as a snake pit where people stepped on each other. They didn’t see there was kindness and friendship and love. And that was the sustaining part.”

Norbert Wolheim, told of his shock at seeing a friend in Auschwitz praying. He demanded to know why. His friend said, “I am praising God,” to which an angry Norbert retorted, “Are you out of your mind? Praising God here? In this situation where we are isolated? Left alone, in this hell? What are you thanking God for?” His friend responded: “I am thanking God for the fact that he did not make me like the murderers around us.”

These survivors remind us that even under the most unthinkable circumstances, the most brutal crimes, and the complete abandonment of the world, individual Jews were able to preserve their dignity, to demonstrate their love, to perform acts of solidarity, and above all to hope.

Another story of hope that inspires me deeply comes from those who did not survive.

Immersed in Yiddish culture, historian, social worker, and political activist Emanuel Ringelblum was 39 when the Germans invaded Poland. Imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, he understood that something of great historical significance was happening to Poland’s Jews. Something that would be important to future generations. He organized a clandestine operation to create a record of daily life in the ghetto. To ensure a diversity of perspectives and represent the vibrancy of Jewish life, he involved rabbis, writers, scholars, educators, businessmen, and others in the creation of his “archive.” This story is beautifully told in Samuel D. Kassow’s magisterial Who Will Write Our History?

Ringelblum was clear as to how this would be done—not with pathos and sentimentality but with the standards of rigor and objectivity that all good history demanded. The evidence would be carefully gathered and meticulously analyzed. The truth would be told. Including hard truths—about good Germans and good Poles. Even the hardest truth of all—about bad Jews.

In Ringelblum’s mind, the Jews were not a helpless, defeated group of victims, but a people who could retain some degree of control over their humanity, and if not over their physical destiny, they could create a different destiny, by leaving a legacy—a legacy of their own creation. And it would be both a Jewish and universal legacy. He told a colleague:

“I do not see our work as a separate project, as something that includes only Jews, that is only about Jews and that will interest only Jews. My whole being rebels against that. Given the daunting complexity of social processes, where everything is interdependent, it would make no sense to see ourselves in isolation. Jewish suffering and Jewish liberation and redemption are part and parcel of the general calamity and the universal drive to throw off the hated Nazi yoke. We have to regard ourselves as participants in a universal attempt to construct a solid structure of objective documentation that will work for the good of mankind. Let us hope that the bricks and cement of our experience and our understanding will be able to provide a foundation.”

Reflecting on periods of destruction in Jewish history should provoke sorrow. Immense sorrow. The losses are incalculable. But the survivors and victims of the Holocaust would want to challenge us to make sure that our reflection would provoke something much more consequential. That it would also remind us of the power of moral courage and provoke determination, inspiration, and hope. That we—as a people and as individuals—would always write our own history, even that of destruction. In that conviction lies a vibrant future for the Jewish people—and the greatest tribute we can pay to the six million.

Ms. Bloomfield was awarded an honorary doctorate at 91����’s Commencement proceedings in May 2019.

The publication and distribution of the 91���� Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Food for thought:

• To what extent has religion become divorced from justice in contemporary society?
• What “pieties” are being used to justify ignoring immorality, greed, and self-interest in our leaders?
• Would we tolerate a message of rebuke such as this from the clergy of our own houses of worship?
• How would Isaiah respond to the claim that religion should stay out of social policy and politics?

Listen to the haftarah brought to life as it is declaimed in English by renowned actor Ronald Guttman by .