This project grew out of conversations between organizers involved in the JFREJ End Deportations Campaign and JFREJ Clergy, and aims to respond to feelings of exhaustion and grief felt by people taking regular action to face state violence. It's common to experience a rollercoaster of emotions each day -- You could feel hopelessness in the morning and hope by evening. JFREJ clergy want to help, sustain and support organizing in this time, and are offering through this project a connection to our Jewish calendar, its rhythms and traditions.

How the offerings will be organized: From the 17th of Tammuz through the High Holidays, each Thursday, JFREJ clergy will be offering brief teachings and care, in writing and on video for our community. These will be brief videos, meant to find you when you need them.

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August 26th, 2026 / 13 Elul 5786 / Elul — Rabbi Madeleine Fortney

Hi, everyone – Rabbi Madeleine Fortney here.

Blowing the shofar during Elul, the Hebrew month leading up to the high holy days, is a tradition that dates back at least a thousand years.

We blow the shofar almost every day of the month, starting on the 1st of Elul and ending on the 28th of Elul, excluding Shabbat.

Elul is the month during which we engage in intense introspection, known as “chesbon hanefesh,” or “accounting of the soul,” in anticipation of the high holy days.

Sounding the shofar during this time, which I like to do out on my balcony in the mornings, likely to the consternation of my neighbors, can serve as a way to deepen that introspection.

The shofar can be a sort of “spiritual alarm clock,” awakening us and urging us to do teshuvah – to turn, or return, to truth and goodness.

But in the blowing of the shofar, there is also a special place for the brokenhearted.

A Chasidic story: Once the Baal Shem Tov commanded Rabbi Zev Kitzes to learn the secret meanings behind the blasts of the shofar, because Rabbi Zev was to be his ba’al tekiah, or caller, on Rosh HaShanah.

So Rabbi Zev learned the secret meanings and wrote them down on a slip of paper to look at during the service, and slid the slip of paper into his pocket.

When the time came for the blowing of the shofar, he began to search everywhere for the slip of paper, but it was gone; and he did not know on what meanings to concentrate.

He was greatly saddened. Broken-hearted, he wept bitter tears, and called the blasts of the shofar without concentrating on the secret meanings behind them.

Afterward, the Baal Shem Tov said to him: “In the habitation of the Ruler there are to be found many rooms, and there are different keys for every lock, but the master key of all is the axe, with which it is possible to open all the locks on all the gates.

So it is with the shofar: the secret meanings are the keys; every gate has another meaning, but the master key is the broken heart.

When someone truthfully breaks their heart before God, they can enter into all the gates of God’s rooms.” (Or Yesharim)

I imagine that many of us in this community are feeling brokenhearted as we work to try and make New York City, our country, and the world more just during this time of great upheaval and violence – particularly as ICE continues to target our neighbors.

I’m reflecting on the power of a broken heart during this season in the Jewish calendar, and I hope, as we make our way through Elul, toward the high holy days, that our own rawness and vulnerability will allow us to access even deeper meaning in the wails and broken staccato blasts of the shofar.

I invite you to join in on this ritual of sounding the shofar (or hearing it sounded) during Elul with me – and may you find in it, too, some strength and solace as you enter into the holy rooms of introspection this season.

Thank you for the essential work you are doing, my JFREJ friends.

- Rabbi Madeleine Fortney

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August 20th, 2026 / 7 Elul 5786 / Elul — Rabbi Ellen Lippmann

Hello, JFREJ, and happy Elul! We are ending the first week of this special month that leads us from the month of Av to the month of Tishrei, or from a time of destruction to a time of renewed hope and possibility. A new year is coming.

But wow is it hard to be happy these days, especially for those who are working so hard to abolish ICE or do court watch or end deportations or stop the deaths in deportation centers like Delany Hall.

For me, and maybe for you, I need to find my way to a happy new year by finding new and old sources of comfort. There are two that really sustain me in this month:

First, the idea that in Elul, “the King is in the field,” meaning this is a time when we can encounter God or the Shekhina or the Divine Presence in a way that is closer and more intimate than the majestic God of the Holydays. Can you imagine this field, this place near you - your street, subway car, back yard, favorite room - where you could get an abiding sense of the Divine close at hand? I urge you to do that imagining, perhaps take a few minutes to stop and sit or rest, close your eyes, picture the field and that feeling of closeness. Hold it to your heart, your kishkes, your inner being. And be comforted.

Second, many people read Psalm 27 every day during Elul. There are many verses that may jump out at you. One that often grabs attention is: One thing I ask of GOD, that is what I seek:

to live in GOD’s house

all the days of my life,

to gaze upon GOD’s beauty,

to visit God’s palace.

This language, like the language of the king in the field, is a bit archaic. But I am not the only reader of this psalm that focuses on the idea that there is one thing more than any other that I desire strongly, one thing, one result, one relationship, one crucial conversation that can strip away all the rest and remind us what is most deeply important. As we prepare for a new year, a chance to renew, what is most deeply precious to you? What can you focus on as you let other concerns drop away? How delightful is that possibility?

It’s Elul and the King is in the field, and there is only one thing you need to focus on, to ask for, to recognize. Starting now.

- Rabbi Ellen Lippmann

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August 13th, 2026 / 30 Av 5786 / Entering Elul — Rabbi Emily Cohen

We’re so lucky to have this month. That might seem like an odd thing to say about a month, but bear with me. See, today is the first day of the month of Elul. This is a month without formal holidays but with a lot of opportunity for meaningful engagement.

Traditionally, during Elul, Jews engage in a heshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. We look back at the year that’s coming to an end and we take stock: where have we done well? How have we made the world better? And where have we mis-stepped? Where have we been, to put it politely, less than our best selves?

Part of the challenge of this work is that most of us gravitate toward one or the other. Either we have a hard time naming what we’ve done well, because we’re hard on ourselves and are always focused on doing better, or we have a hard time naming our missteps because we’re afraid of acknowledging wrong-doing and the challenge of making it better. But each of us has done wrong, and each of us has done right. We all have ways that we could be more generous, more compassionate, more patient, more committed to the necessary work of repairing the world. And we all have ways that we could be gentler with ourselves and the complex juggling act of managing life in New York City in 2026/5786. It’s our task to hold both, something that we JFREJers have some experience with.

As JFREJ members, we don’t shy away from the world’s ugliness but nor do we let it push us into complete despair. We do court watch and witness unspeakable dehumanization and cruelty, but we also gather to sing songs of community and hope. We lobby our electeds, whether they’re aligned with us or they’ve made it clear that they aren’t listening to their constituents. We hold seders and build sukkot in the streets to have beautiful public celebrations of Judaism, and we grieve the genocide in Gaza.

The work of Elul is the work of this balance, of acknowledging our internal ugliness (which, sadly, we all have some of) without letting it push us into self-pity or defensiveness. It’s the work of tough conversations, with ourselves and loved ones, and of making a commitment to change what must change even when that change is incredibly difficult. And it’s the work of hope, because only through hope is such change possible.

I wish you all a powerful Elul.

- Rabbi Emily Cohen

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July 28, 2026 / 15 Av 5786 / Tu b'Av — Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg

I recently counseled someone after they had witnessed a particularly traumatic scene unfold at court watch. The volunteer was accompanying a young parent who was given deportation orders in front of their kids. The experience left this court watcher feeling powerless, doubting that they had made a difference because they were unable to prevent the family from experiencing such profound pain.

This week, the week after Tisha b’Av (the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av,) we sit amidst the wreckage of the destroyed Temple, the place where our ancestors believed the Divine dwelled with us. The grief still heavy in our hearts, we try to figure out how to get up and put one foot in front of the other, how to make meaning out of this pain. Thankfully, our ancestors developed spiritual technology to help them process what happened and to metabolise the fact that there was nothing they could do to stop it. They passed these practices down to us in the form of seven weeks of consolation.

Last Shabbat this period of consolation began. Every Shabbat for seven weeks, after the Torah reading, we read words of comfort from the prophet Isaiah. In last week’s haftarah, Divine words came through Isaiah in the form of a mantra for us: “Nachamu, nachamu ami,” “Comfort you, oh comfort you my people” (Isaiah 40:1).

And today, Tu b’Av, the 15th of the month of Av, is known as a day of love. According to the Talmud, on Tu b’Av, the “daughters of Israel” would dress in white and go out to dance in the fields, their lovers following after them (Ta’anit 4a).

These observances remind us that even in the midst of great suffering, love and comfort can also be present. Tu b’Av invites us to reframe our experience of powerlessness and of doubt, asking, “what would it have been like for that family at court watch if you hadn’t been there alongside them? What would it have meant if folks didn’t show up with mutual aid after ICE kidnapped a neighbor or family member?”

These weeks invite us to see that our presence in these places of suffering brings some measure of comfort, even of love, that wouldn’t be there if we were absent.

Nachamu, nachamu ami - Comfort, oh comfort you, my beautiful JFREJ people. May YOU be comforted, at least in some measure, by knowing that your presence, your commitment, your love, does matter.

- Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg

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July 22, 2026 / 8 Av 5786 / Tisha B’Av — Madeline, rabbinical student

The Three Weeks of anticipatory, intensifying mourning reach their pinnacle on Tisha B’Av (“the Ninth of Av”), traditionally treated as the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. Tisha B’Av’s memory technology is both a synchronic and diachronic commemoration of Jewish history. Synchronically, the holiday officially marks the date that Jewish texts ascribe to the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and 70 CE by the Romans (though the exact historical date of these events is unknown). The dating around Tisha B’Av first appears as references to the destruction of the First Temple happening on the 7th of Av in II Kings (25:8–9) and on the 10th of Av in the Book of Jeremiah (52:12–13). The rabbis of the early common era reconcile these dates by describing a process of Babylonian desecration and destruction of the Temple between the 7th and 10th days, on which they claim that the actual burning of the Temple occurred on the 9th. In the early centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile of the Jewish people, the rabbis created Tisha B’Av as an explicit “holiday” for mourning. On that day, we traditionally observe a full fast (with the same length and parameters as Yom Kippur). We read the Book of Eicha (Lamentations), poetic dirges which wrenchingly eulogize the destruction of the First Temple, as well as poetic elegies called Kinnot written by Ashkenazi communities in the 17th century. And we practice Jewish mourning customs, such as refraining from greeting one another and sitting low to the ground. We act out our grief visibly, in both a liturgical and social fashion.

Mishnah Ta’anit 4:6 (a section of the Mishnah all about fasts) first presents a diachronic interpretation of the 9th of Av, laying out five ancient calamities that supposedly occurred on that date throughout the centuries and millennia. In addition to (1) the destruction of the First and (2) Second Temples, the mishnah credits that date with:

(3) the return of the Twelve Spies—sent by Moses in the Torah to scout the land of Canaan/Yisrael—to the Israelite base camp, where they spread fear mongering testimony about the land and evoke unnecessary despair among the people
(4) the Roman quelling of the Bar Kokhba Revolt and destruction of the Judean city of Betar, 65 years after the destruction of the Second Temple
(5) the Roman commander Quintus Tineius Rufus decimating the area in Jerusalem surrounding the former Temple

Furthermore, according to recorded history and lore, subsequent anti-Jewish disasters—in which authorities asserted dominance over and violence against Jewish minorities in their midst—continued to transpire on or near the 9th of Av. These include: the launch of the First Crusade in 1096 and the Rhineland massacres; the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492; the approval of the Nazi “Final Solution” in 1941; and the beginning of deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. It is typical to commemorate entire events such as the Rhineland Massacres (during the Crusades), the Chmielnicki massacre of Polish Jews by the Cossacks, and the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av.

The losses that Tisha B’Av commemorate are political. We grieve instances of recurring, compounding attacks on Jews as Jews, identity-based violence that wields imperial or nationalist force against a minority group. Tisha B’Av’s emotional and conceptual technology contracts so much loss into a single day (and days/weeks of onramp to the holiday) for a reason: to intervene against collective mourning that consumes and commandeers our lives, rather than activating our activism. Just as the Talmud teaches us (Taanit 29a) that our joy reduces as the month of Av progresses, so too does our joy increase during the month of Av, leading up to the ecstasy of Purim. We tie our emotions to memories anchored in specific moments in time, so as to make the passage of time bearable, durable. We shift our emotions alongside changing seasons, with their dynamic offerings for our moods and environment; we transform our emotions alongside the flow of the years, healing ourselves as distance from the immediate locus of our loss provides us with new perspective and strength as our context evolves.

If we are only ever grieving, across all the days of the year and in the same way across the years, we risk becoming emotionally stunted and reactionary. We risk turning the feeling of grief into the practice of grievance, ahistorically certain that every new loss is the same as the last. Instead, Tisha B’av’s concentrated performance of mourning helps us never forget the past while keeping it in perspective and applying it to new, unique contexts of loss in the present. We learn strategies for resilience and resistance by revisiting our past losses in swallowable doses, rather than allowing total grief to swallow us until it becomes us, as Jews, as organizers, as individuals whose political stories immerse us in collective definitions.

In the last few months, despite the power we have built and people we have fought tirelessly to protect with our bodies and our words, we organizers have suffered numerous New York-based and national political losses. Tisha B’Av gives us the space—really, the encouragement—to feel and express the abundance of our grief for all those suffering some sort of “destruction” by authoritarian flames: immigrants ripped from their homes and detained under unconscionable conditions, trans folks denied healthcare and safe self-expression, Black communities disenfranchised and gerrymandered out of congressional representation, Jews and Muslims scapegoated and physically attacked for fabricated social problems, and extreme heat and smog ravaging our environment. Enveloped in Eicha’s siren, we allow ourselves to lament to the fullest. Today, let us read the stories of all those we mourn and honor, from then to now. And then, let the day’s brevity remind us that collective, politicized grief is a moment, a month, a memory which ties together all the violent abuses of power that have forged our liberatory sensibilities over time and made us into those who fight for our people, all of them. Our losses are inextricable from one another. Yet, in their entanglement we can twine them evermore to a unit we revisit and then put away as we approach the work of resetting, recommitting, and rejoicing at what those losses propel us to regain. On Tisha B’Av we mourn, so that after the fact we will have room in ourselves to hope.

- Madeline, rabbinical student

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July 16, 2026 / 2 Av 5786 / Shabbat Chazon — Rabbi Abby Stein

There is a Hasidic story from my childhood that has been on my mind over the past few weeks - and, well, years.

For centuries, there was an old Ashkenazi “custom,” or rather prank, on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning coming up next Wednesday evening through Thursday. Kids would collect small fuzzy burrs and throw them at mourners at synagogue who got too deeply into crying. Early Hasidic communities - never great fans of sadness, given Hasidism’s emphasis on joy - leaned into it even more. The message was simple: yes, mourning has its place, but let’s not let it consume us.

One year, the students of a Hasidic Rebbe felt the children were going too far with their pranks and disruptions. A disciple asked: “Is this really the proper way to mark the saddest day of the year? Is this how Hashem wants us to mourn?”

The Rebbe responded: “Well, if Hashem isn’t happy with the way we mourn, they can feel free to take away this day of mourning from us.”

In other words: if you don’t like how we mourn, please feel free to remove the cause of our mourning.

We are now in “The Nine Days,” from Rosh Chodesh Av through Tisha B’Av, the ultimate day of mourning in the Jewish calendar. Like most Jewish fast days, Tisha B’Av holds generations of catastrophes within it.

The point is: we have a lot to mourn - historically, and today.

On Wednesday night, Jews around the world will read Megillat Eicha, the Book of Lamentations. One verse has been getting to me especially over the past few years, while watching the most televised genocide unfold in Gaza:

חֵטְא חָטְאָה יְרוּשָׁלַ͏ִם, עַל־כֵּן לְנִידָה הָיָתָה. כָּל־מְכַבְּדֶיהָ הִזִּילוּהָ, כִּי־רָאוּ עֶרְוָתָהּ׃

“Jerusalem has greatly sinned; therefore she has become a mockery. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her disgraced.” (Eicha 1:8)

The Lamenter is speaking of sins from 2,600 years ago. Yet the sins of the people - and especially the government - occupying Jerusalem today feel ever-present as we approach Tisha B’Av.

Since the advent of Zionism, some have hijacked this day to further nationalist goals, alongside the displacement, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide of Palestinians. It is the same ideology used here at home against immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, our transgender healthcare, reproductive rights, and anyone whose humanity is treated as conditional.

Growing up in an anti-Zionist religious community, Tisha B’Av was, among other things, a day when we mourned Zionism. For 2,000 years, we mourned while yearning for a just world: bread for all, and roses too; every person sitting peacefully beneath their vine and fig trees; a world with no war. To call a nation-state taking us further from that dream, the fulfillment of this yearning is frankly insulting to generations of our people who yearned for justice.

Yet as we approach mourning - and the work of building that world - it is easy to feel that we are missing the mark. Are we doing enough to fight crimes against humanity committed falsely in the name of our people? Are we doing enough to fight nationalism here at home?

Last week, I was in DC, for the third year in a row, with Interfaith Action for Palestine, pushing back against Christian Zionism and Christian Nationalism. The power and beauty of interfaith organizing was on full display. Together, we visited all 535 Congressional offices. We did work that I know will have an impact.

And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking: here we are, doing this again. The genocide is ongoing. Ethnic cleansing is accelerating.

Are we doing enough? Are we mourning enough? Are we doing this correctly?

Then I hear the Hasidic Rebbe’s voice: okay, maybe we aren’t doing this perfectly. We will keep doing our best. But if any power thinks we are mourning wrongly, feel free to take away our reasons for mourning. End nationalism, capitalism, and hatred of all kinds, and we will gladly give up the mourning.

In the words of Isaiah, concluding this week’s Haftarah:

צִיּוֹן בְּמִשְׁפָּט תִּפָּדֶה, וְשָׁבֶיהָ בִּצְדָקָה׃

“Zion will be redeemed through justice, and those who return to her through righteousness.” (Isaiah 1:27)

Our mourning might not be perfect, but our actions will keep going - with joy.

- Rabbi Abby Stein

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July 9th, 2026 / 24 Tammuz 5786 - Chizuk from Al-Khalil by Rabbi Jason Klein

Hello from Israel-Palestine.

In the spring of 2023, I had the opportunity to live in Hebron for about a month, where I jumpstarted my spoken Arabic and made friendships that I anticipate will last a lifetime.

I was self-conscious approaching my trip because of the history of Jewish people coming to Hebron after 1967, not leaving, and displacing Palestinian people violently. So, my foremost intention was to be a good guest.

About halfway through my time here, I realized that I was living about a fifteen-minute walk from Be’er Haram Ar-Rameh. This archaeological site is venerated as the location of Abraham & Sarah’s tent whose biblical name “Mamre” in Genesis 18 persists on street signs in English and Arabic to this day. I had already felt privileged to be so warmly welcomed at every step of my experience—perhaps a romanticized experience of living in the city that is often regarded as a distillation of the Occupation because of the heavy militarized presence of a small number of Jews who have been abetted by Israel in making their homes here.

Little did I realize that the origin story of our mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, welcoming guests, was a three-minute taxi ride from my doorstep—the place where Abraham sat recovering from his circumcision, the place where both Sarah and Abraham laughed when three visitors announced there would be a second child—in their old age. Three years later, and several trips back, I kept feeling drawn to the site and wanted to share it with you in these weeks as Tisha B’av approaches.

The Talmud famously relates the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza (B.T. Gittin, 55b) the latter of whom was mistakenly invited to a party in place of his friend-with-a-similar-name. In a display of sinat chinam, baseless hatred, rather than quietly resolving the matter, even after Bar Kamtza offered to pay for the party, the host publicly embarrassed Bar Kamtza, an incident that our sages link to the destruction of the Second Temple.

The reason I came to Hebron to learn Arabic three years ago was because I wanted to be able to carefully listen to people’s stories and share those stories—after all, my spoken Hebrew had been proficient for a long time. And as an American Jew, I have been able to enjoy a unique freedom of movement in the land of which I thought I could take advantage to contribute some small degree to the people in the land where Israel has created so many barriers and walls. My time here sometimes inspires me to frame the Occupation through the lens of egregious violations of hospitality person by person by person rather than through the lens of political power on the international stage. It has helped me understand why, both ancient Greek and Jewish traditions have imagined the Procrustean Bed/Bed of Sodom along the way to a society’s ultimate corruption.

But just as there can be baseless hatred, there can be baseless love, love for its own sake. And just as a society can become corrupt when people neglect to be good guests or good hosts, transformative experiences are possible when people offer hospitality without condition. Witness the powerful stories of welcoming thousands of “strangers” into communities in Newfoundland on September 11, 2001, as recounted in Come From Away.

From whistles on key chains to petitioning for policy change, from creating alliances to watching at courtroom doors, the End Deportation movement to which so JFREJers have dedicated our time and resources is at its heart an amplification of the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim that originated right here in Hebron over my shoulders. Our progenitors in Sarah and Abraham taught us from this tent to eschew xenophobia, to eschew a mentality of scarcity.

There is enough for everyone. There is enough land. There is enough to eat. There is enough possibility. I know that the echoes of that hospitality that have never left this besieged city thousands of years later and that this call to hospitality also echoes across sea and ocean as we dream and act to deliver on our highest aspirations for America. May you always have the experience to feel welcome, just as you have shown people that they are welcome.

- Rabbi Jason Klein

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July 2, 2026 / 17 Tammuz 5786 - Rabbi Lexie Botzum

What are the Three Weeks or Bein HaMetzarim?

Today, the 17th of Tammuz, is a minor fast in the Jewish tradition, meaning we don’t eat or drink from dawn until shortly after dusk. It, along with our other fast days not connected to a holiday, commemorates a watershed moment in the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem and the people’s subsequent exile. The 17th of Tammuz is when the walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans. However, it’s common in Jewish tradition to layer tragedies–to trace a thread between generations and imbue particular dates with grief not for just one catastrophe, but for many. The Mishnah in Tractate Ta’anit says that on the 17th of Tammuz, five things happened: the tablets were broken by Moses, the daily offering could no longer be sacrificed during the siege of Jerusalem, the walls of Jerusalem were breached, the Greek general Apostomos burned a Torah scroll, and an idol was placed in the temple sanctuary.

While this might feel a bit heavy-handed, tying all these tragedies to one date allows us to experience a grief that’s multi-generational; it allows us to mourn not just this discrete moment, but all the moments of rupture that led to it, and that our ancestors experienced. It reminds us that we can hold multiple griefs at once.

Fast days are moments of more acute mourning, where we refrain from eating or drinking and recite special prayers, but the 17th of Tammuz also kicks off a period of more extended mourning, referred to as the Three Weeks or Bein HaMetzarim (between the straits). During the three weeks between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’Av–our day of greatest mourning, marking the destruction of both temples and other disasters–we take on various traditional mourning practices: no weddings, parties, or celebrations; no haircutting or shaving; no listening to music with instruments; and no purchasing new clothes or other recreational items. Starting on Rosh Chodesh Av, in the nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av, these limitations intensify: no pleasurable bathing; no consuming wine or meat (outside of Shabbos); no laundering, or wearing freshly laundered clothes.

The Three Weeks, and the fast days capping them off at either end, function as a model of how to materially grieve catastrophe in a way that still carries us through our lives. The fast days constitute our moments of most acute grief–when the horrors of our broken world demand our full attention, insisting that sometimes in the face of grief life as normal should grind to a halt. The Three Weeks, and the Nine Days, show us how to continue living our lives without dismissing or avoiding that sorrow. This time bein hametzarim, between the straits, is one of restriction, where we work and eat and gather, but we limit our joy, our luxuriating, our excess. This mourning manifests in both our bodies, and our communal formations.

And at the same time, while the horror of present and past catastrophes never dissipates, the Three Weeks are a delimited time. We cannot spend the whole year carrying on life as usual, but we also cannot spend all our time without joy, without celebration. In providing this tiered timeline of mourning, the Jewish calendar allows us to materially reflect different ways of incorporating grief into our lives, while insisting they must continue.

- Rabbi Lexie Botzum

Av - Tishrei: A JFREJ Clergy Ritual Offering