“Redemption,” Rabbi Elaine Zecher’s Shabbat Awakenings

January 30, 2026 | 12 Sh’vat 5786

Welcome to Shabbat Awakenings, a weekly reflection, as we make our way toward Shabbat. You can also listen to it as a podcast.

This week, we witnessed the power of community: strangers, neighbors, leaders, and interfaith clergy, raising their voices together to protect the people with whom they live, risking their own lives in the face of oppressiveness in Minneapolis united to oppose tyrannical forces.

This week, we commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day recognizing the brutal, hateful and destructive forces that annihilated our people and millions of others.

This week, the clock in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv stopped at 843 days, 12 hours, 5 minutes and 59 seconds with the remains of the last hostage, Ran Gvili’s, returned to his family and Israel finally. The thousands who gathered there and around the world, holding a vigil for all those days, hours, minutes and seconds could finally close this horrific chapter of hostage taking.

In a time of trouble, on the precipice of despair, from where will our help come? In moments like these, we have a resource in the Torah and particularly in this week’s Torah portion.

There is a midrash about the moment when the Israelites stood at the sea, frightened and immobilized by the water before them. They could feel the earth shaking beneath their feet with tyrannical Pharaoh and his army racing to recapture them and take them back into captivity. The people crowded together by the water’s edge fearing for their lives and their future. They stood so close that one person, Nachson ben Amminadav fell in. What would become of him and them? Then the waters opened and their freedom suddenly became a possibility. How was that possible? The reason, this midrash explained, was because when Nachshon thrashed about in the water, gasping for air, the others reached out their hands while others jumped in to rescue him. Together they saved him and themselves. It was at that moment the water separated to allow for the path toward freedom and liberation.

Midrash often seeks to answer a question the text does not provide. How was it possible for the waters to separate? The Torah ascribed the miracle to God. How else could such a supernatural phenomenon occur? Yet, perhaps the miracle is in human power and the willingness of community to take care of one another, even in the most devastatingly difficult despair. Their willingness to risk their own lives made the difference for freedom to prevail.

When people stand together with the hope and belief that the world can be better; that humanity has the capacity to create good even in the face of evil intent, we rise higher toward moral purpose and a vision for a better future. This is our path toward redemption.

As Pirkei Avot, the ethical teachings of the rabbis of the Talmud instructs us, “It is not upon us to finish the work, yet we cannot stop trying either.”

Shabbat Shalom! שבת שלום

I welcome your thoughts and experiences here.

Rabbi Elaine Zecher