Rabbi Menachem Creditor

Apr 2, 2025

Vayikra: Taking Our Place in History - #Day544 #Broadcast1274 #Vayikra #BringThemHomeNow #UntilTheLastHostage #AmYisraelChai💙

Mar 31, 2025

Messy Holiness: A Call to See and Honor (Vayikra/Trans Day of Visibility)

"Let's Get Messy," Preston M. Smith

Messy Holiness: A Call to See and Honor (Vayikra/Trans Day of Visibility)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor

Vayikra. A new book of Torah begins. A shift from the grand narrative of Shemot, of Exodus, to the detailed, ritual-heavy world of Leviticus. And here we are, at the beginning of Nissan. Pesach is coming. We may not feel ready, but let’s prepare anyway.

Today is also Trans Day of Visibility. And in a world that too often makes it unsafe for our trans siblings to be seen, we will counter that with extra presence, extra light. To our trans friends: we see you. You are created in the image of God. Torah and tradition are yours, just as they belong to every images of the Divine. But today, especially today, we say it out loud.

Which brings us back to Vayikra.

This book is different. Shemot told a story—a painful, powerful story—of degradation, enslavement, and liberation. It was a journey with a clear direction, even through its struggles. But now we enter a different kind of sacred space. The Mishkan has been built. God’s presence is clearer within the community. And suddenly, we are plunged into the intricate world of priestly service, sacrifices, and ritual law.

Many struggle with Vayikra. The blood, the offerings, the precision—it can feel distant, irrelevant. But if we look deeper, we see that Vayikra is about the messiness of life itself. Life is messy. Life is bloody. And the work of holiness is to make meaning within that mess, to find a way to bring order, dignity, and sanctity to a world that often lacks all three.

Today, on Trans Day of Visibility, we must confront the forced invisibilities of our world. Torah calls us to see the unseen. To extend dignity where it has been denied. To refuse the easy comfort of looking away. Vayikra is often read as a book for the priests alone, but that is not true. The priests were entrusted with sacred responsibility, but the laws, the lessons, the call to holiness—those belong to all of us.

The priests worked behind closed doors, ensuring that offerings were made correctly, that blood was handled properly, that the sacred space remained intact. But here’s the truth: holiness was never meant to be contained. It was always meant to flow outward, into the world. And so it must be with us.

To be rendered invisible is to be robbed of life itself. And we, as Jews, know this too well. For 542 days, we have witnessed brutal attempts to erase our pain. We have seen hostages taken, their stories diminished, their humanity denied. We will not allow that to happen. We will not let them be forgotten. And we will not let anyone—trans, Jewish, oppressed, unseen—be erased.

We are here. All of us. And our task is to make sure everyone has the chance to say exactly that.

May we be blessed with the strength to do the messy, sacred work of seeing each other, of honoring each other, of fighting for each other.

First They Came: A Warning Rewritten

First They Came: A Warning Rewritten
Rabbi Menachem Creditor

First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out
—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out
—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out
—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me
—and there was no one left to speak for me.

- Pastor Martin Niemöller

Niemöller was right. By the time a pragmatist realizes that solidarity is their only refuge, it is too late. Standing against tyranny is always the right thing. Standing together is the only way. These words echo across history, reminding us that the failure to act, the failure to speak, is complicity. And yet, even this powerful trope, the now-iconic confession of a man who saw his own silence come back to haunt him, is not immune from distortion. Any historic trope can be abused, conflated, distorted. What does it mean to skip over a complex reality and describe the victim of tyranny as blameless?

The moral landscape of silence and action is not simple. The world does not exist in binaries of good and evil, pure innocence and absolute guilt. We want, desperately, for the oppressed to be faultless, for the persecuted to be beyond reproach. But to demand such perfection is to ignore the reality of human evil, societal frailty, to flatten a complex history into a digestible narrative, to remove agency from those who suffer. And yet, there is danger in the other extreme as well. If in scrutinizing the persecuted in search of imperfection we allow the sins of the victim to justify their suffering, we cross into a different and just as grievous moral failure.

What if Niemöller’s words were rewritten, re-examined, refracted through the moral grayness of our world today? What if his warning included not just those who failed to speak for others, but those who spoke selectively, those who saw persecution but remained silent because they believed, perhaps even rightly, that the persecuted had done wrong?

First they came for the enablers
of those who sought to hurt my community,
and because I was so hurt
and my children so vulnerable to this hatred
and the enablers so unfettered until this point,
I remained silent.

Then they came for the refuge seekers,
but I was not a refuge seeker,
had not been one for a time,
and wished not to become one again,
so I remained silent.

After a time,
my silence was all there was.
Well, that and my dizzied conscience.
But it was quiet, and my children were safer.
For a time.

Here lies the heart of moral injury, the gnawing wound of knowing that the semblance of safety was purchased at the cost of silence. That silence, itself, can be a weapon. It is tempting, always, to prioritize the security of one’s own over the abstract principle of justice. But justice is never abstract. It is lived. It is felt in the hunger of the displaced, the desperation of the forgotten, the broken bones of those who face tyranny alone.

To be human is to wrestle with impossible moral tensions. We are called to stand against oppression, and accountability for hatred and violence is non-negotiable. But we are also called to stand for our values, hard-learned through centuries of the world’s abandonment of the Jews in times of oppression. We are called to be pragmatic, but we are also called to be righteous. And sometimes, these calls contradict one another. Sometimes, standing up means standing in danger. Sometimes, speaking means risking safety. These are difficult moral questions.

But silence is never neutral. Silence is never passive. As Elie Wiesel famously taught, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Yes, the world remains silent in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, the mass murder of 1,200+ Israelis, the documented sexual violence perpetrated by the Hamas terrorists upon hundreds of Israeli women and men, the torture and execution of manacled hostages, and the ongoing mass-hostage crises. Despite brief flashes of solidarity and the occasional statement of support, the world has largely been complicit in Jewish suffering since October 7, compounding the pain with the sense of widespread tacit approval. Silence is a choice, an action, a force that shapes history. The world refuses to acknowledge Jewish pain, with rallies condemning any Israeli response beginning on October 8, 2023, including explicit support of Hamas’ acknowledged goals of murdering Jews and eradicating the State of Israel. This silence is unforgivable. And, in this acknowledgement, we affirm: silence in the face of dehumanization, of societal cruelty is wrong.

The Jewish community deserves better than we have received from our neighbors in our ongoing pain. It has been 542+ days of grief, of trauma, of our sisters and brothers murdered and hidden underground by sadists supported by an unbelievable network of international enablers, some knowing, some misled into brutalizing complicity.

So what is the answer? What is the Jewish way? If the world is complex, if moral purity in a fragile political moment is an illusion, if silence can be sometimes wise and sometimes unwise—where and how do we stand?

We must stand together. Not because we are perfect, but because tyranny does not wait for righteousness to be proven. And so, we must find ways of acting in defense of the universal vulnerability every human being shares, and we must remember that personal safety and human rights are only as strong as a society’s demand that they be respected and enforced.

We must speak, exercising the Divine gift of thoughtful articulation. We must remember to reject silence, not because it is always wrong, but because it is never truly safe.

First they came. And they will come again. The only question is whether we will be ready to stand.