Current Events
Email delivered from Rabbi Max Edwards to congregation on Sunday, January 25, 2026
Dear B'nai Abraham Community,
Three weeks ago, one of my closest friends sent a text to our college group chat. It was a link to a gofundme page for a beloved member of his kids’ daycare staff who was taken by ICE on her way into the building. It took days to locate this staff member, who was transported out of state, separated from her partner and child, and for what it’s worth, is a legal resident of the US through 2030. Since then, Minnesota, my home state, has been set on fire by ICE.
What started as a pretense against Somali immigrant communities has morphed into clashes at a local high school, the detentions of a number of children, as young as ages two and five, encroachments on local college campuses, including my wife’s alma mater, the brutal killings of two people in broad daylight, and over 2,000 federal agents roaming the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul, looking for their next victim.
My friends tell me that people have gone outside to shovel their driveways and have been taken, sent to detention centers in Texas, Louisiana, or further - separated from their families with no due process or legal basis. Tens of thousands of residents, including many US citizens(!) are afraid to leave their homes, and if they do so, are carrying immigration papers and passports with them. These are teachers, cooks, nurses, men, women, young, and old. They are staying in their homes because a group of vigilante federal agents with guns will take them from their families.
Communities, however, have been enormously resilient. There is an entire ecosystem in Minnesota working to keep people safe. They are organizing grocery runs, childcare, mutual aid, and in-home medical care because going outside is too much of a risk. Rabbis across Minnesota and now the country are speaking out against this violence, including an important sermon from Rabbi Vaisberg this past Friday night. The Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements put out a joint statement condemning the violence.
Needless to say, this is the furthest thing from normal. These clashes are playing out on streets just down the block from friends, family, and colleagues. Streets I know intimately well. Americans are being killed by their government. My college friend said it best: Typically in a crisis you expect a government to help save you, and instead, they’re the ones inflicting the damage. When I read about Alex Pretti’s killing, I was worried I was going to open up the article and see the face of someone I know. Turns out he graduated in 2011 from the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts - my brother’s school and graduation year. This means that back in 2011, I almost certainly heard his name announced on the day of his college graduation.
It is possible that ICE could come to Essex County in the same way they have come to Minneapolis. We live in a wonderfully diverse and vibrant region of the country, and there may come a time when we will need to stand up for our literal neighbors.
On that topic, I will quote our former Senior Rabbi Joachim Prinz again and again, because his words are timeless:
“Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.”
This statement is deeply relational and deeply Jewish. Rabbi Prinz was only able to emanate collective responsibility after seeing it fail so spectacularly in Germany just prior to the Holocaust. Jewish history gives us a special voice and a special vision. We know where this type of unchecked violence leads and how it gets there. Your voice is invaluable, and the history of Temple B’nai Abraham attests to the unique voice of our enduring community.
We are working to co-sponsor a bystander training should something like this happen in our area. As soon as a session is scheduled, we will be in touch with a date and time. If you want to make sure to receive an additional notification, you can reply to me directly from this email.
Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept.
With love,
Rabbi Max Edwards
Sermon delivered by Rabbi David Vaisberg on Friday, January 23, 2026
Earlier this month, like many of you, I learned of yet another awful event to take place in our country—the kind that has become way too familiar. ICE agents in Minneapolis shot and killed a woman during what officials called a “routine traffic stop.” Her name was Rene Nicole Good. She was 37 years old: a writer, a poet, and a U.S. citizen. She lived with her partner and a six-year-old child.
Of course, within hours, justifications began. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Good had weaponized her vehicle and tried to perform an act of domestic terrorism; she was called “very violent” and “very radical.” Other voices sympathetic to ICE dug into her personal life, surfacing her divorce and speaking about her private business and her children’s lives.
Of course, Good is nothing like what these officials described. She was a poet and a mother of three. Her neighbors called her compassionate. Her ex-father-in-law said that she had never been an activist; she had just dropped off her six-year-old at school and stopped to support her immigrant neighbors.
We heard from the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, who watched the video, and his answer was blunt. He said, “Having seen the video myself, I wanted to tell everybody directly that is not true. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody getting killed.”
We saw the violence first, and after that, a story. We’ve been watching this unfold over the past year. A U.S. military veteran in Newark was detained and forced to defend the legitimacy of his own military documentation because he was Hispanic and didn’t have his passport on him. People have been arrested at green card interviews—something that used to be a routine final step toward legal status now turned into a trap. A British tourist was detained for 19 days after a visa mix-up at the Canadian border.
In case you think this might still be distant for you, I had to stay in this country to make sure that I could get my green card while I was a student. I had to be very cautious preparing for my interviews, and after those interviews, many things were continually in question until I became a citizen. Even these days, that is not a sure thing.
What we find is that propaganda often precedes violence, and these days, propaganda also follows violence to make it acceptable. This should be a familiar pattern because this is what our people have been living with for millennia. As Jews, we have been the perennial scapegoat. Actions against us have been justified beforehand; they’ve been justified afterward. We’ve been “too successful,” or “too different,” or “too dangerous,” or “too similar” to non-Jews, making us “devious.” We are everything that was needed at that time to redirect attention from the real issues that society was facing. We supposedly “controlled too much” and “demanded too much,” becoming a “threat to every social order.” This propaganda machine has worked to make violence against us seem reasonable and necessary.
We continually face a spiritual and moral test, and this seems to be of even greater importance in this period in which we find ourselves. Based on our continued experience, do we recognize the wrong that is happening right away? Do we see ourselves in this story? Do we have the wisdom to ask if these stories we hear are legitimate, or if there is something that sounds a little bit off—and very familiar?
This week we read Parshat Bo, but we can go back just a little bit to understand where we first experienced this fear of the “other” and the propaganda that follows. If we look at Exodus in the first chapter, Pharaoh said to his people, “Here, this people of Israel, they are many more and mightier in number than we. Come, let us use our wits against these people, lest they become even more, because if war should occur, they will be added to our enemies and make war upon us or leave us in trouble.” We were a growing people; Pharaoh saw this and saw a threat simply because we were different—because we were outsiders.
He doesn’t just express fear; he strategizes. He builds a narrative: that we are too many, that we are “swarming” over the land, that we are mixing in places where we don’t belong, that we might join their enemies, that we might make war. Pharaoh calculated the fears he presented to the Egyptian people to justify what would come next.
Based on our historical memory and our sacred texts, the Torah commands us again and again to remember that we were strangers in Egypt. Except this term for “stranger” is not always translated as “stranger.” Ger means a person who is an “other” in our society. It can translate as “foreigner,” “refugee,” or “immigrant.”
The Passover Haggadah tells us not just to remember our ancestors who went through this, but to imagine that we ourselves were these refugees—that we ourselves were these immigrants. We are told to imagine we experienced what it is to have society spread propaganda and fear about us, and do far worse.
So what are we to do? We are not to shut down and say that as long as it’s not our people, we’re okay. We are commanded to love God, our neighbors, and the stranger. Because the stranger can sometimes be the person where it’s harder to find that love—because they are different, because we may not know who they are, or we may know one but not the rest. The Torah says that’s an unacceptable response. Rather, we are commanded to feel what the stranger feels—to have empathy—because we know what it feels like. We know what it feels like when a powerful construct comes into play to justify our oppression. We know what it feels like when violence comes with a story attached.
When we see this happening to others, we cannot stand idly by. We cannot let violence against the vulnerable become normalized in our presence. We cannot accept propaganda used to change minds. We cannot turn away from the pattern that we know so well—not just from ancient times, but that our people have experienced generation after generation.
We are living through a period that will define us. Years from now, our children will ask what we did when we saw this escalation, when we recognized these familiar patterns, when we knew in our bones that something was deeply wrong.
Our answer cannot be silence. Our answer cannot be that we looked away because it was not happening to us. Our answer cannot be that this is too big a problem for us to have the power to act. Our answer has to be that we, as Jewish people, lived through Egypt. We felt what it is to be this foreigner, this stranger. And we are commanded to keep that memory alive so that we will be different and build a better society—one that welcomes the stranger and treats them fairly. We must ensure no one ever again experiences the terror that we know too well.
There’s a reason why we tell our story as though we were there: because we’re obligated to live this story again and again until we reach a day when there are no more taskmasters, no more Pharaohs, no more strangers and slaves—only fellow human beings. Let us not make the mistake of remaining silent or saying this is happening to somebody else. Let us live up to who we are. Let us fulfill our obligation and protect that divine spark of humanity that exists within every human being.
Shabbat Shalom.