I wonder if the one vital thing you really need right now is to be part of a Minyan Tzedek.
‘Minyan’ is a Hebrew term for a sufficient number of people (historically, ten people assigned male at birth) to proceed with public Jewish worship. (For us Christians, it only takes two to make Eucharist. But there must be at least two.)
So that’s ‘Minyan.’ Next: ‘Tzedek.’ Tzedek translates as justice, fairness, righteousness, or integrity. I recall the days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died: because she died on Rosh Hashanah, she was hailed as a Tzadeket — same root word as the one for tzedek. If you die at the Jewish New year, tradition says you must have truly been an honorable and just elder of the community. God kept you around for the whole year.
Now, put it together: a Minyan Tzedek is a gathering of righteous ones, or better understood, a gathering for righteousness, a gathering for justice.
Here at St. Paul’s we’ve recently formed a Minyan Tzedek we call the Community Action Working Group — a somewhat more, well, ordinary term. CAWG is their acronym. CAWG is a Christian gathering to be sure, but it is, essentially, a Minyan Tzedek, a gathering for righteousness and justice.
There are two reasons why I wonder whether joining a Minyan Tzedek like CAWG is the one vital thing you really need right now. The first, as you might expect, is that this world needs a lot more tzedek. Surely you agree. During these hot summer weeks, I am trying not to look away from the famine and slaughter in Gaza. We must not look away. But Ukraine is languishing, too: we must not look away. And immigration raids are plaguing this country: we must not look away.
And this week the U.S. president fired Erika McEntarfer, someone whose existence I learned about just yesterday. We must not look away from that firing, either. Ms. McEntarfer was the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a nonpartisan office. Labor statistics matter. They are crucial. We need to know about the state of the economy. Livelihoods, and lives, depend on an informed and active electorate. We need more tzedek in the world, and not just in the big, terrible atrocities. Pray for Erika. Pray for statisticians. Pray for all laborers.
But there’s a second reason why I wonder whether joining a Minyan Tzedek like CAWG is the one vital thing you really need right now, and that’s this: the minyan itself is an incarnation of righteousness in the world. The minyan itself is an intervention. The minyan itself is changing the world, simply by existing. And being a part of that can change you, too.
Some of you may have noticed that over the past few years, I’ve turned again and again to Jewish sources of wisdom and insight. I do this because the Jewish people are our cousins in faith, and also our forbears in faith.
I do this as well because on certain issues — particularly Gaza and the massive trauma suffered by the Palestinian people — I want a Jewish perspective on the tzedek required right now, and I want to draw alongside Israeli and diaspora Jews who are standing in solidarity not just with their own kin, but also with their Palestinian neighbors and companions.
And finally I want a Jewish perspective because, again and again in the Hebrew Bible, we read that the answer to injustice can be found right in the center of the people’s faith tradition. The exile to Babylon was an historical cataclysm, a multi-generational human tragedy for the people who once formed the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The scattered exiles made sense of that trauma by reflecting on their faith.
That’s what’s happening in today’s passage from the prophet Hosea, even though Hosea lived two centuries before the Babylonian exile, and was responding to an earlier historical catastrophe. The trauma of the fall of the northern kingdom was interpreted as a break in their relationship with God. But then God lovingly calls them back, even as God “roars like a lion”: “They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt,” the prophet sings, “and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.”
We Christians, in turn, also interpret traumatic loss through the lens of our faith. “Again and again you called us to return,” we sing to God in one of our Eucharistic prayers. We identify with the wayward and ancient Israelites. When Christmas approaches we take up Hebrew prayers of longing for God’s justice, for God’s dawning. And our Easter Good News is a distinctly Jewish-sounding anthem of redemption and new life that transforms the whole land into a verdant garden.
To gain a strong Jewish perspective on current crises, I have often turned to — and sometimes preached about — Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community in Los Angeles. This week I’m reading her book called The Amen Effect, where she lays out her central theological premise, the guiding principle of her vocation, the central meaning of her life: the deceptively simple idea that (and I’ll say this in my words) when we gather, God saves the world.
When we gather, God saves the world.
Rabbi Brous begins her book with the fundamental instruction from her faith tradition that we show up for one another, for celebration and mourning alike. So when I read Rabbi Brous and then read today’s Good News according to Luke, one of the first things I notice is the solitude of the rich fool. In this parable, the rich fool stands in for anyone in our faith tradition who underestimates our mission, and misunderstands the purpose of life in God’s abundant presence. It’s easiest to make this mistake when you’re twisting in the wind, out there all by yourself.
Someone in the crowd had asked Jesus to mediate a dispute about a family inheritance, and Jesus tells this parable to raise the sights of everyone in his hearing: this movement isn’t about petty legal disputes with a winner and a loser. It’s not about possessions. It’s definitely not about the heretical “prosperity gospel” that distorts Christianity into a personal self-help tool, pray diligently enough and you’ll have physical and financial security for many long years of leisure. No. The Jesus Movement, again and again, calls for an outpouring of possessions and time, passion and energy, for the benefit of our neighbor.
But this is not merely an ascetic way of life, all of us penniless mystics eating bugs in the desert so that our neighbor has enough to eat. The Jesus who tells the parable of the rich fool in Luke’s Gospel is the same Jesus who shares nineteen abundant meals with his friends in that Gospel. Christianity doesn’t offer a method of spiritual self-mortification or severe self-denial. It is okay to save enough to retire safely, with physical and financial security.
The deeper teaching here is about the deathly poverty of solitude. It’s about the dread foe of loneliness. It’s about a focus on self that pushes others away. And so we might notice that the rich fool talks to himself in the parable. “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years,” the wretched, lonesome landowner says to himself. (He has no one else to talk to.) In his determination to preserve himself, he loses himself in objects and money, in lavish but lonely dinners for one.
And this is the one thing in the Hebrew Bible that God proclaims to be not good. Rabbi Brous writes about this in her book. In Genesis 2:18 God says, “It is not good for a person to be alone;” and in Exodus 18:17-18, writes Sharon Brous, “Moses is rebuked by his father-in-law, Yitro, for taking too much of the burden of leadership upon himself. ‘It’s not good, what you’re doing,’ Yitro says. ‘You can’t do this alone!’ This is astonishing,” Rabbi Brous concludes. “The only thing the Torah identifies as fundamentally not good is aloneness. Twice.”
And this brings me back to CAWG, the Community Action Working Group, our own Christian Minyan Tzedek. CAWG may save lives before we’re done with our work. Some of us may get arrested for a good cause, protesting any number of atrocities besieging our nation in these hard times. But simply coming together as a group, as a minyan, is itself curative, prophetic, and powerful. And it’s not just CAWG. In fact, the Community Action Working Group is only one small extension of this Minyan Tzedek, this weekly gathering, this Eucharistic community of mission. Awash in baptismal waters and nourished by the Body and the Blood of Christ, we rise as one group, one people, united in mission, for the healing of the world.
But Rabbi Brous says it best. Here’s her take on the first and ultimate human gathering, the gathering that gave birth to all of our other gatherings. Sharon Brous offers us an insightful interpretation of the creation of Eve as a partner for Adam in Genesis chapter two. Here are her words:
“Even as God marveled at this wondrous creation, Adam’s heartache was something God could not abide. ‘I will make this one a partner,’ God proclaimed, an ezer k’negdo in the original Hebrew… and God set out to disentangle Eve from Adam. Only when they were severed into distinct beings were they finally able to find their way to one another of their own volition.
“Ezer k’negdo is usually translated as a helpmate, but it really means someone to help you (an ezer) by standing opposite you (k’neged lo). Someone to face you, even when everyone else looks away. Someone to turn toward you and say, ‘I am here. Tell me your pain.’ Someone to support, to challenge, even to confront when necessary. The anam cara, in Celtic wisdom. The soul friend.”
Brous continues:
“The Rabbis imagine the end of that sixth day of creation. After hours of naming animals and frolicking in the garden, the sun begins to set. Adam and Eve have never experienced night before, and Adam starts to panic. He wonders if maybe he did something wrong. As the sky blackens, his alarm turns into desperation. Could it be that the world is ending? Eve hears Adam’s cries and comes close, sitting down across from him (k’negdo). They hold each other all night long, weeping and wailing until — to their astonishment — the world does not return to null and void, and instead the first hint of a new dawn arises.
“It’s then that they realize: this is the way of the world.
“There are two important lessons here. First, you cannot escape the darkness. It’s part of the natural rhythm of the world.
“Second, perhaps the most important question we must answer in our lives is: When the night comes, who will sit and weep by your side? Who shares your worry? Who sees you?” (End quote.)
This is our reason for being here, you and I, all of us. Just this. We are here for one another, here to see, hold, and sometimes confront one another, for the healing of the world, as the sun descends and night falls.
If you’re willing, we can hold each other all night.
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Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13C), August 3, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle.
Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21