Parashat Bo: Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2025
The Tikkun Olam Commission (TOC) invites your community to host a special Shabbat focused on reparations. This movement-wide initiative is a great opportunity to re-engage in the deep reckoning with racial harm and accountability that we began as a movement with the passage of the Reconstructionist Movement Reparations Resolution in January 2023. The goal of the Reparations Shabbaton is to facilitate both ongoing congregational study and action by identifying ways to join local reparations efforts.
Are you interested in hosting a reparations Shabbaton in your community?
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What is a Reparations Shabbaton?
Inspired by the successful engagement strategy of other justice-themed Shabbats like HIAS’ Refugee Shabbat and NJCW’s Reproductive Freedom Shabbat, the TOC is creating a menu of ready-to-go programs and resources for our congregations to develop a customized weekend of programming dedicated to the topic of reparations.
Parashat Bo is the week we read the story of the Israelites receiving reparations from the Egyptians on our journey from slavery to freedom and a great time to re-engage with the commitments we collectively made in our movement’s reparations resolution.
We suggest an arc of the weekend that starts in study – re-engaging the need to understand the foundational harms our societies are built upon, and leads toward action – taking inspiration from the dozens of local reparations projects emerging around the world and putting steps in motion for your own congregational reparations initiatives.
Why Organize a Reparations Shabbaton?
Following the summer of 2020, The North American Jewish communities’ commitment to racial justice work was the strongest it’s been since the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. As the uncertainty of the stability of the world seemingly increases each day, and the threats to Jewish safety and well being grow in our mind’s eye, and the collective dedication of the Black Lives Matter movement fades with time, these commitments have been difficult for many Jews and Jewish institutions to sustain. In addition, the October 7th massacre and subsequent war in Gaza have deeply strained relationships between many Jewish communities and their progressive movement partners for racial justice, leaving many Jews uncertain of whose lead to be following in this moment. We are living in a moment of great uncertainty about what the future of Jewish life in Israel, America and around the world will look like in the coming years.
The Reparations Shabbaton is designed to be a supportive container to help a congregation re-orient themselves to the racial justice work of the present moment.
Despite these many great unknowns, our commitment to the transformative power of racial justice work to help Jews and our fellow travelers is unwavering. We will continue to fight for the full dignity and equality of BIPOC Jews and our non-Jewish BIPOC neighbors and community members, and work to transform our societies into one that lives up to our highest, democratic ideals of justice and liberty. Our movement’s work on reparations began as a response to a direct ask in 2019 from Representative Sheila Jackson Lee z”l who said, “if you in the Jewish community want to partner with us [the Congressional Black Caucus], help us get that reparations bill [HR40] out of committee and move it forward. That’s what we need you to do – do that – and we’ll know you really want to build this partnership.”
In January 2023, the entire Reconstructionist movement responded to Representative Lee’s challenge by passing a historic reparations resolution, committing ourselves to the practice of reparations as a Jewish roadmap to societal healing and transformation. We dedicate the Reparations Shabbaton program to her memory, may it be for a blessing.
That work of reparations is just as important now as ever before. We invite you to join us for an immersive weekend of Reparations Shabbat, where we will take another deep dive into this visionary world of collective teshuvah and make moves as a community towards action for truth and reconciliation for the foundational harms of our past.