Kyle Desrosiers-Levine

NEW YORK (RNS) — For years, Daniel Cayre felt conflicted about his place in Jewish communal and spiritual life.

On holidays like Yom Kippur, he’d go the first evening to a Reconstructionist synagogue that felt welcoming of his gay identity. On Yom Kippur day, he returned to the traditional Sephardic synagogue of his upbringing, where the melodies, spirituality and liturgy reflected his Syrian Jewish heritage.

Neither space felt complete: Most liberal synagogues followed Ashkenazi liturgical traditions, and Sephardic synagogues often leaned more conservative in terms of gender and sexuality.

“I started thinking there had to be a space for Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews seeking LGBTQ inclusion while still wanting traditional liturgy and community,” he said. Sephardic Jews are a diaspora group whose ancestors were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula 500 years ago by the Christian monarchy. Many Sephardic Jews migrated in exile across the Ottoman Empire. A related group, Mizrahi Jews, are those who trace family roots to Arab and Muslim lands; some identify as Sephardic, while others do not. Today, estimates for global Sephardic populations sit around 6.2 million, while Mizrahi populations (which overlap demographically) are estimated at 3 million. An estimated 10% of the American Jewish population identifies as having either Sephardic or Mizrahi roots, with communities today primarily concentrated in Israel and France.

Cayre, a 43-year-old Brooklyn-born real estate developer whose family traces its roots to Syria, is gay, married and a recent first-time father.

As he spoke with others about a lack of spaces inclusive of their whole identity, Cayre realized many shared the same sense of absence. That led him to launch a New York-based modern Sephardic and Mizrahi community called Kanisse in 2021, in time for Yom Kippur, when Cayre and other lay leaders put together an egalitarian language Sephardic maḥzor, a holiday prayer book.

Named after the Arabic and Hebrew word commonly used by many Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews for synagogue, “kanisse,” the community became a space where people of diverse levels of observance and many backgrounds gather for prayer, learning and cultural programming. Kanisse is fully egalitarian, with mixed-gender seating, where people of any gender identity can serve as “shliḥe ṣibbur” — prayer leaders — and receive “aliyot,” an honor where one recites the traditional blessings before and after Torah readings in front of the gathered community. Traditionally, these roles are reserved for men.

Kanisse has become a New York prayer space and community where LGBTQ Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews gather. Nourished by ritual and community, many LGBTQ Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews have similar communal, spiritual and activist grassroots movements — often with little funding, limited infrastructure and a reliance on substantial volunteer labor.

“There was a large LGBTQ community that was interested,” Cayre said. “I was looking for a place where I could go with a partner and be fully open, and eventually knew that we were planning on having children and (wanted to be) able to bring a family there.”

…

Read more via Religion News Service (RNS).

It is Psalm of lament and also of faith. A psalm of profound anguish, yet also of trust. Like many of the Pslams, its authorship is traced to the depends of Korah who rebelled against Moses and Aaron, questioning their priestly authority. In spite of this insurgency, Korah’s descendant went on to become celebrated composers of Psalms offered in the same temple their father once rebelled against.

In the ancient temple, the Beit Hamikdash, the Levites offered these songs of poetry to the God as part of sacrifices of praise and supplication. Through sacrifice, the idea is, God was brought close to God’s people and the people brought close to God — in covenantal truth, in intimacy and in love. The Hebrew world “Qorban” — with close cognates in Arabic and other near eastern langue today — meant sacrifice. But its root (ק.ר.ב ), i.e, the verb lekarev, also means to draw close. It’s a drawing close in all the fullness of what it means to be human and mortal: fear, lament longing, anguish, guilt, sorrow, supplication, desire, thanksgiving, praise, hope and celebration. All is brought together in the sacrifice, and all these human emotions are contained together in the book of Pslams, Tehillim.

The 42nd Pslam, then, is one of my favorites because of this image:

כְּאַיָּל, תַּעֲרֹג עַל-אֲפִיקֵי-מָיִם-- כֵּן נַפְשִׁי תַעֲרֹג אֵלֶיךָ אֱלֹהִים (ב)

“As the deer pants for water, so my soul thirsts for you, Oh God” (42:2)

The psalmist continues, explaining the mockery he has endures at his enemies’ hands, who scorn his faith and trust in God, who make him feel little and weak. His soul is “downcast”, he is living through the dark night of despair. Yet, mere verses later, without warning, the author’s perspective shifts dramatically:

“As with a crushing in my bones, mine adversaries taunt me;
while they say unto me all the day: ‘Where is thy God?’

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why moanest thou within me?
Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him, the salvation of my countenance, and my God.” (42:10-12).

With no indication that any material circumstances have changed, the poem’s tone does as the author recalls past miracles and wonders. He considers that, in spite of all that he cannot possibly understand in the unimaginably big universe, כל העולם, he somehow finds faith.

Like the stag in the forest: beautiful, strong, athletic and graceful, he wanders, thirsting and desiring of his material needs. The deer is magnificent; but he is also prey. The deer lives cautiously, always keeping one ear up as he lowers his head to drink from the gurgling brook. Perhaps the deer lived through one of the times of drought; perhaps he wondered emaciated for weeks on end looking for better pastures. In his beauty and strength, and also in his frailty and utter dependence on material needs, the deer is mortal. Just like humankind. Mortal.

And so, I love this image of the ‘deer panting for water’, seeking, thirsting, desiring to know God — amid a confusing and frightening, yet beautifully magnificent world.

For my Hebrew name, I chose Eyal (אַיָּל) — deer. Often in modern Hebrew, it is spelled with two “yuds”, but in the Bible it is spelled with one; this is the animal in its animal fullness, not a potential later cognate translation of ‘strength’ or ‘might’ that would become associated with the given name Eyal (אייל). Though, the truth is, I don’t really see any contradiction or duality between frailty and courage — moreover, I don’t see a contradiction between doubt and faith. It’s all part of the package.

Whether I’m writing as a journalist whose covering religion and having the tremendous privilege of interviewing people about their inner and outer lives— or whether I’m reflecting on my own experiences , I try to be like the deer. I think it’s all connected: the inner spiritual life, the communal life, and the reaching out to others in their journeys with the most intimate parts of being human. We have the highest highs and the lowest lows; we are capable of incredible violence and of incredible compassion. These things are part of why I love human stories, why I love to write, why I try to be the best journalist I can when sharing all that I’ve learned about religion and spirituality.

So, this is my Substack’s story. This image of the deer, האייל הקטן שלי, follows me and guides me, alongside myriad other images of what it means to wrestle with doubt and faith, what it means to struggle with all that I cannot understand and yet persist in my spiritual searching.

So I share my writing with humble hopes that it may illuminate my own way, and that it might resonate in some way with your journey.

But because of the wars in Iran and Lebanon, Palm Sunday Mass at St. Joseph’s this year had to include a few changes. Attendance was limited because large sections of the church building have been transformed into a makeshift shelter for people displaced by this latest round of Israel-Hezbollah fighting. The outdoor procession had to be rerouted to navigate church grounds now crowded with cots and sleeping bags…

Read more at America Magazine.

All the extraordinary beings gathered in council to discuss what to name the new planet and how to make it spin. Only when a being named Iy Wato sang out her name did the planet begin revolving, infused with life and motion through the power of naming. From the word the creature sang out, life began and Earth was thus named Iy Wato.

Through collaboration and the act of thoughtful naming, all creation was bestowed with dignity.

“It is from these stories that our ancestors teach us how to think before acting, speaking or responding,” Bernardo Alves told America. “They teach respect for nature and the universe. Sharing this story is rare, but we believe that communicating with the wider world can strengthen relationships among peoples…”

Read more at America Magazine.

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https://www.attemptadventure.com

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One of my favorite episodes of our 8-part series can be viewed here.

Bridges staff told RNS they thought the new model was successful because it brought together people of goodwill in a structured way. It did not marginalize diverging viewpoints and instead encouraged honesty and vulnerability.

Read more via Religion News Service.

“I knew my fate was already tied to the Jewish people,” she told RNS.

Bloom, a Jewish day school teacher in Los Angeles, was raised in a multifaith family, threw herself into Jewish life at college and co-led local gatherings of the Asian-Jewish Lunar Collective. She’d completed a comprehensive modern Orthodox conversion program study course.

Now the final decision was hers.

So, she stepped into the mikvah, a ritual bath, and chanted blessings that sealed her commitment to God, the Torah and its teachings.

Read more of my reporting via Religion News Service.

and futile our labors,

For my suffering daughter

I sought the god of our neighbors

—

To beg is not easy,

to kneel before a beggar,

So tremendous our pain,

I asked him for a favor

—

The sweat, the blood and bile

the screams, the taunts, the terror,

Youth locked in her room,

no healing, no avail

—

Trapped deep within her body,

no sign of her precious soul

Not my laughing little girl,

what gods, whose mercies to extol?

—

Thus I sought the mendicant,

the Nazarene of great acclaim,

They said that legions fled

at the mention of his name

—

When I came upon the place

he was said to be staying

I found him in the yard alone

neither studying nor praying

—

He seemed preoccupied,

drawing in the sand,

He barely turned his head toward me,

aloof to my demand

—

Prostrate to the ground I fell,

lower than a beast

Told him that I would gladly eat

crumbs of his paschal feast

—

If only he could heal the spirit

of my tiny, suffering girl,

pity for a foreigner

in a dismal world

—

Looking down at me, his eyes soft,

Calloused hands began to shake,

he knelt down to my level,

softly he spake:

—

“I know not of thy piety,

nor love for God my father,

I only know your desperation

and the anguish of your daughter

—

“She did not earn this fate,

she pays for sins not her own

This little lamb is burdened,

but she has never been alone

—

“Woman, you are indeed not worthy,

no creatures ever are

So great is your desperation,

I command the demons flee afar!

—

“Go home and see your daughter,

Sleeping in peace,

Her affliction is gone,

torment at last has ceased.”

—

Indifference is no more,

Love has moved my heart;

Not bound by the fates,

No longer far apart.

—

Note:

For a theology class several years ago, I chose to write this poem about the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, because it is one of my favorite Gospel stories. Two slightly different versions of the story exist in Matthew 15 and Mark 7. I have combined them here and used creative liberties. It aims to function as a ballad or hymn where the narrator explore the suffering of her demon-possessed daughter and of her encounter with Jesus the Nazarene, who appears to change his mind about the foreign woman approaching him begging for a cure for her daughter, and chooses to save her from her affiliations.

The title:

From Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum:
Sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea.

“Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”

This ancient Domine, non sum dingus, “Lord, I am not worthy” is the ancient liturgy, once said six or three times in the Roman Rite (both before the priest’s communion and the people’s communion); today it is one said once in the mass.

I contrast it with the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman and Jesus, where Jesus appears to first scold the woman for approaching him,“Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27). To this, the woman responds, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28). (Or, as Matthew has it: “Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” [Matt. 15:27]). And Jesus says to her, “For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:29). This, many theologians have thought, was an example of Jesus changing his mind and making mercy and grace open to all people, including those on the margins.

Tradition has long associated him with the Book of Lamentations, and it’s not hard to see why. Jeremiah’s voice is one of anguish in the face of violence, injustice, and collapse. But this isn’t just an ancient story. The themes that run through Jeremiah: trauma, displacement, punishment, and the fragile possibility of hope, have made the text resonate far beyond its original context.

As scholar Kathleen M. O’Connor writes, the book is “a full-throttle response to a multi-leveled calamity,” addressing invasion, exile, and the lasting wounds left behind. Jeremiah is not just describing disaster; he is trying to make sense of what it does to a people.

That’s part of why artists have returned to Jeremiah again and again.

Marc Chagall’s 1956 painting Weeping of Jeremiah is one striking example.

Chagall paints Jeremiah hunched over, clutching a Torah scroll. Behind him, faceless figures fade into the background. Above them hangs a deep red sky over an otherwise grey world. The scene evokes the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, but it also reflects something more recent: the Holocaust, which had taken place only a decade earlier.

That connection is unsettling. In Jeremiah’s own narrative, suffering is often framed as a consequence of the people’s wrongdoing. Applied to the Holocaust, such a framework would be not only wrong, but morally indefensible. And yet, Chagall still turns to Jeremiah — not to explain suffering, but to express it.

Because Jeremiah is, above all, a witness.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, Jeremiah’s anguish comes from the unbearable tension of loving a people he is called to condemn. When destruction finally comes, “his agony was greater than the heart could feel, that his grief was more than his soul could weep for.”

You can hear that grief in the text itself:

“My grief is beyond healing,
my heart is sick within me…
For the wound of my beloved people is my heart wounded…
Who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem?” (Jeremiah 8)

Jeremiah doesn’t stand at a distance from suffering; he absorbs it. His life becomes a symbol of it: he is denied a family, rejected by his community, mocked, imprisoned, even thrown into a pit. At one point, he goes so far as to accuse God of being “a deceitful brook.”

This is not quiet faith. It is protest, confusion, exhaustion.

And that’s what makes Jeremiah endure.

Chagall, painting in the shadow of the Holocaust, may not be offering a theological answer. He may not even be affirming that God is present. But he recognizes something in Jeremiah: a language for grief that feels otherwise inexpressible. A way to give form to suffering when meaning threatens collapse.

Jeremiah is not just a prophet of doom. He is a figure of witness, someone who names pain honestly, who refuses to look away, and who continues speaking even when no one wants to listen.

I first fell in love with Jewish languages as a Fulbright fellow at Tel Aviv University. I was focused on Hebrew, but soon took a special interest in Yiddish.

I was fascinated by the languages of the Jewish diaspora that had regathered in Israel — Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Amharic — and wished I could learn them all. I also delighted in learning Palestinian Arabic idioms and expressions from my Arab friends and colleagues at the university.

Each encounter with language built connections with its speakers. It was indeed the confluence of language and culture that made the world around me so compelling; each person I met carried a family history shaped by language.

Like any new language, learning Yiddish felt like invoking a kind of magic. But it carried something profound: the knowledge that it had once been the most widely spoken Jewish language in the world, and that millions of its speakers had largely been destroyed in the Shoah. Learning it took on a higher purpose.

I was a Roman Catholic from Texas. I loved my faith community and still appreciate a warm, loving Christian upbringing. But I guess a part of me always sensed my soul was drawn to Judaism — even before I knew much of anything about it — to the Land of the Bible and the people who wandered in the wilderness and whose living Torah shows what it means for humans to wrestle with faith, with history and with the future.

Moving to Israel for my graduate study was my first real and sustained exposure to Jewish life. I was welcomed into homes for Shabbat dinners and holidays with a warmth that felt both casual and profound. Jewish, Muslim and Christian history, archaeology and art was all around. The past in Israel did not feel distant; it pressed up against the present.

About a year into my time there, I met my now-husband, Sagi, at a small bar on Nachalat Binyamin in Tel Aviv. Through him, I met his grandmother, Sarah. He called her Savta Sarah, so I did too.

On Shabbat afternoons, we visited her home, sitting over coffee, fruit and biscuits, talking about everything and nothing. A ninety year old woman, she spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and Hebrew, always with a Yiddish inflection, and very little English. My Hebrew was still rudimentary. But I knew German which is still intelligible to a Yiddish speaker. So that became our shared language.

Savta Sarah taught me words like nudnik, mentsh, tachles, shtinker, meshugas — and pointed out how Yiddish lived on in Israeli slang over the decades. Yiddish, she told me, was a language of humor and cynicism, a way of making life’s tsuris bearable.

Sarah offered examples with a kind of dry wit: expressions that turned resignation into comedy, hardship into levity. Yiddish articulated a sense of resilience through cynicism, from the tragic to the banal – for example – “Ikh vil dos nisht haltn, efsher vet emitser dos ganvenen” (“I don’t want to keep this but hopefully, someone will steal it”) can be used when you’ve been given something you don’t want, but feel too guilty aboout throwing away.

I also loved “der mentsh trakht, un got lakht” (Man supposes but God disposes) ” – used when bad things happen, to remind the hearer, mostly with humor, of the futility of man’s mortality, but it can also refer to a sense of faith, despite the circumstances. In a recent phone call about family history, my mother-in-law Yudit told me this phrase was one of her favorites.

Or more darkly, Yiddish culture invented jokes to make light of things too horrible to speak about, like this joke, which I didn’t learn from Sarah but elsewhere in my reading:

A census taker comes to the Rabinovich house:

“Does Abram Rabinovich live here?”

“No.”

“Well, then, comrade, what is your name?”

“Abram Rabinovich.”

“Wait a minute — didn’t you just tell me that Rabinovich doesn’t live here?”

“Aha,” says Rabinovich, gesturing to his meager accommodations. “You call this living?”

Humor and cynicism is baked into the Yiddish idiom; it was how people survived — not only materially, but emotionally. Such cynicism coexisted with tenderness and warmth in a culture rich with hospitality that always made sure to pause on weddings, bris-milahs, holidays and Shabbos to celebrate the day with whatever rations were available – no matter how modest.

Sarah embodied that sensibility: perceptive and generous, yet direct and unsentimental. She was also the sole Holocaust survivor of her immediate family.

Her memories occasionally surfaced without warning. We would be talking about something mundane, and suddenly she would shift into the past.

She was born in the early 1930s near what is now the Polish-Ukrainian border. Her mother was murdered by the Nazis in a mass execution of Jewish women and children. Sarah herself, my mother-in-law told me, survived this mass killing by mere luck, and tellingly, never spoke about her mother.

Afterwards, during the chaos of a violent attack on the forced labor camp, Sarah was separated from her father, who was killed. She herself survived by hiding in the snowy fields for several days, later being taken back to the camp. There she reunited with older female cousins who smuggled her scraps of food. She was still a child.

After the war, Sarah was sent to a refugee camp in Cyprus, during the period when Palestine was a British Mandate and the British government was turning back ships carrying Jewish refugees to eretz-yisrael, the Land of Israel. For a while, she considered joining relatives in Venezuela, writing letters to them in mmm Yiddish, but ultimately tried again to land in Haifa, at last making it and immigrating. There, she built a life from nothing — marrying, raising children, and lovingly witnessing her grandchildren and great-grandchildren reach adulthood.

By the time I knew her, that life was expansive. A family rebuilt.

Sagi and I never asked her about her experiences, but they emerged in fragments. Once, early in my relationship with her, Sarah recalled guarding a loaf of bread in her bed in the camp, only to wake and find it stolen. She told it plainly, without emotion.

And yet she joked often and radiated pride in the family she had helped rebuild. She was not religious but her life was itself a testament to Jewish resilience and continuity.

Over time, my relationship with Savta Sarah became part of my own spiritual journey. What began as curiosity about Judaism deepened into a desire to convert. After years of learning, I entered a Modern Orthodox program called “Project Ruth” here in New York, where I now live, and will soon enter the mikveh to solemnize my conversion.

There isn’t just one reason for that decision. But Savta Sarah, a very secular woman, is part of it — not because she argued for faith, but because she embodied a form of Jewish continuity through her stories and the Yiddish she taught me that felt both fragile and defiant. Through her, I saw what it meant not just to inherit a tradition, but to participate in rebuilding it.

I have always been a spiritual person who has felt close to God, and felt drawn to the daily prayers of Jewish liturgy and the intimacy of putting on tefillin. I was drawn far less to the laws of keeping kosher. But when I think of Jewish history and my Jewish journey that has led me into the Jewish people, like the interwoven braids of a havdalah candle, it makes sense to be observant. I’m not doing it just for myself, but rather as a way of honoring the generations who came before and to pave the way for the generations to follow.

When Sagi and I left Israel in 2022, we visited Sarah one last time. By then, she understood we were a couple. We had never formally explained, but she did not need us to.

As we were leaving, she pressed several crisp hundred-dollar bills into Sagi’s hand, smiling mischievously. “This is for both of you,” she said. Then, more seriously: “Look out for each other.” She repeated it several times, as if to make sure it would stay with us.

It has.

Savta Sarah died a few years later. Not long after, my own grandmother, who had lived a very different life in Fort Worth, Texas, looked at us and said, “I’m glad you found each other.”

The two women could not have been more different. And yet, in the end, their blessings were the same.

Since Savta Sarah’s death, I’ve continued learning Yiddish, slowly and informally. Language and memory have become central to how I understand my place in the Jewish story.

Learning Yiddish is about more than preserving words and phrases. As its learners, we carry forward the lives and worlds that those words once held.

A century ago, Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe could likely not have imagined who might one day take up their language. A gay Texan who fell in love, not only with an Israeli man but with all of Jewish history.

As fewer and fewer native speakers remain, the language’s future may depend, in part, on unexpected inheritors.

And for me, it is a distinct honor that God has let me be a part of it.

She’d just told him about a young girl who’d died at 21 years old in 2020. We were all at her Methodist church and were walking past the front garden heading back to the car. My nephew pointed to a small memorial stone which lived beneath a crepe-myrtle tree, under a verdant, placid canopy. It was a fine spiring day. We all walked over to take a look, indulging his curiosity.

My nephew is almost 7 years old and loves to ask Big Questions. It’s that phase of development when death is on the mind.

The young woman would have been about my age — born in 1998 just a few weeks before me. Instead she died young, very tragically, and as my mom believed, she died of cancer.

She told my nephew that the girl died young and went to Heaven, just like Blue, our beloved cat. Blue died of poisoning, the vets said. She had terrible symptoms on her last days and a whole team of vets try to save her to no avail, her tiny body finally giving out. What exactly she’d eaten, we’d never know, like she’d bitten and swallowed too much of a plant toxic to cats.

This was, for my nephew, a first experience of death, of that change of state of being mortal to being beyond mortality. Cat or Human, Death is a part of that life. Beyond life.

With the spontaneous innocence only a child’s wonder can employ, my nephew asked what the girl ate that led to her death. It was the only way he knew that people could die yet. “I don’t know, I don’t think she ate anything, she was really sick and eventually died and went to heaven,” my mom said. “It was several years before I moved here, but I think Pastor Jeanette probably remembers her.”

“Somebody loved her very much,” I offered. My mom agreed, that there was a mom and dad out there somewhere who loved this girl very much and had to live with burying their child.

My nephew wanted to get hermit crabs, he also told us today. He currently is caring for a little terrarium of caterpillars waiting to emerge into a million colors of unfolded wings and the freedom to fly. It sits in his room on a shelf. Hermit crabs, we thought, would be a great next step in learning how to care for Life.

I then thought of my own childhood, having a couple of pet hermit crabs that lived on our kitchen counter. We loved to take them out of their habitat and build little lego obstacle courses or tracks out of tinker-toys, setting them up on long lanes to race, to see which creature was the fastest. Occasionally the crabs would get away and we’d spend an hour searching from them under furniture to bring them back to the habitat.

When you’d open the cage in the morning to feed them, lifting the lid, an acrid aroma of dampness rose, alongside a metallic fishy smell. I still recall. I’d feed them and soak a sponge in water so they could drink from its cool moisture.

One morning, I picked up my hermit crab Whose Name I Can’t Remember (but I think it was something from a Disney movie). I grabbed him by the shell, assuming he was curled up, waiting to emerge and come play. But no, I picked up the neon colored shell he’d recently upgraded to as he’d grown — and a lifeless body curled up behind a big pincher — slipped out and fell to the bottom of the container. He was brown and still limbs sprawled, denuded of life and home. I surely shrieked for my parents’ help.

This, I recalled, was my first brush with Death, at about the same age as my nephew.

But we live in America and many children instead grow up in war-torn countries, in communities ravaged by violence depriving them of a time of Innocence. They have never not known Death, and the acrid smell they inhale in the morning is smoke and ash and blood. This is their normal. How can I reconcile this? I really can't. I can’t begin to wrap my mind around it.

At the same time, how can parents in the Texas Hill Country bury their own daughter at age 21, just at the beginning of what should have been, please God, a long and beautiful life, but wasn’t.

But instead of making my cry, my newphew’s innocent question almost made me laugh. I did suppress it out of respect for his earnestness and my understanding of the important moment of his early grapplings of mortality that I happened to be privy to. But the sheet innocence of his question of what toxic food someone might eat that causes them to go to Heaven, this made me smile and I just wanted to hug him and hug myself, tenderly and protectively.

Members of the Manhattan Sikh Association sing kirtans, call-and-response chanting, designed to create a shared, meditative devotional experience during a Vaisakhi diwan, Saturday, April 18, 2026, at Infinite Space NYC in Manhattan. (Photo by Kyle Desrosiers-Levine)

NEW YORK (RNS) — In 1675, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur completed a revolutionary act of selflessness that would change the faith’s trajectory and moral demands, according to Sikh martyrology.

At the time, the Mughal Empire in South Asia mandated conversion to Islam. Sikh tradition holds that Bahadur, the ninth of 10 Sikh gurus, chose to defend the religious freedom of Hindus in Kashmir, who had appealed to him for help, said Amandeep Singh Sandhu, a United Kingdom-based educator from Everythings 13, a Sikh educational organization. He and his disciples advocated on behalf of the Hindus in court, and as a result, they were executed.

His martyrdom and Sikhs’ two-fold desire to defend themselves from persecution and stand with others in need ultimately led to the establishment of the faith’s Khalsa, a community of ritually initiated Sikhs who commit to both rigorous spiritual devotion and martial courage…

Continue reading at Religion News Service.

That moment is what the team at Bridges is trying to build—again and again—across Texas.

I recently sat down with three members of the organization—Executive Director Shariq Ghani, Policy Analyst Julianne Ho, and Christian Outreach Coordinator Justin Elder—to understand how their work has evolved, and why they’re leaning into some of the most difficult conversations in American public life right now.

What emerged was not a story about easy unity or surface-level dialogue. It was a story about discomfort, structure, and the slow, often surprising work of turning strangers into neighbors

From “Minaret” to “Bridges”

The organization now known as Bridges didn’t always have that name.

Originally founded as the Minaret Foundation, the group began with a focus on helping Muslim communities engage in interfaith life. But over time, the work expanded—across faiths, across cities, across lines that didn’t fit neatly into a single identity.

“The name reflected where we started,” Ghani told me. “But it didn’t reflect where we were going.”

The shift to “Bridges” wasn’t about abandoning roots. It was about clarity. The new name describes both the mission and the method: closing gaps between communities that share geography, but not always conversation.

A Political Climate Shaped by Fear—and Faith

It’s impossible to understand Bridges’ work without understanding the broader environment they’re operating in.

Texas, like much of the country, is experiencing rising religious tension—not just Islamophobia or Antisemitism, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Hindu rhetoric. Much of it is amplified by political cycles and social media ecosystems that reward fear and division.

“There’s a weaponization of faith happening right now,” Ghani said. “Religion becomes a signal of who’s in and who’s out.”

Ho echoed that sense of urgency, noting both the energy and anxiety in the current political moment. “There’s excitement,” she said, “but also fear—especially with the rhetoric we’re seeing.”

And yet, the team is not interested in becoming another political voice in the noise. Bridges is explicitly nonpartisan. Their intervention happens elsewhere: in relationships.

The Case for Hard Conversations

Rather than avoiding controversial topics, Bridges has made a deliberate choice to center them.

Immigration. Israel and Palestine. Gender identity. Religion in public life.

These are not side conversations—they are the conversation.

“If we’re only designing programs for easy, ‘kumbaya’ moments,” Ghani said, “then we haven’t built anything that lasts.”

Their events are structured to create discomfort—but also to guide it. Small groups. No tables. No physical barriers. Time for silence. Prompts that force reflection rather than reaction.

The goal isn’t consensus. It’s durability.

Justin Elder, who also serves as a pastor, put it more bluntly: “Most people want conflict avoidance. But conflict avoidance is resolution avoidance.”

What Happens When It Works

The most compelling evidence for Bridges’ model isn’t theoretical—it’s human.

Ghani shared a story from just the day before our conversation. He ran into a participant from a recent interfaith potluck at an Apple store. She greeted him with a hug and an update: her discussion group had continued meeting—monthly, on their own.

They had met at a coffee shop. Then at someone’s home. Then again for tea.

They had talked about refugees, war, housing repairs, and everyday life. They had built a WhatsApp group. They were attending each other’s birthdays.

No one had asked them to do this.

“That’s how you know it’s real,” Ghani said. “It’s not performative.”

At another event—a long-running Muslim-Jewish gathering—initial tribal lines were stark. People clustered by identity. But by the end of the night, participants were taking selfies together like old friends.

Something had shifted.

When It Doesn’t Work

Not every conversation goes smoothly.

There have been moments of real conflict—comments that hurt, statements that require repair. Bridges doesn’t see these as failures.

“The discomfort is the data,” Ghani explained.

Hard conversations are supposed to surface tension. The question is not whether conflict happens, but how it is held, guided, and worked through.

Structure matters. So does patience. So does the willingness to stay in the room.

Common Ground Still Exists

While much of Bridges’ work focuses on difficult dialogue, Ho’s policy work reveals another side of the story: areas of deep, often overlooked agreement.

Across faith communities—urban and rural, conservative and progressive—she has found strong alignment on issues like child welfare, food security, and mental health.

One initiative she highlighted, a program called “Handle With Care,” connects first responders with schools to support children who have experienced trauma. It’s simple, scalable—and widely embraced across communities.

“Everybody wants to support children’s mental health,” Ho said. “The question is how.”

That distinction—between shared values and divergent solutions—offers a more nuanced view of polarization. It’s not always about disagreement on ends, but on means.

Beyond the Monolith

If there’s one idea the team returned to repeatedly, it’s this: no faith community is a monolith.

Not Muslims. Not Jews. Not Evangelicals.

Elder, reflecting on his own experience, described moments in Bridges conversations where his points of agreement shifted from one group to another—sometimes aligning with Muslims, sometimes with Jews, sometimes disagreeing with fellow Christians.

“It breaks the categories,” he said.

This insistence on complexity pushes back against dominant narratives—especially those that flatten entire regions or traditions into caricatures.

“Texas isn’t a monolith,” Ghani said. “It’s far more complex—and far more interesting—than people think.”

The Long Game

No one at Bridges believes a single event can change the world.

But they do believe something more modest—and perhaps more powerful:

People who have eaten together, talked honestly, and built relationships are less likely to be turned against one another.

In a moment defined by algorithmic echo chambers and escalating rhetoric, that might be one of the most important interventions available.

“There’s a question in front of us,” Ghani said. “Will faith continue to draw lines—or will it build bridges?”

For this team, the answer is clear. The harder part is doing the work.

And then doing it again.

“We all had an awakening,” she told me. “This is our country—and we need to work towards building alliances.”

Ali is the founder of the American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council, known as AMMWEC, an organization she launched in 2011 with a group of mostly South Asian Muslim women. The idea, she said, was to create a different kind of platform: one that challenged both extremism and what she saw as its enablers—inside and outside Muslim communities.

“We said we need to be the voice of reason,” she said. “Clarity—and the front line on extremism.”

From the beginning, the work was as much internal as external.

“It’s very hard to call out the bad actors in your own community,” she said.

A different inheritance

Ali grew up in a religious Muslim family in South Asia, shaped, she said, by a pluralistic understanding of Islam.

Her grandmother was a Muslim leader in India’s Congress movement. Her father wrote about the Prophet Muhammad. She grew up, she told me, hearing stories of prophets shared across traditions.

“I never heard one anti-Semitic word growing up,” she said. “We were taught the stories of Moses, of Jesus.”

That background shaped how she read the Quran.

“The Quran confirms the earlier books,” she said. “So how can anyone teach us to hate Jews or Christians?”

It also shaped her sense that something had shifted in recent decades.

“These are tragedies of the last 50 years,” she said, referring to deteriorating Muslim-Jewish and Muslim-Christian relations. “I didn’t grow up seeing them.”

Building a counter-voice

Ali said AMMWEC emerged partly out of frustration with existing Muslim organizations in the U.S., which she felt did not reflect her views.

“The agendas did not align with ours,” she said.

The organization focused on interfaith partnerships, women’s leadership and countering extremism—often in collaboration with law enforcement and local institutions. It also worked at a grassroots level, helping women start nonprofits and engage in civic life.

“We believed mothers had to be the first line of defense,” she said, referring to concerns about online radicalization in the years after 9/11.

The pushback, she said, came quickly.

“We were harassed, intimidated,” she said. “People said we were being paid, that we were working for the government.”

Still, she said, the group persisted.

“We knew this was the path of moral clarity.”

October 7 as a breaking point

The October 7 attacks marked a turning point—for her organization and for her personally.

“It was one of the most monumental moments of my life,” she said.

In the days after the attacks, she said, divisions within her own organization surfaced sharply. Some members urged her to downplay or deny what had happened.

“They wanted me to say it didn’t happen,” she said. “I said—it did happen.”

Half her board resigned.

“I was alone,” she said.

Ali chose to speak publicly in support of Israeli victims and against Hamas—something she framed not as a political stance, but a moral one.

“I stood for humanity,” she said. “It just happened in Israel.”

The backlash, she said, was immediate and global.

“The floodgates opened,” she said.

A cost that became personal

Shortly after, Ali said, she was informed by the FBI of a threat against her life tied to the Iranian regime.

“They told me my life would not be the same,” she said.

She described the moment as disorienting: losing colleagues, facing public backlash and now confronting personal risk.

“You can’t live a normal life,” she said.

She no longer posts photos of her children online. Her family has been harassed. There are places she avoids.

“There are mosques I can’t go to anymore,” she said.

At the same time, she framed the threat as a kind of confirmation.

“It meant I was being heard,” she said.

Bearing witness

In the months after October 7, Ali traveled to Israel with a small interfaith delegation, including Muslim and Sikh leaders.

“I wanted to see for myself,” she said.

They visited kibbutzim, met survivors and spoke with victims’ families—including Bedouin Muslims.

“People forget Israelis are not just Jews,” she said. “They’re Muslims, Christians, Bedouins.”

What affected her most, she said, were accounts of violence against women.

“A woman is a woman,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if she’s Jewish or Muslim.”

She connected those stories to cases she had worked on involving domestic violence and honor-based abuse in South Asian communities.

“For me, that was it,” she said. “We had to speak up.”

Trying to change minds

Ali said her work has begun to shift some opinions, particularly among Muslims who have participated in AMMWEC delegations and programs.

“We took Muslims to Israel,” she said. “They came back and said—what can we do?”

She described a gradual change in public response to her work.

“After October 7, 80% of the comments were hateful,” she said. “Now it’s reversed.”

At the same time, she emphasized that the work remains difficult—and often isolating.

“We don’t want to be popular,” she said. “We want to be truthful.”

Against the idea of a monolith

A central part of Ali’s argument is that American Muslims are not politically or ideologically uniform.

“Don’t assume because I’m brown, I think a certain way,” she said. “We are thinkers.”

She was particularly critical of how media and institutions elevate certain voices.

“For too long, we’ve empowered the loudest voices,” she said. “Not the most representative ones.”

Her goal, she said, is to surface a different kind of leadership—especially among women and at the grassroots level.

“These are people who came here for the American dream,” she said. “They’re working, raising families, building lives.”

What comes next

Ali described the current moment as both fragile and clarifying.

Interfaith work, she said, can no longer be symbolic.

“Not just dialogue,” she said. “Action.”

That includes public solidarity across communities, even when it’s uncomfortable—or costly.

“If you believe in something,” she said, “you have to take the stand.”

For her, that has meant losing colleagues, facing threats and continuing anyway.

“We decided to go against the grain,” she said.

And, she added, that choice—more than anything else—has defined the work.

He starts with God.

“Our body is a piece of God,” he told me. “We’re a temple for the divine presence in this world.”

Freeman is a personal trainer with two distinct online audiences: one focused on the LGBTQ community, particularly gay men, and another rooted in Jewish thought, drawing on Torah and Hasidic ideas from his own background in yeshiva study. The overlap, for him, is not a contradiction. It’s the point.

Fitness, as he sees it, is a form of responsibility.

“If we don’t take care of ourselves,” he said, “we become a burden—not just to ourselves, but to the world.”

Freeman described the body as a system of cells, each doing its part. Humans, he said, function the same way at a societal level. “Each person is like a cell in the world,” he said. “We all have a role.”

That framing shifts fitness away from vanity and toward obligation—not in a punitive sense, but as a kind of participation.

“It’s a sign of respect,” he said. “Discipline isn’t a restriction. It’s a commitment to yourself.”

Who feels like they belong

Much of Freeman’s work centers on people who feel like they don’t belong in fitness spaces at all.

“They go to the gym and just walk on the treadmill for 20 minutes,” he said. “Because that’s what they know how to do.”

He calls it “gym anxiety”—a mix of intimidation, inexperience and the sense that everyone else knows something you don’t.

Part of that, he said, comes from how fitness is presented online. The bodies that dominate social media are often highly specific—and not always attainable.

“There are physiques people are chasing that aren’t natural,” he said. “And people don’t know that.”

The result is a quiet form of exclusion. If you don’t look like that, you assume you don’t belong.

Freeman’s approach is deliberately broad. “Fitness is for everyone,” he said. “We all eat, we all move, we all sleep. It’s just about learning how to manage those things.”

The weight of being seen

Most of Freeman’s clients are gay men, and in that space, body image carries a particular kind of social weight.

“We’re sexualized from the moment we’re identified,” he said. “So a lot of how we feel accepted comes from how we look.”

Clients often come to him with familiar goals—lose weight, build muscle—but those goals are rarely just physical.

“They’ll say, ‘I want to feel accepted,’” he said.

In a community where appearance can shape social interactions in immediate ways, that desire isn’t abstract. Freeman described watching how differently people are treated based on small changes in physique.

“Same person,” he said. “If the abs are there, people engage. If they’re not, they don’t.”

His work, he said, is partly about helping clients navigate that reality without being defined by it. He focuses on small, measurable progress and on reframing how clients evaluate themselves.

“The first thing I ask is, ‘Give me a win from your week,’” he said.

A win, he added, is relative. For one client, it might mean consistent workouts. For another, simply getting out of bed.

“We’re all different,” he said. “You can’t measure everyone the same way.”

What religion makes easier

Freeman grew up in a religious Hassidic environment in Brooklyn and studied in yeshiva. When he works with observant clients today, he finds that religious structure often simplifies one of the hardest parts of fitness: food.

“The more restrictions you have,” he said, “the easier it is.”

Keeping kosher, for example, limits where and what a person can eat, reducing impulsive decisions. The challenge is less about discipline and more about logistics—spacing dairy and meat meals, planning ahead.

The bigger complication is Shabbat.

For clients who don’t use their phones or track food on Saturdays, standard fitness metrics fall away. Meals are fixed, often large, and tied to ritual rather than routine.

Freeman doesn’t try to override that.

“I tell them, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Enjoy Shabbat.”

In his view, the day functions as something fitness culture often neglects: recovery.

“You need a day where you’re not thinking about calories,” he said.

Not 100%

Freeman returns often to a simpler problem: inconsistency.

“Everyone wants to show up at 100%,” he said. “But that’s not real.”

Instead, he asks clients to think in smaller terms.

“What do you do when you’re at 50%?” he said.

For many people, that’s when they skip entirely. But Freeman sees that as the turning point.

“If you show up with 50%, it helps you show up with 100% the next day,” he said. “If you skip, it becomes easier to skip again.”

The goal is not optimization. It’s continuity.

Not all or nothing

At one point, I mentioned something from my own life: taking the subway to synagogue—participating, but not fully observant.

Freeman immediately connected it to fitness.

“That’s exactly it,” he said.

He described growing up with a more rigid mindset, where partial observance could feel pointless. “If you break one thing, what’s the point of the rest?” he said.

He no longer sees it that way.

“It’s not all or nothing,” he said. “God is forgiving.”

Fitness, he added, works the same way. There isn’t a single correct path, and there isn’t a threshold where effort suddenly “counts.”

Different trainers, he said, will take different approaches to the same goal—and all of them can work.

“It depends on the person,” he said.

A practice, not a performance

Freeman compared fitness to doing laundry.

If you stay on top of it—wash, fold, organize—it becomes easy to live with. If you don’t, it piles up, becoming harder and more time-consuming to manage.

“The more you put into it,” he said, “the easier your life becomes.”

He also pointed to something more structural: after about age 30, the body begins to decline. Strength and muscle don’t maintain themselves.

“The only way to stay strong is to work on it,” he said.

That includes not just exercise, but sleep, nutrition and something harder to quantify: regulation.

“We’re constantly in a state of stress,” he said. “Fight or flight.”

Part of both fitness and religious practice, he suggested, is learning how to step out of that state. Shabbat, in that sense, becomes not just ritual but mechanism—a forced pause.

“A time to disconnect,” he said. “To calm down.”

Planning for it

Freeman’s advice, in the end, is practical.

“You don’t need a whole gym,” he said. “You just need your body and some space.”

Fitness, like anything else, requires planning.

“If you want to go on vacation, you plan it,” he said. “You save, you book it, you go. This is the same thing.”

The difficulty, he suggested, is less about knowledge than follow-through. People say they eat “healthy” while gaining weight, or assume effort has to be perfect to matter.

It doesn’t.

What matters is showing up, at whatever capacity you can manage, and doing it again the next day.

“We all judge ourselves more than anyone else does,” he said. “Everyone is focused on themselves.”

The solution is not to eliminate that instinct, but to redirect it.

“Be someone you’re happy with, for yourself,” he said.

A conversation with Tali Ehrenthal, ASSAF, Aid Organization for Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Israel.

I recently spoke with a Lebabon-based Filipina migrant worker and parish community leader, Ms. Loren Capobres and Fr. Piotr Żelazko, a Polish-born Catholic priest serving as the Patriarchal Vicar for the St. James Vicariate for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel.

Both leaders spoke about the instability that shapes daily life for many migrant communities in the Middle East. From Beirut to Tel Aviv, Ramallah to Damascus, Tyre to Haifa, the rising conflict, like all conflicts, touches the lives of regular civilians from all nations, faiths and backgrounds. As a writer, I feel a responsibility to highlight the stories of human beings — who, without exception, are unique, precious and complex. They are not — and I refuse to ever see them — as political entities or symbols of any national government. Instead all people are people: from the affluent to the poor, the Ethiopian domestic worker to the elderly terminally ill woman she cares for — from Israel to Gaza to Iran to Lebanon, civilians with families, histories, names and stories all suffer the consequences of war and hope for peace for their children.

As I continue my my reporting on migrants affected by war across the region for America Magazine, I spoke with Ms. Tali Ehrenthal, an Israeli human rights advocate working with refugees and asylum seekers from Sudan, Eritrea, Ukraine and other countries affected by conflict and war who’ve made Israel their home. What she described was not only the strain of war, but the rapid deterioration of already fragile systems supporting one of the most vulnerable populations in the country — a reality that mirrors that I uncovered in Lebanon.

A System Under Strain

Ehrenthal’s organization, ASSAF, founded in 2007, focuses on refugees and asylum seekers living in Israel and the Palestinian Territories—particularly those facing acute vulnerability: survivors of torture and human trafficking, at-risk minors, the elderly, and individuals with physical or mental health conditions.

Their work combines direct humanitarian assistance with long-term advocacy. But under current conditions, both are increasingly difficult to sustain.

“We’re seeing a dramatic increase in needs,” she said, “while at the same time our capacity to respond is being significantly reduced.”

The Collapse of Funding

Over the past year, the organization has lost approximately 50 percent of its funding.

Part of this stems from cuts to U.S. aid, which contributed to the collapse of key United Nations programs. Partnerships with agencies that once supported survivors of torture and trafficking, such as those who were persecuted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), have been severely disrupted. This has affected dozens of aid programs in dozens of countries, particularly in places like Western Asia where there have been countless refugee crises.

At the same time, Ms. Ehrenthal told me, many international donors have withdrawn from Israel due to the political realities of the war. Politically-motivated boycotts and sanctions have not only affected corporations — but most devastatingly, these boycotts have meant that thousands of refugees and migrants living in Israel have lost resources provided by NGOs which rely on foreign funds to serve the most vulnerable. Among the migrants and asylum seekers organizations like ASSAF serve in Tel Aviv, many asylum seekers in Israel actually include Palestinians escaping political persecution in the West Bank, such as outspoken members of the LGBTQ community.

Further, in an era of populism and polarization globally, funding priorities have shifted globally, and organizations that once supported refugee populations are redirecting resources elsewhere.

Even within Israel, available funding has narrowed.

“Local philanthropy is strained, people are suffering economically,” Ehrenthal explained. “And when it exists, it is primarily directed toward citizens.”

The result is a widening gap: more people in need, fewer resources available.

Outside the Social Contract

Refugees and asylum seekers in Israel face a structural reality that shapes every aspect of their lives.

“To be a refugee,” Ehrenthal said, “is to exist outside the social contract.”

They are largely excluded from state welfare systems and receive little formal support, even in times of national emergency.

At the same time, they experience the full impact of the war and ongoing Hezbollah and Iranian attacks: missiles, disrupted infrastructure, and widespread psychological stress.

“They’re exposed to everything,” she said, “but without protection, recognition, or assistance.”

Work, Housing and Immediate Risk

Roughly half of the asylum-seeking population is concentrated in South Tel Aviv and nearby areas, though communities exist across the country. Many originate from Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia and Ukraine.

Most are employed in low-wage, physically demanding jobs—positions that are highly vulnerable to disruption.

With the escalation of the war, many workplaces have shut down or reduced operations. At the same time, the absence of childcare systems has made it difficult for parents to continue working.

The economic consequences are immediate.

“Many people have already lost their income,” Ehrenthal said. “And in the coming weeks, we expect that many will not receive salaries at all.”

For families living paycheck to paycheck, this creates cascading risks: inability to pay rent, rising food insecurity, and growing debt.

Parallel Networks of Support

In the absence of government assistance, refugees rely on a patchwork of NGOs, community networks, and religious institutions.

Ehrenthal highlighted ongoing collaboration with Catholic partners, including the work led by Fr. Piotr Żelazko and the Latin Patriarchate’s vicariate for Hebrew-speaking Catholics. This community runs a parish and shelter that is fully packed, particularly focussed on the Filipino migrant worker community in the country.

“They’ve been incredibly supportive,” she said. “Their humanitarian assistance has helped us continue operating during a very difficult time.”

These partnerships—often bridging Jewish, Christian, and international actors—have become essential to sustaining basic services.

Her organization also works within broader coalitions, including U.S.-based and international networks focused on hunger relief, refugee protection, disability services, and support for at-risk youth.

When Support Disappears

Despite these collaborations, the overall system remains fragile.

Ehrenthal described what happens when funding cuts force organizations to scale back or close programs.

“In most cases, when a service shuts down, there’s somewhere else to refer people,” she said, speaking of the funding cuts resulting in ASSAF having no ‘plan B’ for supporting migrants it serves. “Here, that’s not the case. When we close a program, there is no alternative.”

The consequences are immediate: individuals lose access to food assistance, mental health services, and basic case management—often with no backup option.

A Narrowing Window

Looking ahead, Ehrenthal warned that conditions are likely to worsen without intervention.

The combination of lost income, rising living costs and reduced humanitarian capacity is creating a situation in which many refugees may soon face acute housing instability and deepening food insecurity.

Mental health risks are also increasing, particularly among individuals already affected by trauma.

“We are one of the few frontline organizations still operating at this scale,” she said. “If we are forced to reduce further, there will be very few options left.”

An Urgent Reality

For audiences outside the region, Ehrenthal emphasized the importance of recognizing the specific vulnerabilities facing refugees in Israel during the war.

This is not only a story of conflict, but of exclusion—of a population navigating the same dangers as everyone else, without access to the systems designed to mitigate them.

“Without intervention,” she said, “the situation will continue to deteriorate.”

For now, survival depends on a limited network of organizations and partnerships working to fill the gap—under conditions that are becoming harder to sustain by the day.

Image courtesy of ASSAF website.

There, amid sirens and a barrage of daily, even hourly, missile alerts, I spoke with Fr. Piotr Żelazko, a Polish-born Catholic priest serving the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem as Patriarchal Vicar for Hebrew-speaking Catholics. His parish is not defined by geography alone, but by language, migration and a generation born between worlds.

What he described was not simply a ministry. It was a Church learning how to live and adapt under incredibly difficult circumstances.

A Church Between Languages—and Generations

The Latin Patriarchate is divided into multiple vicariates: territorial jurisdictions like Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Cyprus, alongside pastoral ones serving migrants and Hebrew-speaking Catholics. Fr. Żelazko belongs to the latter—but in practice, much of his ministry serves migrant Christians and migrants of all faiths, particularly Filipinos.

At the Catholic parishes he supports, most of the children he ministers to are born in Israel to Filipino migrant workers. Their first language is Hebrew. Their parents’ lives, however, remain precarious—shaped by temporary labor, legal uncertainty, and now, war.

Every Saturday, before the escalation, families gathered in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for catechism, Mass, and community — in Israel, the Roman Catholic Church obtained permission to move its Holy Days due to Sunday being a working weekday in the country.

Hundreds of people attend the Roman Catholic parishes Fr. Żelazko and the vicariate serves in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Be’er Sheva. Before the war, children excitedly prepared for First Communion. Parents shared meals. The rhythms were ordinary, even joyful.

Now, they are shaken up.

Life in the Shelters

With the outbreak of war, and the escalation with Iran and Hezbollah sending rockets into Israel and the Palestinian Territories on a daily basis, public life has narrowed into survival. Educational gatherings are canceled. Numbers allowed to gather for prayer are restricted. Movement is dictated by proximity to bomb shelters.

In Tel Aviv, many migrant families live in apartments without direct shelter access. Faced with near-daily sirens, some have relocated entirely—into underground public bunkers — such as the old Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, which has deep underground levels, which are safe to shelter from a barrage of rockets.

“They brought tents,” Fr. Żelazko told me. “They live there now.”

In these shelters, time stretches. Children attend school through screens. Parents, when they can work at all, leave their children behind in improvised systems of communal care. One mother watches a group of children; another takes the next shift.

The war has stripped away even the fragile stability many migrant workers relied on. No work means no pay. And as non-citizens, many receive no state support.

“The first challenge,” he said, “is simply survival.”

The Invisible Costs of War

The economic toll is immediate, but the deeper costs are harder to measure.

Fr. Żelazko described visiting a family in Be’er Sheva whose home was damaged by a nearby missile strike. Windows shattered. Furniture destroyed. These, he said, can be replaced.

“But the fear in their eyes,” he told me, “that will stay.”

Children no longer sleep through the night. Parents hesitate to leave their homes. Even in cities less frequently targeted, the unpredictability of sirens creates a constant, low-grade terror.

And for migrants, the vulnerability is compounded. Without health insurance, a medical emergency becomes a financial catastrophe. When one Filipino father suffered a stroke, his family faced overwhelming hospital bills. The Church intervened—negotiating costs, raising funds, mobilizing support from abroad.

But these are stopgaps, not solutions.

“The Church Must Come to the People”

In wartime, Fr. Żelazko insists, the Church cannot wait behind its doors.

“If people are afraid to come to church,” he said, “the church must come to them.”

Priests travel—carefully, often at personal risk to their safety—to visit families and pray with those unable to leave shelter. The danger is real: sirens can catch you in transit, leaving little time to find safety.

Still, none of the foreign Catholic priests under his leadership have left.

“They all decided to stay in the country,” he said.

He himself was abroad when the war began. He crossed multiple borders to return.

“I wanted to be here.”

Easter in a Bomb Shelter

This year, Easter for the Filipino community in Tel Aviv will not be celebrated in a church filled with light, but deep beneath the earth.

Fr. Żelazko plans to celebrate Mass in a public shelter beneath Tel Aviv’s central bus station, pending government permission. The symbolism is unavoidable.

“You are underground for the most important Christian feast of the year, celebrating Christ’s resurrection from the dead and rising from the tomb,” he said. “And you have to preach about the light — under ground.”

For him, this is not a contradiction—it is the essence of Christianity.

He recalled celebrating Christmas Mass in a prison, preaching about hope in a dim, crowded room. Men hardened by life wept openly as they sang Silent Night in multiple languages.

“That was one of the most beautiful moments of my priesthood,” he said.

He expects something similar this Easter.

The homily, he suggested, will not be words alone. It will be the act of gathering: singing, praying, holding hands. If conditions allow, families will emerge briefly for a festive barbecue at the shelter’s entrance—ready to run back underground at the sound of a siren.

“It’s about being together,” he said. “Even for a moment.”

Theology Without Illusions

There is no easy hope here. No promise that the war will end soon, or that suffering will resolve into clarity.

Fr. Żelazko rejects what he calls “cheap consolation.”

“You cannot say everything will be okay,” he told me. “You don’t know that.”

Instead, he points to a theology of presence—rooted in the idea of Emmanuel, “God with us.”

“In Christian faith,” he said, “God is not far away in suffering. He is very close.”

This closeness is not abstract. It is embodied in the community itself: in shared food, in mutual care, in the simple insistence that no one is alone.

“The Church is the people,” he said.

The Generosity of the Poor

Again and again, Fr. Żelazko returned to one observation: the extraordinary generosity of the Filipino families he serves.

“They have so little,” he said. “And they are ready to share.”

In the shelters, small acts of kindness take on outsized meaning. Someone brings coffee. Another brings strawberries. Music appears, and suddenly people are dancing—if only to release the pressure of fear.

“These moments,” he said, “they give me more than I give them.”

A Wider Crisis, A Fragile Network

Beyond the immediate needs of his community, Fr. Żelazko is increasingly concerned about the collapse of support systems around them.

NGOs serving migrants and asylum seekers in Israel have seen funding slashed—by as much as 70 percent—due to shifting international politics and reduced foreign aid. At the same time, demand for services has surged.

“The needs are increasing 120 percent,” he said.

In response, the Church has begun to reverse its usual role—seeking resources not only for its own communities, but for the NGOs themselves.

“It’s a moment to be creative,” he said. “To find who can help, and how.”

“Christ Is Walking Our Streets”

Toward the end of our conversation, Fr. Żelazko grew more direct.

“There are many debates in the Church,” he said—over liturgy, doctrine, language. “But I say: look around.”

“Christ is walking our streets,” he continued. “He is hungry. He is afraid. He has no job.”

“And we do not see Him.”

It was not an abstract statement. It was a reminder that culture wars and debates that divide the church worldwide are ignoring the suffering of Christ among the most vulnerable.

After the War

Fr. Żelazko ended with an invitation: to remain connected, to pay attention, to refuse indifference.

“We are here,” he said. “And we will not abandon those who need help.”

One day, he added, when the war ends, visitors will come. They will see these communities not as statistics, but as people—families who endured, who gathered underground, who celebrated Easter in the dark and still spoke of light.

Until then, the Church remains where it has always been at its most essential:

Not above the crisis, but within it.

On a recent afternoon in Beirut, the conversation began with an apology.

Ms. Loren Capobres had just returned from a medical appointment. She was delayed in traffic that had stopped due to a road being blocked by rubble from a recent airstrike on a Shia neighborhood with Hezbollah presence. A similar airstrike had landed just across the street from her home days earlier.

“This is our life right now,” she said simply.

For seventeen years, Capobres has lived in Lebanon as a domestic worker—one of hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers who sustain the country’s households while remaining largely invisible within the broader society. She is Filipina, Christian, and, by her own description, “lucky,” though the word sits uneasily alongside stories of racism, precarity and war.

But if her life in Lebanon is marked by her experiences as a migrant, it is also defined by a different kind of rootedness: the church.

The Church as Shelter

For seventeen years now, on Sundays—her single day off—Capobres goes to the Jesuit parish that primary serves English-speaking migrants in Beirut. What began as ordinary participation gradually deepened into ministry: organizing community activities, volunteering at a migrant center and accompanying other workers navigating life far from home.

When war escalated in late 2024, the parish church transformed.

Displaced families began arriving at the church in waves—people fleeing bombed neighborhoods, carrying little more than what they could hold. The Jesuits made a decision: the church would become a shelter.

“We cannot say no,” Capobres recalled from a conversation she had with other communal leaders and the Jesuit fathers and brothers.

Inside the parish, boundaries of space dissolved. The church became a space of triage and care. Volunteers cooked meals, distributed basic supplies, arranged sleeping areas. Capobres took night shifts, often sleeping on-site, staying close to those who had nowhere else to go.

“We try to give them a home,” she said. “Even if it’s not really a home. Being with them—it’s already a big thing.”

What emerges here is not merely humanitarian response, but something closer to what theologians might call the ministry of presence: the insistence that God’s nearness is mediated not through abstraction, but through bodies that remain.

A Word from the Pope

Months earlier, Capobres had experienced something she still struggles to fully describe: a personal encounter with Pope Leo during his visit to Beirut.

“I consider it a miracle,” she said. “Until now, I still can’t believe it happened.”

There are no grand exchanges in her memory of the meeting. No extended dialogue. . Instead, something far more elemental.

“I just said thank you,” she recalled. “Everything stopped. It was only me and him.”

Then, a single phrase from the Pope to the woman who's become a leader in her community:

“Be strong.”

She has held onto those words ever since—not as sentiment, but as preparation.

“It’s like that word was preparing me,” she said. “For what is happening now. I think of it and I think of the Lord calling us to be strong, never abandoning us.”

In classical Christian theology, grace is often understood not as the removal of suffering, but as the capacity to endure it. Strength, in this sense, is not triumphalist. It is vocational. It calls a person not away from crisis, but deeper into it.

Capobres did not leave Lebanon when others did. Even as her own Philippines embassy began repatriating migrant workers, she stayed.

“I feel that I have to stay,” she said. “Maybe I will be the last to go.”

Faith Amid War

Conflict has reshaped the rhythms of religious life.

Holy Week, typically marked by public processions and late-night liturgies, has been scaled back. Gatherings are smaller. Events are held earlier in the day. Movement is restricted. The church itself houses displaced migrants from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Sudan, limiting access to certain spaces, for example, restricting the space available for the traditional Palm Sunday procession this week.

And yet, Capobres insists, something essential remains unchanged.

“It’s different in the activities,” she said. “But it’s the same in our faith. The focus is the Lord,” she said. “We are welcoming the Resurrection.”

Inside the shelter, people of different nationalities and religions live side by side. Prayer happens in multiple forms, sometimes simultaneously. There is a Sri Lankan Buddhist prayer space and the largest immigrant group served are Sunni Muslims from East Africa. The Jesuits, joined by Loren, would wake up at dawn to help prepare food for the Muslims in the shelter while they were observing Ramadan.

“You see other people praying in their own way,” Capobres said.

In a region often defined by sectarian division, Sunni versus Shia, Lebanon versus Israel, Muslims versus Christians, such moments carry a quiet theological weight. They suggest a lived ecumenism—not negotiated through institutions, but forged through shared vulnerability and presence with those at the margins. At the Jesuit parish in Beirut, there is a Sudanese women’s group: its leaders are Christians and most of its members Muslims; they are from “enemy” communities back home, but in Beirut amid war, they have become like sisters.

“That’s love,” she said. “You can see the love.”

The Migrant as Witness

Capobres is clear about one thing: migrant workers are more than the labor they provide.

“Our capability is not limited,” she said. “We can help. We can do our purpose, even while we are working.”

This assertion challenges the dominant framing of migrant life in the Middle East, where workers are often reduced to economic function. In her own lived experience, migrants are not only recipients of care—they are agents of it. They are not only they displaced—they are builders of community.

For Capobres, the vocation she’s found is simple, but demanding.

“Always remember that God is love,” she said. “And that love should be spread to everyone—whoever they are, wherever they are.”

It is a statement that risks cliché until it is placed back into context: a crowded church, turned shelter, in a city living through war; a migrant worker taking blood pressure readings, cooking meals, counting beds; a woman who heard a Pope say be strong and chose to stay.

For the most marginalized in society living through war, theology is not being debated.

It is being lived.

—

THIS INTERVIEW IS PART OF A LARGER PROJECT ABOUT MIGRANT WORKERS AND REFUGEES IN ISRAEL AND LEBANON, LIVING THROUGH CONFLICT. THE LARGER PROJECT WILL BE RELEASED SOON.

-KDL

I share some of the fruits of our conversation here, revisiting what he told me about “the Body of Christ” having AIDS — which calls to mind the visual image of Maxwell Lawton’s 1993 painting 'Man of Sorrows: Christ With AIDS', a painting that considers the tragedy of AIDS as one of humanity’s many wounds inflicted on Christ himself.

A Church with AIDS

In the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, many churches responded with silence, at best—or condemnation, at worst. For the Reverend Charley Garrison, a Waco, Texas pastor who cared for countless HIV-positive congregants, the American church’s response remains one of the deepest wounds inflicted upon the gay community in its most tragic moment.

“All we knew was our friends were dying,” he recalls. As people searched for meaning in the devastation, religious fundamentalists often offered a brutal answer: that AIDS was God’s punishment. For many in the LGBTQ community, that message shattered any remaining trust in organized religion. When gay people walked away from the church due to trauma, Charley, himself a life-long Christian, says simply, “I understand.”

Yet in the midst of that rejection, another story of faith was unfolding.

Garrison found it in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a denomination founded in 1968 by and for gay and lesbian Christians. When HIV began spreading in the United States, MCC congregations were hit hard. Members died. Pastors died. Entire communities were devastated. The denomination became known, sometimes derisively, as “the church with AIDS.”

Instead of rejecting that label, they embraced it.

“If we are the body of Christ,” Charley remembers thinking, “then Christ had AIDS.”

This, for Garrison, was a theological notion. Jesus Christ was the God Incarnate who himself suffered the wounds of a broken humanity — who himself knew intimately the pains of alienation, scorn and condemnation. Christ’s pain was both physical and emotional — much like those who lived with AIDS and died due to its complication. Between 1981 and 2000, more than 500,000 Americans died of AIDS. While many see it as a ‘thing of the past’ today, Garrison’s small church still serves a large HIV/AIDS ministry decades after Magic Johnson’s ‘cocktail’ came out. In central Texas, many of its congregants are low income and transgender, and drive long distances to the church and its HIV/AIDS support groups.

For Garrison, the crisis reshaped Christian theology itself. Simple explanations about sin and punishment collapsed for him, under the weight of so much suffering. God’s presence became something discovered not in doctrinal arguments, but in the reality of hospital rooms, hospices and support groups.

Garrison recalls the rituals hospitals required in the 1980s — visitors had to put on gowns, masks, gloves before entering a room with an AIDS patient. The first time he put them on, something in him revolted.

“I realized it was nonsense,” he says. “I wasn’t going to do that to the patient.”

He removed the protective gear and walked in as himself.

Sometimes his ministry meant something as simple—and as radical—as touch at a time when people feared the spread of the virus as little was known about it. Many AIDS patients had been abandoned by family, friends and even caregivers who feared infection.

“If you’re going to kill me,” he remembers telling God, of his ministry, “take me down, because I’m not doing wrong by doing this.”

The Church Today

In the decades since, treatments have transformed HIV from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable condition for many in high-income countries. In some circles, the fear has faded so much that people treat the virus as a distant memory.

But Charley sees a different reality.

In smaller cities and rural communities in the 2020s, people still fear losing jobs, families, and friendships if they disclose their HIV status—even though discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and disability are all technically illegal. Stigma remains powerful.

For Charley, that means the church still has unfinished work to do.

Real reconciliation, he argues, doesn’t mean shame or self-reproach. It means a change of direction, a correction.

“If you’re waiting for everybody to feel nice and warm and fuzzy in your congregation, before you affirm LGBTQ people,” he says, “It ain’t never going to happen. And if the AIDS crisis showed us anything, we can’t afford to sit around and wait.”

His ministry today continues much as it did during the worst years of the epidemic: support groups, food pantries, pastoral care and hospice volunteering for LGBTQ seniors and those who are terminally ill. For him, nothing is more important than the simple call to be present for others.

And after decades of witnessing suffering and death, Garrison said his faith has only deepened.

“It instilled in me a stronger faith in a God who cared,” he says. “A God who stands with the marginalized and calls others to do the same.”