Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Becca Weintraub | July 17, 2026

Shabbat Shalom to everyone.

As I walked home

from this building BJ yesterday in the late afternoon.

As I said earlier, as we know, yesterday here in New York was particularly bad.

If anyone was outside and I was surrounded by both haze

and the pungent smell of smoke from the fires,

the horrible fires that are in Canada right now, and I found myself

thinking about what it must have been like thousands of years ago, in usual time,

as the temple burned the ash, the smell,

the despair, the grief, the feelings intensified

as I thought about our world, our ultimate temple burning.

And yet, it's not exactly the same.

But the feelings I had just to smell and to feel it.

Just to think of what that city was like.

This Shabbat is the Shabbat before

Shabbat of our communal day of mourning.

When we remember the temple, the destruction of our temple,

and many other horrible, horrific things that have happened in our history.

And it's known this Shabbat in particular as the Shabbat has gone.

And the name comes from the opening words of our half Torah Hazan, Yahoo,

which is the vision of Isaiah, who is the son of Amazon.

This vision that Ikea who has is not a pleasant one.

And the rabbis teach that the

harshest form of prophecy is through vision.

To see destruction is different from simply hearing about it.

To have that vision of the destruction.

I think one of the hardest parts of reading the book

of Isaiah, of Lamentations, which will read on Wednesday night

to begin to Shabbat up, is its vivid depiction of the suffering

endured by the people of usually home during the destruction of the temple.

The images are raw.

They're incredibly gruesome and painful

and difficult to absorb.

We cringe and perhaps even cry

as we are forced to picture them.

But what is this meant to do within us?

What's it supposed to do to see these visions, to have

these visions, to hear them, to depict these horrible things?

The appears that's in our Rabbi

who preached his powerful show during the final years

of the Warsaw Ghetto, reflected deeply on this very question.

His final draft, which was delivered just days

before the deportation from the ghetto, began.

It took place on Shabbat Hazan on July 18th,

1942, exactly 84 years ago.

From tomorrow.

He expounded on the teaching of the sages, teaching

that the harshest form of prophecy is a vision in which we truly experience

another person's pain.

He writes, when in Scripture and in the writings of our blessed sages,

we studied the descriptions of the agony endured at the destruction of the temple.

We are thought we had some notion of pain.

We thought we had some notion of pain.

At times we even cried while learning their teachings.

But now it is pain.

It is plain that hearing

about suffering is vastly different from seeing it, let alone enduring it.

God forbid the possessing a rabbi says,

who witnessed and endured unimaginable suffering in his time.

He reminds us that these visions are not meant simply to overwhelm us.

They're meant to crack open our hearts.

They teach us to cultivate empathy, not because we must experience

every pain ourselves, which he knows is the worst of all,

but because seeing the suffering of others should awaken in us compassion.

It should bring us to compassion.

The prophetic vision should not be the first step.

It shouldn't be the last step.

It should be the very first step for us.

That stops it from becoming a reality.

That wakes us up, that shakes us,

and we're living in a moment when our world is burning,

literally, as we know.

And also sometimes it feels like metaphorically.

Immigrants and marginalized communities continue to suffer here in our country,

and we know around the world, War in hatred

bring death endless cycles of violence and destruction.

The visions haven't stopped us.

The visions of your

Yahoo and the painful images of Asia instead

hauntingly familiar to us in our day

as we open the newspaper on our screens,

as we walk through the streets, our own streets here.

The temptation may be to turn away,

but the Torah calls to us to look with open eyes,

to see, to feel,

and then ultimately to choose love over hate.

We know what it means to be strangers in Egypt.

We know what it means to experience oppression.

We remember this not so that we hold on to anger and hate, but so that we might

love more deeply and create a different vision for the world.

A vision like the one that we see a slight glimpse of at the end of each

Yahoo, is half terror

of this half terror that will read where redemption remains possible.

A vision of hope. Shabbat

offers us a taste of that redemption.

It invites us into it for the infinite

loving kindness to sit in that has said that loving kindness that is unending,

from which our very world and each one of us was created.

May we allow that sacred feeling to strengthen us,

to face the pain of our past and present with compassion,

and to help create a different vision of the future,

one that is rooted in love and justice, one that paints

the picture of repentance, of healing and ultimately of redemption for all.

Shabbat Shalom.