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This past weekend, when I spoke at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church, I was asked what, according to Judaism, makes a space sacred. I talked about people, about purpose, and about how our memories can transform a place from the everyday to the sacred. But after last night, I’m thinking about it differently. Maybe a space becomes sacred when we choose to show up in it, even when it would be easier and safer, to stay away.

The news from Washington, D.C., that Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two Israeli embassy employees, were murdered as they were leaving an American Jewish Committee event at the Capital Jewish Museum, is heartbreaking and deeply unsettling. We’re still absorbing what happened. We’re shaken, we’re angry, and we’re grieving. And yet, as Shabbat arrives, we prepare once again to come together not because everything feels okay, but because we need one another when it doesn’t.

Jewish resilience has never meant ignoring pain or fear. It means showing up with them, sitting beside one another, praying with cracked voices. It means choosing connection over isolation.

So this Shabbat, we gather not in spite of what happened but because of it. We gather to mourn together, to steady ourselves and lean on others when we can’t steady ourselves, and to remember that just being together is a sacred act that makes our space holy.

 Shabbat Shalom