Posted on December 26, 2025 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
Dear Temple Beth-El,
This week’s Torah portion is Vayigash, the denouement of the Joseph story in which Judah pleads to Joseph on his brother Benjamin’s behalf, Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers, and they reconcile. It is a striking end to a powerful tale, one that begins with arrogance and enslavement and ends with abundance and forgiveness.
As I meditate on the parashah this week, I am thinking about our recent trip to Charleston, SC with our 11/12th grade Confirmation students. We spent Shabbat in the oldest continually active Reform Jewish congregation in America and helped to clean and preserve the gravestones of the historic Jewish cemetery in which Jewish Revolutionary War soldiers, poetesses, and captains of industry are buried and in which the sociopolitical and religious drama of a Jewish community is preserved. We walked the grounds of a plantation–a property whose natural beauty shrouds the history of atrocities committed there. We toured the International African American Museum and learned again the painful history of the Middle Passage–both the horrors of the genocidal slave trade and the transformational effects it ultimately had on American culture. It was at once a reckoning and a retrospective.
I will never forget what it felt like on the final morning of our trip. Overnight, while we slept, the horrific attack on Bondi Beach took place. Already our first planned stop that day had been the Holocaust Memorial site in the park in Marion Square in historic downtown Charleston. On the ground at its center is a bronze tallit, sculpted to look disheveled and discarded, with one of its fringes cut off as one would if the tallit were to be buried. The trip to that memorial took on a far deeper significance as we sat in the shade of antisemitic violence that had yet again darkened our world. We recited El Malei Rachamim in a circle while locals enjoyed a Christmas market and the music of a rock band just 100 yards away, oblivious to our pain.
To go, in the span of just eight days, from the pain of that morning to the light and joy of our community menorah lighting was a whirlwind. The way our non-Jewish neighbors showed up to celebrate Jewish resilience and the miracle of our continued existence reminded me that no matter how much the world wants us to close off and turn our backs, we are always in the right when we instead open our arms and love our neighbors. This year’s Chanukah in its totality has reinforced for me that our responsibility as Jews is to remember, to bear witness, and to respond to acts of hate by making more space for love and tolerance in this world.
This is my final Shabbat message of 2025, and it is also my New Year’s resolution. More love, more light, more forgiveness and reconciliation, not in spite of the past but because of the lessons we’ve learned from it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
