What do you want me to say? It can’t get worse? It’s going to get better? If life imitates art, then the times we’re living in are imitating this week’s Torah portion. In Sh’lach l’cha, messengers were challenged to scout out the Promised Land and report back to the Israelites what they found there. All but two of the scouts came back and said, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (Numbers 13:32ff).

These messengers condemned the whole search process and doomed the people’s faith that God would deliver them to the Promised Land. These ten men who failed in their duty to convey their faith in God perished by plague. Joshua and Caleb, however, stood out among the men who returned with an encouraging outlook that upheld God’s Name and the people’s ambition to enter the Promised Land. Caleb said, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it” (Numbers 13:30). Furthermore, Joshua and Caleb said to the people, “The land is exceedingly good; [it is] a land that flows with milk and honey…” (Numbers 14:7-8).

Just as the Israelites stood on the edge of the Promised Land, our relatives once immigrated to America with faith and hope in a promised land. Between roughly 1880-1912, more than two million Jews believed that America was the Golden Land and that it was their best hope to live freely as Jews or as anything they wanted to be. Isaac Mayer Wise, organizer of Reform Judaism in the 19th century, believed that America was Judaism’s best hope and its modern Promised Land. Of those who came to America, some returned to Europe because they didn’t thrive here and yearned for what was familiar.

Jews who came to America and had families, built businesses, and dreamed about their futures here weren’t wrong. Though life for early Jewish immigrants wasn’t easy, it was the right choice, as the 20th century fought two world wars and Europe suffered from Nazism and the Holocaust. Historians of 20th century Jewish life in America have reported on it, and fiction writers such as Abraham Cahan, Charles Angoff, and Herman Wouk, to name just three, told vivid stories about familiar Jewish characters who learned English, scraped by, earned a trade, and began to realize an American dream of their own.

Oddly, the questions asked today now echo those of the past, namely, will it get worse, and is it time to go to Israel, our ancestral home and the original Promised Land of our ancestors? Or maybe the question is, what happened to the American dream that Jews and millions of others came here to find and contribute to for themselves and their families? I don’t believe that it’s time to go. We have to address the question about our America. In the past, our ancestors fled places where they were not registered citizens, where they were tolerated but always at the mercy of despotic rulers. Conversely, America was a new promise because here we were citizens and not merely tolerated. Some institutions of America are teetering, but many are still showing strength and resilience against cultural, political, and social shockwaves. The seemingly intractable nature of politics today is still no match against the groundswell of Americans who go to the polls, flood social media, and advocate for what we know is still right and good.

When I was asked recently about what we can do to find our way back to the reasonable center in America, I explained that it’s not an easy answer that one can recite “while standing on one foot,” a reference to Rabbi Hillel who deflected a complicated question with a clear and wise adage. Not wiser than Hillel, but I explained that in Torah we learn that we have been given what is right and good. What is right is what we have been taught in our best civics classes and biblical teachings about ethics and humanity. What is good is a matter of human judgment and ultimately of God’s. Both take time to realize. But what remains right and good will always be true for us. They are the enduring lessons that will accompany us as we traverse these times.

Our human inclination, linked to our sense of right and good, is to return to a state of civic mindedness, reasonableness, and social and political change that emerges from the people and is represented by elected officials.

The latter part of the 20th century was kinder to Jews. It didn’t happen by accident. It took tenacity and resilience that came with dedication to education, business expertise, and advocacy not only for Jews, but other minorities, too. Especially in Houston, pioneers like the late Rev. Bill Lawson advocated and led the way to a relatively peaceful transition from segregated lunch counters and schools to an integrated city where hard work and not the color of one’s skin mattered to the city’s strength. Later, Archbishop Fiorenza and Rabbi Karff joined him in realizing new dreams for vulnerable citizens of our city. Their work became a model of civic mindedness that the city judged as right and good. And we know that God judged their work to be not only good, but very good.

Signs are all around us that though our work is hard, leaders whose faith animated them to stand up to do what is always right and good have rarely failed to make a positive impact in their day for the sake of ours. We can be such leaders, too. Will our days get worse? Yes, if we do nothing. Will our days get better? Only if we get busy doing something about it. As we stand on the edge of the future of our promised land, let’s carry with us the words that Joshua and Caleb said to the people, “Let us by all means go up…The land is exceedingly good; [it is] a land that flows with milk and honey…” (cf. Numbers 13, 14).

L’Shalom,