Unconscionable.

A prayer for our country.

1,995 minors seeking safety and asylum in this country were separated from their parents between April 19 and May 31 of this year, a period of 6 weeks — and 2 weeks have passed since then.

1,940 adults were separated from their children, in this country, during the same period.

Years ago, during a visit to Yad Vashem — not my first visit to Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, but my first as a parent — I stood utterly devastated in front of a small display of toys and cards with which children were sent on trains as part of the Kindertransport — these small mementos their only enduring connection to the safety and loving embrace of their families.

I put myself in the shoes of a parent and cried. How could one make the impossible choice of sending their child away? I imagined selecting a single toy to accompany my son, and just dissolved in tears. Then I put myself in the shoes of a child and cried. How could a young child even remotely grasp what was happening, the desperation of a parent who would make such a choice? Would they even be aware that a choice had been made?

Never, while I stood there, did it even occur to me to consider that the shoes I might someday wear would be those of a citizen in a country where the inhumane practice of forcibly separating parents and children — asylum-seeking refugees — would be the sanctioned law of the land. Like so many in our country tonight, I face this unconscionable reality… and I cry.

“Thoughts and prayers” don’t even come close to touching the desperate urgency of this moment. But this is the time in our service when we pray for our congregation, our community, and our nation — and this is the space to which we come to recalibrate our moral compass. And so we must pray:

On this Shabbat of Father’s Day Weekend — still feeling the echoes of Mother’s Day celebrations, as well — may the leaders of our nation speedily and clearly see the unequivocal error of their ways. Let the rising indignation of religious communities throughout our country crescendo into a singular, resolute voice declaring Your sacred command — the most repeated in Scripture — “Do not wrong a stranger nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Indeed, as long as children are being torn from their parents and parents left to anguish over the wellbeing of their children, it would seem we are all still in Egypt.

Having desperately lost our way, this Shabbat may we speedily find our way back to being a Promised Land.

And let us say: Amen.