Many people are aching for the world. We want justice and change. We want relief from the steady churn of violence and fear that greets us every time we turn on the news. And yet many of us are afraid of what this constant urgency is doing to us, of becoming harder or smaller in the process. Justice has become something we shout with our shoulders tense and our fists clenched. The dominant question of our moment seems to be, what does justice demand?
But I am becoming convinced that this is not the first question we should ask. Before we ask what justice demands, we need to ask what posture we are bringing to the table, whether we are speaking from fear and urgency, or something steadier.
This question became unavoidable for me last summer, when a conversation I wasn’t prepared for forced me to confront it. A friend—someone I loved, trusted, and respected—said something that stopped me cold. In the middle of a heated conversation about the world, she told me I needed to cut ties with my Jewish friends. Especially, she said, if they considered themselves “Zionists.”
The word landed like a weapon. I could feel how much the word had changed in what it meant to her. Whatever meaning it once carried had been flattened and politicized; in the process, it lost its connection to real people. I remember sitting there stunned, my chest tight, trying to understand how someone I knew to be thoughtful and justice-oriented could speak so easily about erasing a whole group.
She invoked scripture. She spoke of God. She spoke with urgency and self-righteousness: a terrifying clarity that left no room for confusion, and certainly not room for relationship. I left that conversation shaken. It revealed to me how quickly faith can harden when it is driven by righteousness, instead of grounded in God.
Rather than staying alone with it, I reached out to someone who knows how to hold complexity, my dear friend Rabbi Brad Hirschfield.
If I’m honest, I was a mess. I was crying so hard my face was leaking everywhere. And I thought to myself, “Great. I just wiped snot off my upper lip in front of one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America. Real cool, Jill.”
But he didn’t rush me or correct me. He offered a posture of shelter, holding space for my confusion, grief, anger, and embarrassment. He listened as I told him what my friend had said, words that must have hurt him, and yet he did not respond with anger. Instead, he slowed everything down.
He helped me name what I was feeling without turning it into a judgment, inviting me to be generous without asking me to abandon my convictions. He reminded me that covenant does not demand certainty before it demands compassion.
The contrast between those two conversations, one sharp with emotion, the other grounded in shelter, reshaped how I listen and speak about justice. Both spoke of God and both spoke of justice. But only one left me more human.
I began to notice how often I approached sacred texts the same way my friend had approached that conversation: moving outward before I had gone inward, acting before I had thought things through, speaking for God before allowing God to steady me. I often come to scripture with a task already in hand. I come looking for instruction or clarity, or for something to teach, apply, or fix. Even when I am seeking justice, I am usually seeking it with an agenda. Rarely do I come without a plan, simply to be held.
When justice becomes the primary lens through which we approach faith, something subtle and dangerous can happen. Scripture becomes a tool and theology a weapon. God-language becomes a way to justify urgency without reflection.
We are living in a moment when scripture is often used as an argument, rather than approached as a sacred text capable of forming us, a tool rather than a refuge. And in the context of antisemitism and Israel, Jewish lives are treated as concepts instead of neighbors, and God’s name is invoked without allowing God to shape the conversation.
This does not happen because people care too much about justice, but because they pursue justice without the steadiness that comes from remembering we are talking about real people. The texts that were meant to shelter us, to hold us, begin to splinter us instead. When we demand justice without a place of shelter, we become faster, louder, more brittle. Spiritually speaking, shelter is the place where we allow God, not righteousness, to lead. When we seek shelter in the scripture, we adopt an inner posture that steadies us when urgency is high, allowing us to pursue justice without losing sight of the people involved. When we seek shelter, we don’t have to have our feelings sorted out before we arrive. God receives anger and grief as they are and gives us enough steadiness to stay present.
When we come to the gospel as a shelter, it keeps our pursuit of justice from being driven by urgency or contempt, and it insists that we keep the actual people involved in mind, even those we do not understand or agree with.
I recognized this only after living it. Once in a conversation that left me braced and shrinking, and once in a conversation where I was crying so hard I kept wiping snot off my upper lip, yet somehow felt steadied enough to stay human.
I am still learning what this looks like in practice, but it has begun to change how I move through charged moments. I still ache for the world to be different, and I still believe faith has something to say about how we live together. This is not about stepping away from the world’s pain, but about being steadied before engaging it. It means allowing God to tend what is anxious, reactive, or brittle in me before I speak or act. It is the work of being formed by prayer, Scripture, and honest self-examination, so that my pursuit of justice grows from love and fidelity rather than urgency or sanctimony.
For me, that has begun to look surprisingly ordinary. I pause before I speak God’s name in a conversation that is already charged. I choose to call someone who can help me slow down, rather than joining the rush to certainty. I sit with a sacred text long enough to be steadied by it, instead of scanning it for ammunition.
And sometimes it looks like refusing to speak about people as abstractions or reducing them to labels, symbols, or acceptable losses, even when doing so would make my argument cleaner or my side feel stronger.
In a world on fire, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is not to sharpen our arguments or harden our convictions, but to return to our sacred traditions and the long story of God with humanity, not to use them as tools to justify ourselves, but to let them shape our loves, restrain our certainty, and remind us of the human cost of self-righteousness.
Even if you have to wipe your nose.