Earlier this week, the JCRC was honored to offer remarks at the annual Interfaith Prayer Breakfast at the Colorado State Capitol, held in recognition of World Interfaith Harmony Week. The gathering brought together faith leaders from across traditions around the theme, “Many Faiths, One Humanity,” and a shared commitment to mutual understanding, cooperation, and human dignity.
Below are the remarks shared by Brandon Rattiner, Senior Director of the JCRC.
It is a genuine honor to be here, gathered with leaders and friends from so many faith traditions. Finding myself in interfaith spaces is honestly one of the best parts of my job as Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council.
We gather at a moment that feels deeply unsettling for many. A moment when so many are in pain. When we live in a world we recognize less and less. When holding our lives and our communities together can feel impossibly hard.
In moments like this, I turn to my faith. Not because it promises that easier days are right around the corner. Not because it claims privileged access to some ultimate truth. But because the Jewish tradition holds thousands of years of argument, wisdom, and reflection about how human beings live with one another in complicated times.
Each week, Jews around the world read the same section of the Torah—the first five books of the Bible. And because God has a sense of humor, this week’s portion has an extraordinary amount to say about this moment, and about a gathering like this.
This week’s portion is Yitro, possibly the central episode of Judaism as a whole. In it, God appears to the entire people of Israel at Mount Sinai, making a covenant with them and giving the world’s most famous brief code of ethics: the Ten Commandments.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once wrote that at Sinai, a new kind of nation was being formed, and a new kind of society—an antithesis of Egypt, where the few had power and the many were enslaved. At Sinai, the Israelites ceased to be merely a group of individuals and became, for the first time, a body politic. We became a people bound by shared laws and a shared moral responsibility.
Rabbi Sacks highlights three remarkable aspects of this moment.
First, this covenant places moral limits on power. The Torah establishes the primacy of right over might—the idea that power must always answer to ethics.
Second, the covenant could not proceed until the people themselves gave their consent. The lesson is there is no legitimate government without the consent of the governed, even if the governor is God itself.
Third, the covenant is made with everyone. The Torah states specifically that the entire people were to be gathered together for this ceremony, “men, women and children.” And according to Jewish tradition, all Jewish souls—past, present, and future—were present at Mount Sinai for the giving of the Torah. Citizenship and its privileges are available to all.
Taken together, these ideas—equality under the law, democracy, and universality—form the building blocks of a free society.
They are not unique to Judaism, and they are not unique to people of faith.
They are human values. They are American values.
And while things feel hard right now—because they are hard—if a ragtag group of former slaves wandering in a desert could consent to a moral vision bigger than themselves, I have no doubt that our society can recommit to these values too, regardless of what our algorithms feed us.
No matter your faith tradition, I believe faith—understood broadly—can be an antidote to this moment.
Be in community.
Move toward a vision of a good life.
Learn from your ancestors.
Repair what is broken.
Make time to rest.
Practice humility.
These ideas may have originated in faith, and we should remember that more often. But they also happen to be the same practices that soften hardened hearts, complicate easy answers, and resist the polarized, binary thinking that pulls us apart.
Thank you all for being here today.
Please email Brandon Rattiner at brattiner@jewishcolorado.org with questions or comments.