Sanctuary is a new publication for the American Jewish community rooted in the moral, ethical, and religious traditions of the Jewish people. Through original investigations, analysis, and criticism, we seek to encounter the questions, contradictions, and minutiae of American Jewish life, and to restore the spirit of independent thought, healthy debate, and faithful dialogue that animates our heritage.
Our Purpose
To the Jews who came to make a life in this country, often leaving much or everything behind, “America” meant promise. It meant opportunity. For many, it meant freedom: from the economic restrictions and bodily danger of the Pale of Settlement, from the insidious antisemitism and illiberalism of Weimar Germany, from the religious tensions of the Maghreb. This is the founding myth of the American Jewish life, a story so familiar and yet so enchanting it must be retold again and again and again, leaving entire corpora and literatures in its wake.
And yet, myths are only as strong as the simple faith that sustains them. American Jewish history is as much American history as it is Jewish. What happens to it when the great founding myth of the United States–in Jefferson’s words, “a sanctuary to which unhappy victims of civil and religious persecution may incessantly flee”–fails to persuade the modern conscience? What happens when it shatters in the face of its own tragic future?
Our American Jewish present has not evaded the fate of America writ large in the 21st century. Atomization and polarization are its primary forces, horsemen of a technology-driven disintegration who seed the ground for dangerous extremism, intellectual vacuity, and moral anomie. Our traditions and collective mythologies are emptied of their living, abundantly complex memories and replaced with shinier, hollow caricatures. Our leaders are those who can shout the loudest. For those of us who know that a brighter, healthier world is possible: to where do we turn?
In the desert–that deathly, ruthless landscape that collapses all meaning into the stark language of mere survival–the Israelites build a Tabernacle, a sanctuary dedicated to life around which they unite and form a collective identity. There they are asked to offer their yearnings and celebrate their milestones, rather than on the myriad sandstone altars that surround them. Without the Tabernacle, tradition teaches, the Israelites might have descended into political factionalization or religious extremism. Perhaps they would not have survived at all.
We Americans are beholden to, and perhaps preoccupied with, freedom. Freedom is the unspoken language all thriving societies share, the ground in which our American Jewish forebears sowed their dreams. In our pursuit of its American definition, we perhaps have neglected its Jewish one. Jewish freedom is no less absolute, no less uncompromisingly devoted to the flourishing of life in all its forms–even as it holds different ideas about how to arrive at that flourishing. And just like our freedoms in this country, for it to live, it must be given space to breathe.
Sanctuary is that space. Here, ideas are welcome even if–and especially if–they challenge established modes of thinking and being American and Jewish. Here, attention is given to what is said, not to how much it does or does not conform to prevailing ideological pieties. Here, we plumb the depths of our terrifyingly vast intellectual and ritual heritage without fear. And here, we offer a refuge to those whose deeply held convictions and human empathies have left them without a place to speak their truths.
The Talmud likens Jewish tradition to a storm-tossed, splintering plank of a long-sunken ship. To survive the tempest is to cling on for dear life. Yet the plank cannot save anyone if it is pulled in many directions, only if it is held in delicate, trusting unison. Will you join us?
Our Name
Sanctuary aims to embody Jewish unity through difference, as represented by the Tabernacle, surrounded by the twelve tribes of Israel and traveling before their encampments like a vanguard of their newfound freedom. We intend to engender a space of tolerance, forgiveness, and respectful, impassioned disagreement, in the spirit of the sanctuary cities of the Bible and our modern world. And we aspire to become a second home for “Sanctuary Jews”: “ordinary” Jews who sit in the pews of the synagogue, who fight for the lives and rights of their fellow human beings on the streets, and who take refuge in our great religious and literary traditions. Like the sanctuaries of the synagogues that took in immigrants—Jewish or not—over the course of American history, and those that offer safe haven to immigrants and refugees today, our doors are open to all who seek refuge within.
Our Emblem
According to Jewish tradition, the future city of Jerusalem–described by the prophet Isaiah as a holy site for all peoples of the world–will have twelve gates. When the Israelites travel through the Red Sea, they travel in twelve separate lanes, one for each tribe. And per the Jewish mystical tradition, both of these point to twelve supernal gates through which prayers ascend depending on one’s tribal heritage. The great mystic R. Isaac Luria suggested there is a thirteenth gate through which all prayers can ascend, regardless of the descent of the person offering the prayers. Our emblem represents these twelve gates in three concentric circles. Each circle, signifying our communities, the Jewish people, and the world, is open on four sides, like the stranger-welcoming tent of Sarah and Abraham. The thirteenth gate lies in the white space at the center of the letter “S”: the Hebrew letter Yud, which embodies the divine wisdom at the heart of creation, in whose image the Tabernacle was fashioned.
Our People
Netanel Zellis-Paley
Editor-in-chief
Eliana Sisman
Features editor
Jordan Friedman
Contibuting editor
Jonathan Taubes
Contributing writer
Netanel Zellis-Paley is a Ph.D. student and organizer based in Philadelphia. His work and interests live at the intersection of imagination and memory, bringing the world's great knowledge and faith traditions together in conversation to grow a more vibrant, abundant present for all.
Eliana Sisman is an autistic Jewish writer and law student who lives in Los Angeles. She has a B.A. in sociology from UCLA. She loves history, Torah, disability rights, cooking, the ocean and butterflies.
Jordan Friedman is a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, passionate to restore the honor of Judaism in contemporary society. He wants the wider world to associate Jews and Judaism with kindness, gentleness, and moderate piety that remains in productive conversation with outside disciplines and the other great religious and secular wisdom-traditions of the world.