Pray With Your Feet

For some of us, prayer looks like gathering in a sanctuary, chanting the melodies of our ancestors.

For some of us, prayer happens most meaningfully at Jewish summer camp, led by the guitars strummed by our favorite counselors.

For some of us, prayer looks like the notes we write in our journals or our instinctive, spontaneous expressions of awe or need.

And for some of us, our connection to spiritual life is enacted through our activism. 

By literally putting our values into action — by protesting, letter-writing, phone-calling, showing up in social justice spaces — we express the core of our Jewish souls. At JRC, we hold that this is not only a legitimate form of prayer but one that is valuable and necessary.  We believe that using our voices and speaking truth to power in a public way, especially when we use our privilege to show up for another group that needs us, is a crucial part of what it means to be Jewish.

That’s what we mean by “praying with our feet” — not just reading or learning about social justice, but standing up and taking part in it as a spiritual practice. Visit our Committees/Task Forces page to learn more about our focused social justice work.