By Barrett Holman Leak in San Diego
Recently, I found myself in the midst of flying flour and showers of spilled sugar and gobs of butter. But there was much laughter around the kitchen table between two little girls and me. Their lives right now are a series of seismic shifts—loss, abandonment, and the cold, hollow fear of not knowing where they will be sleeping tomorrow or who truly cares that they even exist. When you live in a state of constant survival, the world isn’t a home; it’s a blur of terrifying unpredictability.
I didn’t start our time together by asking them to “process” their pain. Instead, we baked.
We pulled out the flour, the butter, the toffee candies, the sugar, and the chocolate morsels. I watched their hands—small and tentative—as they gripped the measuring cups. For children who feel they have no control over their own lives, the “exactness” of a cookie recipe is a sanctuary. I guided them through the directions: “Two cups of this. One teaspoon of that.” As the flour dusted the table and the scent of vanilla began to rise, I saw the hypervigilance in their shoulders start to melt. In the simple, rigid structure of following instructions and bringing their energy to it, they found something the world is currently denying them: predictability. You see, in this moment, they aren’t “abandoned”; they are creators. They exist, they are seen, and they are safe within the boundaries of the bowl, the measuring cup, the cookie pan.
We have the ability to create a container for our collective soul and our physical existence, which has been under attack. We are trying to build our own places of safety, a Mishkan, here in the United States of America. And it is hard. Not only are we Jews being attacked, but also Black and Brown people who are being disproportionately thrown into economic poverty, starved of jobs, money, food and housing, physically under attack, and put into mass prisons and/or deported with government-sanction. We are living in a time of jagged, visceral horror:
● A woman is fatally shot in the face three times while simply trying to drive away from chaos
● A man is thrown to the ground, kicked, punched, and shot ten times in the back.
● And then, the ultimate gaslighting: we are lied to about who these people were and what happened to them.
● Journalists—the ones tasked with the sacred duty of witnessing—are being punished for simply reporting what is happening.
● We are pounded daily on TV, radio, and podcasts with the message: We’re coming to get you. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
● Nearly half the population of the USA eagerly embraces a man who delivers a joyful, unifying message of love and resilience, and is met with death threats and false accusations from a hate-filled minority.
This is trauma raised to a fever pitch. We are building our sanctuary in a landscape of chaos, racism, and rising antisemitism that seeks to make us feel homeless in our own skin.
In Parsha Terumah, God instructs the Israelites—a community of recently freed slaves still carrying the somatic memory of Egypt—to build the Mishkan. Here is where God meets us, according to Ibn Ezra: the Mishkan, like the baking, like the collective actions of things such as letter writing, do we connect. This portion about the Mishkan teaches us human beings about the structure of the cosmos so that, through physical ritual, we can connect with God.
The traumatized cannot survive on “inspiration” alone. They need safety. The meticulous details of the Mishkan—the exact cubits of gold, the specific shades of blue wool—are a structural response to chaos.
Just like those two girls with the measuring spoons, the Israelites needed a “recipe” for the Divine. For a soul vibrating with hyper-vigilance, predictability is a mercy. We build these ritual walls not to hide from the world, but to create a space where the lies and the violence of the outside world cannot penetrate.
The text says, “From every person whose heart moves them, you shall take My offering” (Exodus 25:2). This is agency. Trauma is defined by the loss of choice; healing is the restoration of it. When the world tells us we are victims, we exercise our agency by becoming the architects of our own ritual lives. This is a hallmark of the Reform movement. We create a ritual that is meaningful for us. When the world tells us to hide, we exercise our agency by showing up to measure out the gold and the blue wool of our tradition.
I invite you now to look at your hands. These are the tools of your agency.
Blessed is the One who gives us the strength to measure. Blessed are the hands that hold the cup, the pen, and the prayer book. Blessed is the precision that grounds us when the world feels shapeless. May our hands be steady as we build our sanctuary. May our palms be open to receive the truth, even when it is heavy. And may we find, in the act of doing, the peace that the world refuses to give.
We are building this Mishkan, this sanctuary for ourselves, together—through collective action and raising our voices, gathering together, sharing Shabbat dinner each week, measuring out our hope and our grief like flour and salt. In doing this, we are building belonging for ourselves and creating a sanctuary where the truth is told, our stories are listened to, where the fallen are honored, where joy can be nurtured and expressed, and where we have hope for our community to one day speak and live without fear.
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Barrett Holman Leak is a freelance writer based in San Diego.
What really jumps out is how many articles this author has published in such a short time: eight between February 4 and February 20. That pace alone makes you wonder how much original thinking is actually going into them, especially since the writing often reads like AI-generated text. It’s hard not to question credibility and trust when things start to feel mass-produced.
Even more concerning is how these articles keep framing the Jewish community. Time and again, Jews are treated like a single, uniform group, with “Ashkenazi Jews” cast as a collective moral problem. That’s just not reality. Jewish identity is diverse, shaped by vastly different histories and experiences. Reducing it to a modern American racial category flattens centuries of lived experience, erasing real trauma from Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, Soviet-era oppression, and present-day antisemitism. Judaism existed long before today’s ideas of race even took shape, yet these pieces reinterpret Jewish history almost entirely through a U.S. racial lens. In doing so, they downplay antisemitism and recast Jews as perpetrators, rather than as a people with a long history of vulnerability and generational trauma, a tone that feels especially jarring when antisemitic hate crimes are at record highs. Orthodox and visibly Jewish individuals, many of whom are Ashkenazi, have been frequent targets in major antisemitism hate crime hotspots like New York.
The most recent article continues this pattern and layers on confusing political messaging, including a line claiming that “nearly half the population of the USA” embraces an unnamed man (apparently Trump?) as offering a “joyful, unifying message of love and resilience.” That sentence doesn’t even make sense, either logically or factually.
Overall, these articles offer a surface-level take on Jewish history, yet deliver it with a tone of self-assured moral judgment. Writing for a San Diego Jewish community publication should demand clarity, historical accuracy, and accountability, not a blending of political ideology, trauma language, and religious teaching into a story presented as unquestionable truth.