Uvalde. Buffalo. Santa Ana. Bomb threats at JCCs (including our own).

If the Messiah were ever going to come to fix our broken world, now would be a good time.

On Shabbat we are going to take a look at three texts that deal with the Messiah.

The first is an Elijah story. Elijah famously tells a rabbi searching for the Messiah that you can find him in a leper colony, among the most diseased and impoverished people.

The second is a story by Israel’s Nobel Prize-winning author Shmuel Agnon called The Kerchief, which is a literary treatment of the passage from the Talmud about the Messiah coming from a leper colony.

The third is a sermon by Rabbi Harold Kushner, delivered at his son Aaron’s Bar Mitzvah (Aaron would pass away later that year), on the Agnon story.