I have no words for what’s happening in Ukraine. Yet, do I have the right to talk about anything besides the Ukraine?

Also, anything I would say, others have said already.

All are upset, angry, incensed, frightened.

Some are inspired by those staying back and fighting—civilians taking up arms to defend their country. Others are inspired by worldwide meetings for prayer.

So, instead of talking about Ukraine, I’m going to talk about a series I’ve been watching obsessively every night over the past couple of weeks: Good Girls.

My husband, who, like many men who fit the stereotype, loves watching war movies—the gorier the better—finds this show too scary;

All at once, very serious, very deep and very funny: ridiculous, unlikely, impossible, yet believable enough on certain levels that you get hooked. It keeps the heavy stuff just light enough that you can keep watching. It matches the reality and tragedy of life with the absurdity of people and our idiosyncrasies.

Above all, perhaps, it calls out societal problems that make it impossible for many to live a “normal” (and honest) life: low-paying jobs, high mortgages, medical bills, and basically no safety net in the wealthiest country in the world for those who play by the rules.

Three unlikely women—two sisters who couldn’t be more different, and the third, their best friend—from middle class backgrounds: the sisters are white; their friend, Black. They are “good girls” in desperate straights for different reasons.

They start their life of crime by robbing a grocery store, and are sucked into a whole crime ring. As they get deeper and deeper in, they both can’t and don’t want to get out because of the money, as hard as they try, as much as they commit each time to stop.

It gets bloody and gross, but also manages to stay light enough to laugh. It gets crazier and crazier—kind of like our world right now.

This week we finish reading the Book of Exodus. It’s a leap year, a “pregnant year,” as the term in Hebrew is translated; the month of Adar is doubled up; the double parshas (parshiot) we normally have are singled out.

Adar is the month of Purim, the holiday that tells (and acts out) the story of Esther and Mordechai and Haman, when everything gets turned on its head and we are “commanded” to get drunk enough to not know our enemy from our friend.

Good Girls break most, though not all, stereotypes we live with as Americans; the “nice, white girls” are criminals; the Black woman and her family are educated, honest and straight-laced under normal circumstances; the gang leaders, though Mexican and covered in tattoos, are not sexually manipulative and have very sophisticated taste in furniture.

And so it goes.

P’kudei is a repetition of the construction of the Tabernacle in all its detail. It is a finishing. A completion in itself. It’s how the Book of Exodus ends.

The parsha ends with God filling the space with “his” glory, during which time Moses can not enter the tent—not sure if it’s because he’s forbidden, or literally unable.

By day, a cloud (apparently God) settles over it, and by night, fire fills it.

This will happen throughout their forty years in the desert; as long as the cloud hovers over it, the Israelites know that they can not move forward. The lifting of the cloud signifies that it is time to move on.

Can we stand just one more thing? Another war? Along with a pandemic?

Can’t we just move on, beyond the horrors?

Cloud covering by day; fire by night. How do we move on?

We the (good and many) People of the United States of America, along with the people of Ukraine and all good people around the globe, are trying our hardest, in our own individual and collective ways, to do what we can to change the status quo, to stand up for and defend and preserve what needs defending and preserving: to put out the fires, to clear away the clouds: to see clearly what needs to be seen and to lay the foundations for a new world.

The double month of Adar, pregnant with possibilities, along with the shmita year and the leap year are supposed to offer us opportunities for newness.

Maybe we can’t see it clearly yet. And we can’t figure out why the fires—all the time, it seems. And we don’t know how our story ends.

In the meantime, like the story I heard of a Ukrainian mother laughing despite everything, we have to keep laughing: it’s our resilience.

Hazzak Hazzak v’nitchazek. Strong, strong, we must be strong—for each other.