Thirty years ago, I made choices as a young mother that went against the grain.

One was that I ultimately decided I would not “sleep train” my child.

I would not “let my baby cry it out.”

I got a lot of pushback.

People laughed at me.

They told me I was a victim of my child’s “manipulation.”

The same for breastfeeding beyond one or two years.

How would my marriage survive?

Because it’s inconvenient to get up for a baby in the middle of the night.

We need our sleep.

And our sex life.

I understand completely.

Such are the choices we must all make.

It’s never easy.

This week in Torah, we are given a choice:

A blessing or a curse.

If we continue to act as we have, we will be cursed.

If we listen to God’s commandments, blessing will be ours.

Moses tells the Israelites:

“Once you cross over, you will not act in the Promised land as you act here.”

Things will be different.

Two crucial things came out in the news this week.

Both may lead us to despair, if we look at them from one angle:

How can these things still be happening—after everything!

Take, for instance, what happened in Mississippi.

A gang of six former law enforcement officials attacked, abused, sexually assaulted two Black men back in January.

It goes without saying that the cops were white.

They shot one of the men through the mouth, causing permanent physical damage.

Which I’m sure pales to the emotional trauma.

They then stood on the porch of the house talking about how to cover it up.

Modern day lynching, so many years after Jim Crow was abolished.

How could they continue to get away with such a thing?

How is this still possible?

Then there’s Donald J. Trump.

How can his political career still be thriving?

How?

After all that’s been brought to light over the years and decades and even more recently.

After continual abuse of power in government, and sexual abuse of women.

As I write!

We may easily be overcome by hopelessness.

Just a year ago, we were given the impression that the Me Too movement was dying!

(So soon? It was just getting started!)

And that the Donald Trumps of the world would win.

But E. Jean Carroll, a sexual assault target of Trump’s—thirty years ago—has refused to be a victim.

She won a civil case against Trump earlier this year—way past the statute of limitations was up!

Because of changing laws!

She had been told three decades ago by her friends to stay quiet; “He’ll bury you.”

It was a fair assessment of the power differential—

For that time, and even now!

Thirty years later, she refuses to be timid.

She has not let him bury her voice.

Now, women are saying, “We are not victims, not broken, not defiled, not ruined, asking men to rescue us.”

Rather, as Brooke Gladstone of On The Media says, “They’re pissed off, living their lives, defying the public imperative to open a vein in public as a testament to their loss and brokenness…

“They’re nobody’s property, nobody’s responsibility, and it’s about freaking time we took them seriously.”

And those former cops in Mississippi?

They pled guilty.

They will no longer be allowed to continue what they’ve been doing for—decades?

This was not true even a few years ago.

So are we ready for the Promised Land?

Not quite.

But we’re getting ready.

Thirty years ago, people told me I was damaging my children by taking them to bed with me.

That they would grow up to be too afraid to walk in this world.

My marriage would not survive.

None of these things happened.

Both my children are thriving, anything but afraid to walk in this world.

The same for my marriage.

We may despair and become paralyzed after a defeat, says Rebecca Traister in her On The Media interview.

But, “Social progress happens over lifetimes, not seasons.”

The choices we make are never easy.

We live in a society that demands much of us.

But the big spiritual lesson I took from my choices around child rearing was this:

“If I could close my heart to my own baby’s cries,

“how much easier, then,

“to close my heart to the cries of strangers in the world?”

The choices we make should never involve closing our hearts to those who suffer.

Our choices start in the home of our hearts.

Shabbat Shalom.

And say Amen.