Progress Is Not Inevitable — It Is Promised

Hello and welcome to Contact Chai. Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on June 12th when Rabbi Steven delivered a sermon deflating the naive notion that progress is inevitable rather than the product of hard fought victories, like our spiritual ancestors setting out to vanquish Canaan who we read about in the parsha or our queer ancestors who struggled against bigotry who we honor during Pride month. How will we promise to carry forward a legacy of courage?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This drash was delivered at our service on June 12th, 2026. You can listen to this sermon on Contact Chai Podcast or watch it on YouTube.
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My generation was raised on the idea that progress was inevitable. Yes, there was still work to be done around racial equality, gender equity, the redistribution of wealth, disability access, etc. but the “why” of this work was obvious. It was the right thing to do. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us from posters pinned to the walls of our classrooms: the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice. And we, Millennials, were born on the downslope toward this unavoidable righteous end.

And so when Obama was elected (which was the first presidential election that I, and many people around my age, participated in), it only furthered our sense that progress was the natural course of history. Any student of civil rights was aware that this journey is never a straight line. But where we were heading, however meandering our path might be, felt certain.

Standing where we are now, so far from the future we had hoped for, we know the inevitability of progress is a myth – a beautiful one, certainly something to strive for, but in the end an imagined ideal, not a reflection of reality.

There were, if we had listened then, voices telling us that this forward momentum was not something we should take for granted. Many Black educators and activists warned us that the election of a Black president, although something to be celebrated, did not undo the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow – nor did it dismantle the structures of American society that continue to uphold racial hierarchies, affecting everything from educational outcomes to healthcare access. Obama himself raised this prophetic warning. In his farewell speech, he said, “After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.”

https://youtu.be/RUoYFiu8dlM

The prophetic voice points to an inconvenient truth. In Judaism, there is a great tradition of truth-tellers who call from the edges of society to warn us about what happens when we tolerate social ills or abuse power (in fact, there is an entire section of the Hebrew Bible devoted to their writings – it’s where we get some of our best, and most quotable, verses: “Let justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream” [Amos 5:24] or “They will beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, nor will they learn war any longer” [Isaiah 2:4]). Despite their eventual canonization, prophets are never popular while alive. Their words are harsh. But it would be a mistake to only understand them as a source of castigation. By telling the truth of where we are and the obstacles we face, they identify the work that needs to be done and challenge us to get to it. Just as the prophetic voice refuses ignorance, it does not tolerate the hysterics of fear nor the idleness of despair.

As hard as it can be to hear the truth, it is harder still to be a truth teller. When we open the Torah this week, our ancestors are encamped in the wilderness a short journey from their intended destination – the land of Israel. God, perhaps understanding that they could use some encouragement, tells Moses to send scouts ahead of the people to assess their future home. He selects one person from each of the twelve tribes, instructs them to take a good look at the land and the people who live there, and come back to report what they saw to the waiting Israelites. The scouts return after forty days, bearing grapes, pomegranates, and figs. It’s just as God has promised, the scouts report, it’s a land flowing with milk and honey. There’s also a lot of people there. They’re pretty strong and they live in large, fortified cities.

Caleb, the scout selected from the tribe of Judah, steps forward. Yes, the people are strong. Yes they live in large, fortified cities. But this is the promised land, he says, the place we have been working so hard to reach! Whatever challenge faces us, yachol nuchal lah, we have what it takes to overcome it.

And here is where something interesting happens. The other scouts begin to change their report. A land flowing with milk and honey, is that what we said? No, this is a land that devours anyone who steps foot in it. And the people? Oh, they’re not just strong. They’re like giants! When we compared ourselves to them, we looked like grasshoppers – and they must have seen us the same way.

Hearing this version of the story, our ancestors panic. They tear their clothes and weep. Didn’t God promise us a better life, to bring us out of slavery to a place where we could be free? Why did we come all of this way to die, to watch our loved ones get taken from us by these terrifying creatures? We should have stayed in Egypt!

But Caleb insists on the truth, rebuking the Israelites. Yes, the way forward is going to be challenging. But you are all being ridiculous right now. Stop giving into fear! Despair is not a strategy. The promised land is still there – and it is exceedingly good, we saw it ourselves. Remember that God is with us. We’ve got what it takes. It’s not going to be easy, but we can do it if we try. But in response to his truth-telling, so caught up in their hysteria, our ancestors threaten to stone Caleb to death.

In the end, this generation of Israelites will die in the wilderness. According to the Torah, it is as much a punishment brought upon them by God as it is a consequence of their own actions. They had been operating with the mindset that their destination was inevitable, that the promised land would come to them – when in fact, the journey was always theirs to make. No one could take those steps for them. And when faced with the possibility that the end was not inevitable, that it would take real work (and a sober assessment of their own shortcomings) to reach their destination – they panicked. Fear became an obstacle greater than any fortified city, despair a wilderness harder to cross than any they had traversed before. And anyone who tried to name that fact, and the fact that our ancestors were the ones standing in their own way, was rebuffed and refused.

It’s Pride Month, a moment when we reflect on and celebrate the hard earned progress experienced by the LGBTQ+ community since the Stonewall Riots nearly six decades ago (the riots were an act of civil disobedience against unfair policing of queer spaces, whose commemoration is why June has become synonymous with Pride). But amidst the parades and the parties, there have been some truth-tellers sounding the alarm – and I think we owe them an apology.

As with all forms of progress, I was raised to believe that LGBTQ+ equality was inevitable – and I think, for a time, a lot of us felt this way. Of course, like any journey through the wilderness, the path was not linear (I was living in California when Obama was elected, our joy tempered by the passage of Prop 8 – which ended a brief window of marriage equality for the state). Yet the destination felt certain, and step by step it drew closer. We secured workplace protections. We fought for healthcare access. We found representation in the media, in schools and universities, and in our halls of government (and while we haven’t had a queer president, we did have a gay presidential candidate win the 2020 Iowa Caucus). Eleven years ago, the Supreme Court extended marriage equality to our community and it felt like the fight was over.

But there were voices, especially among our trans siblings, who warned us that there was still work to be done. They pointed to the continued discrimination against trans folks in housing, employment, and healthcare access. They noted the barriers that blocked them from changing legal documents to reflect their gender identity. They mourned the fact that being transgender, and especially being a trans person of color, made you a target of violence in this country. They painfully called out queer organizations and community spaces for forgetting (or sometimes, shamefully, excluding) the “T” in LGBTQ+. Yet too often, their voices were drowned out in the giddiness of Pride – as corporations courted our wallets and packed our parades, as the White House went full drag in rainbow light – and many in the LGBTQ+ community, and by extension our allies, believed we had reached the end of our journey. Any backlash against this unavoidable conclusion was the dying gasp of hatred quickly becoming history, even when it manifested in terrible and tragic ways (today is the tenth anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting). Just give it time and everything, inevitably, will turn out alright.

But our trans siblings kept sounding the alarm, serving as prophets of an inconvenient truth, warning us that there were people working to bend the arc of history in a different direction. Already standing at the edge of the LGBTQ+ community, not always welcome or able to participate in spaces that had been created for their cisgender gay and lesbian siblings, trans folks became an easy target – used by the right as a bogeyman to stoke fear among their constituents, while largely ignored by a left who felt like the fight was already won. Trans people became a convenient scapegoat, used to distract Americans from the nation’s many economic and social ills (Sound familiar? We, Jews, know this political tactic all too well). And so over the past few years, we have seen a tidal backflow against transgender rights and protections – quickly washing away many of the hard earned wins that have taken decades to secure. This administration has made a public spectacle over participation on sports teams and bathroom access, while quietly scrubbing transgender resources from government websites and pulling federal funding from hospitals that offer gender-affirming care. According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, in 2026 (that’s less than six months) there have been 793 bills, introduced at the national or state level, that seek to block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, or the right to publicly exist. 55 have passed. 668 are pending.

To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, first they came for trans folks – and we already know who is next. For years, the crosswalk leading to the former site of the Pulse Nightclub has been painted rainbow – a reminder of the beauty and resilience of the queer community, even amidst tragedy (as I mentioned earlier, it has been ten years this evening since a gunman murdered 49 people and injured 58 more in an act of anti-LGBTQ+ violence). Last year, the City of Orlando removed it. And it’s not just rainbow crosswalks that are being painted over in cities across the country. Our symbols and stories are being removed from flagpoles, restricted on social media, banned from school libraries, and erased from national monuments. The corporations who eagerly capitalized on Pride are decidedly less colorful this June. And inevitabilities like marriage equality don’t seem, well, so inevitable anymore. In 2022, 71% of Americans felt that LGBTQ+ relationships are morally acceptable – a number that had steadily climbed, year after year, to reach that high point. This year, that percentage has dipped to 62%. In January, a coalition of 47 national organizations launched a campaign to overturn marriage equality. The fight is not over.

It is hard to admit that the progress we thought was certain is anything but that. There is a particular kind of despair that sits heavy on my heart when I remember the hope I had, not so long ago, thinking about what the future had in store. I mourn the loss of inevitable progress, even if it was just a myth. Knowing that there are well-organized and well-funded forces in the world, abetted by people who control the very institutions meant to protect us, seeking to undo everything we have worked so hard to secure – it’s easy, and understandable, to feel like grasshoppers compared to them. I am afraid of what might happen before we have the chance to correct course, if that’s even an option available to us – how many protections lost, how many people harmed, how much greater the distance between us and where we want to end up. Maybe we can’t make it. Maybe the wilderness is too vast, too perilous to find our way across.

Right now, we have a choice. We can be the generation who dies in the wilderness: mired in fear and despair, mourning the loss of a clear path forward, perhaps wishing for an imagined past – an Egypt, where everything was easier than it is now, right? Or we can be truth-tellers: those who recognize that there are obstacles ahead of us, and that maybe how we thought we’d get there is no longer how we’re going to make it, but still we have what it takes to make the journey – if only we’ll let go of our grief and self-pity, and get out of our own way. This is not to say that feelings of fear and despair aren’t real. But they are not the whole story.

Being a truth-teller is hard. It often puts you against the majority. It can place you on the margins of society (or your own community). It can mean speaking truth to power, but it can also mean being honest with (and potentially upsetting) people we care about. Sometimes it means taking a hard look at ourselves, to see where we have allowed our perceived smallness to hold us back. But as much as the truth can be hard, it can also carry hope. Caleb was honest about the challenges his people faced. And he was also able to show them the beauty of what lay ahead of them, and remind them of the promise that had carried our ancestors so far – from slavery in Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. It was not just divine largesse that brought them from one place to another, but their own two feet. Caleb was selected as the scout representing the Tribe of Judah – and we yehudim, we Jews, are his descendants. This kind of truth-telling is in our spiritual DNA.

So let me tell you some truths.

This is the truth. Progress is not inevitable. It is achieved through hard work, diligence, and a willingness to listen to those on the margins – especially when they feel threatened or tell us they are under attack. Looking at the young people in this room, I am so sorry that you don’t get to grow up in a world where the arc of history always bends toward justice. I wish I could give you that promise. But that promise will only happen if we make it happen.

This is the truth. There are forces working to undo the progress we have made, on this issue and on so many others. We must do everything in our power to resist that. And because of the challenges they place before us, the journey ahead will not be easy. We may have to change course. We might have to find another way.

This is also the truth. As Jews, we have crossed countless wildernesses like this before. We are still here (and to be frank, so many of those who tried to prevent us from being here are not). And as queer folks, we are the inheritors of a creativity and a resilience that will help us face whatever obstacles stand in our way. We are also still here. Following in the footsteps of those who came before us, I know we can find a way forward toward that promised future.

And one more truth, because it deserves to be said again and again in our holy spaces, like this one, and in our sacred moments, like Shabbat. Every single one of you is created in the divine image – whether you are lesbian, gay, or queer, bisexual, asexual, or heterosexual; intersex, transgender, genderqueer, or cisgender; out or in the closet; whoever you love, whatever your relationship status, whatever your relationship structure; wherever you find yourself on the beautiful rainbow of human gender, sexuality, and self expression. There is only one you and you, just as you are, are loved. Let this truth be our guiding principle as, together, we bend the arc of history toward justice, toward acceptance, toward celebration, toward pride, and toward love. 💕 

Happy Pride and Shabbat Shalom.