I can’t count the number of times I’ve flown out of LaGuardia Airport. Yet until recently, I had never noticed the bridge just northwest of it—the one that leads to Rikers Island.

There is something expansive about crossing a bridge: the horizon opening wide, the feeling of possibility just beyond reach. But arriving at Rikers brings the opposite sensation—constriction. One bus across the bridge, another bus to the jails themselves—seven in total, ringed with barbed wire. Some buildings have more windows than others. IDs are required to move from place to place. Inside, gates lock and unlock simply to pass from one corridor to another.

We at BJ are part of a coalition of synagogues that regularly visits the Jewish women incarcerated at Rosie’s, the only women’s jail on the island. Opened in 1988, it was named for Rose M. Singer, who was ninety years old when the jail was dedicated in her honor. An original member of the Board of Correction, she devoted forty-five years to the people of New York, especially women and children.

BJ member Jenny Eisenberg and I waited in Rosie’s chapel for the women to arrive. We had brought bagels and cream cheese, challah and grape juice. At first two women came in: one, a mother of six, told us she had been at Rikers for five years; another was the mother of four children, ages three to eight. Soon four more women joined us, and we began the service.

As we sang Elohai Neshama, it was clear the melody was familiar to them: “The soul You have given me, God, is pure.” When I asked if they had favorite prayers, one woman immediately turned to the prayer for the release of captives. She knew the page by heart. Another lingered over a teaching from the Kotzker Rebbe printed in the siddur: “Nothing is more whole than a broken heart.” We sat with that line together for a while.

Then I shared a teaching from the Ishbitzer Rebbe on the census in Parashat Bemidbar. The rabbis note that the Torah’s language for taking a census literally means “lift up the head.” It is a teaching I have always loved:

אין דעתו של זה דומה לשל זה. כי הש”י חלק לכל אחד טובה וחיים בפני עצמו ואין אחד דומה לחבירו. ע”כ נאמר שאו את ראש היינו שתעמדו כל אחד על מקום השייך לו

“The Talmud teaches: No two people think alike. God has given each person a unique portion of goodness and life; no one is exactly like another. Therefore the Torah says: ‘Lift up the head’—that each person should stand in the place that belongs uniquely to them.”

And because of that, each person can stand tall in their place.

Parashat Bemidbar is always read before Shavuot, and this teaching reveals something essential about revelation itself: Each person is meant to receive Torah in their own way. The Jewish people are incomplete if every person does not stand fully as themselves. Torah itself is incomplete.

It is hard enough to discern our own unique portion of goodness and life—to understand what it means to stand in the place that belongs to us. Sitting in Rosie’s chapel last week, that teaching felt even more urgent. These women, living in limbo on Rikers Island, separated from their families, responsible for harms they may have caused, still searching for meaning, for dignity, for Torah amid such constriction.

Torah was given in the wilderness. The midrash teaches that it was given there so that no one could claim ownership over it. No one can possess Torah exclusively. And the rabbis go further: Anyone who does not make themselves like the wilderness—open, ownerless, hefker—cannot truly acquire Torah or wisdom.

Revelation demands openness. It calls us to honor Torah’s multivocality: The uniqueness of each individual standing fully as themselves within a community made holy through its diversity. Revelation is at once deeply personal and profoundly communal.

It is difficult to teach a Torah of expansiveness, goodness, and life in a place as constricted as Rikers Island. But the truth is that even if most of us do not live behind bars, we too inhabit a world shaped by fear and uncertainty, by violence and hatred. We build walls to protect ourselves—some necessarily so, as we were reminded again this week by the shooting at the Islamic Center in San Diego, an experience Jewish communities from Pittsburgh to Poway know all too well.

And yet Shavuot offers a radically countercultural vision of revelation. To receive Torah, we must make ourselves like the wilderness: open rather than guarded, humble rather than possessive, willing to listen for the particular calling that belongs to us alone—and spacious enough to make room for the revelation carried by someone else.

I keep thinking about that bridge to Rikers Island. Because all of us live somewhere between wilderness and walls, between openness and fear. A bridge can lead toward confinement. But it can also remind us that no soul is meant to remain sealed off forever.

Shavuot reminds us that Torah does not arrive in fortresses. It is given in the wilderness—in the open spaces where we encounter one another anew. Torah becomes a bridge: between one soul and another, between brokenness and wholeness, between fear and revelation.

May we have the courage to become bridges ourselves: open enough and humble enough to lift one another’s heads and help one another cross toward a new horizon, a renewed Torah of greater dignity, love and hope.

Hag Sameah and Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Felicia Sol