Rabbi Alon C Ferency

This meditation begins with a single, trembling word of hope: oulai—“perhaps.” When Abraham stands before God and pleads for the people of Sodom, he invokes the moral imagination that sees possibility amid ruin. “Perhaps there may be fifty righteous… perhaps ten.” Perhaps becomes a mantra that loosens the grip of certainty, resentment, and despair. Through breath and contemplation, participants are invited to hold their own sites of injury, politics, or difference in this spacious uncertainty—to soften judgment and allow compassion to emerge. Perhaps is not indecision but permission: the courage to imagine goodness where none seems apparent, to let empathy and curiosity restore what fear divides. As we repeat oulai yesh, we practice the faith that healing and justice might yet be possible, one “perhaps” at a time.