As I meet with b’nai mitzvah each week, I tell them that one day, many years from now, they will find their Dvar Torah in a drawer. When they reread their words, the relevance will be as clear as the day they delivered it on the bima.

This week, I heeded my own advice and discovered the hard copy of my own bar mitzvah Dvar Torah from Parshat Ekev thirty years ago. I focused on the haftorah, a message from Isaiah. God assures us that “we are engraved upon the palm of God’s hands.” The haftorah continues, “Why when I came was there no one there?”

I wrote three decades ago, “On one hand, this is a simple message to have faith in God. But faith itself is not the end but only a means God will not do everything for us. There are times when we have to act out on what is right.”

When I reread that speech, I saw myself as a 13-year-old in Syracuse, New York. The internet was barely alive, there were prospects for peace in the Middle East, and I had an innocence about the world.

Today, do we not ask the same questions as Isaiah? What is the purpose of faith? We know not simply to say God is with me, but for us to have the ability to say we are with God. Over the last few years, with increased antisemitism and the tireless effort to defend ourselves as Jews, it is faith in God and in each other that has kept us strong throughout doubt and throughout fear. As I write these words, I have open the Torah that I was given at my bar mitzvah and the prayer book that I was given as a 1st grader in the Syracuse Hebrew Day School. The ancient words of Isaiah, passed down through our sacred books, are what have kept that faith alive. The haftorah concludes, “God has comforted Zion.” I pray for that comfort for us all this Shabbat.