Dear Friends,
Welcome to WORD WATCH: 40 days to reframe, refine & repair our language – our 2026 PREPENT journey into a new and better Jewish year. Ready to rebuild? This annual tradition of the Lab/Shul community invites us to take each of the 40 High and Holy days that begin the new year as an opportunity to reflect, review and rebuild. This year’s High Holy Days theme is Holy Shift and our Prepent focus is on the words we use, how they hurt and how they can heal. We are all caught in wars of words, weaponized as hate speech or drained of meaning; hollow slogans, sloppy shorthand, performative chants. On top of actual conflicts that claim lives and sow sorrow, how we wrestle with each other about these tough realities is making things worse. Too often we monitor what can and cannot be spoken, or stay silent, leaving our shared language limited, confusing, fragile, and fraught. In Jewish mystical tradition, this reality is known as Galut Ha-Dibbur—the Exile of the Word. What does it mean for language to go into exile? It happens when words are held hostage by conflict, polarization, and fear. It is the quiet trauma of watching sacred, nuanced concepts get flattened into battle cries, leaving our deepest and most nuanced human truths homeless and unspeakable. When the vocabularies we inherit no longer match the complex, wounded realities we inhabit, our ability to listen or speak to one another falls apart. So how do we rebuild? How do we bring our words back home, mend our speech in such divided times? We weave the wisdom of the mystics with our annual tool of repair – turning to one of our tradition’s oldest, helpful spiritual technologies: the month of Elul. For generations, the forty days from the new moon of Elul through Yom Kippur have served as an intentional, daily laboratory for personal reflection, communal conversations and collective change. Elul gives us the space and the pacing to slow down, weigh our words, and engage in the sacred work of Teshuva—return and repair. Because the war of words is one of the most bitter battlegrounds of our reality, this year’s journey focuses on the very building blocks of human connection: From Elul 1 through Yom Kippur (August 14 – September 22, 2026), I invite you to join me, together with our team, our seasonal artist in residence Gili Getz, and other artists and thinkers, for Prepent 2026. For 40 days, we will explore a curated selection of exiled words—from Peace and Zionism to Truth and Accountability. While we won’t be able to tackle every single boulder of trauma or trigger-term in a single month, with only short posts per word, our list is meant to spark your own reflection and shift. We all have our own unique way with words. And we all have work to do when it comes to repair. Every day you will receive a daily word and reflection directly to your inbox. We warmly encourage you, your friends and families, to use this practice if found helpful, to identify other specific words you wrestle with, reflect on their meaning, and share with us or with others. One day at a time, we hope to lift our words from the battlegrounds of binaries, reclaim them from our keyboards, rebuild a vocabulary that shifts from rage to repair, holding both our pains and our shared humanity. By naming this exile, we begin reclaiming words as bridges rather than barriers. It’s one of the ways how to re-build a better world, together. Join us to co-create a collective shift together, heart to heart, word by word, day by holy day. Let’s rebuild a better world with our oldest building blocks. Shana Tova: A Better Year, and Better World, for All. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie Design featuring photography by Artist/Activist in Residence: Gili Getz |
