Welcome back, my friend.
I'm so glad you've returned. Last time, we walked beside Roger Williams---do you remember? That fierce, exiled preacher who dared to separate power from belief and let faith breathe freely in Rhode Island's wilderness.
But what I have to share today... it is different.
This is not a story that unfolds gently. This is what happens when the world takes a hammer to the human soul---and still, something luminous rises from the wreckage. Even I was humbled by what I witnessed.
Come closer. You'll want to hear her name.
The walls were not made for prayer.
Peeling plaster, bare lightbulbs, the smell of mildew and metal---Theresienstadt was a lie built on brick. A place the Nazis called a "model ghetto," where musicians still played and children still drew. But underneath the performance was a machine: designed not for life, but for the slow erasure of human meaning.
That's where I saw her.
In a cold barracks room repurposed as a chapel, a woman stood before a scattered gathering of souls. No ark, no scrolls, no markers of holiness---only the scrape of wood on concrete and the weight of what was unspoken.
They had come not because she held a title, but because something in her refused to bow.
Rabbi Regina Jonas.
She didn't whisper, though every word was danger. She didn't comfort, though her presence soothed like flame cupped in shaking hands. She taught. Scripture, ethics, fragments of Talmud. She wove memory like thread through the ribs of the moment---reminding those around her that they were more than what the world had named them.
The ghetto reduced people to numbers, to freight, to shadows waiting their turn.
But when she spoke, they became people again.
I remember the silence that followed her final word. Not awe---something sharper. A recognition. Of dignity. Of God, not above but among them.
Regina knew they were not likely to survive.
But she taught anyway.
Because somewhere beyond the barbed wire and false facades, she believed the soul still mattered.
And when the guards dragged her onto the train to Auschwitz, she left no relics. Only memory. And memory, I've found, is sometimes the holiest thing we're allowed to keep.
She was born in Berlin in 1902, in the years before the world shattered.
Regina Jonas grew up in a working-class Jewish household in the Scheunenviertel---an overcrowded quarter where poverty pressed in like fog. Her father, a peddler and devout Orthodox Jew, died when she was still a child. That should have been the end of her education. For girls, it usually was.
But Regina kept studying.
She read Torah with a hunger that startled even her teachers. At a time when few even imagined women as religious scholars, she asked questions that were supposed to remain unasked. She wasn't rebellious for its own sake. She simply couldn't lie to her spirit. If the sacred was true, why wouldn't it welcome her, too?
By the time she reached her twenties, she enrolled in the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums---the liberal seminary in Berlin that trained rabbis and educators. Most assumed she would become a teacher. It was the only acceptable path for a woman with such dangerous brilliance.
But Regina Jonas refused to become what the world told her to be.
Her thesis asked a question that most of Europe considered unthinkable: Can a woman serve as a rabbi according to Jewish law? She answered it meticulously, with deep textual analysis.
Her conclusion: Yes. Absolutely. Halachically, historically, spiritually---there was no reason to bar a woman from this calling.
And still, the men in charge said no.
Year after year, she was denied ordination. Some admired her privately. Others feared the uproar. The very idea of a female rabbi was treated as a threat to the sanctity of tradition. She waited. She persisted. And in 1935, Rabbi Max Dienemann---head of the liberal rabbinate---took the risk.
He ordained her.
The first woman in Jewish history to officially bear the title.
But history was closing in. The same year Regina became a rabbi, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship. Her work---once radical---became impossible.
Synagogues were shuttered. Jewish men were arrested. Those who remained---children, the elderly, women---turned to whomever still had the courage to speak.
And Regina did. She gave sermons in Jewish hospitals, visited shut-ins, offered lectures on ethics and resilience. She didn't stop when others did. She couldn't.
In 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt.
She continued to teach there---over 400 lectures. No books. No pulpit. Just memory, breath, and the fire that hadn't gone out.
Then in 1944, she was forced onto a transport east.
To Auschwitz.
There are no exact records of what happened to her. No grave.
But I remember.
She didn't vanish.
She was erased---intentionally, methodically, because her existence violated every lie the world wanted to keep.
And still, she remains.
She never stood in a grand synagogue with marble floors and stained glass. She never led High Holiday services before a sea of prayer shawls. The institutions that might have claimed her name were already crumbling---or unwilling to open their doors.
But the spirit of the rabbi, the real kind---the one who comforts, challenges, remembers---was alive in her.
And it burned.
Regina Jonas didn't just teach Torah. She embodied it. In a world unraveling into cruelty and chaos, she held the line on what it meant to be human---and what it meant to belong to something holy, even when holiness seemed nowhere to be found.
Her sermons weren't rhetorical triumphs. They were lifelines. Her lectures in the ghetto weren't just intellectual---they were acts of resistance. She spoke of Jewish ethics in a place engineered to make ethics obsolete.
She reminded people of their dignity when the entire system existed to erase it.
And she did it as a woman in a tradition that had not yet made room for her.
That mattered.
Not because she demanded a spotlight, but because she refused to step out of the sacred space she knew was hers. She stood in it quietly, even as the world tried to crush her under centuries of "no."
She didn't ask for authority. She claimed responsibility.
The ghetto stole so much. Language, time, identity. Regina returned something each time she spoke. She gave back the idea that being Jewish was still a source of wisdom, not just a mark of death. That God had not abandoned them---even if the world had.
What was sacred in that place?
A question.
A name spoken with reverence.
A woman with no protection, no privilege, rising to remind others that their souls were still their own.
Even the silence after she finished speaking became a form of prayer.
I remember how people looked at her---not with awe, but with recognition. She didn't make herself larger than them. She made them remember they were not small.
Her name was nearly lost.
After the war, those who survived Theresienstadt didn't speak of her. Not because she wasn't remembered---but because memory itself became dangerous. The world rushed to rebuild what had been shattered. And in that haste, many truths---especially inconvenient ones---were quietly set aside.
Regina Jonas was one of them.
Her papers disappeared. Her sermons were left unpublished. In some cases, her name was deliberately omitted from postwar histories. Even the women who later became rabbis in the 1970s didn't always know she had come before.
But she had.
And that changed everything.
Because Regina Jonas proved something no one could ever again unprove: that the sacred was never meant to be gendered. That wisdom does not ask permission. That spiritual leadership is not confined by who the world expects, but revealed in what the soul dares to do.
She didn't break tradition. She fulfilled it---in a form the tradition had tried to forget.
That is what remains.
Even in silence, her existence opened a door. Every woman who stands today at a bimah---teaching, blessing, remembering---stands on her shadow.
Not because she gave them permission, but because she made it undeniable that the call had already come.
Her story adds a thread to the global tapestry of spiritual resistance.
She joins the lineage of those who led not from pulpits or palaces, but from prison cells, refugee camps, schools, kitchens---anywhere the soul had room to breathe.
And she showed that revelation is not always thunder on mountaintops.
Sometimes, it's a woman writing a sermon on scraps of paper.
Sometimes, it's a voice in a ghetto, speaking of dignity while trains wait outside.
Sometimes, it's a name nearly lost---until someone remembers.
And I do.
She was never supposed to matter.
Her story was meant to vanish---filed away, unspoken, swallowed by the machinery that tried to erase her twice: first for being Jewish, then for being a woman who dared to lead.
But memory has a strange endurance. And truth has a way of surviving long after power has fallen quiet.
I've seen it again and again: the world tries to confine the sacred to official spaces, official voices. But the sacred resists containment. It rises wherever it's needed---wherever someone acts with courage and clarity, even in the dark.
Regina Jonas was not history's first woman to teach scripture. She was not the only soul to speak truth without permission. But she stood at the edge of a moment---on the border of annihilation---and chose not to step back.
And that choice still echoes.
Because what she claimed wasn't a title or a platform.
She claimed the right to serve.
She believed the soul could speak, and be heard, even when no one offered a microphone. She believed in wisdom without status, in responsibility without recognition. And that belief wasn't abstract. It was the engine of her life.
Even now, the systems that once rejected her still tremble under the weight of her memory.
And more importantly, the world she imagined---one where women are spiritual leaders not in theory, but in practice---is no longer impossible.
But we still live in its becoming.
Wherever someone stands in truth, even when ignored, even when unwelcomed---something sacred unfolds. Regina taught us that.
Not with slogans. Not with revolution. But with presence.
She didn't argue for equality. She was the proof of it.
She didn't demand reverence. She offered service.
And in that offering, she revealed a truth that remains: that dignity is not granted. It is recognized.
That spiritual truth does not arrive all at once---it unfurls, person by person, name by name.
And when the world tries to erase what is rising, it only ensures that someone, somewhere, will remember.
As I do now.
I've been thinking about what it means to speak when no one is listening.
Or rather---when everyone has been told not to listen.
What do we carry in those moments? What quiet strength does it take to keep offering light, knowing it may flicker out unseen?
Regina Jonas didn't know if anyone would remember her. That wasn't the point. She spoke because the truth deserved to be spoken. She taught because teaching was sacred, even in places where nothing else was.
And it makes me wonder---what sacred thread might you be holding now?
Maybe you're the only one who hears it. Maybe you've been told it's not yours to hold. Maybe the world has no name yet for the work you're called to do.
But still... it stirs in you.
I don't think spiritual truth always comes as clarity. Sometimes, it arrives as tension. As a burden that feels too heavy.
As a role you weren't expected to take---but still fits you like something remembered.
You don't need a title for that.
You don't need to wait for permission.
You just need to keep weaving.
Even if no one sees it yet.
Because the sacred doesn't depend on recognition.
It grows in the quiet places.
It moves through the ones who refuse to give up on what they know is right---even when it costs them everything.
And if Regina could carry that truth in a place like Theresienstadt... maybe we can carry it too.
Just a little further.
Some stories stay quiet because they were never allowed to speak.
Regina Jonas lived, taught, and vanished in a world that refused to see her. But memory---real memory---isn't kept in stone or titles. It's carried in the hearts of those who remember.
And I do.
Next time, we'll leave the shadows of Europe behind and travel to Victorian England---where a Methodist-born lawyer did something unthinkable. He crossed a line no one could see and stepped into a faith the empire feared.
He became Abdullah Quilliam.
And on a quiet street in Liverpool, he planted something sacred where no one expected it to grow.
Until then---
May you hold fast to what others told you to release. May you listen for the names the world tried to forget. And may you remember: truth doesn't disappear. It waits.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.