Rosh Hashanah 2026: Do We Stay or Do We Go?

Earlier this summer, my daughter Nomi and I went to see The Producers in London’s West End. I saw it decades ago with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Could anyone really top them? But Nomi had never seen it. What we got was a mashup of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, and a Springtime for Hitler that had us in stitches.

The theatre was packed with Brits. Statistically speaking, almost none of them Jews. And as the laughter built and rolled through the house, it felt good,  surprisingly good, to let loose among strangers. We carry so much trauma. So much suspicion and fear of the other, for good reason. Laughing together as Hitler and his cronies were skewered on stage felt like a dose of humanity; a rare sensation these days having suffered betrayal after betrayal by those whom we counted on as friends and allies.  

But then I stopped laughing. 

How could this British audience find the parody of Hitler's murderous hatred so funny when the UK just recorded the sharpest rise in antisemitic attacks of any country outside Israel? When Jewish men are stabbed on the streets of Golders Green and Hatzalah ambulances are burned? When they've elected some of the most extreme anti-Israel and anti-Zionist politicians in British history? Wasn't this exactly what Dara Horn names in her haunting book People Love Dead Jews: sanctimonious grief over Jews long dead and indifference to the ones still crying out?

I couldn’t read the room; couldn't figure out who I was sitting with. Was it safe to laugh? Was my laughter condoning what I feared was a naive, performative, protest against antisemitism? I wanted to stand up and shout: Who are you people?

Of course, I'll never know. What I took away instead is the lesson of that moment, which I've been trying to figure out. Here's what I've got: I can't conclude that everyone in that audience was a bumbling antisemite. That's unfair to them, and it's no help to us. For the sake of my own humanity, I have to stay open to the humanity of others. But for my own pride, and my own safety, I also have to stay awake to today's grotesque hypocrisies, the hate and the lies that have been paid for in Jewish blood. And to those who tolerate them, even if they would never lift their own hand against us.

More than two years ago now, in April of 2024, Franklin Foer published "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending." He traced the explosion of Jew-hatred that began on October 8th on campuses and lecture halls, in elementary schools, city councils, school boards, governments local and national. He chronicled the decades of intellectual and political drift, here and in Israel, that wore away hard-won bonds between us and our fellow citizens, our colleagues, our neighbours. And he noted the embers stoked deliberately by the left and by the right until they caught and burst into flames of blame and rage, fanned by political leaders and pundits, and then used as pretext for attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish businesses. I don't need to recite the litany. We all know enough. But if you haven't read the article, read it.

What matters most for us this morning is the question he names that Jews have asked themselves in every period of decline in our safety and our status: Do we stay, or do we go?

What does it mean to be a Canadian Jew, an American Jew, when we feel our governments and our fellow citizens have failed us, even betrayed us? Can we still be at home here? In boardrooms and courtrooms, universities and hospitals, sports leagues and restaurants? Do we still belong in, do we still belong to, the countries that took our families in, that gave us the chance to begin again, that let us flourish as remarkably as we have? Or do we belong only among our own, in our own country, on the other side of the world?

No one gets to judge how anyone else answers. For some the question is academic; a way to voice frustration, not an actual plan. We're not going anywhere. For others it's a moving truck already booked. Some are staying but telling their children to build their futures elsewhere. American Jews are looking north. Canadian Jews are looking south. Nobody knows which way to turn.

The tragedy is that we're asking at all. Ninety years ago our people asked this same question. Some of the answers went up with the smoke over Auschwitz. Other answers are the only reason we are sitting in this room. Those echoes are deafening.

The latest edition of Sources, the Hartman Institute’s journal of Jewish thought, is devoted to exactly this question. The articles are written by American Jewish scholars, philanthropists, policy experts, authors, and civil society educators. They're writing about America, and yes, the two countries are genuinely different, but the thinking crosses borders. And the essays arrive at more or less one answer: Not to become less American, or less Canadian, but to become more.

Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum reaches back to Justice Louis Brandeis, who argued a century ago that being a proud Jewish American was to fulfill the vision of both traditions which dreamed of a world that welcomes people in the fullest expressions of who they are, just like the multicultural vision at the heart of Canada. 

That combined identity is precisely what's under attack. Jews everywhere are held to account for a government they did not elect, in a country that is not their home. Pew's latest survey, released in April, found that 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavourably. Being an American Zionist has now become suspect. So Jews on the left are quietly dropping Israel out of their Jewish identity, and Jews on the right are quietly dropping America out of their Jewish identity. We talked about the first of those last year. Koplow says the second is just as grave a mistake.

It’s a grave mistake because it misreads the Jewish Golden Age by assuming there’s been something special about us that made our success here possible. There wasn't, or not only. There was something special about the constitutional architecture, the institutions built to hold a pluralistic society together. Which means that walking away from the work of democracy, precisely now when it is most precarious, forfeits the very thing that protected us. It misses a critical opportunity, even responsibility. 

Withdrawal is not shelter. Turn away from spaces hostile to Jews and they only grow more hostile. Seal ourselves into our own enclaves and we aren't safer, we're simply easier to target. Fragmented societies are societies where fragments get isolated one at a time. Civic alliance is among the oldest defences against tyranny.

The fewer encounters people have with actual Jews, the easier the lies go down,  and there are more lies now, spread by agents human and artificial. So stay in the room, Koplow argues. Have the complicated conversation about why Israel matters to us as Canadians and Americans. Explain the two pillars our tradition has always held together: the universal and the particular. For some of our fellow citizens this is genuinely hard to grasp, so we have to say it plainly: Judaism summons us to take the blessings and burdens of being Jewish and use them to heal the world at large. Both at once, always. Extremists have dragged each of those pillars to its most dangerous, opposing extreme. Ours is the battle for the centre; to hold them together in creative, spiritual, moral tension. That's where we make our home.

If Koplow argues that leaning in is the smartest political strategy, Deborah Barer argues that it's a mitzvah. Her model is the brit, the covenant between God and Israel. Citizenship, she says, is the same kind of bond. Mutual obligation, mutual privilege, and no exit clause from our commitment to our democracies, despite our hardships and disillusionment.

A covenant is a love that survives disappointment; that navigates the inevitable chasms between ideals and the limited people entrusted to fulfill them. Read the Tanakh honestly and it is a chronicle of our failures. None of the grand moments safeguard us from the mistakes we go on to make. Not Sinai, not settling the land, not building the Temple. Well into the Prophets we are still being castigated for abandoning God. To enter the covenant, Barer writes, is to commit oneself to be in relationship with people who are a continual disappointment.

And God never walks away.

Neither should we.

There's a midrash that God begins each day with a little Torah study. Barer reads that as teaching that the Jewish response to human failure is not to give up. It's to reinvest. Covenantal love is not an idea; it’s a practice. Which is also what Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins means when she says democracy is not something you have; it's something you do. 

When we’re commanded to love our neighbour, it’s not an emotion we’re required to cultivate; it’s a lifestyle of loving gestures. Rabbi Akiva said this is a core principle of the Torah. The Targum activates it by translating it to say, “What’s hateful to you, don’t do to someone else.” The root of the Hebrew word for love, ahavah, is yahav, which means to give. 

Helping to heal the ills and pains of our fellow citizens is a bedrock of democracy. But here’s the hard part, Barer acknowledges: we can’t predict the demands this civic love will make on us.

When I marry couples, I make sure to explain that saying “Yes!” when you’re proposed to can’t mean that you wish to stay bound to the person before you for the rest of you life for the simple reason that they will not be that same person for the rest of their lives. Not even for the next week. Saying “Yes!” means I commit to loving you over the lifetime of changes you - and I - will undergo. Some for the better, some not. Divorce happens, you might counter. And you’re right. But ideally not before genuine and deep effort to save the marriage.

Mara Benjamin uses the paradigm of parenthood, where we can’t actually divorce our children, to teach the same lesson. We commit to a lifetime of caregiving and devotion before we have any clue who this child we brought into the world will become and what they will need from us.

Na'aseh venishmah/we’ll do and we’ll listen. Our ancestors at Sinai committed before they understood. Citizenship is no different. Just as Jewish law has had to keep adapting to new realities - electricity, artificial intelligence, LGBTQ inclusion - so our political life keeps handing us new realities to adjust to, some of them genuinely dangerous. And just as last week's parashah insisted that the Torah belongs not only to those who stood at Sinai but to everyone who would ever embrace it, so we have to read ourselves into the story of our country. The story of its past, its present, and, this is the crucial part, its future. We claim its achievements. We own its failures. And we share responsibility for what happens next. 

But Barer's real message is even sharper. Ideals live or die not in the grand arena of national politics and debates, but in daily practice; in the routines we build and the bonds we make with the people on our own street.

How do we respond to a season of fear and vulnerability?  Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Read to kids in a literacy program. Bake for a women's shelter. Run errands for a homebound neighbour. Coach little league. Show up at the school board meeting. Learn the name of the person who delivers your mail.

It sounds absurdly small against what we're facing. You will not close the great divides of this country by working at a soup kitchen, but you will help reweave its frayed fabric, one gracious stitch at a time. A country, like a covenant, is only ever the sum of what its people actually do for one another, on an ordinary Tuesday, when no one is watching. In this season of teshuvah, of turning, we don’t turn away, we turn inward.

Our question shows up in Jewish philanthropy, also. Do we keep funding universities and hospitals and museums, or do we bring our money home?

Bret Stephens, Dan Senor and others make a forceful case that we will never blunt Jew-hatred by buying the world's affection with outsized generosity. Put the dollars into day schools, camps, Israel trips. Build a generation that is educated, proud, rooted. It's hard to argue with. And besides, many say, why should we repair a world that has treated us like this?

We Jews have debated this before; in every crisis, in every era, in every country. Too often it curdles into a loyalty test.

Rona Sheramy, who leads the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women, refuses the premise that it’s a zero-sum game. When we invest in the wellbeing of our fellow citizens we fulfill our halakhic obligation to the needy, and we manifest Jewish empathy forged in our own history of oppression. But it’s more than that. Investing in democracy is a Jewish security measure. She calls it the most urgent Jewish cause of this moment.

A society that treats difference as strength, that lets people stay rooted in who they are while participating fully in public life - that is the only kind of society in which Jews have ever been safe. Defending it serves our interest, and it’s a project Jewish wisdom is well equipped for. The road is long and difficult, but the stakes are too high to abandon it. Besides, wouldn't retreating from the public square just finish the job our enemies started?

Sheramy also rephrases the question that brought us here. Not only should we stay or should we go, but: is this a moment for scarcity or for expansiveness? Are we an ever-dying people, or an ever-regenerating one? Our history is not only survival. It is four thousand years of ongoing renewal through crises of persecution, expulsion, dislocation, disempowerment.

The friction at the heart of every allocation decision - inward vs outward, particular vs universal - is not a problem to be solved. It is the enduring characteristic of Jewish life in a liberal democracy, where our fate has always been braided together with everyone else's. Not a bug, but a feature of Jewish experience in every time and every place.

I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking it too. How are we supposed to lean in when we're not even welcome in the room?

It's a fair question. Jewish artists, writers, academics and physicians have been made unwelcome in their own professional communities, and some have even been shown the door. Jewish social activists have been pushed off the very platforms organized to do the healing I've been describing. The hypocrisy is staggering.

And even in the rooms we do still occupy, we’re vexed about how to show up. Do I mention that I'm Jewish? Do I say I was just in Israel? Which part of my Jewish identity do I want them to see, and which part do I quietly set down before I walk through the door?

Ask Tamara Tweel, a longtime civics educator, and she'll tell you: don't walk in carrying anxiety. Don't walk in with an agenda to explain yourself. Walk in with pride and sincerity. Radiate not our suffering, not our victimhood, not even our anger. Radiate our beauty and our integrity.

Dara Horn, the same writer I was thinking about in that London theatre, says something similar in her new book on antisemitism. This moment, she argues, is limited less by rampant bias than by pervasive ignorance. Which means it is redeemable. And the way to redeem it is to keep telling what she calls our Jewish love story. 

Because you cannot fight hatred by teaching people to love. You fight it by teaching people to be curious.

Every antisemite in history has told a big lie about Jews in order to seize power and keep it, dressing bigotry as righteousness, blaming us for wrecking whatever the mob happened to value that century. We've been Christ-killers and murderers of Christian children. Too religious and too secular. Too rich and too poor. Too powerful and too vulnerable. Too separate and too assimilated. Human rights warriors and human rights violators. The only consistent charge, Horn argues, is nonconformity; that we don’t bow to the tyrant of the day, human or divine, because we believe in the dignity of every human being and their right to live their own truths. Including our own.

That is the story to tell. Not only the story of what was done to us. Rather, the story of a tradition built on love: love of self, love of the other, love of the God whose goodness we are here to make visible.

And we should recount out loud the radical ideas we contributed to human civilization and are still also refining. That freedom demands responsibility. That responsibility must be reinterpreted in every generation, which takes learning, curiosity, argument, and patience with people who disagree. That people don't have to agree in order to live together. That no one has to be just like everyone else. That freedom and pluralism can coexist. That change is always possible.

These are exactly the ideas that would-be tyrants need silenced, along with the people who keep saying them. But we have survived, and thrived, because Jews before us kept choosing those ideas and building holidays and rituals, communities and institutions, to hold them. 

That's what Horn is teaching Jewish and non-Jewish students through her new platform, The Tell. She is widening the mission of Holocaust museums that dot our landscape: cultivating curiosity not only about how Jews died, but about what makes Jews so passionately alive, four thousand years and running.

As she puts it: "There is no empathy without curiosity; no respect without knowledge; no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbour."

Here in Canada that work is being carried by organizations like O Canada Friends, which equips Canadians beyond our own community to use their voices, their networks and their leadership to speak up, to ask questions, to defend the values that have united us. Through curated missions to Israel, small group conversations, and advocacy training, people are brought together, perspective is built, and change agents activated.

I know. It sounds like a longshot. Everything sounds like a longshot right now.

Which is why I keep returning to Howard Zinn's essay from 2004, "The Optimism of Uncertainty." His argument was simply that we're wrong to assume the world ever stands still. We forget, he wrote, how often we have been astonished by institutions crumbling overnight, by people changing their minds, by rebellions no one saw coming, by systems that looked invincible right up until they collapsed.

It was surprising enough when The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that John Galliano would be the subject of its 2027 Costume Institute show; the exhibition that launches the Met Gala and an honour the museum has extended to only two other living designers in its history. This for a man convicted in a French court over his antisemitic tirades, at a moment when Jews are being attacked in the street.

But who expected that after Jewish and non-Jewish New Yorkers decried the decision - the City Council Speaker, donors. community leaders, rabbis - the Met would back down and cancel the show?

Who would have thought that the pushback against the motion for the Montreal City Council to suspend institutional and diplomatic ties with Israel would have yielded the revised version it did; not one we would have preferred, but still one that removed the provocations that could have further divided the city and endangered all of us?

These are small wins in an enormous war. But they were not inevitable, and they did not happen on their own. They happened because people who could have stayed home instead showed up and expressed their feelings out loud, to the faces of institutions that did not want to hear them. Every victory sends a message.

Barer puts the charge this way. The tensions we're living in are not a reason to withdraw. They are a call to sustained, collective responsibility to strengthen our democracy. To accept the yoke of citizenship is to bind ourselves to one another across disagreement, disappointment, and time, not only as critics of our country's failures or beneficiaries of its promises, but as caretakers of an unfinished project. The dream may never be fully realized. Covenantal citizenship asks us to stay committed to one another in the work of trying. As the saying goes, trying times mean we have to keep trying.

Yesterday we spoke about the mitzvah of hope. Let me end there.

Two years ago the Hebrew University oncologist Dr. Benjamin Corn and his wife Devora, a family therapist, founded the Institute for the Study of Hope, Dignity and Wellbeing. They teach hope. Literally. To patients facing life-threatening illness, to survivors of trauma, to people facing isolation and the end of life. They have the research data, and fourteen collaborations with medical centres around the world, to show that it works. Hope turns out to be a technology. Of course it was developed in Israel.

Lo bashamayim hi. Hope is not in the heavens, beyond our reach. If we can't find it on our own, we can be trained. They even built an app. It's called Hopetimize.

The people who learn hope share three things. A goal that is both meaningful and plausible. A pathway around the obstacles. And agency; the will to change. Anger, fear, jealousy, and blame don't get denied, they get managed.

Our goal has certainly been defined for us, and it is certainly meaningful enough. And if the voices I've brought you this morning are right, it is also plausible. We don't have to suspend our doubts. We have to manage them. What we have to supply is the willingness to stay in it. Not to turn away. To lean in.

So, do we stay, or do we go?

I can't answer that for anyone. Not for you, not for your children. But for those of you who are staying — and that is most of us — I hope you'll carry some of this morning with you into the life you keep building here.

You cannot fight hatred by teaching people to love. You fight it by teaching people to be curious. 

You cannot fight fear by leading people out of the room. You fight it by bringing them closer to the table. 

You cannot fight despair by telling people to believe. You fight it by moving them to act, and to act with hope.

Od lo avda tikvateinu. We have not, we will not, we cannot, lose our hope.

Shanah Tovah.