Rosh Hashanah 2025/5786: The People We Are, and Aren't

Every life is shaped by two great love stories. So writes one of my favorite philosophers, Alain de Botton, in the opening to his book, Status Anxiety. The first great love story is our quest for intimacy with another human being; the yearning for romance which inspires art and music, literature and movies, a story celebrated across time and space. 

The second, a tale kept more private and often a source of shame and ridicule, is our quest for love from the world: for recognition, approval, and respect.  “And yet”, de Botton cautions us, “this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.”

To be loved -- by family, friends, fellow citizens, fellow human beings and fellow nations -- to be the object of someone’s concern, is to have our existence acknowledged, our feelings listened to, our needs provided, and our mistakes forgiven. When we feel that love, we thrive. But when we don’t, when we feel invisible, misunderstood, marginalized; we wrestle with shame and rage, envy and despair.  

We  all understand this social anxiety. We're constantly navigating other people’s judgment of us around dinner party tables, at staff meetings, and in the private spaces of our most intimate relationships. We even navigate it right here. 

We come to shul on the High Holy Days for our annual review and are immediately confronted by the presence of others through whose eyes we relentlessly judge ourselves. Do I go to shul as often as that person or am I not pulling my weight around here? Do we give as much tzedakah as that family or am I holding back? Have my children married Jews like those of the couple next to me or am I the one whose kids married out? Are my grandchildren marching for Israel like those young adults two rows ahead of me or are mine posting online about genocide in Gaza? 

Interrogating ourselves like this can actually be useful. Our best behaviour is motivated by a delicate balance between our own conscience and how we imagine others think of us. The Mishnah advises that the most noble path a person can walk is one which we personally consider honorable and which brings us honor from others.  

But what happens when that balance is off? What happens when we ascribe more power to the way others see us than to the way we see ourselves? The drive for recognition can fuel hard work, good judgment, and often, morality. Measuring ourselves against others and becoming more like them might help us evolve into better versions of ourselves. But it can also just make us better impersonators. In our love story with the world, it’s tempting to mold ourselves into other people’s expectations of us, but it’s also lazy, with serious moral and spiritual consequences - for us and them. 

And what happens when the balance is off in the other direction? When we refuse to ascribe legitimacy to the way others see us? The risk here is not just that we become myopic or narcissistic, guided only by our own feelings and desires. The very opposite can happen. Ignoring others can cause us to become estranged from ourselves. This too can drive us to become people we aren’t. Worse, it can drive us to become people we should never, ever, be. 

On this Rosh Hashanah, in this season of internal reckoning and renewal, while the war in Gaza continues to rage, while we still have 48 hostages in captivity, while vicious and violent antisemitism around the globe still spews in halls of power, in restaurants, concert halls and airports, and as political violence alarmingly spreads, I want to share my own wrestling with two painful illustrations of these dynamics that are hurting us all and that might be obstacles to the work we’re here to do - as individuals and as a community. The first is the trend of Jews - especially young Jews - turning away from Israel. The second is Israel’s turning away from itself. 

Among the most disturbing images circulating since October 7 are those of Jews protesting against Israel. I’m talking about groups like JVP - Jewish Voices for Peace - whose website proudly describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. Or Canada’s IJV - Independent Jewish Voices - which ran an ad recently saying ”IJV salutes the victories of student-led encampments across Canada”. I’m talking about placards at anti-Israel demonstrations that read “Jews against Genocide”. I’m talking about a shul in NY whose recent rabbinic search included a requirement that applicants identify as anti-Zionist - which doesn’t mean criticizing Israeli political leaders or policies; it means opposing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. I’m talking about how hundreds of Jews gathered for a vigil in Toronto on October 15, 2023 to say the Mourners Kaddish for Gaza. October 15, 2023 - barely a week after October 7. I’m talking about the large numbers of Jews who are helping to ensure that Zohran Mamdani becomes NYC’s next Mayor. I’m talking about the woman who walked into a shul in Brooklyn where Andi and I were davening one Shabbat wearing a keffiyeh; a shul that amazes you with its thriving, growing community of young, committed Jews, and then breaks your heart when it makes the prayer for the State of Israel optional, one you’re permitted to recite silently so as not to offend the person next to you. [Update: Last month the shul banned wearing Keffiyehs to services but their policy of an optional, hushed prayer for Israel remains intact.]

What’s most vexing is that the values espoused by those Jews who identify as anti-Zionists are deeply Jewish values. Freedom. Peace. Equality. Democracy. These values aren’t just rooted in our historical experience when they’ve secured our rights and protections in foreign countries. These values form the essence of our own tradition and set the tone for our mission and purpose as a people right from the very first chapters of the Torah. We’ve taught them to our children and grandchildren in our homes, our day schools, our summer camps. We’ve died for them in the battles for civil rights that undergird our Western democracies. They are enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. So why are these Jewish values being used against us by our own people? How can our own family members stand in solidarity with people calling for and justifying violence against Jews? 

While these Jews are not, God Forbid, defending October 7 as others despicably do, consider the liberal world in which Jewish anti-Israelism lives. Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in New York expressed the appalling state of it all this way:

“Why has Hamas become popular with so many young Americans? Hamas doesn’t permit free speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion, political pluralism or opposition parties, or anything that defines a liberal society. In Hamas’ world abortion is illegal and LGBTQ is illegal. Corruption is rampant…Why do those who see racism everywhere…fail to recognize the systemic antisemitism of Hamas? Why do those who are so acutely sensitive to the assignment of moral accountability to both individuals and institutions fail to assign moral agency to the Palestinians? Why do progressives treat Palestinians as passive victims bearing no political or moral responsibility for their actions?…Why do those who so believe in diversity condemn Israel, one of the most diverse countries in the world?

This is not liberalism; it’s a betrayal of liberalism. It isn’t progressivism; it’s a back-sliding of progress. How could a vast number of people in the west confuse an Isis-like philosophy for a liberation movement and ignore, explain, deny, and justify blood-thirsty brutalities?”  How, indeed.

Against this backdrop, our cultural and political landscapes have hardened into left and right, lost the center, and flattened social discourse into facile, naive polarities of “us” and “them”, “the oppressed” and “the oppressors”, “the strong” and “the vulnerable", “the aggressor” and “the underdog”. People who read the news and learn history from Tik-Tok are forced to choose one side or another. Compromise is treason. Ideology is the litmus test for loyalty. Progressive now just means conformist. The generation who taught us all about intersectionality - the interconnectedness of race, class, gender, oppression, and power-  has no capacity for nuance; no interest in parsing the complexities of implementing values like “freedom”, “security”, and “justice”. 

It’s from within this world that the shocking display of Jewish anti-Zionism emerges as Jews echo and imitate the ways in which these values have been grossly distorted. And those distortions are indeed foreign to our tradition, rendering many of those Jews who reject Israel as an apartheid state or a colonialist, genocidal occupier as strangers to their own families and communities. 

Many in these liberal Jewish spaces - on campuses and in professional settings where their faculty and bosses, peers and colleagues claim some of the most critical views on Israel our generation has ever encountered - are pulled and influenced by recklessly superficial definitions of “right” and “wrong”. Not to mention what comes out of Hollywood. If you’ve seen the documentary “October 8”, they’re also caught up in the decades-long relentless campaign of hate and disinformation designed by the Muslim Brotherhood and their proxies to co-opt deeply cherished Western language of “equality” and “freedom”, language which lies at the heart of the struggles for social justice here in North America and around the world and that speaks persuasively to today’s generation anxious about the broken world we are bequeathing to them.

Wanting to be on the presumed “right” side of history, and expressing what they feel is their genuine Jewish passion and integrity, they take on the identities and campaigns of those who speak a homogenized and weaponized language of liberation and compassion, and in the process, forget their own mother-tongue; one that isn’t only capable of nuance, but demands it. Especially now.

Glance at any page of Talmud discussing how to apply any Jewish law or value - ritual or ethical - and you will confront a multivocal debate about what our tradition demands of us in the constantly changing circumstances of our lives. This is our quintessential Jewish legacy that is ours to uphold in both our personal and collective lives: to think deeply and critically about how we show up in the world, whether that means reinforcing patterns or embracing change. To defend our actions and to admit our mistakes with the same honesty and humility. To be able to hold often-conflicting beliefs and values and dreams without losing coherence. The Talmud may be an ancient book, but its process is timeless. And yet, where is that process when it comes to Israel?

And there’s something else. Many young people who were raised in Zionist homes, camps and schools feel they were taught a Zionism that was too simplistic; that glossed over the harder and even darker dimensions of Israel’s struggle for survival. Is there some truth to that? Did we fail to teach the story of Israel with the courageous complexity our tradition demands, leaving some ill-equipped to face the more complicated story of our beloved land? Could we have salvaged their devotion with more honesty? Could we have guided them better to negotiate the debunking of some myths about Israel while remaining resolute about Israel’s legitimacy? 

A recent study of Jewish undergraduates concluded that as polarized as left and right have become, many Jewish students defy the ideological assumption - and the social expectation - that their opinions need to be ruthlessly consistent. Researcher Eitan Hersh documented that these Jewish students would welcome a socially-acceptable option on the political spectrum that enabled them to both be pro-Israel and to protest some of the actions, statements and policies of the current Israeli government. They want to be able to stand in that place with integrity. I can relate to that. Can you?

It’s not just those who claim the mantle of Jewish liberalism who end up donning the garb - literally and figuratively - of an anti-Israel culture and ideology. It’s also those in the camp of Jewish religious and national fundamentalism who claim the exact opposite Jewish values, who end up impersonating a Judaism that is equally unrecognizable, who help push our young people away from Israel.

Over the last several decades, well before the massacre on October 7, we’ve been witnessing a menacing rightward lunge in Israeli politics and in the Israeli national religious movement. Tomer Persico - a scholar with ties both to the Hartman Institute and the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies - writes worryingly about the melding of religious rigidity and extreme nationalism that has led to the worshipping of land and state, to unchecked violence by settler aggressors, to the dehumanizing of Palestinians, and the destabilizing of historic alliances. In his words, “Under the impression of the current war the Religious Zionist fundamentalists blatantly asserted what in the past was only implied: that they simply disregard universal humanism, liberal values, and at times even Israeli law; that theirs is a Judaism that disavows core Jewish values and ideals such as the fundamental quality between all human beings and the struggle for justice; that they adhere to a limited, diminished and immoral version of Judaism.”

Young, and not-so-young, Jews today - in the diaspora as well as in Israel - are not only lured away from Israel by the false narratives of the liberation movement. They are repulsed by the Israel they see transforming before their eyes and its leaders who claim to speak in their name - in our name. And so they shelter among those they sadly believe to be more aligned with their own sensibilities.

This is a moment for Jews in Israel and around the world to join together in the battle for the soul not only of our country but of our Judaism. This is about more than the war in Gaza. This is about more than Israeli politics. This is about our fundamental identity as Jews which, as Persico warns, is being defaced by our own people as violent, racist and fanatical. The urgency of returning our hostages must be our priority, but there is also an urgent call to reclaim Judaism’s and Zionism’s core humanistic values and to bring our alienated people home. Home to a Jewish culture and a Jewish State that has all the tools - the ideas, the people, the strength, the courage, and the spirit to produce a proud and lustrous alchemy of patriotism and genuine liberalism.

If we’ve explored the risks of over-identifying with other people’s judgment of us and losing ourselves as a result, an equally dangerous trend occurs when we dismiss their opinions and end up ignoring our own internal calls for accountability.

That the world is filled with double-standards when it comes to Israel is true today, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. Nothing we can do will ever eliminate those who hate and vilify. But too often we react to those unfair critiques in a way that not only distances us from our opponents’ judgement, but also from our own. 

What other sovereign state would hesitate for a second before engaging in war to eliminate a murderous enemy on their border who unleashed the worst attack on their citizens since their founding and who has sworn to do it again and again and again? What other nation in such a defensive war would care as much as the IDF does to minimize civilian casualties? What other army has to battle terrorists who wear civilian clothes and embed themselves in schools and hospitals while trying to contain collateral damage? What other military would allow humanitarian aid into the warzone when 48 of their innocent citizens are being starved and tortured to death while the world remains silent having forgotten about the captives and about the devastating massacre that started this all?

We’re familiar with these questions. We hear Jewish leaders in Israel and around the world ask them. We ask them ourselves. They express legitimate righteous indignation. What’s less righteous about them is the absence of what ought to be the next question: While our critics may have unjust expectations of us, what does our own tradition demand of us at this moment? Ultimately, it’s not about whether we’re living up to someone else’s standards. It’s about whether we’re living up to our own. 

About 20 years ago at a gathering of rabbis, Dr. Moshe Halbertal, a co-author of the IDF Code of Ethics, stated clearly: the ethics of the Israel Defense Forces are steeped in Jewish and humanitarian commitments to the value and dignity of human life. The IDF holds itself accountable not to the military ethics of any other army in the world; it holds itself accountable to its own. 

Fast forward to today. Many who believed unfailingly in the IDF’s efforts to fight this just war justly felt assured by these commitments, until they didn’t. It was easy to deflect the world’s criticism of civilian deaths, of rampant hunger, until it wasn’t. On a recent episode of For Heaven’s Sake, the podcast which features Rabbi Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi in dialogue with each other, they discussed the reluctance of Israeli leaders and citizens to interrogate whether their prosecution of the war had crossed any Jewish moral lines. They acknowledged that there are valid arguments to be made over the role of the UN, over Hamas’ disruption of food distribution, over the danger of hundreds of thousands of people rushing a food site when our soldiers lack appropriate riot equipment. They resisted any suggestion that we were intentionally starving Gazans. But they lamented that we didn’t own our share of responsibility - whatever that share is - in a timely and effective manner to minimize the inevitable consequences of laying siege to a region. They felt shame for what they called our moral indifference to widespread suffering.

They confessed: we didn’t want to know. And with the world using their accusations of famine and genocide to question our right to exist, we weren’t motivated to find out. After all, as Kohelet says, 

ויוֹסִ֥יף דַּ֖עַת יוֹסִ֥יף מַכְאֽוֹב׃

The more knowledge, the more heartache. The more we’re aware of our failings, the more pain and regret we feel. 

And so we turned away. People would ask us about suffering in Gaza and we would answer with October 7. People would ask about hunger, and we would respond with Sudan. And that’s not wrong. But, much as I myself struggle to admit, it’s also not entirely right. Comparing ourselves to others does not let us off the hook of our own moral responsibilities.

The growing distress throughout the Jewish world over what people feel is an untenable amount of suffering in Gaza has strained Jewish families and communities. Look what happened when UJAFed in New York allocated $1 million to an Israeli NGO delivering humanitarian relief in Gaza. It unleashed a storm across print and social media of Jews accusing other Jews of enabling those who seek to destroy us in the name of “feel-good” Jewish values; and the reverse: Jews blaming other Jews for supporting Israeli policies that give license to antisemites to hate us even more, imperiling Israel’s safety and the safety of Jews around the world.

Why are we so uncomfortable with the idea of checking ourselves against our own moral compass as this war rages on? Do we fear it will compromise the legitimacy or the integrity of our Zionism? Do we fear it will be seen as capitulating to a hostile, antisemitic world? We ask these questions on Rosh Hashanah when our tradition teaches that the sounds of the shofar echo the wailing cries of the mother of Sisera, a Canaanite general killed in battle against us. Our iconic Jewish call to spiritual and ethical uprightness is fueled by the demand that we show compassion even to our enemies, people whom we, from time to time, have no choice but to engage in war for the defense of our country and our people. But in this teaching and in so many others, the Torah warns us against saving our bodies at the expense of our souls.

How we navigate other people’s judgment of us is a delicate task with huge stakes both for us and for them. Investing too much in how others see us can lead us to become people we aren’t. Tuning them out entirely can prevent us from being who we ought to be, or worse, turn us into who we should never become. None of these risks are tenable for us. Not as a people. Not as a country. Not as individuals. 

So, before you berate yourself for not being as observant or as charitable as the next guy in shul today, before you blush with shame for your children’s choices or their politics, ask yourself: Have I been true to my own values and convictions? Am I overly influenced by other people’s opinions of me? Do I reject other people’s counsel? What more do I have to learn from others? What more do I have to learn from myself? Have I done my best to teach my values to the next generation? Have I shared my own struggles over how to hold them all together when things get complicated so they can wrestle better, also? Have I been honest with others? Have I been honest with myself?

These questions invite deeper wrestling with ourselves as we recalibrate the balance between the dictates of our own hearts and the affirmation we seek from others so that we can live more authentically without surrendering ourselves, or hiding from ourselves. 

Apart from this inner work we have to do, we will likely be left with unresolved difficulties relating to those I discussed whose values, whose ways of being and doing Jewish seem to undermine what we stand for and believe in. How will we remain in community together? How will we share a sense of belonging to the same people? How can we remain a loving and united family? I’ll be taking up these urgent questions in my sermon on Yom Kippur. But for now, remember this:

Every life is shaped by two great love stories: the one about our quest for intimacy with another human being, and the one about our quest for love from the world. “This second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.”

As we renew our stories and those of the Jewish people, I pray we can write in our own authentic voices and join them together with our fellow Jews and human beings who share our passion for justice and for freedom; that we can fulfill the promise that we as a people will make to my son, Aaron, and his bride, Lauren, (Sidney Margles’ grandaughter) under their chuppah this Sunday -  עוד ישמע בערי יהודה ובחוצות ירושלים /we will once again hear in the cities of Judah and the courtyards of Jerusalem, קול ששון וקול שמחה/ voices of joy and happiness; voices singing in a new harmony: Am Yisrael Chai. 

Shanah Tovah.